I think the key to survival and growth of federated platforms is that the onboarding experience for new users be simple and stable. If a new user has to understand what federation is and how it works, then the system is already failing them. Federation needs to be transparent to the fullest extent possible. There’s a lot of value in telling a user “You can sign up on any of these proven-reliable instances, and your choice doesn’t overly matter, because they’re general-purpose and stable, and you’ll still fully interact with users from every other instance either way.” There’s a lot less value in giving them a 30 minute presentation on federation, then overwhelming them with a list of 500 instances to pick from, half of which are hyper-focused on one topic or run by extremists.

At the same time, if they end up being led to an instance that has issues with stability, absent admins, political extremism at the admin-level, or if that instance is topic- or region-specific, or if that instance has defederated from a huge portion of the fediverse, or if that instance just shuts down and stops existing in a few months… Chances are that user’s going to get a bad impression of the platform as a whole, and never come back.

To me it just seems like the instances which don’t offer those issues - the general-purpose instances with long-term support plans, experienced teams, and sane admins - will just naturally end up as big instances, as survival of the fittest. And I don’t see that as an issue at all.

Like, sure, the fediverse is designed around decentralization, but there’s a point where decentralization hurts more than it helps. I don’t think anyone would disagree that if we had maximum decentralization, with every single user self-hosting their own instance, that things would be awful for everyone - and I don’t think anyone would disagree that the opposite, with 100% of users being on one single instance with no alternatives, would also be undesirable. There’s benefit to having consistent user experiences, consistent rules, consistent expectations.

In short, yeah, I think the way forward is having a few flagship general-purpose instances that vacuum up most new users, with a wide plethora of smaller instances that are less general-purpose, or region-specific, or just try out new things with rules and moderation policies.

I do think there should be an extremely simple way (for the end user) to migrate your entire account from one instance to another. Something you could do in just a minute or two.