If you get everyone together in one place anyway, call it a public community and enable ways to to set up and organically discover other ones.

Keep communities intentionally relatively small.
(less drama, more signal and better monetization strategies)

Enable publishing certain content types in multiple communities at once.
(blind-spot opportunity that most builders on open protocols keep missing and keeps them trapped in a false "public-square VS niche without reach" dichotomy)

Hehe, yes, own app 🔜

I'd loved to actually test delta chat with someone tbh 😅

Good ACL.
Good PKI.
Open content types.
Signatures where needed.
Pay with anything.

For individuals and small groups.

Yup, I think initially focusing on private contacts, chat groups and small public communities is the better way to bootstrap in any case.

Why do so many of these projects want to bootstrap a public square?
It's freaking hard and in the case you succeed it'd be only to realize, once again, that every public square ever trends towards corrupt centralization, high school drama and whoredom.

If I'm not wrong, that's kinda how pubky does it, right? But in public folders, on the homeservers.

#noob trying to understand it all here.

But I just want a root ID that points to my drive (homeserver), then have data on there, part of that data being profile metadata that I can choose to have discoverable by (some or all) others.

Yup :110percent:

The latter seems realistic and aligns with the number one business model I can see around all this: hosting + convenient security

Ideally you have access control on that stuff.
This what people loved about Facebook (until they messed that all up), the ability to choose woo cash see what.

It'd be a bit like an auto-fill UX, that you confirm our not, when you want to post in some forum or join a chat.

Lol, champagne problem, never heard that one before. Accurate 😅

Many ways out of that, no?
(especially if you sponsor registrations for onboarding users for a big part)

Ton of value in interop profiles tho.