There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first.
I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.
I once thought personas were critically important. Something like Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But 1) I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to prevent deanonymonization and 2) USA govt didn't protect our privacy, so there is no market for a privacy preserving stack.
It shouldn't matter what servers are anywhere. It should all be eventually consistent for some agglomerated cluster sampling of the world. Make the content immutable and ephemeral. People that care to archive it will.
Federation is silly and is part of the problem. Plus it creates more little fiefdoms.
I'll subscribe to my own filters if I care, and my agent will handle the rest.
But perhaps for efficiency I should rent a server to do the filtering on the cloud and then sync it down to my phone? Well then why not instead consume from a server which already did most of the filtering that I wanted? And now we get back to something like usenet, or the modern day fediverse.
But if there were hubs funded by groups of interested people that allowed those folks to share the cost of "seeding" and in return only "leech" the information they care about... then isn't that essentially the same kind of decentralization that already exists on the fediverse? The way I understand it, instances are set up by communities of people with similar interests and those instances are configured to only propagate a subset of the events that their community is interested in.
anyways the idea is very much to do like bittorrent or kademilia but for social media posts i need to research more the fediverse before building anything tho
They all have awkward tradeoffs which lead most people to use one of the centralized networks.
In the end, I return to whatever system has the people I want to interact with; I get very little out of social media unless they are present.
It has ZeroTalk as a Reddit-like thing, ZeroMe as a social network and ZeroBlog as a Twitter-like thing.
https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroTalk
That's news to me, as a Mastodon user. I just scroll my homeserver's default feed and get stuff from all over the internet.
If you're just scrolling a bunch of random stuff, you might not care. But what if we want this to be like old Facebook, where you follow people you actually know? Am I going to miss wedding and birth announcements? Party invitations? Other important life updates from friends and family?
You could criticize the modern algorithmic feeds on platforms like Facebook for not showing some of these things as well, if they don't think it will engage you enough, but at least the post is there and available. When I ran into that issue between my 2 accounts, I looked for the post specifically, I had the ID... it simply wasn't available to me.
you could throw more money into the instance's tip jar to make it easier for them to decide to rehost a larger part of the data firehose - that may not be the entire reason they defederated from an instance but it may be part of it
you could move to another instance whose admin's choices are more in line with yours
Though, IMO Mastodon not the better of the fediverse platforms, but I don't love microblogging social media. But it's all going to end up being like Linux. Some people tried it once, didn't like it, and then 10 years from now it'll be totally different and everyone will wonder where it's been all their lives.
Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.
I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media?
Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.