The All-Feed is very important to increase the content-quality of the threadiverse and therefore, ensure its existense. However, for smaller instances, there is only limited reason to put the All-Feed prominent in their UI, because their posts will never be present there. However, if they push people toward their the Local-Feed (which they currently do), people will only stay on their instance and overall discussion quality declines.
So, to truly overcome instance protectionism, we need a new feed, in which an instance can find a good balance between showing content from other instances and its own.
How so? For who, and why? I doubt it’s true for me. I use my subscribed communities. How does the existence, or the state of existence of the All-Feed affect my content quality?
What do you mean with “push people towards their local feed”? Are you referring to the instance default setting, wether the instance page should be fed from All, Subscribed or Local? And you mean the default should be All, not Local?
Also doubts about the last part; “people will only stay on their instance”. I joined my instance when it had around 100 users, and instantly started searching for communities which interest me, and subscribed to them, regardless on which instance they are hosted.
Maybe the kind of user you are talking about exists. Maybe some people never search for their interests, never get interested in a cross-post community, never get interested in a community when other people talk about it. I have doubts about all this, but maybe it exists. But it’s on you who makes that statement to show this user group exists in a number large enough to talk about it as if there was no one else.
Maybe some people will only stay on their instance, but if some is small enough, and a good part of those enjoy exactly that, why should we care or even try to change that?
I do agree however, that community discovery should be improved even further. Especially for people from very small communities, it can be a tricky process to discover new communities on remote instances.
I’m all for more control, which is why I’d like that power on the user level. Let me choose how to curate and compose my feed. An instance may predefine defaults, yes. Much like instances predefine wether their start page is populated with All, Subscribed or Local, and users can freely choose otherwise or change this setting permanently for them individually.
Ideally, I’d like to assign weights to instances and communities, to control how likely a post from that origin is to show up in my feed.