@frankmeeuwsen @Gargron

Yes, starting an instance around some affinity group would give you a strong local feed that helps like-minded people meet one another, while leaving everyone open to following other stuff/people they care about via federation.

@HedgeMage @frankmeeuwsen @Gargron I think this is the incentive to federate. If you don't like it here, or better elsewhere, you can fork off or move. Hopefully this will keep up the flow of new users, and to spread them over other instances.

@timp @Gargron @frankmeeuwsen

Agreed. Now if only we had cheap/easy account migration and/or meaningful account linkage of some kind. This would be the only thing likely to motivate me to start an instance.

There would be an attraction to starting one with membership only open to people who've been around my infrastructure coding group a while as a badge of honor thing, plus local feed making it easy for alumni to connect.

@frankmeeuwsen @timp @Gargron @HedgeMage I believe that this is critical to the success of federation to the point that I would support accounts being unique across all domains, as unpalatable as that is, if that is the only feasible way to achieve cross instance portability of accounts.
@Hueman @Gargron @timp @frankmeeuwsen I don't see any technical reason so far to tie portability to like-username availability.
@Gargron @timp @frankmeeuwsen @HedgeMage I listed a practical reason while remaining technically agnostic