Social media's next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable

Re:Social media's next evolution: decentralized, open-source... by JimDabell on Monday August 25, 2025 @08:59PM (#45021054)

> I know people like to compare it with email

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.

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Re:Social media's next evolution: decentralized, open-source... by specialist on Monday August 25, 2025 @11:16PM (#45021899)

IMHO: profiles (personas, aliases, alts) are orthogonal to federation.

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.

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Re:Social media's next evolution: decentralized, open-source... by pjc50 on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @06:08AM (#45024507)

Keeping the accounts separate seems like an extremely mandatory feature to me. If I had multiple Google accounts I would absolutely not want any information leakage from one to the other.

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