I think that sounds like a really good idea, if you want to get corporate- and government hosted instances on board. What keeps most of them away from free software is that they can’t write a contract with anyone with clear boundaries and guarantees. If Mastodon offers these types of contracts, it would help the adoption rate.

The UI isn’t the problem? The attached screenshot shows people talking about federation. Federation is very confusing, but also the core part of how the Fediverse functions. The only thing you could to is to provide an entry portal, where all servers are categorized by the type of content they provide and you can check and uncheck the type of content you want or might want to interact with. Based on your choices, the portal could recommend a random Lemmy or Mbin instance that has a track record of being reliable and allows you to interact with most content of that type. So if you’d want to see porn for example, the portal should choose an instance that is federated with lemmynsfw.

Lemmy.world is the most mainstream instance. You may find small instances that have more political center types, but for all the “issue” is that the fediverse is federated. So lemmy.ml users can comment on your post on lemmy.world as well.

I think Lemmy/Mbin would benefit from ‘moderation pools’. The basic idea is that, if you subscribe to or join a moderation pool, your instance will automatically copy any moderation action taken on content your instance also hosts. This would allow multiple single-admin instances to moderate even during off-hours of any single admin.

Discoverability is an issue that I identified quickly. One reason why artists mostly stick to X may very well be the small user base, as well the fractured nature of the fediverse making it hard to gain reach

Ok, so it works, but it more or less hacked tohether and not officially supported. BlueSky still wants to have its walled garfen.

Does BlueSky now have ActivityPub support?

As I understand it, 3) already happens. What causes the load is that each connected instance is also loading and caching the preview.

While I think that many are ok with ‘trying out’ Lemmy by joining a random instance at first, I also have seen numerous threads in which users are complaining about not being able to subscribe to communities they are interested in, only to be told that the instance hosting the communities they are interested in is blocked by their instance. I don’t think it makes for a good first impression to join a Lemmy instance, only to be immediately told that you need to join another instance to see the content you are interested in.

One benefit of Mastodon not mentioned is that the activitypub protocol is used by more services than Mastodon. I personally am looking to switch to Kbin or Mbin, whenever those become usable alternatives, as they allow me to interact both with Lemmy and Mastodon.

In theory at least, online services would be more safe than a locally decrypted vault. If your computer is compromised, the bad actors can pull your encrypted vault for an unlimited brute force attack. Of course, this can be mitigated by increasing the decryption time. However, if your vault is already decrypted, then bad actors can just pull all your password from your memory.

I, for one, am decrypting my vault once when I start my PC. In theory, if I were to use an online solution, bad actors wouldn’t be able to pull my vault from memory.

To quote a really old comment on reddit back in the day: “My takeaway is that donuts are a lot more healthy than I thought.”

You are only shown what your server has stored. Your server only stores what people of your instance have subscribed to. If you visit bogger instances, they all have different Hot feeds, because each server pulls different content. There is no one way to see what is going on in all of the fediverse. You are only ever shown a part.

Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.

Because decentralization, at least as it is now, runs counter to what people are looking for in a social media platform; mainly discoverability.

There is no algorithm on Mastodon and it doesn’t need an algorithm to make content more discoverable. What is needed, first and foremost, is a reliable way to find and follow creators without jumping through hoops.

Right now, there is no way to discover profiles your server isn’t already federating. People need to be findable.

How can a platform be enshittified when it is by design federated and can, as such, have defederated communities?

That is a recurring, moronic take. If you want a small community, go choose a small, defederated instance. Don’t declare that Mastodon/the Fediverse should by design be hostile to people reliant on discoverability.

And then people keep wondering why twitter isn’t dying.

And that’s a bad thing. While you may think of Instagram- or OF models when thinking about influencers, there are also many artists and other content creators that rely on reach provided to them by large, easy to search through content platforms. If Mastodon by design hampers those people’s reach, they won’t join and with them all their followers won’t either.