They're not the answer as long as they don't have loads of people. The attraction of FB and the like is that almost everyone has a FB account, just like almost every public figure has a twitter account. The downside of things like Mastodon is how do you know what server you want to connect to? For a non-technical user it doesn't offer any more obvious utility than a FB group.

There is indeed the problem of discovery that Mastodon doesn't feel like addressing. Like, you pick a server, make an account and now what? There's no way to bring your existing social graph with you. Even if your friends are there, you won't ever find them without asking each and every one about their username@domain. But I have some ideas on fixing that for my fediverse project — like making a DHT out of instance servers, thus making global search possible while keeping the whole thing decentralized.

I agree this is the main problem with ActivityPub, can you elaborate on your DHT idea? I'm thinking of doing something similar. How can the search be fast if the data is on many nodes, will you store the cache on a single instance and update it on some interval?

To be honest, I haven't really explored this yet, it's just that DHT feels like the most sensible approach. It's a rather ambitious project and I'm currently making the core functionality work (and interoperate with Mastodon where applicable). I'll probably do a Show HN post at some point.

> The attraction of FB and the like is that almost everyone has a FB account

This is exactly why FB should be forced to federate with other social networks, by law.

But in a way they already do, by going full Hoover over the social media floor and buying them outright.

Federate, not annex.