My response would be something along the lines of “Do you use a different phone number or email address depending on the topic of the conversation?”, but the blank stares quickly remind me that I am part of the last generation that actually talked on their phones and wrote emails to actual people.

I mean… not a phone number, because that’s not given out willy nilly, but emails? hell yeah. I don’t use my work email for private convos, just like I don’t use my junk email for coordinating group trips.

But just like you choose an email to converse with (do you have gmail? well that says something about you. Hotmail? same thing), you only communicate on the fediverse with that account. it doesn’t mean your identity is that topic. It just means its your home base. Just like gmail or hotmail might be your ‘home base’.

Most of us will however be better served by joining a a neutral federation or - even better - by running the instance under your own domain.

which is choosing a topic (yourself) as the root of your identity. Maintaining your own instance is hard. Maintaining a large instance even harder. Growing that instance and keeping it from turning into Reddit (isn’t that why we’re all here) means making choices about what you want to be. Programming.dev was never meant to be a catch-all. I was the main moderator of /r/ExperiencedDevs and frequently helped people on /r/cscareerquestions. I wanted a place to replace that, but that still had other things connected to it. A sort of in-between between HN and Reddit.

At the very beginning of the exodus, there were instances popping up left and right that had absolutely no connection to each other besides all saying “lemmy”. We had lemmy.net, lemmy.world, lemmy.news whatever. Tying your identity to lemmy (or the fediverse even) is a losing proposition. The website should be able to grow no matter what tech it uses, and no matter if it’s federated with this fediverse or not.

The choice in making a topic-ed instance was a deliberate one and a very thoughtful one. You can’t grow if people have no clue what you are or what you do. Reddit took literally 14 years before it was mainstream enough for people to start coming over from facebook groups. Whether that’s something to be desired or not, you can argue about, but it is a point to make that when you tell someone “Oh I use reddit” they’re like “what’s a reddit”. That doesn’t happen with programming.dev. And it doesn’t happen with other topic instances like solarpunk or mtgzone or literature.cafe. You know what you’re getting when you go in (a programming forum), and you happen to be able to use that to communicate with other forums rather than having the diaspora that is Discourse or BB, which you can joyfully find out after joining. Needing to know that something is the fediverse before going in is terrible for discovery and honestly terrible as a website idea. Reddit grew because it happened to be a forum of forums which many people wanted. But a forum of forums where you can choose literally hundreds of sites (and you have no way of knowing which are good or even mediocre) or even host your own? That’s too much for most people, even software devs.