Re:The unrealized potential of federation
by wmf on Monday September 21, 2020 @11:57PM
(#24550681)
Ultimately I think developers need to take some responsibility for causing and fixing de facto centralization by not steering new users to "default" servers and refusing signups once a server has excess market share.
Federated communication or social media works differently than P2P file sharing. In file sharing you're locating random anonymous peers but in social media that's the last thing that you want. When communicating with a specific person you need their identity anyway and you can use some system like DNS or a blockchain to find the server backing that identity.
Multicast on the public Internet is not going to happen due to state management cost, and it's not helpful for federation anyway due to the spam problem.
Federated communication or social media works differently than P2P file sharing. In file sharing you're locating random anonymous peers but in social media that's the last thing that you want. When communicating with a specific person you need their identity anyway and you can use some system like DNS or a blockchain to find the server backing that identity.
Multicast on the public Internet is not going to happen due to state management cost, and it's not helpful for federation anyway due to the spam problem.