So basically I’m struggling with a couple of facets of the fediverse that I don’t see how they can work out.

One is that I think it’s an overall good and healthy thing to have potentially several different takes on communities. Yes, this can fall into an ‘echo chamber’, but it also just helps and is nice to be around people who are similar to you. I think the internet can absolutely handle multiple versions of the ‘gaming’ community, just as much as it can handle multiple versions of the ‘politics’ community. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr all have a different vibe and I’d like to see Lemmy offer the same. And I don’t think that vibe needs to necessarily come from a different format. We’d all probably been a bit better off if there’d been a few more reddit’s around.

Which brings me to my second issue. It’s hard to build a ‘vibe’ without at least some control of who can interact. This is the problem Beehaw has faced. At the end of the day, you need to be able to keep people out. Which means that a login, by design, cannot interact with the entirety of the fediverse, because that would mean no one could be blocked or that we’d all have to agree on how to run our communities. Unlike email, I don’t personally feel like my lack of ability to see or comment on some alt-right communities post is a problem.

My last issue, is that I don’t feel like instances can scale. My guess is that for a pretty good community to form, you need to be closer to 2-20 million users. I like Beehaw. But it’s clear it’s struggling. But I don’t see how the fediverse could ever truly take off as a concept unless we could hit that threshold. And I don’t see how any regular, volunteer instance admin could run a site for that many people. So I feel like we need some sort of distributed computing model, where instance owners team up to create a ‘super-instance’ and act as overall site admins for a community of 2-20 million people are so. Individual instances can go down or up as admins burn out or get brought in and the overall site is managed collectively. If one admin goes rogue, the others can defederate and kick them out.

And in a world with super-instances, I’d have a login for my chill vibes Behaw super-instance, maybe another for an super-instances focused solely around sports, maybe another on a ‘free speech absolutist’ platform because Beehaw became too heavy handed about something, etc.