/r/ModCoord thread working on extending the blackout beyond tomorrow, as a response to Steve's email: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/
Absolutely, the backend federation protocol I personally think is great (though I question the scalability of a lot of the existing backend implementations). With some extra discovery services that help connect you to different instances, I think that would really help with some of the challenges I've personally see people run into
This is likely an unpopular opinion, but the extent to which current solutions are decentralized actually makes it difficult to gain critical mass. When watching others (previous Twitter and Reddit users that are not very tech savvy) try and use Mastodon or Lemmy, it's very clear the idea of federation still is pretty foreign, despite having used it in email for a long time.
I think OP has a very valid point: providing a better experience through the illusion of centralization could be beneficial to transition users to the Fediverse.
And this actually doesn't destroy the whole purpose of federation to begin with:
It's clear with Apollo, RiF, Tweetbot, and every other "third party" social media client that the actual interface is often fungible and there's enough demand-- when the social network is large enough-- to support multiple, high quality clients.
Reddit isn't dying because of the interface itself, despite the app and new website being terrible user experiences. They're running into challenges because they are upsetting the user base by exerting control over the content. Yes, you now must consume Reddit through the official interface, but it's not the interface itself.
But federation is not about the interface, it's about distributing the content in a way that results in a network that has no single authority over it. Regardless whether one particular UI or app does something unpopular, your content is all safe on your server and federated to others, and you can simply switch.
There's obviously still challenges if "mastodon.com" provided a "centralized" UI and literally everyone gravitated towards it (it makes it harder for the critical mass of users to migrate later), but they don't actually ever have control. In this scenario they may have more mindshare, but federation makes the network (and its most important asset: the content) resilient as a whole.
I spun up my own Lemmy server last night in my Kubernetes cluster. It's great to have the option and wasn't difficult at all, and once Apollo is gone, I'm thinking I'll end up using Lemmy exclusively.
Another one I saw suggested was https://redact.dev/
I started my own as well (I also run my own Mastodon server) in a Kubernetes cluster. It took maybe 30 minutes to get everything up and running in my home lab setup.
If you've never used Docker before and wanted to give it a shot, there will be a learning curve, but it's honestly very rewarding and depending on whether it's relevant to you, it's a good professional skill to have as well
For what it's worth, all of the technical specifications are open and published by Tesla. I believe they a design patent, but that they've committed to open use of it as with their other patents.