I think the biggest issue with the decentralised crowd is they think their target market is their (technical) peers. Web publishing was a cul de sac until it went WYSIWYG. Dialup internet didn’t take off until the likes of AOL dumbed it down.

Until the decentralisation experience becomes AOL simple, it will remain a backwater.

Kept the site invite only during some turbulent times on Twitter. I think that strategy was a huge misfire.

I still think we haven’t seen the “what’s next” in social. I think all these completing protocols are barking up the right tree but they seem to be a bridge to the next thing, not the next thing in and of itself.

So, I think Bluesky has it wrong and the Mastodon model is still better (theoretically, of course, I have no idea how to make this more popular) ; which is to say -- there are no huge advantages and probably tons of pitfalls when you try to do "one universal identifier that sticks forever" for people.

We already have a better working model for this; it's HOW WE DO EMAIL. On one hand, email is a very strong "centralized identity" thing, and on the other it's not absolute. Yes, it has problems, but as twitter has shown -- deeply centralizing the thing has MORE problems.

I'd like to see them actually make it so the common person can understand federation and see it as a plus rather than a confusing onboarding roadblock.

If you don't control the url of your content (i.e. outsourcing it to a social network), you control nothing. All the other details of interface and interoperability can be worked out. If you can't redirect the traffic, you're out of luck.

The core problem with Mastodon and AT Protocol is that they are just codifying the user experience of Twitter and therefore locking in that design. We need to be exploring the space of what is possible in social media, not doubling down on a known broken design. Twitter was not particularly popular compared to other social media apps, and the core design has a ton of problems.

I was wondering recently how much time I've spent arguing with bots online. Hours, surely. Dozens of hours? And it seems like it's going to get worse. The Reddit front page seems largely bot-run now. It's only a matter of time until it spreads.

I honestly hope so. Having organizations like Meta or Twitter et al control massive sections of the social media landscape is not healthy. Any organization, group, or individual that wants to have an online presence should be able to spin up their own service and publish to any constellation of servers that want to hear what they have to say. I hope the EU efforts to push common standards are also applied to US companies in US markets to make all of the coms services federate like we were promised over a decade ago.

I got banned from the most popular mastadon server for simply correcting a guy about an indian tribe that he got wrong so yea doesn’t feel much different than the centralized web to me.

Secure-Scuttlebot.

another beautiful confirmation that there's no reason at all for bluesky to exist that actually might matter to users

Maybe working in secuirty has screwed my vision because this stuff bounces around in my head all day.

I think social media as we know it today is already at the end of the road. Our data has been obtained to make generative AI products and now we are entering a new phase of the internet. The social media we have has already been poisoned by assholes trying to make everyone addicted for money, or victims of non-kinetic warfare.

There is going to be way to many self-managing sock puppets all with an agenda. Automated psyops agents left to their devices, all talking to each other and you.

That’s not to say there won’t be sociable media, it’s just that regardless of how federated anything is we are all still going to constantly be in contact with AI.

the next big social media platform will be the one that can guarantee the most authentic human connections.

Until we get to that point, we will have what we have not and watch it get worse as smaller federated instances pop up that become selective or invite only.

Not much different then private hidden services

Federation is the future because politics demands it. As more and more social media platform turn into an intelligence gathering and an information warfare tool, countries around the world will make stricter laws to restrict the current American and Chinese owned BigTech moats of social media platform. We are already seeing this with new data privacy laws or stringent restriction or even outright banning of the platform (as China has done). This is a huge headache for American and Chinese government because such restrictions impairs their current online intelligence programs. The obvious solution is to partly sacrifice the profits of the BigTech to keep the data flowing. We'll soon find inter-operability being forced on platforms (like iMessage or WhatsApp). More "open" protocols will be pushed and standardised slowly to make it difficult to impose political restrictions and weaken privacy laws (because the message will be that BigTech are no longer in control, but "the people" and every government wants to spy on its citizens). Just look at email to realise how these things eventually end up - how many of you run your own email servers, and successfully ensure that your mails aren't bocked by "spam" services? Federation is good and necessary. But we are now decades past from the idea of "controlling our data".

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