I’ve recently tried to use peertube and I think it could improve a lot if it showed all the content in all instances. But instead you have to look around many instances to try and find something you like. Then there’s other thing, it can’t suggest content if it doesn’t know what you like and without sharing the data between the instances it doesn’t know anything about anyone. If the user data was encrypted and shared between all sites, when you log in it could use the now decrypted user data to suggest content. Or maybe it can share the data with third parties, I don’t really know.
Which would be awesome. A fediverse that depends on all servers being the same is effectively centralized. A fediverse where there are freestanding reasons for joining any of a million different servers is a fediverse where dependence on outside servers is minimized, which is a good thing.
You want enough content to keep things interested but don’t necessarily need the logic of any and all instances to be that they must depend on access to a server other than the one that operate on in order to be worthy of use.
If you want to minimize dependence from outside servers then it’d be best to centralize, not federate. If you want a million servers with 5 people on each you need dependence with the outside servers you want content from, unless you are exclusively interested in the content those 4 other people post in your one server.
Your subscription to a community from an outside server will always depend on the outside server providing the content from that community. And you have to also depend on your server having connection with that outside server.
You necessarly need every server to depend on all outside servers you want to participate in. Either that or you’ll need to have one account in each of those servers you are interested in, which wouldn’t be that different to the end user from having each of those servers be centralized.
The main thing you get is mirroring and replication. Which I’m not sure is worth it considering all the other problems that brings, like deleted content needing to be deleted everywhere, like the need for instances to block and whitelist so they don’t host bad content, etc.
A million small instances > a few big instances
A million CONNECTED small instances > a few big instances