Start by participating, and then identifying and elaborating concrete problems and potential solutions to them.

So what concrete problems and potential solutions do you see?

Edit: People have been participating in federated networks since ages. But it is hard. Especially if you want to give users the same experience as with non federated sites.

And I am not sure, if for example lemmy has solved it

https://programming.dev/post/50696

So it is an open question, if a federated network can work as stable and easy as a centralized instance.

I would think so, but so far it is only a hypothesis.

The biggest problem I see so far is discovery and UX. UX is going to be fixed by the devs with time so I'm not worried about that but discovery isn't getting the same attention yet. Right now on Mastodon we have like github repos with lists of people of certain types and then the presentation of user lists by the instances themsleves but these are both primitive. We need to figure something else out. Being able to follow hashtags was a great step forward but we'll have to do better. I think even cultural changes could help, like make it normal to introduce people to eachother. Maybe add a suggest protocol for people to recommend people/communities to other people.