Keeping the accounts separate seems like an extremely mandatory feature to me. If I had multiple Google accounts I would absolutely not want any information leakage from one to the other.

IMHO: profiles (personas, aliases, alts) are orthogonal to federation.

I once thought personas were critically important. Something like Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But 1) I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to prevent deanonymonization and 2) USA govt didn't protect our privacy, so there is no market for a privacy preserving stack.

I don't think this approach will work for most people. Assuming the Bluesky firehose is 50GB/day, that's a massive amount of data to have to download just to filter for the handful of events a person might actually be interested in. My phone barely goes through a couple GB per month!

But perhaps for efficiency I should rent a server to do the filtering on the cloud and then sync it down to my phone? Well then why not instead consume from a server which already did most of the filtering that I wanted? And now we get back to something like usenet, or the modern day fediverse.

You're describing ZeroNet.

It has ZeroTalk as a Reddit-like thing, ZeroMe as a social network and ZeroBlog as a Twitter-like thing.

https://zeronet.io

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroTalk

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroMe

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroBlog

I've spent a bunch of time in this space, and there are some really interesting options (SSB, matrix, etc).

They all have awkward tradeoffs which lead most people to use one of the centralized networks.

In the end, I return to whatever system has the people I want to interact with; I get very little out of social media unless they are present.

Boy, those of us that remember Usenet are probably getting deja vu…

Well you can run your own ActivityPub Server/Client and subscribe (and thus federate) with anyone who hasn’t explicitly blocked you from federating with them. Bridge that with AT and you can see and interact with whatever you want on the Fediverse.

I actually tried to vibe-code this, not finished tho

At one point I had 2 accounts. One was on my phone and one was on my laptop. I was in the process of moving to the one on my laptop (I know migration exists, but I'm weird and didn't want to do that). Anyway, I was on my phone and saw a post with my one account from some other federated server. When I went on my laptop I couldn't find it. I figured it might just need to propagate. I waited days... nothing. I've seen behavior like this a lot. You're not seeing a problem, because you can't know what you don't see.

If you're just scrolling a bunch of random stuff, you might not care. But what if we want this to be like old Facebook, where you follow people you actually know? Am I going to miss wedding and birth announcements? Party invitations? Other important life updates from friends and family?

You could criticize the modern algorithmic feeds on platforms like Facebook for not showing some of these things as well, if they don't think it will engage you enough, but at least the post is there and available. When I ran into that issue between my 2 accounts, I looked for the post specifically, I had the ID... it simply wasn't available to me.

no, you get the subset your homeserver administrator decides to rehost

So, is the problem that you have accounts on both networks. You would be OK with just posting to both accounts, but for people who have the federation toggle on, they’ll get a duplicate view of your posts?

That actually does seem annoying. You probably can’t do anything about it, but it seems like it would be extremely easy to fix on the platforms’ sides. Since you are intentionally trying not to have people get dupes of your posts, they could just add the ability to tag a post with some identifier, then not show posts that have the same identifier, and rely on you tag your posts appropriately (and an obvious feature would be to automate that tagging and include it in the various “share to <other platform>” buttons).

It'd be nice to have an HTTP 301-equivalent forwarding option + verify control via hashing.

E.g. one could make a special post on the "continuing" feed, then tag the "killed" feed with 301+hash for auto-redirects (and/or dedupe)

Right so your quibble is that part of your audience is not portable, not that federation makes posting harder. You either maintain a centralized service account or you don’t. That hasn’t changed with Meta services. It is Threads that doesn’t allow for portability.

Further a tombstone would point users to the new account if they choose to continue following you. This can be done in a post and your bio.

How bad is it that your two accounts end up in the same feed? By your own admission Threads is a different audience.

well, the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. and therefore if that is a concern you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. federation only works if everyone that you want to reach is in it.