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It'll probably be ActivityPub. All the other protocols are too onerous for people to understand. AP has the simplicity of email, the potential for easy central
by noirscape 3y ago
It'll probably be ActivityPub. All the other protocols are too onerous for people to understand.
AP has the simplicity of email, the potential for easy centralization (...like email, which makes it aligned with corporate interests) and is something that most users will be able to figure out. It's also very much build around the "worse is better" mindset, where the protocol has very obvious deficiencies yet people are so used to those deficiencies that it's growing in spite of those with no replacement in sight. ActivityPub will succeed for the same reason that Outlook is still the most used email client today even though everyone can agree that almost any other client is better: it's entrenched.
Nostr and Bluesky are trying to do decentralized identity, which while admirable, doesn't really align with corporate interests and it's left the federating/decentralized content parts very underdeveloped. Like, functionally speaking Bluesky is just a Twitter clone with an odd account scheme at the moment, their stuff doesn't actually federate, while Nostr has approximately zero relevance. (Bluesky at least has a userbase, even if I would personally consider it to be "the worst parts of Twitter before Elon took over". The worst of Twitter right now is well, honestly I would just say the entire site and be done with it.)
- verdverm 3y agoThanks, this is helpful. I'm going to give AP a go. Is it worth running self-hosted or better to just sign up at https://mas.to https://mas.to? > the worst parts of Twitter before Elon took over Do you mean primarily self promotion and aggrandizement?
- edent 3y agoSelf-hosted is possible - but you'll be tending to your server a lot. Media cache fills up quickly, upgrades can be complex, even a moderately popular post can eat bandwidth. It is certainly possible but it's like the early days of blogging. If you want to learn how to run a system, do it. If you want to spend your time interacting with people rather than machines, use a dedicated service like mas.to.
- verdverm 3y agoIf I have a popular post, do other servers use their media cache to reduce load on my instance?
- edent 3y agoThey should do, yes. But a popular post of mine was federated to over 2,500 servers - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/09/how-far-did-my-post-go-on-the-fediverse/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/09/how-far-did-my-post-go-on-t... Once you have a large enough following, your instance will send messages to the servers of all your followers. If they repost something, it will go to all their followers - and so on.
- verdverm 3y agoThanks again! Do you have any recommendations for software for self-hosted? --- I'm somewhat leaning towards https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/ https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/ since it is written in Go and I could contribute back
- jasonvorhe 3y ago(not a self plug) A few friends of mine are working on a Fediverse hosting coop, starting soon with Mastodon, in case you want to be a friendly beta user: https://enoki.tech/ https://enoki.tech/ From what I know they're running it all on Kubernetes and have taken care of solid backups, scalability and they're taking stuff like data protection seriously. Perhaps they'll offer you a free 30 day trial for a single user instance. Can't hurt to ask.
- verdverm 3y agoI'm a k8s expert so I wouldn't pay to outsource that part. If I'm going to pay someone else, I don't want to be thinking at that level and more likely join one of the most popular servers with good moderation and policies
- retox 3y agohttps://btrf.ly/store/instances https://btrf.ly/store/instances