Please be creative! Will there be more communities? Will we refer to each other based on the instances we belong to? Will there be beefs between instances? Will there be doomed romances of two peoples meeting from different places of the fediverse?
Trollfare between popular instances leads to irl confrontations and wild accusations spread across media. Throwing illegal content up onto adversarial instances in community raids becomes a standard way of “swatting” that instance and getting it taken down and posted across the news. Governments start taking over major instances and using it to disseminate fake news and propaganda leading to further polarization and confrontation. Governments set up their own instances with communities for various branches of government. Eventually joining any federated instance requires a government federation account, and your citizenship status dictates where and to what extent you’re allowed to participate. Spies are sent into various instances to try and gain political power and influence. Corporations buy up all the biggest instances and eventually the software it runs on. All data is collected and sold.
Aka “the Birth of Skynet”. Let’s maybe avoid that.
A lot of instances would have average Facebook quality posts.
A few more demanding instances would emerge.
It would be nice to be able to access your local/neighborhood instance instead of the Facebook group
That’s what I’m looking forward to most. I used Reddit for my local stuff (Vancouver/Canada), but still used FB for marketplace and local buy&sell things. Replacing all of that would be nice.
A while ago it was worse, where some organizations only had Facebook groups, or you could only buy a ticket/item through Facebook. That has mostly changed… to other proprietary platforms.
I think it’s somewhat of a false premise … the attraction of the fediverse is that at a large scale it would be hard to predict. It’s more dynamic and flexible to where people are actually up to with things. So the promise of the fediverse at least of such a future would be many things constantly changing without as much inertia built into the system.
Beyond that, if it were truly successful, I think, or would hope, that it would bring about a true democratisation of the internet, where people could truly feel like they personally own a part of it and contribute to other parts as a collective.
Hopefully the worst it can be is a reddit-clone and not other big social media. I wish there’s a better way to aggregate all lemmy posts and make them searchable in search engines. I reckon it’s the allure of reddit, the random collection of information and discussion from ordinary people you can easily find from search engine without (or at least, less obvious) marketing ploy to sell something. That’s the one thing sadly can’t be replaced by lemmy yet.
Maybe there should be a universal lemmy search engine for that? Not just to search communities but also for posts and comments (outside the search option in an instance because it’s limited to communities that are joined by the members of that particular instances). I’m not sure how difficult it’s going to be.
Lots of drama, sometimes defederations would make headlines on world news.
