Nope. FOSS doesn’t have the marketing or rapid development of centralized services. We stand out on longevity and stability over night however. Who knows how many days Twitter has to keep their lights on, and then the whole thing is dead. ActivityPub has no central point of failure, so it’d only die if every single dev lost interest. Though we definitely have a lot of problems we need to figure out, and our development is incredibly slow compared to theirs.
Who wants another Silicon Valley? Their model is foundationally based on “moving fast and breaking things”.
What about focusing on responsible, organic stewardship and community over growth at any cost? If no one’s making any real money, we don’t have to hitch our cart to the capitalist horse which has resulted in our current situation.Tangentially related, but I’ve been feeling like perhaps we’ve been jumping the gun with Lemmy and Kbin…
Maybe it would have made more sense, at least from an interoperability statepoint, to make an activitypub User protocol that can be selfhosted easily. So instead of making a new account for each Lemmy or Kbin instance someone has, you can instead connect your activitypub account to it.
Additionally as I know hosting has been an increasing problem around here, perhaps it would have been better to make instances single focused message boards ( i.e. just political humor, just animemes, just 196 etc.) So that the instance host can more easily manage moderation and hosting costs without ballooning things they might not necessarily care about to also be hosted by them.
This is just idle musings though, I’m not sure of how the community would be receptive to such thoughts.
Many end up think along these lines at some point. It’s not you! Truth is activity pub is best thought of as an experiment. It’s got flaws as a system, and its recent growth is, IMO, somewhat awkward given the long term game. It would have been much nicer if the fundamental system were more solid.
Many who’ve moved platforms from big social to Fedi, especially the non tech ones, would not be so happy to move again soon. They’re used to a decade or longer on Twitter and Facebook. So any new and improved protocol would split the user base and so struggle to gain traction. Same goes for the platforms probably.
This interview from a while ago now of a developer that has made a parallel universe to the fediverse all in their own it seems is pretty eye opening on hotter tire whole thing might be under engineered: https://medium.com/we-distribute/got-zot-mike-macgirvin-45287601ff19
To me, it seems pretty dated in what it was trying to achieve and shows it’s age in the current climate of privacy, safety and moderation concerns.
They’re used to a decade or longer on Twitter and Facebook. So any new and improved protocol would split the user base and so struggle to gain traction.
Could that be an inherent issue, no matter how you approach it? The issue might be that any social IT system which gains traction is already 10 years outdated. If true, it would mean we could start making something new now, which might be popular in 10 years, but then unable to effectively deal with whatever people deem essential in 10 years.
Yea it’s a good point.
I’d imagine there are technological foundations which can grow into new demands without breaking things or starting anew. The internet seems to have done this well. I think there are good questions of activity pub in this regard. I do hope the protocol can be updated without having to start again.
Yes, but the Fediverse is only one part of the equation, and has its own pitfalls.
Free and open source software could overtake the proprietary software market in theory, but in practice it often fails since many FOSS projects are made for developers by other developers, most of who tend to be power users. And the average user needs ease of use, and easily accessible common functions, not a lightweight command-line interface with scripting.
Even then, things like games and other stuff might only will be partially FOSS, like engines and frameworks, the rest being behind a paywall. However, I think people should experiment with what I call “open source universes”, which is basically creating shared universes that are open source. Maybe even make some open source RPG system with it too, so we could have an open source alternative to the likes of D&D, WH40k, etc. At one point I tried to make something like this, but the issue was that it was based on an old webcomic idea of mine, which I started working on when I had totally different views on many things. Might revisit it with different ideas later on.
Open source hardware will be a really hard uphill battle, with a large issue coming from closed-source drivers (Thanks ARM and nVidia!), cost and difficulty of manufacturing silicon, etc.
