There are a large number of unanswered questions about the Fediverse. I don’t just mean questions that users may have, but questions for which no suitable answer exists yet. Some are extremely abstract and existential like “will the Fediverse survive the next decade?” Other questions are very concrete like, “What is the copyright status of a federated post?” or “What are the moral implications of federating content that may be harmful or recording a crime?”
I wonder, for those of you who stay up nights thinking about the Fediverse, which question is the most important to you?
I’d be a shame if it really broke apart. I mean that would be more a De-Fediverse. Like all the Discourse forums where I need to open up every single one of them to read what’s new, because they’re specialized and not interconnected in practice. I’d advocate for the instances to still interconnect while doing whatever they want. And giving more control to the individual user. Ultimately… it’s complicated. We have things like (instance) local timelines in some federated software. And it’d be great to have distinct Lemmy places/instances. One for political debate and news, one dedicated to Free Software… That’s kind of what communities are for. But it’s the same people in all larger ones. And the instances all look the same, and topics and interests are not part of the onboarding process. So people currently end up on some random instance.
What’s to stop people from making “tunnel” instances, maybe even with reposts?
That aside, ultimately, we’re at the mercy of whoever is paying for the instance, and their interests. So if everything does fragment, it’s just kinda the nature of the hosts.