@Louis Ingenthron @Chris Trottier Look beyond your bubble of .NET devs who came over from the birbsite over the course of the last six months.

Look at those who have been here before the #TwitterMigration. Better yet, look at those who have been on #Friendica or #Hubzilla before Mastodon even existed. The Fediverse was much different back then.

People generally distrusted all of #GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). They used Linux whenever and wherever they possibly could. They avoided commercial, corporate-owned, proprietary, non-free, closed-source software like the plague.

Microsoft was actually considered the ultimate evil, also due to Steve Ballmer's attempted crusade of total annihilation against #FreeLibreOpenSourceSoftware, Linux first and foremost.

Devs coded in C, C++, PHP, Python etc., always either cross-platform and Linux-first or Linux-only, put their works under the GPL, the AGPL, the MIT license etc. and open-sourced them. They would never have touched C#, .NET or any other language that was owned by a big corporation and/or would have lead to Windows-only or Windows-first software with a 10-foot barge pole. And they never had to.

Some Fediverse projects actually moved their code repositories from GitHub to Framagit, Codeberg or another non-corporate, non-commercial Gitea-based hoster after Microsoft took over GitHub.

Probably not only over the search issue, but generally over what the #Fediverse shall be.

One faction is the "old guard" that values Free Software, open-source, privacy, actual security, decentrality, federation, online services developed and run by the community etc. Many of them have been around before there was Mastodon, and Mastodon was launched in 2016. These people typically use the Fediverse through a desktop browser running on GNU/Linux.

They strongly oppose any central/centralistic structures in the Fediverse. They've got very good reasons to do so. The same goes for commercial, for-profit entities bringing proprietary, non-free products into the Fediverse.

The other faction makes up the vast majority of the #TwitterMigration newcomers. They don't care for any of the above. All they want is the Fediverse as a whole to be as easy to understand and to use as Twitter. Many only use the Fediverse through the official Mastodon app on an iPhone or a smartphone with manufacturer-issued Android.

They staunchly demand there be central structures if they make things easier for them. In fact, I guess many would love to see the whole Fediverse being reduced to only Mastodon and then Mastodon being turned into a centralised, monolithic silo so that nobody will ever have to know what instances are and choose one ever again.

Oh, and they usually absolutely despise tech-talk with a raging, burning passion. Even more so if it's about something they neither know nor understand (Free Software, open-source, Linux, Nextcloud, Raspberry Pi, anything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon, what happens behind their Mastodon app etc.).

Platform-wise, I can see a split happen between Mastodon and everything else. Mastodon doesn't care if it's compatible to anything else. It's increasingly becoming a walled garden within the Fediverse. I can actually see it either deliberately break existing ActivityPub standards or even fork ActivityPub or invent its own protocol if that's more convenient than sticking to vanilla ActivityPub.

The more difficult it becomes for other projects to federate with Mastodon, the more projects might decide it's no longer worth trying if it meant they'd have to overthrow basic principles of their own. They might even gradually introduce something more sophisticated than ActivityPub, e.g. Nomad, and then abandon ActivityPub, also to get out of reach of ActivityPub-introducing corporate silos such as Tumblr.

The problem isn't searchability.

The problem is mandatorily and firmly connecting all of Mastodon (or the whole Fediverse, i.e. including all of Pleroma and Akkoma and MissKey and CalcKey and Glitch-soc and Friendica and Hubzilla and you get the idea) to something centralised.

Being 100% decentral is a killer feature of the Fediverse and has always been one. And it's being defended tooth and nail. Whenever someone introduces some centralised service that tries to automatically latch onto the whole Fediverse, instances defederate and block it left and right.

See, if there's anything central in the Fediverse that absolutely has to be used, this means two things. One, the Fediverse has a single point of failure. Two, there's some central point from which theoretically the entire Fediverse could be manipulated, controlled, censored. Something that's impossible with a fully decentralised architecture.

Truth be told, this has a lot of conflict potential. Those who have been in the Fediverse for many years are here because it's free-as-in-freedom, open-source and decentralised to the point that anyone can run a private instance of their preferred project. And they want it to stay that way.

Those who came here with the #TwitterMigration aren't in the Fediverse because it's decentralised, but although it's decentralised. Some simply see the complicated architecture of Mastodon alone as a lesser evil in comparison to Elon Musk. Even more staunchly demand the whole Fediverse be converted into a fully centralised, monolithic, corporate "Twitter without Musk" silo so that they don't have to wrap their minds around the concept of "instances" or think about what works behind their mobile app at all.

It's the latter who keep on demanding mandatory centralised features for the whole Fediverse. And it's the former who demand they be defederated from all instances of all projects once someone develops and launches them.