🐢 Keb I am starting to think that any new microblog should have federation support at this point. There's too many social networks; things are too fragmented. It's definitely nice having a small community of likeminded folks, but the paradox is that every community in its early stage wants *more* users until the point where old users reminisce of the good old days when the site had "personality", and then leave to another smaller community.

🤘 Matthew I disagree. Federation is one of the reasons Mastodon/Pleroma are unpleasant; it contributes to context collapse and makes it harder to compartmentalize across forums. If I'm on server X, I don't want to hear from anybody on servers Y and Z (or see their untagged loli porn or alt-reich memes). If I wanted to interact with people on servers Y and Z, I'd create accounts there.

🐢 Keb Both Mastodon and Pleroma have features to only see content from within your server.

🤘 Matthew Are you talking about the Local feed? That doesn't solve the problem of trying to have a conversation with people on your instance only to have some troll from shitposter.club or neckbeard.xyz jump in. Mastodon provides public, unlisted, followers-only, and direct--but not local-only, and unlisted isn't an adequate substitute because unlisted toots are still accessible from the open web.

🐢 Keb Ah yes, I see what you're saying. Although I think that's one of federation's greatest strengths -- I personally have not experienced trolls derailing conversations, but I reckon that can be an issue on any large enough community. Mastodon and Pleroma can definitely find better ways to help isolate users that want to be isolated.