I understand the idea of the “fediverse”, but personally think that the “no backfill” is the biggest missing piece of the great puzzle.
If I, 2 years from now, wanted to create an instance on the ever-so-popular fediverse, why should I? I can’t attract any new users, as they’ll lack all of the historical posts that makes a community a community (the inside jokes, the posts we still remember, that sort of thing).
Where we are today, better load your instance up with content from the popular communities at the popular instances, to ensure you are able to attract new users in the future.
I get why that defeats some of the purpose of the fediverse, but as for “new instances” it is crucial to have content - or else you have no new users.
I’ve played around with the Lemmony script, and altered it to take only popular instances in account. Right now it only parameterize by active users pr community, but I’ve changed it to also look at users pr instance, so you can subscribe to e.g. top 10 communities of the top 50 instances, so you have the content on your instance for new users joining… But this is just me playing around (and causing the load on the popular instances) with the dream of some day being able to provide my users with the content they would also be able to view on the major instances.