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by ancientsofmumu
1488 days ago
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There's a tangible benefit to being discoverable without effort (no friction for users); other "famous" FOSS projects are part of the fosstodon.org instance such as https://fosstodon.org/@mate - kind of makes sense to me as a generic user. $0.02 |
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Relays are supposed to make federated content more easily discoverable, but right now they're still far from being what I expect them to be (i.e. curated lists of instances categorized by topic, like an OPML that aggregates multiple feeds/channels based on some criteria), and they're instead saturated and endless streams of zillions of instances with no filtering/aggregation criteria and plenty of spam/adult content. And if you run your instance they're going to fill up your database storage FAST. After joining to the largest relay I immediately got my federated timeline flooded by erotic anime toots in Japanese and filled up 50 MB of db storage in an hour.
Fediverse user directories like those run by @FediFollows are good ideas for discovering new content, but they're still small (we're talking of a few hundreds profiles so far).
But I also believe that it's worth the effort of running your own instance. Right now most of the folks are on mastodon.social or mastodon.online. Fosstodon itself already has 21k users. The purpose of the Fediverse is to be as decentralized as possible, because smaller communities are easier to moderate, aggregate and federate. If everybody ends up signing up to 5-6 big instances, and the long tail is left to pick the crumbs, we'll have again the centralization problem that we were trying to solve.