I’ve been seeing these “why not federated <something>” popping up here from time to time, so i figured I could make two suggestions (a suggestion and a question, really) that have been popping up in my mind as well.
Let me ask the question first, in this post, and make the suggestion on another post, to keep the discussion clean:
Wouldn’t it be better to have the fediverse be a server only (like mail, or usenet - as federated as can be) and then have clientes like mastodon, lemmy, whatever… be just clientes to that server?
The post would have fields like author, date and time, subject or title, text resume, text content, image, link, video, x, y, z, … Then clientes would fetch whatever they are interested in (maybe mastodon would focus on author, date, image and text resume, pixelfed on image, peertube on video, lemmy on all of them… a blog would fetch the author, the date, the title, possibly text resume to use as lead, and text content and display that as a blog entry…
Information could, then, just flow via jason, xml (xmpp, why not)
Maybe I’m being naive here, but would very much like to understand why.
Of course the server would authenticate and distribute to other servers and to clientes what they ask for.
The image is a little provocation, of course ;-)
In practice, a random individual probably won’t be able to self host an ATProto instance. Read this: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
O saw that post fly by in the distance some time ago (it’s from Fri, 22 November 2024), but only skimmed through it because it was to long for that moment. It still is, so I’ve added it to my “read it later when you dare” app.
On one hand, maybe Christine Lemmer-Webber agrees with me in the sense that ATProto might end up being somewhat decentralized. The DID problem could perhaps be circumvented. On the other hand, here’s a quote from the text that I did like:
The quote might argue against my assumption that just having the possibility of owning a (fediverse) server might entice enough people to participate in the ecosystem… just like email, I guess.
Again: didn’t read the full article. Only tldred it and presumed the rest.