thinking about maybe making a peer-to-peer social network system based off of RSS, or something similar with RSS back-compat, big ramble below
the big issue with the fediverse as it is right now is that it...doesn't really actually do better than a centralized system? there's so many issues that federation brings without much benefit at all, especially when there is a material benefit to being on the same instance as your friends bc that way you can't be defederated away from them due to instance-owner drama
social media needs to be either way more centralized than fedi or way less centralized than it, and I'm kinda brainstorming what the way-less-centralized version would look like
now the big advantage of centralized social media in the first place is that you can both read and write in one place - you've got One Website where you can see all your friends' stuff and post your own stuff so they can see it too
now the key operand here is all your friends - fediverse's biggest issue is that federation is optional, and while that's absolutely necessary for situations like "the general existence of gab" it's ended up causing a lot of grief for end users caught up in feuds between instance admins
the holy grail for decentralized social media would be a system where the instance you signed up on didn't actually matter, to the point where your home inst doesn't even know about the existence of other instances and fetching posts from elsewhere was all done directly on the client
now if only there was some standardized protocol for fetching a feed of articles or posts from anywhere on the web, that would allow syndication like that to be really simple...
oh wait, there is! but there's a slight problem - RSS is designed for blogging, not microblogging, so each item in an RSS feed is meant to link to a full webpage instead of just containing the text of the post
this is an issue for microblogging and social media because reader modes aren't perfect by a long shot, so this results in a lot of friction between seeing your friend posted something new and actually getting to read it, which is a death knell for social media unless the post is a full-on blog post or article
RSS has a couple other issues for this use case too, most notably 1) no support for republishing and 2) the requirement that every single post for a feed be kept in the RSS XML file in order to be part of the feed (which is a massive problem for social media because twitter accounts can have tens of thousands of posts compared to a few hundred articles for a blog)
I'm thinking about a potential feed format that fixes all of these issues by having multiple types of feed entry (including inline posts, linked longform articles, and linked video/audio/etc), a spec for repubs, and segmented feeds (where the metadata link you subscribe to links to a bunch of other feed documents which each hold 500-1K items)
the remote follow/like/reply/boost problem would likely be dealt with via url schemes or a browser extension to redirect you to either a desktop/mobile app or your home instance's page respectively
if I ended up making this whole system it'd probably have support for both the feed format I'm planning and classic RSS/atom so you'd be able to throw all sorts of other blogs and feeds in as well
another advantage to adding repubs to feeds is that it allows people to set up their own automatically or manually curated repub feeds for people to look through if they really care about a trending tab or whatever
I'd definitely be interested into looking into how to Actually Write This at some point but it'd be a pretty big undertaking and I'd probably want others to help out with it as well so I'll see
if there's anything I'm not considering here feel free to let me know, this is just a brainstormy ramble about what I'd do if I had the time/energy/motivation/whatever lol thanks for reading this far either way
(edit: since I'm just thinking about it now this idea currently doesn't have anything in mind for blocking, non-public posts, or stuff like that, that'll be something I have to sort out if I decide to go through with this)
