This is very true. At some point someone has to hold your account info. A DID just means another 3rd party or otherwise, holds your account which can also go down or become lost. Hosting your own account is the best for the health of the fediverse also.

Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.

On this point specifically, I think this idea is good. Multiple communities sharing a pool of aggregates that can moderators opt into. Great, I don’t know how feasible that is with ActivityPub, but I hope it can be worked out once the dust has settled.

However, “fragmentation” is neither a problem, nor do I feel exists as things currently stand. If different servers want to host communities around a similar topic, that’s not a bad thing. On Reddit, you had Gaming, Games, Truegaming, etc. They’re all about playing games, video or otherwise, yet if you look at them at all you’ll see they cater to almost completely different audiences. I don’t NOT want ultra dominate monolithic groups. I think if their existed a single “Technology” community then that would be a failure of the fediverse.

Right now is a period of extremes, so don’t evaluate communities too harshly. In the long run, I want to see dozens, maybe hundreds of small communities that maybe don’t get a huge amount of traffic, but are none the less, active and interesting.

All of the Reddit replacements are trying to replicate Reddit but without what makes Reddit actually the great: the mountain of archived content from over the years.

This premise, I feel is the wrong way to look at it. What you think what’s makes Reddit great and what made reddit great to me are totally different. What each user wants or expects from a reddit alternative is something that ISN’T Reddit. If I wanted Reddit, I’d go back to Reddit.

From your post, I don’t think you were really into internet forums. I was a part of several dozens forums, with tons of overlapping and also different discussions. I was sad when many of them slowly died as Reddit dominated niche communities. The current expression of the community-based fediverse such as Lemmy and Kbin are a return to form that I deeply missed. In the old days you could have an art subforum and the vibe of each art subforum was totally different, but shared the general themes of certain styles of art.

I think the “fragmentation” of the current fediverse is great, its no longer one massive hivemind of a single dominate discussion points. I think in the long term, many of these communities will grow and change to suit their respective audience and some will fall out of favor and that’s okay.

I personally do NOT want a single technology community. It becomes boring and samey really fast as the same opinions are reiterated over and over. Focused unique communities will come around that will be my peak of this amazing system.

Scaling from a few dozen sure is a big undertaking, but the vast majority of streamers are streaming to only a few dozen at a time. Something a relatively strong VPS can handle. Once your audience is above that, then is it not unreasonable to expect actual broadcasting infrastructure? I think the argument being made is that twitch as it is, with basically infinite free video encoding is massively unsustainable.

Platforms like Floatplane exist, which is sustainable. So its not an unfathomable problem to solve, its just more complicated than text.

Owncast, while not federated technically, exists. Bandwidth over the years has gotten a lot cheaper, and even real time video encoding has made significant improvements with av1 reducing bandwidth over all, though I’m not sure owncast supports it yet. A reasonably motivated streamer could absolutely host their own website and livestream to it, at not an outrageous cost.

Streetpass was such a cool, and fun thing. I’d love to have an app on my phone that worked like streetpass, with some modern controls. Just collecting people’s miis was silly and some people got really creative with it.