A complimentary change to landing pages could help a lot.
Designing Fedi landing pages eg https://calckey.org/ to spread people out across more & smaller servers by recommending a (randomised by page load) general server immediately right off the bat.
Randomised to show smaller servers more frequently.
An opt in service. Server admins could potentially set a userbase target for their server promote opt in too.
The "feudal-verse" is real. Each platform and each instance all operate like self-interested self-promoting fiefdoms in some polite competition with each other. It's natural in an ecosystem where platforms and instances do more or less stand alone.
But, arguably, the ecosystem and the user are being left behind a little bit.
Right now, I'm not sure the fediverse actually exists.
I'd like to try that once a hosting service is available. I'm the absolute worst when it comes to tech, and could never be an admin. But an island, able to connect with anyone sounds pretty good too, as long as they do all the brainy stuff. 😉
@riversidebryan I'm pretty decent at following well-written directions and probably could do it myself… but I also know I don't have enough patience to fiddle with it and would rather someone else deal with that for me. I don't mind the admin side of things though.
@maegul@atomicpoet There are some fediverse servers that act like a co-op where cost is shared and admin-type decisions are arrived at democratically, like a condo corporation.
Thanks! And yea, this sort of thing makes a lot of sense. But also, I imagine it isn't for everyone either.
I was more wondering at a software/architecture level if it'd be feasible to host many people on a single service/hardware while providing all the control of self-hosting but also optimising as many shared resources, especially around caching I would imagine but also other things like shared block/allow lists etc.
I'd suspect a new platform architecture would help.
Would such an architecture naturally get you closer to some form of nomadic identity?
If the service easily allowed you to bring your own domain, and any number of alternatives existed with essentially the same or similar structure such that you could download and upload essential data, then you'd be "nomadic" no?
Esepcially if the structure, as you suggest, allowed you to run various platforms on a generic server/DB. Sounds like Fediverse 2.0.
@maegul@steve@atomicpoet
This is sort of what I want, a fully managed, updated, patched personal/family solution, (maybe with background caching from Fediverse shared for efficiency) that runs multiple personal servers per person. So each individual can have pixelfed, calckey, mastodon, friendica, kbin, as they like.
@ArtBear@atomicpoet@steve Yea, and I think you're not at all alone. It's probably a conspicuously under-served design/interface for how commonly it's desired across users of all the platforms.
It seems the key is not merely a self-hosting service but either a "meta" architecture that embeds the current platforms, or, a new more modular architecture for any/all fediverse platform.
Increasingly feels like there's new and valuable software ground to break here.
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