What's one big thing we could do to make it easy for new users to follow others and engage more in the Fediverse while encouraging a diversity of instances?

Eliminate the flow below and make it seamless to follow and engage with posts across instances.

@mike

hey mike nice to see you. 😀

that was the big advantage twitter had over RSS feeds. it was possible to centralize subscriptions, but it required cooperation among the different vendors. and i think people in this world will resist centralization.

@davew Nice to see you too Dave!!

Ironically unless this is solved there will be a constant gravitational pull toward everyone just being on one mega instance because the experience will be so much easier. And with players like Meta circling they'll have a distinct advantage.

Somehow we need to find ways to fortify the many independent instances that exist today and one of the ways to do that is to make it easier for them to collectively provide a great user experience.

@mike

we already have a really good federated identity system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System

why shouldn't we build on that, every user with their own identity provided by DNS.

i asked the folks at Tucows to do this a few years ago. i wanted to use DNS for documents. they would have started a business selling sub-domains.

and there's no reason every new experiment requires an identity system. and it should also come with storage, that the user pays for.

@davew @mike just learned that the DNS is not secure and resilient enough for the management of identifiers at scale beyond low value things like RSS posts.

This is why systems like Gaia-X will use DIDs, hopefully without PoW methods.