The typical ratio is 1:9:90, meaning only 10% are actively posting or commenting. The Lemmy numbers fit to that surprisingly well, although you would think a few more lurkers would at least vote sometimes (which Lemmy reports as active in the monthly stats). My guess is that the lurkers don't even bother to sign in.
There is no such thing as a blind relay. There will always be meta-data accumulation at such points in the network.
It is possible to try to minimize the meta-data accumulation and obfuscate it further and there are certainly some interesting theorectical concepts for that in systems like SimpleX, Nostr etc. but in the end most of these are just giving a false sense of security.
In addition many of these systems engage in what I call "trust-washing", i.e. them proudly proclaming: "there is no need to trust us, bro!" When in reality there are multiple points of failure in their pretend to be trustless system that they just chose to ignore or try to distract you from.
And when it comes to the real-world, tried and battle tested system like Tor are where I would put my safety, not some brand new crypto-bro dondogle that is funded by venture capital investors (like SimpleX).
I think this is a fallacy, and anyone that is old enough to remember the popular days of Bittorrent will have stories to tell.
Yes, in theory p2p models can be more secure if you really know what you are doing.
But in reality the users' end devices are often the weakest link and most people have bad opsec. A server operator has often a much better idea what they are doing and systems like Tor or xmpp that allow servers to protect their users by not sharing all the metadata with every participant are safer for the majority of users.
Yeah, just a modern forum. NodeBB or Discourse, maybe Flarum. The first two even have some experimental federation support and for Flarum it is planned at least.
It never is "all" though. It is all communities subscribed by any member of your instance right now. On smaller instances it is noticably different from larger ones.
This is already implemented and coming with Lemmy 0.20.0 afaik. Not precisely with this goal in mind, but more general to give instance admins more customizability over vote federation.
I kinda agree that it might be interesting to lean into the idea to have the all feed further curated by what instance members are interested in. It already is to some extend, but the bigger the instance the more it gets dilluted out right now.
I am not aware of one with direct AP integration, but I think Opengist has an RSS feed that you could use with a bot to automate posts on a Mastodon etc. account fairly easily.
Basically Matrix is to Xmpp, what Bluesky is to ActivityPub. Which all the various issues both technically and related to VC and crypto-currency funding.
In addition Matrix uses a federation model that is extremely inefficient, making it hard to run your own server once you have a few users that join larger rooms. And as a side effect of this inefficient federation model that replicates the database onto all participating servers, it tends to centralize all the metadata on the servers (run on AWS under UK jurisdiction) hosted by the for-profit company that is behind Matrix.
And last but not least they rugpulled everyone very recently and made the only fully functional server implementation open-core to upsell larger servers to their proprietary hosted offering.
Why would Matrix be the only option? XMPP is significantly better. You can either sign up on a public server or pay a small sum to have your own private server for you and your family for example on https://snikket.org/ or I think https://jmp.chat/ also includes optionally a small server in the subscription.
Federation of servers has been extensively discussed for Veloren, but the problem is that player characters are currently tied to the server they are on (contrary to player accounts) and that the developers are concerned about the potential havok to the simulated economy that players moving between servers could cause.
Originally it was supposed to be ActivityPub based, but recently they posted something about it being for XMPP, Matrix and IRC as well 🤷♂️ Maybe they decided to fork Pidgin 😂
IMHO Sup. isn't going to happen. They will have their hands more than full with Pixelfed's new popularity and maybe Loops.
The typical ratio is 1:9:90, meaning only 10% are actively posting or commenting. The Lemmy numbers fit to that surprisingly well, although you would think a few more lurkers would at least vote sometimes (which Lemmy reports as active in the monthly stats). My guess is that the lurkers don't even bother to sign in.