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 servers

No duplication/federation/protocol required, just software.

#fediverse
@fediverse

  • Square Singer@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    10 months ago

    Sorry, no condescension intended.

    Your post read like one written by someone with very minimal knowledge about the subject, which might have been a misunderstanding on my part. So I tried to cover the basics before talking about the rest.

    There is really no shame in asking questions about something where you don’t have experience. There are far more topics I have no idea about than there are topics where I do have a deep understanding.

    So to get on the same page, I’ll summarize what I understood, please correct me if you mean something different.

    • You don’t like ActivityPub, you want a new protocol
    • The system should make it easy to create new, small instances
    • The instances should share sessions with the other instances (=single sign on) based on trusting them
    • You prefer a centralized system?
    • You want the system to not use a single protocol (ActivityPub), but use multiple protocols?
    • ActivityPub based services have bad UX due to the complexity of the protocol

    Is this correct?

    We have a few contradictions here.

    You cannot have a system where anyone can easily create servers and at the same time have shared sessions based on trust. These two requirements conflict with each other.

    Either servers only work with servers they trust, and then you can’t just create a new small server and interact with the network.

    Or anyone can easily create a new small server, but then you can’t do anything based on trust, since you never know if that server was created with malicious intent.

    Regarding centralized/decentralized you have to differentiate between implementation and management.

    All major social networks run distributed systems. If you want to serve billions of users, you need to run millions of servers. These servers are distributed around the globe to give fast access to users everywhere. Chances are pretty high that your ISP has a few racks of Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and Tiktok servers.

    Their distributed system is orders of magnitude more complex than everything running ActivityPub combined.

    But their system works, because they have tens of thousands of highly paid specialists to make them work.

    ActivityPub based services on the other hand have almost no funding and manpower.

    Mastodon is the best in this respect. They have 6 people who are actually working on the system.

    Lemmy has two developers who earn close to minimum wages.

    Kbin has a single guy developing it.

    That’s the real reason why the UX is crap.

    If anything, ActivityPub and the services running on them are extremely underengineered and underdeveloped.

    Btw, there is something rather close to what you seem to want: online forums with Google single sign on.

    The forums are not interacting at all with other forums. No federation or anything at all. There are enough commercial solutions that work really well. And with Google Single Sign On you also don’t have to register for each forum.

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      10 months ago

      Sorry, no condescension intended. …

      All good!!

      And thanks for the reply! I don’t have time now to read through it, but will later. Just wanted to say I’m aware my post was very short and understand where you were coming from … and that, for me, if I address an issue I have with tone, it’s in the interests of the community, kinda “tone policing” as awful a term that is to say out loud … to just let someone know they may not come off as well as they or we would like. But I’m all good personally and look forward to reading your post!