Submitted by GrnBlck in lobby (edited )

Not necesarilly calling for raddle.me to join the fediverse (though I would support that move, were it made) more asking for your opinions about the federation project.

Now Mastodon, Friendica, PeerTube, PixelFed, WriteFreely and Funkwhale have been established as federative alternatives to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WordPress and Soundcloud respectively, it's starting to become something worth talking about as a way of bringing Dual Power to the internet, in the age of centralization.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

I think the problem with federation is that people still have to run the federated servers and the people running the servers inescapably have full access to all of the data on those servers. Since running such a server is beyond the skills or interest of most people, they'll have to pay someone else and trust that person not to read their private data.

I would love to be wrong, and have these services conquer the internet. But I think it will only ever be a tiny fraction of the web.

I think the real solution, which is barely in its infancy, is truly decentralized services. The goal is to run someone on your own device, even just a phone, and have it available to the world as though it were like Facebook or something.

For examples see the dat protocol ( https://datproject.org/ ) plus the open source Beaker Browser ( https://beakerbrowser.com/ ) and their concept truly decentralized Twitter clone, Fritter ( https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter ).

Or see Secure Scuttlebutt ( https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ )

There are also a number of projects trying to do this using cryptocurrency transactions as a messaging system. I think the general idea has merit, but I wouldn't touch cryptocurrencies (even the 'green' ones) with a ten foot pole for at least a few more years. The one that seems like it might have possibilities is the SafeNetwork ( https://safenetwork.tech/ ), which isn't a cryptocurrency and doesn't have a blockchain but often gets lumped together with them in discussions. I still would not invest in it, but I'm hoping it might become what the decentralized internet needs.

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ziq wrote

It's a half measure. A lot like communalism vs. anarchism.

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jaidedctrl wrote

Federation isn´t the best (distribution is way more ideal), but it´s the best we have right now. Distributed networks aren´t quite right for the sorts of large-scale social networks, etc. that are all the jazz right now, at least not what I´m familiar with (IPFS). They will be soon enough, but for now we´re kind of stuck with federation.

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