I mean you can still create the old style forums. If you want a single log in, just add Oauth, not sure why you need the whole activitypub protocol. But presumable if you want to stay in a little community, creating a few logins is barely a problem.

I like the old style mentality of small communities. I hate reddit. But sites like reddit/twitter are fundamentally different. You NEED a sizeable amount of content/users. I am not saying this needs to grow into reddits scale, in fact Im happy at the scale lemmy.world is at, but I would like to see a decentralized alternative to a corporate monolith. To me that looks like several hundred or thousands of instances of anywhere between 20-100k users each. To achieve that, we have to balance the influx of new users into different instances, which is why I am talking about inter-discoverability within instances. Otherwise you have a couple instances which get all the traffic and that turns right back into reddit. But maybe there is a different way to achieve that.

Does that make sense?