I had shared an earlier version of this last week, and a draft of the updates a few days ago. Thanks to everybody for the feedback!
Here’s the key points:
- Don’t tell people “it’s easy”
- Improve the “getting-started experience”
- Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
- Prioritize accessibility
- Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
- Invest in moderation tools
- Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software
- Values matter
- This is a great opportunity – and it won’t be the last great opportunity
Federation is arguably the whole point of the fediverse however. Decentralisation is the solution to the problems created by centralised, proprietary platforms like Reddit and Twitter, but it can only survive if users are invested in it. If everyone joined one main instance, its admins could easily remove federation, add proprietary extensions etc and become yet another walled garden.
Trying to build the fediverse without onboarding users about federation would be like trying to build a democracy without educating citizens on the function and value of voting.
We should not shy away from sharing the concepts of federation, we just need to be better at sharing them.