[nmcela]

I would love to contribute. I don't know much about federated ecosystems, though. If you do, could you point me to the right direction? (Google is shit as you know.)

I installed Matrix and Synapse to my local server, but the installation process is not good, and the usability is bad. Clients are super buggy. Unusable, basically, as information got lost all the time.

I'm a game designer and a low-level game engine programmer, grumpy about slow hard-to-use software, so maybe there's a higher chance of doing more good than harm, lol.

[andrewmunsell]

Definitely use some of the platforms as a user, first. I personally use Lemmy & to a much lesser extent, Mastodon. I think once you start using them and understanding how the web UIs work (or don't), it'll help you build a mental model around the problems with UX and (partially) scalability of how federation works in these systems today.

You can always go down the ActivityPub rabbit hole (maybe starting with something like https://dev.to/thasmin/getting-started-with-activitypub-2mgm) to understand the federation protocol, but this may be less useful if you're interested in the UX problem

[karmakurtisaani]

Check out join-lemmy.org for Lemmy instances to join. You should be able to find more info there, or at least ask for more.