There are some well known ones, like L4sbot, that copy everything but they’re upfront about it with bot in their name.

There are a few others more sneaky.

Or Fedilab…

Routing would be the hard bit I expect… if the person you were communicating was 10 hops away how to find the route? Things like BGP do that naturally, but really you don’t want to burden potentially nontechnical users with BGP…

So… more than threads then :p

(guessing a bit, but reports say it was 8 million at the end of july and still falling…)

IRC is great, if a little underground these days. It’s also trivial to run your own although federating requires cooperation from both ends so it’s not quite as networked as lemmy or mastodon.

I think they were experimenting with showing lemmy posts as well.

You follow someone who is on mastodon.social, they see the follow, look at your profile and follow you back

Or you reply to a thread, someone on mastodon.social sees it, thinks you sound like someone they’d find interesting and follows you.

I suggest adding some relays otherwise the only posts reaching your server will be things you yourself have followed, which makes hashtags a bit useless.

My current active relay list is: https://bigrelay.social/inbox https://relay.toot.io/inbox https://relay.intahnet.co.uk/inbox

But those are just what works for me… not any particular recommendation.

Then follow lots of interesting people. Look on other servers if you’re stuck, eg. the live feeds on mastodon.social. The more you follow the more conversations you’ll see and find more interesting people. People who boost a lot are a goldmine for discovery (some people make a hobby of boosting eg. https://mastodon.social/@lisamelton).

It’s fundamental to mastodon… you can subscribe to hashtags, you can search hashtags, but you can’t (usually) search posts directly. That works for the most part, but does limit discoverability slightly.

Groups seem to be the new hotness, though… there are some 3rd party implementations already but a proper implementation in the core is upcoming: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap

Federation is the invisible glue that makes it all work… I have my own server but i can talk to you on lemmy.world without having to think about it or do anything special. Most people joining in the future won’t need to care federation even exists, just like they don’t care SMTP exists.

That said I suspect there will be a few mega servers anyway… just like gmail… people seem to like being where everyone else is.

BigBoobFriday has to happen.

Same with mastodon, thread, tiktok and all the rest. There doesn’t have to be a winner, despite the press being obsessed with finding one.