There are a large number of unanswered questions about the Fediverse. I don’t just mean questions that users may have, but questions for which no suitable answer exists yet. Some are extremely abstract and existential like “will the Fediverse survive the next decade?” Other questions are very concrete like, “What is the copyright status of a federated post?” or “What are the moral implications of federating content that may be harmful or recording a crime?”
I wonder, for those of you who stay up nights thinking about the Fediverse, which question is the most important to you?
Scalability. Federation adds overhead that increases as the number of instances increases. It is unclear to me when we will hit a wall but it’s probably not far off.
How will we pay the bills. Some instances get enough donations to pay server costs but none get enough to pay for staff or developers.
Both of those are only really problems if the fediverse grows, which it hasn’t for a while now. But that could change at any moment.
Might just be a different ratio of people to involvement to infrastructure that scales.