I changed phones, and tried to log back into my Fediverse/Mastadon accounts. The app asks me which servers I'm on—I can't find the accounts in my password manager, can't figure out which servers they were, and the ones I thought I was on maybe don't exist anymore? Or were accessible in one but not another app.

So I managed to log into one of the 3 accounts I'm sure that I have still. And I'm a software nerd who makes "educated" decisions all the time around this stuff.

Protocol People really care about that, and you know what? It becomes their network effect. But it is a self-selecting network. The nature or design of what effects and attracts the network is the same mechanism for limiting its size.

TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat all focus on things that other people really care about—namely video creation, photo curation and ephemeral small network cohesion. and those focuses attract other userbases.

Probably, there's a lot more people who want to create and watch short videos than there are people who want to nerd out over what their 1/10,000 servers' community rules and protocol settings are.