TL;DR: The web is entering a new era, in which communities can move independently through the digital landscape. Parallels with the book “Dawn of Everything” by Graeber and Wengrow sugg…
Broadly speaking, the ability of the user’s choices to organically grow and connect the open social space that the article talks about is still very restricted IMO. And there is probably a fair way to go technologically before the foundations are even there.
I would agree that the Fediverse will probably need to change and that most people on the Fediverse are currently not ready to accept that change. However, I think that it only partially technological and primarily social.
Basically, you critizize the concept of “instances”. Basically, instances are currently synonmymous with “Server”, but they are actually describing something different: a place on the web with a distinct space of rules and standards. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it HAS to be a single server. It could also be group of servers with the same shared policy.
For example, maybe in the future, the “Solarpunk” instance, will be a conglomerate of several servers that share certain community standards, now, if one server does something bad, people are leaving this server and in the worst case, other defederate from it/it gets kicked out of the instance.
This can all happen with the underlying technology. It’s all already there. Basically, imo the main thing is about creating societal protocolls on top of technological infrastructure. I don’t even think that one can expect some technological solution for this. It sounds like “solutionism” to me. Its like saying: the IP protocoll is responsible for the centralization of the web and how can we change it to make it more decentral? Its just as dezentral as it should be. imo the same holds for activitypub. Its what you make of it.
Part of the problem here is that the big-social mega-corp monopolisation of social media was so bad and so long lasting that we’ve atrophied the muscles of social organisation. Collectively and behaviourally, we don’t really know how to do this or how to talk and think about it (personally I think the conversation around Threads and whether to de-fed shows signs of this).
The trickiness with the whole tech v people problem thing, I think, is the interaction between them can be complex, and, when one is interfering with the other, or both with each other, fatal. All up, this whole organising people well thing is hard … like no one is really qualified to do it. Add technology and you get even fewer people even reasonably not bad at it.
I would agree that the Fediverse will probably need to change and that most people on the Fediverse are currently not ready to accept that change. However, I think that it only partially technological and primarily social.
Basically, you critizize the concept of “instances”. Basically, instances are currently synonmymous with “Server”, but they are actually describing something different: a place on the web with a distinct space of rules and standards. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it HAS to be a single server. It could also be group of servers with the same shared policy.
For example, maybe in the future, the “Solarpunk” instance, will be a conglomerate of several servers that share certain community standards, now, if one server does something bad, people are leaving this server and in the worst case, other defederate from it/it gets kicked out of the instance.
This can all happen with the underlying technology. It’s all already there. Basically, imo the main thing is about creating societal protocolls on top of technological infrastructure. I don’t even think that one can expect some technological solution for this. It sounds like “solutionism” to me. Its like saying: the IP protocoll is responsible for the centralization of the web and how can we change it to make it more decentral? Its just as dezentral as it should be. imo the same holds for activitypub. Its what you make of it.
Couldn’t agree more
Yea I think we’re on the same page.
The trickiness with the whole tech v people problem thing, I think, is the interaction between them can be complex, and, when one is interfering with the other, or both with each other, fatal. All up, this whole organising people well thing is hard … like no one is really qualified to do it. Add technology and you get even fewer people even reasonably not bad at it.