KPIs that are being optimized result in increasingly user-hostile products, like Facebook and Twitter. There certainly are UX problems that the current federat

KPIs that are being optimized result in increasingly user-hostile products, like Facebook and Twitter. There certainly are UX problems that the current federated social media projects have. They're not technically unsolvable, it's just that current federated social media projects don't want to solve them for some reason. That's what I'm trying to address with my project (that's not yet ready to be demonstrated, sorry). The primary problem that the current federated social media projects are facing is that there's no global user search. At all. You sign up for a Mastodon account on the instance of your liking, and now what? Sure you can follow Eugen and like the cat pictures he reposts. Cats are cute. But how do you find people you already know without asking every one of them whether they have a Mastodon account? You don't. And that's how you not build a useful social media service. Every single social media service that has had any semblance of success offered an easy way to bootstrap your social graph — be it a detailed global search feature and rich profiles to go with it or the ability to import your friend/contact list from somewhere else. That alone should be telling. There are technical solutions to this, like making a DHT out of instance servers that could be used to link the user IDs on centralized platforms to ActivityPub URLs. Even if said centralized platforms refuse API access to instance admins, there's still machine-readable GDPR data export to take advantage of. It can be done. It's just going to take some time.