@Bloonface hello, I've just read your blog post about why Mastodon and ActivityPub cannot replace Twitter, Reddit and alikes. I'm a motivated FOSS user, and I share your concerns that most people will never invest as much energy as Mastodon requires them to.

I write to you with a question which is in part meant to help me understand how fedi works, in part to propose to you an optimistic scenario which hopefully would brighten the gloomy picture from your blog post.

I understand that choosing who to federate with and who to block is a very fine line, which effectively plays out as censorship from your instance maintainer. Although I'm a techie, I certainly am desperate about the idea of some nerd like me deciding what I should be receiving and what not. And this decision process generally happens in the dark for me. But isn't it the case that one instance can choose to block/deferderate Threads (for example) and another not to? One instance might choose to charge only its most active users, another might find a different source of funding. This way there will be users living the consequences of either decision and in a way experimentally showing what works and what doesn't.

Yes, this experimental mechanism is not ideal and is painful to users (treated as guinea pigs). Running away from commercially-driven moderation, we've landed onto a chaotic moderation, where moderators might not even be aware of the consequences of their choices. But this is a learning experience for everyone. And as you say, it will not be explosive growth, but organic, and very slow.

Certainly, this growth would be strongly facilitated by third-party added-value instruments, such as e.g. some statistics over instances (number of users, federated nodes, posts/toots, hashtags), statistics over users (who contributes most to instance costs, who is a source of tension), analysis of what constitutes a golden middle ground for instance size, etc.

I must say my optimism is based on the fact that I'm on a mid-sized instance (qoto.org) with an userbase with divergent interests and a maintainer who is both moderate and active. I've had my conflicts on this network, but my experience overall is very positive