> an overwhelming number of underwhelming options

I love this phrase, it really seems to catch the problem with all these decentralised projects.

Sure I could try to set up whatever matrix/status/appnet/tent decentralised service of the month happens to be on the front page of HN but also I could just not do that and use Twitter.

The other thing is they all want to take over the entire domain you use them on. Either you have to use a subdomain (which means you can't use your cool [email protected] address) or you forfeit your domain to whatever advert the software brings with it.

Honestly I've just given up with them. I use Twitter, I use Facebook, I use Dropbox and I do things other than trying to run my own versions of those in my free time

> The other thing is they all want to take over the entire domain you use them on

That's not true. Many such projects use /.well-known/ to provide the ability to redirect from the root example.com identity to where you should actually go to send things.

Could you source that? I'm not saying it's incorrect I've just not come across it in these things yet. That'd be the key to getting me on the decentralised bandwagon

Matrix doesn't take over the whole domain; right now you use an SRV record to point to the right place and we're planning to switch to .well-known URLs. source: i work on Matrix.

As an aside, what is the current status of identities in the matrix fediverse? Last time I checked it seemed like the centralisation of identities was "punted" on and you have an OStatus/WebFinger-like system where identities are tied to a particular server.

Ah apologies mate I was thinking of Mastodon when I wrote the original comment

NextCloud / ownCloud have federation but the WebDav links are described in /.well-known/. I haven't installed Mastodon so I can't speak to it, but since WebFinger uses /.well-known/ I would be surprised if Mastodon did anything else[1].

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7033#page-8