I still think it's really important that federated media networks exist because:
- It's way harder for a single bad actor (i.e CEO) to fuck everything up in the name of profit chasing
- They're useful for weaning people off of the mono-platform hell that the modern internet has been forced into and reminding people how websites used to work and still SHOULD work
- Open standards for internet communication can last for ages even with moderate adoption. No one can "take down" the concept of IRC or E-Mail, even if huge mono-platforms have done their best to try and get everyone on a single service for them. You're still usually able to take your data and set up elsewhere using the same backend service, and that's a critical difference. Sure it really sucks when your Masto instance goes under, but it's a hell of a lot easier than losing a proprietary site
- Federation makes it much easier to archive content when much of it is already stored across multiple independent servers run by different maintainers
The whole debacle of Reddit's execs burning down the website recently made me think about this more since the same network of micro-communities could be achieved just by a bunch of individual forums networked together with a single-sign-on tying them together. like how forums worked in the 90s and 2000s, just with the option to network them together and not having to make a new account for every community.
I think there are some things that can be done to make federated networks more resilient to individual nodes dropping out, like having each node naturally keep a partial duplicate of some other nodes on the network per the admin's consent, thus allowing for possible failover instances during downtime, etc.
But I think one of the fundamental changes that needs to happen to the internet as a whole is to demystify web hosting and site creation to the modern web user. Services like Wix or Linode kinda help with this, but at the end of the day, they're still proprietary services for a single host. We need a host-agnostic tool with user-friendly UX that can guide a user through the process of buying a domain and/or remote server instance, selecting your website you want to host, or allowing you to select from several open-source server apps that you want to host from an app store-like interface.
We also need better open tools for making websites to go along with that which don't either throw the user into the deep end of HTML coding or lock down so much that you can't make anything other than a bland web-modernist-sludge page.
Once hosting a game server, personal site, or social media node is simple enough for even the slightly-technically-inclined person to do with a platform-agnostic tool, I think people will start seeing webhosting as a lot less daunting.
the potential is there. like, pre-highschool kids who are the slightest bit "good with computers" are out there setting up minecraft servers for their friends.
many computer people, especially webapp developers, love to complicate things and then turn around and say "o, woe! this system is far too difficult and complex for unskilled hands! pray give me the controller, so that i may control it for you." when we need them to say "òwó this system is too difficult and complex! better make it understandable and reasonable to set up so i'm actually empowering people with my work instead of perpetuating the cycle of people-farming"
is that it's not a one-and-done thing. It's a time commitment that is:
- ongoing
- permanent, as long as the server is up
- to monitor its usage
- to respond with manual updates to security issues
- that scales with the number of components that are needed for the server to run
(e.g. for Mastodon, also with Postgres, with Elasticsearch etc.)
It is a time commitment I literally, a person who has a godforsaken master's in computer science engineering and can absolutely if grumpily look into bootstrapping Linux from scratch if she needs to, absolutely cannot commit to.
And this is on top of keeping up with the social side of whatever activity is occurring on the server itself, if it is serving or receiving materials from or on behalf of others.
right, so the problem statement here is that we want the things-being-hosted to be
- easier to wrap your head around, such that a greater number of people are eligible to host things, including people with more free time to dedicate, and as a result there are enough people literate in the art of hosting things that the burden need not fall entirely on one person, but on a trusted group
- less burdensome to the people doing the hosting, such that less free time and energy are required to begin with
- built for portable identities and data (and with appropriate things encrypted), such that there's less of a commitment of trust and dependency for the user to place on the hoster
- and crucially, resistant to corporate capture
it feels like the effort being invested into software projects always hard focuses on end-user-friendliness at the expense of everything that it needs to be sustainable
