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"
