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 serversNo duplication/federation/protocol required, just software.
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.
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.
Well I’m spitballing here, so I wouldn’t worry about not being able to imagine it! I’m struggling too!!
Is there a chance that BlueSky is more like what you’re after?
No, that’s fairly centralized too. I think I want a peer-to-peer social media protocol. Maybe more like torrents than email.
Yea right. Me too I think. It’s out there and has been for a while. Just don’t think it’s ever taken off.
You might find this interesting: https://pfrazee.com/blog/why-not-p2p
I’m checking this out!