Yeah, this happened to Mastodon (aka the microblogging part of Fedi) also. I was on Mastodon on-and-off for years before the Twitter exodus, and it was a very different place back then. I can see why people miss the overall community on a platform before it became popular, but then I feel like ActivityPub gives us the tools to shape the communities we want, so we have to engage with it and be more selective than we were before.

Sadly, I feel like the Fediverse, based on ActivityPub, was fundamentally designed wrong for scaling potential. I do like Fedi and I like ActivityPub, but I think instances should not have to be responsible for all of this:

• Owning user accounts
• Exclusively host communities
• Serving local and remote users webpages and media
• Never going down, as this results in users and content becoming unavailable

Because servers “own” the user accounts and communities it’s not trivial for users to switch to a different instance, and as instances scale their costs go up slightly exponentially.

I wish the Fediverse from the beginning was a truly distributed content replication platform, usenet-style or Matrix-style, and every instance would add additional capacity to the network instead of hosting specific communities or users.

I guess it’s a bit too late for a redesign now… Perhaps decentralized identifiers will take us there in some form in the future.