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> The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help
by zrm 8y ago
> The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help everyone run the federated infrastructure.
I'm not sure this is a real problem. Email is federated, scales to approximately everyone, and there is no shortage of email providers that all interoperate with each other.
How to fund it when no one you know wants to operate it personally is also no great mystery. Either the server provider puts ads on it, or the users pay for the service. And the individual users can decide which of the various options they prefer but can still interact with everybody who makes a different choice.
- myself248 8y agoFunding community networks is one of the few use-cases I've seen that actually seem to make sense for cryptocurrency. The Althea wireless mesh is doing this -- you "load" your router with a certain amount of credit, and it tries to get you the lowest-cost transport. People running nodes have incentive to optimize their antenna placement and signal, so they can carry more traffic and get paid for it. I don't know if this directly applies to SSB since there's really nothing to "run", other than pubs which we've already established are only a stopgap solution anyway. Simply participating in the network (leaving your client running) is what provides the real "infrastructure", such as it is.