The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

GP meant Sonic the Hedgehog, of course. Gotta go fast!

> Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to avoid a walled garden but this always ignore the practical implementation issues and the lack of a value proposition to users.

Federation IMO solves problems on the developer side:

1. We want to write software, not to wrangle with the laws of a hundred countries. 2. We don't want to deal with providing infrastructure for millions of users. 3. We don't want to run a community in general. Our passion is software, we don't really care what they talk about.

On the user side, the value proposition is lack of lock-in. That if you like the system, you'll eventually find some place where you fit in.

> What would be the benefit to a user of federation?

If Twitter were federated with other services, basically you'd have a way to reach select Twitter users from a saner place.

> Can I, as a user, set up my own server like I theoretically can with email? How then do we police content in such a world? What about bad actors spamming as we get with POTS and email? Who enforces things like law enforcement requests and content moderation?

People federating with you can decide to stop dealing with you in that case. Federation doesn't mean links can't be broken, or never established in the first place.

> Twitter may well die. Who cares? It'll get replaced by something else. Federation just isn't going to happen with these philosophical arguments given all the practical problems.

No system is perfect, but IMO a federated system, if done well enough is more resilient. In a federated system, the hope is that something like Twitter would be just one of many providers. Thus if the leadership goes nuts one day, it has to content with that there's 20 other nigh identical providers, and that it can over time be marginalized if it keeps being crazy.

Also, ideally federation means each community can be more focused, and have its own culture and local rules that make sense for it, but may not make sense for anyone else.

Well it used to mean old ladies. In this context, he's referring to left leaning people who disproportionately dye their hair wild colors vs. conservative people.

> main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is

More awareness won't help while the churn is so high. The Fediverse seems to be happy staying small, actively disdaining the sorts of user-friendly moves that would give them mass appeal (but in the process, perhaps, destroy something its current users find special).

I would worry about fragmentation of learned societies and isolating scholars.