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 serversNo duplication/federation/protocol required, just software.
The fediverse isn’t over engineered, it’s just not quite focused on the right aspects. A federated social network needs to be more like a block chain, where the content is centralized, and the instances (miners) are decentralized. The content is the important part, and with everything being tied to an instance, it makes the content harder to access. You have instances defederating, going down, closing, and version conflicts, all that makes it harder for a network to gain traction.
You are describing a different thing than what the idea of the fediverse is. Content is collected at an instance and these instances federate. That’s why its called Fediverse: people basically form groups, these group federate. It’s a social thing, there is trust involved. With blockchain, the idea is that you don’t need to trust a central entity.
I think you talk about something like nostr.
It doesn’t need to have the full trustless or buring energy for fun, but it does need to be resilient against instances going down, which currently isn’t the case.
What specific edgecase do you have in mind. The fediverse is coping data and is quite resiliant against data loss.
If an instance shuts down everything from it is just gone. ML already ran into dns issues once, if it goes, 20% of lemmy is just gone.
It is not gone. You still have an old copy of the post on your instance.
e.g. https://szmer.info/post/383045
Replaying, posting and making new content is pointless there but the old stuff still stands and it can be read.
I think thats just a thing that will get better over time
But who will moderate the content? Who is to say to what is legal and where? In USA and in EU different pieces of information can be shown. CSAM needs to be removed. Main lemmy devs removed only active mod on !anime[email protected] due differences in censorship.
The same people that do now?
Blockchain is immutable so you can’t remove the content.
The same people can’t moderate the content if content is centralised, there would need be an overlord that sets the rules.
Block chain was more on analogy than implementation. The key is that data isn’t bound to an instance, and ideally most people never need to know about instances.
Sounds like you’re describing BlueSky there. Have you looked into it?
Unless you’re talking about something more nostr/web3.0?
bluesky depends on one single entity. they promised a lot about their protocol, but they have yet to show that other instances other than the official one can operate in a fully independent manner.
I was under the impression that it’s clear that additional relays can work within their system? Have they not setup anything in the protocol for how that’d work?