I find it is a lot easier to search through communities and instances on a desktop. Mobile is clunky even through some of the apps that have been developed are pretty good.

yeah pretty much

This is why federation is not the solution to centralized services. The solution is called decentralized, or P2P. I don’t even understand why ActivityPub got so popular, when it is one of the worst protocols in terms of communication. But whatever. I’m still here. Because it is still better than Reddit

Yet they have an email provider.

That's just laziness/willful ignorance. The fediverse is just spicy emails

Federation is decentralized. I feel like some major structural issues would exist with p2p, like would I only see posts from people actively online while I am online?

What other protocols do you think would suit the needs of a decentralized social media better?

You would still need servers to connect to. Take a look how Solana works - the same concept (with or without the blockchain) would work for social media.

Unfortunately there is no really good protocol. ActivityPub has the purpose of making things interconnected between different worlds. Like, Lemmy with Mastadon. But for that you have to find a common denominator, stripping away all the good stuff, for a feature that no one really wants.

Treating it seriously, I think that people are interested in growth because:

1. if we aren't growing, then due to attrition we are slowly dying
2. people seem to want a little bit more content, especially about niche topics that currently we have to keep going back to Reddit for bc that's where it is at
3. solving the problems inhibiting growth may make us better overall and our experiences here more enjoyable not only for new people but the existing userbase as well - so here growth is the diagnostic indicator of deeper phenomena

So it is not to feed the advertising machine and stockholder valuation, but even with the profit factor removed there are others that remain.

It's like needing to know the password before being let into the treehouse.

I have to say this is my experience too. I'm a boomer and whatever stumble upon here is purely coincidental.

"Fuck spez!"

"Yes, yes, come in, come in!!"

Agreed, as you can expect.

So if there are still servers, that sounds like it's not peer to peer, right?

I am reading up on Solana a bit, but not really finding answers as to what functionally makes it a better protocol. Naturally being a blockchain most of the information is focused on trustless monetary transactions and all the scams that been involved. For what is novel I'm seeing a "leader" server that validates the order of events that as a role can be passed between theoretical similar servers of sufficient hardware? I guess I don't think of super strict chronology as a desperate need for social media. So is the benefit you're looking for in the smart contracts?

Further I would argue that it is underutilized, but the idea of seamless inter-connectivity is a super power tool of a set of social media platforms. And ultimately there is nothing that forces a particular platform to limit itself to the bounds of mastodon, the bones of activity pub are incredible versatile by my understanding. What do you see as the good stuff that is stripped away?

My account was shut down without notice a few weeks ago. The server providing my account shut down. All comments, saved links and history was gone.

How do you explain this to a non-technical user while reassuring that this is a great system?

Block the ani.social instance and it takes away 90% of the anime groups.

“subscribed” is the exact same thing as “all”

It shouldn't be! If you subscribe to a couple communities, your "subscribed" feed on the front page should only show posts from those communities. The "all" feed will show posts from all communities that everyone on your instance (server) subscribe to. "Local" should show posts only from the communities hosted on your own instance.

My experience is that the "subscribed" feed only shows me posts from the specific communities that I'm personally subscribed to.

Oh man it really is too. I spent the better part of a day trying to find a good instance to join to post and I couldn’t figure out the various keywords and stuff; every time I thought I found a fit it was basically the opposite of what I needed. Then I gave up and stopped even wanting to do it.

"you know how when a corner shop closes in town, you're still able to go to a different store, but if safeway has driven all the other stores out of business and then shuts down you'll fucking starve to death?"

As I mentioned (and you listed) growth has its pros, but the troll is basically going "growth good EDIT WOW THANKS FOR LE GOLD KIND STRANGER!". And in Reddit's case (relevant because the troll is comparing both platforms), if anything the excessive growth already led to problems.

But you are here all the same. We appreciate you!