The thing to keep in mind if you are on a Fediverse instance right now is that you are a very early adopter.
We’re still in the stage where we need people acting like bees. Go out to the greater web and find web sites (REAL WEBSITES, NOT AGGREGATORS), and bring back their content. Stuff that has some actual meaning and teeth that can enable people to make comments.
If you’re a commenter, you need to get in there and engage with people. Not every comment needs to be a top level comment. If you see someone has said something, and you’ve got a response to it, even just a conversational one. Post it.
And finally, memes and images are cheap content. They can be looked at and consumed quickly which makes them great for lurkers, but awful for community building. You need actual content for that.
This is the hive, everyone here are drones, if you want the site to thrive, you need to bring back high quality feed material and you need to communicate with your fellow drones, not just hope that other people will communicate with you.
Many hands make light work or something like that. :)
Continuing to decentralize will play a big part. Also we as users will have to have greater ownership and contribution. Not always monetarily, but in participation, moderation or otherwise.
Decentralization and time. The technology will continue to grow. Not too long ago, platforms on the scale of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc. were thought to be impossible. As adoption increases, so too will the contributions from the open source community.
Are there ways to make it easier for laypeople like me to contribute to the infrastructure directly? And I don’t mean financially, I mean hosting or something.
Not really. Best thing you can do is share content and spread the word.
On it.
Eventually the “fediverse” may end up even more loosely connected than it is. All that it really needs to be is decentralised/federated and open source/open protocol.
We’re in the age of epic centralisation of the Internet, but it wasn’t always that way. Hopefully we go back to something where there is much more diversity, much less corporate control, and much less need for monolithic platforms that need to support millions of users (and the technical challenges that come with that).
As far as money, I think people are much more likely to pay for things online if they feel like they have some kind of genuine control over them. i.e. it’s a “donation” not paying for a service. Servers are pretty cheap these days, so even a big instance can get by on a few thousand a year.
An older name for ‘the fediverse’ is ‘the world wide web’, and an older name for that is ‘arpanet.’ It’s a pretty recent development that a few large companies control access to information.
