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> The hardest part about entering the fediverse is joining an instance [of Mastodon]. In the fediverse, organizations shouldn't have to homestead on someone el
by CharlesW 3y ago
> The hardest part about entering the fediverse is joining an instance [of Mastodon].
In the fediverse, organizations shouldn't have to homestead on someone else's Mastodon instance. But unfortunately, self-hosting Mastodon at anything more than "toy" scale is incredibly onerous.
On the bright side, a vendor recently posted about their proprietary Mastodon clone operating at 100 the efficiency of Mastodon, so happily this doesn't appear to be an intrinsic problem with ActivityPub. Let's hope there are better open-source solutions soon.
> So why make the effort? Because the fediverse, like open source, is a movement.
Statements like this make me very sad about the probable future of the fediverse. Nobody cares about "movements" other than zealots. In order to succeed, federated services must be better and at least as convenient as centralized alternatives.
- NoboruWataya 3y agoI genuinely don't think it's possible for federated services to be "at least as convenient" as centralised alternatives, in general. At a certain point convenience must come at a cost, and if you ruthlessly optimise for convenience like many of these centralised platforms do then you will end up trading away federation, privacy and openness. Email is probably the most convenient federated service out there and it is both (i) not that convenient (compared to things like WhatsApp etc) and (ii) not that decentralised (now being gatekept by a few big names like Google). That's not to say we should treat the fediverse as an ideological movement or that we shouldn't try make it as convenient as possible. But I think it will pretty much always be the case that when you choose an open, federated service over a centralised one you are giving up a bit of ease of use for other considerations.