hypothesis: if too many early users sign up on mastodon.social instead of other instances, federation will end up becoming a second-class feature. (imagine what email today would look like if gmail had existed in the 90s.)

other instances need to be able to compete with mastodon.social for growth, or https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 should be implemented.

@bcrypt Federation will never be 2nd class feature for me.

@Gargron @bcrypt Even financially, if anything, if no one else builds something competitive in fedispace, Eugen is incentivized to build parallel instances tailoring to a few different community styles, each with their own Patreon. I'd bet this would be more profitable than forcing everyone to stay on M.soc

@five I think the "community" of instances is kinda overrated. I don't identify as part of the "maly" community. I think all 64 of us are mostly just here because the admin is cool and it's probably going to stick around for awhile

@five nevermind there is like 103 of us now. where did everyone come from heh

@kodo my best guess is it'll play out like subreddits: there's a Reddit culture that spills into everywhere, but the biggest subs also have some cultural artifacts of their own. Then smaller subs will be delineated based on niche uses and rulesets and whatnot