cross-posted from: https://hachyderm.io/users/maegul/statuses/111820598712013429

Is decentralised federated social media over engineered?

Can’t get this brain fart out of my head.

What would the simplest, FOSS, alternative look like and would it be worth it?

Quick thoughts:

* FOSS platforms intended to be big single servers, but dedicated to …
* Shared/Single Sign On
* Easy cross posting
* Enabling and building universal Multi-platform clients.
* Unlike email, supporting small servers

No duplication/federation/protocol required, just software.

#fediverse
@fediverse

  • ryathal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    The fediverse isn’t over engineered, it’s just not quite focused on the right aspects. A federated social network needs to be more like a block chain, where the content is centralized, and the instances (miners) are decentralized. The content is the important part, and with everything being tied to an instance, it makes the content harder to access. You have instances defederating, going down, closing, and version conflicts, all that makes it harder for a network to gain traction.

    • blue_berry@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      10 months ago

      You are describing a different thing than what the idea of the fediverse is. Content is collected at an instance and these instances federate. That’s why its called Fediverse: people basically form groups, these group federate. It’s a social thing, there is trust involved. With blockchain, the idea is that you don’t need to trust a central entity.

      I think you talk about something like nostr.

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        It doesn’t need to have the full trustless or buring energy for fun, but it does need to be resilient against instances going down, which currently isn’t the case.

  • Sentient Loom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    01·
    10 months ago

    I still think we need a simple social media protocol that gives me the power to curate my feed rather than hoping my admins don’t defederate with everybody else (followed by hordes of drooling goons telling me to start my own instance).

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      Well that’s kinda the point of my quick suggestion in the original post.

      Instead of committing to federation, how about committing to aggregating clients that allow you to do exactly this. Right now, there’s no app that will work for both lemmy/kbin and mastodon/microblogging. No way to unify the notifications or even combine the feeds or just have a unified interface for the two platforms (that are, let’s face, both just full of text messages and feeds).

      By allowing each platform to be distinct but remain open with their APIs and “play nice with each other” while leaning into the value of aggregators as a primary part of the value proposition of the system, users might be better served.

      • Sentient Loom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        01·
        10 months ago

        I have a hard time imagining what that looks like, which is just a failure of my ability to think about these technologies. But what I’m talking about is a little different, simply because I don’t think we can go from these diverse systems into something simple and elegantly connected.

        I mean something like email but structured differently. Though email still has spam filters and blacklists, and a new social media protocol might still need those (inevitably infringing on my curatorial freedom similarly to defederation).

        My point is that I’m still looking for something new, rather than to reform the defediverse.

        Edit:

        I might be wrong. It might be good to leverage what we started here and reform the tech to give users more freedom, and take pressure from admins.

        Also… maybe email is not the example I should follow. Maybe it’s more like torrents. P2P social media.