Yeah if you want to do the same community it’s going to be harder, but if you want to make your own community with your own content and views it’s different.

Also, the history of the internet contradicts your point, communities have moved servers since the beginning, there never was a unique central point for everything. Lemmy is a bit inferior here because it only allows you to see communities one by one, but piefed can group communities into feeds that you can directly follow. By not placrng focus on a single one piefed can push for much more diversity

That’s because AP as it is implemented today is crap, it’s a superficial compatibility layer on top of a proprietary (as in, doing non-standardized stuff) platform. We need to take it on its head and make AP the actual core then build on top but that requires some work

Pro-capitalism garbage is putting me off, yet is everywhere. I like that it’s different, not everyone wants the same things

I like that communities/instances have opinions and go in a direction. That’s what make decentralization useful rather than one big average thing that always pushes towards the status quo in the end. Make your own community with your own rules without all-powerful overseers, that’s a system I believe in

No, I’m taking the data as it exists on the API …

We can see a globally slowly downward trend, probably not good but I’m definitely not equipped to analyze that

Then again if it’s some guy in his corner doing stuff on his own, is it really a community ?

Neither nostr nor simplex make “community building” a thing. The most important defining point is the ability to have communal intermediaries. All protocols can do a forwarding bot, starting with the good old mailing-list, but anything more complicated than that is rare. In nostr that would be running a full relay (which is just out of the question if you’re not technical). Simplex isn’t much better. Both are built for individualistic purposes, so it’s not really surprising.

ActivityPub isn’t perfect but it has Groups, with some people working on making them controllable. XMPP has highly configurable pubsub. Those are proper foundations for billions of people building billions of communities

I’ve been thinking about that a lot and plan to build something I’m more interested in:

• powerless instances where all you can do is create accounts and store stuff to be served but every logic and integrity is done by clients
• anonymous account creation so that everyone can participate -> freedom of speech …
• follow-based interaction: if I don’t follow you, you cannot send me anything -> … not freedom of reach
• because instances are powerless they do not define community anymore. Communities are good old accounts, created, managed and animated by users directly
• because clients have all the power, they are the primary storage source
• Communities are the primary dissemination vector. If I don’t follow you but we’re both part of the same community and you post something to that community, I’ll see it
• when I block someone, that block can be propagated to others so they can automatically block that same account. This works for communities as well.

Hopefully a design like this should empower users and communities by letting them focus on the social aspect of building the group, nurturing it, instead of the technical parts that constrain users into artificial uses