3 ms·

Not sure if the siloization of thought is the correct direction. Do we really just want another internet hugbox/echochamber?

• blacklight 4y ago
  It's a bit different in this case. I mean, if an admin wants to run their own silos (maybe a private instance with family/colleagues, or an instance on invite), they're free to do it. But most of the people who run their instances have their interest in those instances being discoverable, and most of the people who sign up have their interest in following and be followed by people on other instances. So no matter if there are many instances, you won't have silos if content is well discoverable. Having an account on a Fediverse instance is like having an email address: no matter if it's Gmail, Hotmail or your own SMTP server, you can still communicate with other people as long as you have their addresses. However, this is still a bit of theoretical talk. In practice, nowadays the solutions proposed for inter-instance discoverability (relays and user directories) are still immature. The former has no filtering criteria, it's prone to spam, and many relays come and go within days/weeks. The latter is still operating at very small scales, but it's promising. I believe that with better curated relays and user directories we can have the best of the two worlds: decentralized small instances that are easy to curate and moderate, but also well connected and discoverable. I'm considering running my own relay with instances dedicated to science and tech, but even the software for relays isn't that stable yet...