Yes, the answer is Nostr
the technology is cool, the people, not that much :)
Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
111–120 of 146 posts
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#112Absolutely. We've pioneered portable identity (and links and data) in a decentralised social web in Peergos: https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media This is also pull based interestingly, but also has visibility controls being E2EE. I don't think society needs public, or at least public by default, social media. This is even more true now in the age of LLMs and mass data harvesting.
> I don't think society needs public, or at least public by default, social media. This is even more true now in the age of LLMs and mass data harvesting. Depends on your definition of “social media.” Is a message board / forum considered social media? Because while they can be problematic, they’re still extremely useful. It would be interesting to think about decentralized Reddit and why lemmy is going nowhere.
That's a good question. I don't think I'm including reddit here because those are moderated spaces on a fixed topic. I consider social media more people posting top level things that others can choose to follow directly. So social media is more like people meeting and talking, whereas reddit is more like an interest-based society meeting and talking.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#113To be more decentralized you could use radio waves outside of the Internet like LoRa to broadcast whatever you need to... maybe it could be combined with the Internet if it's available to increase distance.
Not having any LoRa hardware, I've been imaging just using Bluetooth to gossip updates with people in the same elevator, at the same stoplight... I'd love to build something useful that could tolerate a transport layer like that
One thing that pisses me off is that Google never implemented WiFi "Ad hoc" networking on Android (reducing the probably of decentralized networks taking off).
But I would also love to see something like this going.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not having any LoRa hardware, I've been imaging just using Bluetooth to gossip updates with people in the same elevator, at the same stoplight... I'd love to build something useful that could tolerate a transport layer like that
One thing that pisses me off is that Google never implemented WiFi "Ad hoc" networking on Android (reducing the probably of decentralized networks taking off). But I would also love to see something like this going.
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Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#115Im confused. You can already set up your own fediverse server, just as you can host your own personal blog. Decentralization is just a parameter of how many people choose to join an existing server or create their own.
The problem with fediverse style setups is that they tend to become highly centralized. Email being a great example. It's often pointed to as a perfect example of federation but naive because when highly centralized it only slightly reduces issues of full centralization. So the question is how you be federated while being highly decentralized. This of course isn't important for everything. Centralization can even be…
exactly.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable? as a content consumer I would love to be somewhere where there is engaging content and content discovery. I go to mastodon, my feed is empty and the search doesn't work. I bounce. as a content publisher, I would go wherever the audience is. I go to mastodon, users have a hard time finding me, no one gets my stuff. I bounce. now I (per…
> its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable? Um, apparently, yes? Google searches were doing "+reddit" before reddit melted down. The content was super discoverable and searchable. Everything (including discord, slack, and the fediverse) is laughably bad on that front. People switched from twitter and reddit to ... discord and slack. Mostly beause they handle identity and phon…
I am sorry I couldn't aptly understand you.
did people migrate from twitter / reddit to discord / slack? That's an interesting phenomena if it has happened that I wasn't aware of, do you have sources I can read up on it more?
anyways, my point was that "usability in general" is not the key (reddit has famously terrible interfaces, for example). it is being really usable on the core functionality it should provide (like having tons of content to discover, and getting your content to tons of other people, in case of social media) is what matters.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#117This schema relies on "third-party aggregators / crawlers / search services" for critical parts like comments and content discovery. They are going to be responsible for things like spam filtering, misinformation removal, and blocking accounts which violate TOS. And those crawlers _have_ to be expensive - after all, you need to check every participating server to see comments. So instead of everyone running mastodon…
fair. but I'm assuming you need such expensive (and as a result, centralised) services regardless. a small part of content discovery is "who has reacted to my content", take the case of tiktok, in which a strong content discovery mechanism helped it soar through the ranks. I suspect without such a mechanism the system won't succeed either way (as the fediverse is suffering rn), so its a problem that we will have nevertheless (same as the problem we have with search engines).
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#118> Personal instances will be pretty rare Personal instances of the US Post Office are also pretty rare, my dude. You gonna go deliver your mail yourself? If so, why write a letter? You want total distributed decentralization? Use Gnutella. It's equivalent to giving your letter to your neighbor and asking them to deliver it, and they ask their neighbor, etc, until it reaches a back alley in Algeria, and then that Alge…
People tend to forget that we had everything decentralized in the first place, then centralized them for the sake of convenience: Email -> GMail, IRC -> Slack, RSS -> Social Media, Blog -> Medium, Forums -> Reddit and so forth. And basically, convenience won big time. These are not mutually exclusive though. We need decentralized services to fight discrimination and censorship. But, I agree that there is also disprop…
I wouldn't characterise the history of the internet as having started with "everything decentralised". if I'm not missing something, it was completely the other way around.
introduction of general populous to the internet was through internet gatekeepers like aol or msn, with unimaginable convenience (and centralisation). that convenience lost, in the end, to the world wide web, where a ton of single individuals could set up a website and reach other people across the internet. some of the big central giants of today got born out of this transition (and some were instrumental to it, namely google).
something similar happened to smartphones. ios was intended to be a closed off gatekeeper. people jailbroke it, and apple caved in and opened the system up, allowing anyone to provide services (apps) on it. similar to the www transition, we had a period were you could easily find popular apps made by a single programmer. this decentralisation also basically enabled most centralised social and messaging services of today.
so I see it more as a cycle: in stable times, convenience causes a drift towards further centralisation. when there is a platform shift, established players lose their defensive power, some essential operational costs drop drastically, resulting in a sudden decentralisation: tons of small (mostly individual) players can now enter the market and gain prominence through it. the market then stabilises, thriving players shrink in number and grow in size, and become the convenient, centralised corps of the future, only to be similarly shaken by market forces that allowed them to exist in the first place.
are we close to such a shift now? I think so. current version of the internet is clearly starting to rot and drown in noise, while we are the cusp of new heights of information processing and accessibility through LLMs, while also thriving to push the boundaries of the information we circulate (AR/VR). but who knows.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#119IMVHO: - all distributed solutions show too much overhead to perform well for casual users, some (now abandoned) like ZeroNet was performant enough for some personal blog hosting, but barely and still no "indexing" solution stable enough; - classic decentralized social like Usenet seems to be abandoned by most people (except for commercial piracy) so well, most people do not really care enough to take this root if th…
I admire this vision, and also appreciate the fact that you quoted "just" to underline a recognition of how much of a fundamental shift this is :D
Thanks, and yes it is, but technically we have all the pieces since decades, so while it would be a revolution it's not really something new to be created with uncertain results...
The real revolution is a paradigm shift form the actual development focused on big of IT interests toward a classic desktop centered development, the needed ground is there and battle tested, the rest is "just" to be done on scale. A simple example: we have emails, almost any human on the planet have one, at least between those who use computers in a way or another. Today for 99% mail == webmail, something offered by some third party. We have some desktop MUAs but they are stuck in the '90s at best. However we have for instance OfflineIMAP, notmuch, storage normally big enough, so all we need to have emails on our iron is a MUAs friendly enough for end users, based on notmuch/mu like nomuch-emacs, mu4e, neomutt with notmuch backend and so on, that offer IMAP sync built in so and end user have only to enter relevant credentials and wait for the initial download time. The rest follow naturally.
Similarly you buy an IoT sensor? Your homeserver speak MQTT, CoIoT etc all you need is connecting to the sensor via LAN or to the AP offered by the sensor and then configure your WLAN. You see the sensor pops up in HA or something similar, that's is. No need of a third party "cloud". And so on.
The homeserver is simply a machine on 24/7/365 like most home "router", witch are actually embedded appliance, we only need them more powerful and open to be used by the end user, not only by the ISP. This "center point" offer "sync/services" to all families devices, that's is. The "cloud" became a simple backup/mirror of the homeserver for redundancy, availability, backup.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I admire this vision, and also appreciate the fact that you quoted "just" to underline a recognition of how much of a fundamental shift this is :D
Thanks, and yes it is, but technically we have all the pieces since decades, so while it would be a revolution it's not really something new to be created with uncertain results... The real revolution is a paradigm shift form the actual development focused on big of IT interests toward a classic desktop centered development, the needed ground is there and battle tested, the rest is "just" to be done on scale. A simpl…
thats an interesting perspective. I am personally much in favour of reducing unnecessary interdependence in society, specifically to big corps: google can really screw me up just because they provide an email service for me. questions that come to mind though:
- why would someone do that? its not hard, it can be made easier, but what would be the tangible, low-level gain for people to do that? I can think of examples like safe storage of photos and documents (my old dad already does that, he buys hard disks and stores stuff), easy and safe sharing of stuff in the home (airdrop does this tbh), and secure smart home controls. but I can't generalise the pattern to properly understand the underlying benefit here.
- in communications, there is an issue of trust. like how can I trust email coming form a new personal server, to not spam or scam me? I think that can be solved separately though, just can't formulate the solution clearly in my mind atm.