If every instance is isolated on its own domain with no gateway between them, I don’t see much point to the fediverse.
I only really want to touch upon this point, but the Fediverse platforms were originally designed as a return to the old forum-style format of communities, where you have your own little cozy corners of the internet, with your own rules and culture, while also being decentralised and resistant to the problems of centralisation.
The fediverse, however, allows you to reach outside of your own community and follow/socialise with people inside other communities seamlessly (which, in truth, it does do), negating the need of everyone having to make accounts and identities on every single site/community they come across.
The concept of having the fediverse just be thousands upon thousands of instances seamlessly all connected to each other for maximum content discoverability is only really a mindset that has occurred recently after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, and attention was put on Mastodon. Before this, people just resided in their own little communities and talked to people they knew rather than specifically looking for more people.
The developers of these platforms are looking into what they can do regarding this, but they don’t want to stray far from the principles of these software platforms by making them into social media sites that are just clones of the social media sites they’re trying to move away from.
I mean you can still create the old style forums. If you want a single log in, just add Oauth, not sure why you need the whole activitypub protocol. But presumable if you want to stay in a little community, creating a few logins is barely a problem.
I like the old style mentality of small communities. I hate reddit. But sites like reddit/twitter are fundamentally different. You NEED a sizeable amount of content/users. I am not saying this needs to grow into reddits scale, in fact Im happy at the scale lemmy.world is at, but I would like to see a decentralized alternative to a corporate monolith. To me that looks like several hundred or thousands of instances of anywhere between 20-100k users each. To achieve that, we have to balance the influx of new users into different instances, which is why I am talking about inter-discoverability within instances. Otherwise you have a couple instances which get all the traffic and that turns right back into reddit. But maybe there is a different way to achieve that.
I only really want to touch upon this point, but the Fediverse platforms were originally designed as a return to the old forum-style format of communities, where you have your own little cozy corners of the internet, with your own rules and culture, while also being decentralised and resistant to the problems of centralisation.
The fediverse, however, allows you to reach outside of your own community and follow/socialise with people inside other communities seamlessly (which, in truth, it does do), negating the need of everyone having to make accounts and identities on every single site/community they come across.
The concept of having the fediverse just be thousands upon thousands of instances seamlessly all connected to each other for maximum content discoverability is only really a mindset that has occurred recently after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, and attention was put on Mastodon. Before this, people just resided in their own little communities and talked to people they knew rather than specifically looking for more people.
The developers of these platforms are looking into what they can do regarding this, but they don’t want to stray far from the principles of these software platforms by making them into social media sites that are just clones of the social media sites they’re trying to move away from.
I mean you can still create the old style forums. If you want a single log in, just add Oauth, not sure why you need the whole activitypub protocol. But presumable if you want to stay in a little community, creating a few logins is barely a problem.
I like the old style mentality of small communities. I hate reddit. But sites like reddit/twitter are fundamentally different. You NEED a sizeable amount of content/users. I am not saying this needs to grow into reddits scale, in fact Im happy at the scale lemmy.world is at, but I would like to see a decentralized alternative to a corporate monolith. To me that looks like several hundred or thousands of instances of anywhere between 20-100k users each. To achieve that, we have to balance the influx of new users into different instances, which is why I am talking about inter-discoverability within instances. Otherwise you have a couple instances which get all the traffic and that turns right back into reddit. But maybe there is a different way to achieve that.
Does that make sense?