Sir, this is an Arby’s…

I don’t agree with parent, but I also think that we should stop judging people by association. It’s not just because someone uses closed software that automatically means they are as evil as the corporations that abuse their power to ensure their monopolies. It makes perfect sense to say “I want to support what you are doing but I do not want to show it in a way that enables some third-party that I do not like”.

I’d agree with you if MS was applying this specific business tactic to destroy an established business. But there isn’t at the moment, so I am okay with using that until the market becomes big enough to actually be attractive to potential competitors.

I am saying this as someone who was working on an open source payment gateway for crypto and a crowdfunding platform for content creators on the Fediverse: not enough people are willing to risk putting their money in an unproven platform just because they don’t like the big corporations.

Surely, but there is not forcing you to keep using them when they change the rules.

If it’s any incentive, Github sponsors costs money to Microsoft. They pay for the processing fees, and Stripe is not that cheap for micropayments.

Same for hyperloop

Funny, I am of the exact opposite opinion.

I don’t mind topic-based instances for groups, but I really would not like to have my online identity tied to one specific, narrow interest of mine.

I think, sadly, that either sending in your national ID

That’s why I mentioned the idea of “Zero Knowledge Proofs”. Using a ZK-proof, one should be able to prove ownership of an ID without having to reveal it to anyone else.

At that point, it’s not its own web app anymore, more akin to an email program.

Yes, exactly. I am not a fan of the current way that the Fediverse is working though, and I think it would be better to stop thinking in terms of “servers/clients” and more in terms of “distributed applilcations”.

Can you explain more? How would this do anything to prevent sockpuppets?

Imagine something like a verification check (like Twitter’s old blue check) that is exclusively associated with your national ID. You can have only one of those. If you want to create sockpuppets, you’d have to convince someone else to (a) give them access to their ID and (b) be willing to lose their ability to prove their own identity elsewhere.

It’s not absolutely safe against bots and sockpuppets, but it surely makes it more expensive than even a $10/account membership.

Pixelfed has support for most of the Fediverse.

PIxelfed is still just supporting ActivityPub. I’m talking about multi-protocol communication. A smart client should be able to let you communicate with Lemmy communities, subreddits, Facebook groups and all types of different platforms from a single unified interface. There are plenty of people that think this is something undesirable (like everyone that wants instances to block Threads), but I’d argue that building these integrations with closed platforms would eventually destroy them because they would lose the monopoly on network effects.

You can’t bring an actor ID to a new domain name, can you?

No, but you could have a web server that responds to multiple domains. Ideally, the server listening and responding to the AP requests should be able to work with multiple “virtual servers”, instead of having to have only one instance == one domain that we today. AFAIK, only Takahe does this for microblogging.

• Proof of Humanity. There is some work about using Zero Knowledge Proofs as a way to be able to indicate that the owner of a key can also prove ownership of another set of credentials without having to reveal these credentials to third parties. This would allow us to really get rid of bots and sockpuppets.
• The ability for users to bring their own cryptographic keys and actor id. This way even if a server goes down people could port their whole account over to a different server.
• Multi-protocol federation.
• Get rid of downvotes/upvotes and replace it with multi-dimensional scoring/ranking system.
• User-defined sorting/ranking. I do not want to completely block people, but I do wish to have a system that could boost/de-emphasize posts by certain people on certain topics, and completely ignore them in others.
• Cooperative media storage and distribution that could leverage the storage from clients as well as servers, something based on bittorrent.
• Custom widgets that can be attached to a post/community. For example, I’d like to have a play-by-play tracker for basketball/football games.
• RDF/Semantic Web descriptors. If people are talking about a TV show, or making a list of PC components that they want to review or anything that can be part of a knowledge graph should be linkable and browsable by a specialized browser.
• Collaborative lists/articles/posts. With the item above, it would be trivial to create wikipedia-style posts where a community can build their “common knowledge” and would make it easier for newcomers to get general recommendations and/or a sense of the community values.

You know that you can configure minio to only serve images for authenticated requests, right?

Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you have a very good reason to do so.

I was using old smartphones as an example of the amount of excess computing power available which goes unused, not what people can do with it.

Your argument is just missing the point and annoying sophistry. Can you please just drop it?

I feel like one of the issues with these “new plan for X” essays or posts is that readers usually interpret it as something to completely replace the status quo. It’s not the case. I’m not saying that everyone should start using this. I’m not saying that everyone should leave Mastodon. I’m not saying that all server-focused software using AP needs to go away.

I’m just saying that the current approach is not the only one and that Mozilla could have benefited from trying something different. I’m saying that Federation might be the right unit of organization for some cases, but that there is a whole world of possibilities where Federation is not so suitable.

I get it, it makes no sense to say that a network with 1M+ active users is “doing everything wrong” and that we need to start anew. I am not arguing the case to change those that are already here. I am arguing for changes that could help those that looked at “Federated Social Media” and went away because this model didn’t work for them.

Applying for jobs, applying for government services, buying essential items cheaply, cheap/free education.

None of these things are even close to be available to people in extreme poverty.

Think “no access to running water or sewage systems” levels of poverty, not “living in a ghetto area of an European or North American country”.

I think you didn’t parse the sentence as I meant it.

I am not saying you should make all networks completely connected. What I am saying is that we should not develop Fediverse apps by emulating a closed (as in proprietary, corporate-controlled) service.

I have not once said that we need to get rid of servers, but I am saying that they could (should?) be used only as an proxy for the outbox/inbox. I’ve said already elsewhere, but it may make it easier to understand: the “ideal” model I have in mind is something like https://movim.eu, but with messages based around the ActivityStream vocabulary.

you really can’t get around this, even if you make every user handle their own stuff, every user will have their database and message queue.

Why is it that a XMPP server can handle millions of concurrent users on a single box with 160GB RAM and 40 cores, yet Mastodon deployments for less than 10k active users have crazy expensive bills?

AP has a great migration system.

Hard disagree, here. Tell me one system where I can take my domain and just swap the urls of the inbox/outbox. Mastodon lets you migrate your follower list and signals the redirect to your followers about your new actor ID, but you can not bring your data. But most importantly, the identity itself is not portable.

silo which holds all posts ever made, indexed to search? (…) that’s centralization

You can have decentralized search indexes. Each server holds a bit of the index, but everyone gets to see the whole thing.

i don’t want my end device to connect to every instance under the sun.

Not every instance, but you’d be connecting to the outboxes from the people you follow. How is that different from, e.g, subscribing to a RSS feed?

my fedi instance db is around 30G, and im a single user instance which only sees posts from my follows

First: How the hell did you get this much data? :) I have an instance running for 4 years, with a bunch of relays, serving ~10 users and the DB has less than 4GB.

But to answer your question: If you are running a single-user instance, then you are already running a client, the only difference is that you are running on a remote machine which proxies everything for you. And how you deal with data wouldn’t change: just like you can delete old/stale data in Mastodon, you’d be able to delete or offload messages that are older than X days.

1. On average, we are rich enough to have plenty of gadgets around.

2. Those in extreme poverty need access to more important things than access to these gadgets.

I guess my main issue with your idea is that it will (IMO) encourage people to host more servers

Why? If anything, I believe that it would be the opposite. Less “responsibility” on the servers would mean better capacity to scale and serve more clients on the same hardware and (if the identity is not dependent on the server and can be easily portable) it would mean less attached value to the server itself, so people wouldn’t care so much about “what instance they are joining”.

The best analog there is to what I am proposing is movim, and if you go take a look at their server list, you will see quite a limited amount of servers even though it has as many active users as Lemmy.

Right, one can never be certain about the future, but AP is showing some staying power and (I think) the main reason that it’s not evolving faster is because we are not exploring possibilities beyond “let’s clone popular closed networks, and slap some AP to pass data around homogeneous servers”.

With your suggestion, every post might come from a different server.

Why? Take our interaction, for example. the community is on lemmy.world, you are on lemm.ee and I’m on communick.news. My response generates an activity that is sent to LW, and LW then announces that activity to all the servers who have at least one subscriber. If LW went down, you wouldn’t be able to see this message until it came back up and it started processing the federation queue again. Right?

The same thing would happen in a “message-relay” system. My client would send a message to LW, and LW would then send the activity to lemm.ee, which would then “push” it to you. If any of the servers went offline, the whole process would stop at the node that is offline and would then resume when it came back up.