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.
What do you mean by user abstraction? First I’ve seen this mentioned, or put this way.
Relates to what server an account is on and how it affects the experience. Most people don’t want to know/care
Oh thanks for giving me a proper term to use when pointing at my biggest problem with the Fediverse.
Has it ever been discussed by any developers? Is it technically possible for ActivityPub? Would the costs be exorbitant?
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 :)