People have asked me if having local-only posting somehow discourages federated posting.
I finally did the actual queries on our instance database, and after about a year of having local-only as an option we are at almost exactly 50/50 local vs federated posts.
65% of our accounts have been active in the last month, which is on the high side of normal for an instance with 80 accounts.
We post about 2x more *federated* posts than other instances with ~40 active users.
My theory is that having local-only posts encourages a stronger community, which encourages more posting in general, which leads to more federated AND more local posts.
I believe that offering local-only posts *strengthens* federation.
(Comparative stats above were collected by me looking at the instance/activity endpoint on similarly sized servers to Friend Camp.)
We have some people on Friend Camp who *almost never* post federated, and that's okay. Their presence here helps keep other people who *do* federate engaged and enjoying their time on Friend Camp!
"In Defense of Unfederated Content" would have been my #ActivityPubConf talk had I attended and had I given a talk.
@darius let's just pretend you did give a talk but you didn't federate it
@mewo2 I've decided to actually write this talk as an article for my Patreon backers which is basically the same thing
@darius cool, although it seems like something it would be useful to share with the fediverse more broadly
