@oli He got it wrong, Rudy was talking about fediverse instances as ~100 people (not 100K), contrasting that with Bluesky's huge flat space and design goal of "zillions of people", and highlighting that there's an interesting gap in between.

(Of course fediverse servers can be larger than that, but I don't know any larger than a few thousand people that I'd describe as a communities.)

Island networks and other topologies like that are one approach to filling this gap (although the examples of island networks so far are still a lot smaller, and we'll need something like fedifams / caracoles to get things to work in the millions). "ATmospheric communities" like Blacksky are a different approach to community-in-the-large, and potentially complementary to fedi's networked communities.

@thenexusofprivacy Island networks are a lot smaller, and I think necessarily so.

Though I'm still working to make joining one a basic turnkey operation for a lot of islands that want to join one, which I suspect will increase the size of the network a bit as people find it easier to just click a 'Join' link and auto-add themselves to a group (after someone in the network approves their application).

But yeah, I was trying to imagine this idea of a "community in the billions" as if there is such a thing.

@oli yeah i don't think it was trying to frame Bliuesky's "billions" as a community