There’s a fundamental tension at the heart of the #Fediverse. Rightly or wrongly it’s consistently presented as “an alternative to X” (where X is X, or some other social media). However the flipside of that is that X had everybody in one place. On mastodon, everybody is in different places. The pro-fedi crowd say “it doesn’t matter it’s decentralised, but we can all still talk, just like email”. Yet the other benefit of the decentralised networks is that each instance can be an island, only joined to the ones that it cares about. This creates the tension for potential emigres from big tech.
If I’m on Facebook, Instagram, or X and I want to follow someone, for whatever reason, I can do that. If I’m on mastodon, it may not be possible. If my mastodon server administrator decides that another instance is “bad”, I will not be able to follow them from my account. This is by design.
It’s designed like this, precisely because of the experience of existing on Facebook Instagram or X. If everybody on those centralised social networks decides to pile on, or hurl abuse, or flood the comments with aggressive or sexual material, or repurpose my innocent imagery into something horrible, there’s absolutely nothing to stop them.
I think my point is that federated services like mastodon should stop pretending to be “like X” and start selling on what’s important. You can create a small server just for your friends you can create a small server for people like you, that you would like to be friends with. Where appropriate service can allow you to talk to other like-minded individuals. Where it’s not appropriate, you can cut them off at the knees.
There is a danger that inevitably everybody ends up kind of in a super decentralised state, with everyone hosting one person servers. That’s not the answer. Super efficient, super cheap, small instances would be great something that doesn’t financially cripple the admins. Something that’s so easy to set up and tear down that groups could almost do it just for an event. Make it so that identity is separate.