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A comment on ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol. Parent comment

Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol by jeswin on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @09:53AM (#16223091)
As a counter example, there are millions of non-technical users using the bittorrent protocol. They are running a server on their machines and not aware of the technical complexity that lies underneath. I am not saying it's an easy UX problem to solve, but it can be done.
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Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol by AsyncAwait on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @10:29AM (#16223364)
Sure, I think the problem with people running i.e. Mastodon on their own machine would be what should happen when people turn off their computer.

I guess there could be some sort of "super node" solution, where a known Mastodon server would just forward you the "what happened while I was asleep" stuff and I guess people could encrypt their messages to you with your advertised public key, so that you don't have to trust the super nodes, but I am not sure about the additional complexity involved in implementing that vs current Mastodon using ActivityPub, nor about the usability challenges involved.

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Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol by NoGravitas on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @01:01PM (#16224767)
That's basically how Secure Scuttlebut works; the super nodes are called pubs.

It's actually remarkably easy to onboard to SSB with Patchwork. The problems set in when you start considering mobile devices or multi-device support (the latter is currently possible but risky).

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Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol by fauigerzigerk on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @01:58PM (#16225307)
BitTorrent only works well (i.e in a true peer to peer fashion) if many people are serving up the same files so that some sources are always online. Outside of piracy that is rarely the case.
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Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol by icebraining on Thursday January 25, 2018 @06:56AM (#16230260)
People will serve whatever the software wants; serving only want the user explicitly selected is just an option.

For example, in Freenode you don't control what gets downloaded and served (which also helps to hide what you're fetching on purpose).

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