You can see it if you check https://fedidb.org/. Monthly active users have gone from just a hair under one million to somewhere around 1.4 million and still growing. How do we think this will go? How do we feel about this influx of new users? Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?
I feel like I didn’t really recognize having different “platforms” like Mastodon, PixelFed, etc would give multiple opportunities for the fediverse to make a “first” impression with people.
There are different options to solve this. The current “solve” is to dump everyone on one big server. Mastodon.social, lemmy.world, etc.
Another solution might be a button that sends you to a random top10 instance. Might work for mastodon but lemmy servers defederate like hell and some of the biggest instances are .ml, hexbear, etc.
XMPP has this tiered list https://providers.xmpp.net/ but it’s the same problem of expecting users to care what a server is
I don’t have solution, and if you do then I’m not the person you should be telling :)
An ‘ideal’ solution might require a complete redesign on how federation works.
Something like a more decentralised network where you don’t have a ‘home’ instance.
An instance would be more like a relay into a ‘core’ network, and you could swap between them at any time.
It’d probably require your account info to be public though, so passwords wouldn’t be possible to implement in a foolproof way.
Instead of signing in, your device could generate a public/private keypair on signup.
The whole network would have your public key, and only content/actions that your device signs would be propagated on the network.
Sorry, you probably don’t care about my ideas lol. Just thinking out loud I guess.
fastest reply in tghe west 😎
they tried that and without the centralised moderation it became racist very quickly https://aether.app/
e: also nostr
Oh wow, those are cool. What a shame.
I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that unmoderated communities attract the degenerates :/