@Bit_form I think that, since most of us come from a tech background, we've ended up thinking way too much about the tech and way too little about people and communities. As a result, the thing we've built doesn't actually meet most people's needs, which makes bridging pointless.

You have to trust your instance admin, and there's a local feed, which makes instances a natural community, but Mastodon doesn't support local posts (Hometown does AIUI) and doesn't really privilege local accounts in any other way, and people don't want to have to make multiple accounts to participate in multiple communities.

Hashtags are also a poor fit for communities: different instances have different views of the same hashtag, and they're hard to moderate. And "groups" are a centralized hack.

I don't think federated will ever work well. It'll all follow the same fate as email and usenet: get dominated by a few large players who care nothing about anyone's needs but their own, then slowly die. We're watching the same thing happen with Matrix.

I consider the Fediverse to be a temporary home until someone builds something better on top of Veilid. They seem to have made a lot of very good design choices.