You’ve grafted ActivityPub onto an already established, mature product, and done so as a core feature. You’re not the only one trying this, but you might be the first one out the door with it. There’s a lot to learn from that experience.
You’ve also brought a traditional, small-social-media modal into a space that is dominated by platforms emulating new-social experiences. Again, not the only one, but nodeBB and Discourse are pretty severe minorities in this respect. You guys are going to have some unique perspectives on the Fediverse as an experiment.
Plus, there’s the backfill drum you keep beating.
I think you have a lot to speak to.
On top of that, the Fediverse has been wrestling with its distributed nature for a few years now – maybe longer, but I showed up a few months before the big waves from Twitter and Reddit – and the current prevailing wisdom is that people want systems that obfuscate that distribution, or work around it entirely. There’s not enough people to support niche communities, they say, or people get confused and frustrated when there are multiple active communities of the same name and topic. But personally, I see the way forward for the Fediverse as a network of local-first social media sites, and nothing out there right now quite communicates or is making steps to realize that vision like federated forums do. Not only does a bulletin board not look like centralized mega-sites like Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit, but it also doesn’t behave like one. It centres the local website, its core topics of discussion, and its local users, rather than the constant content stream of modern, corporate social media, while still giving free access to other people and forums.
And I think that’s what’s healthy for the Internet, and should be boosted as much as possible.
