Is decentralised federated social media over engineered?

Can't get this brain fart out of my head.

What would the simplest, FOSS, alternative look like and would it be worth it?

Quick thoughts:

* FOSS platforms intended to be big single servers, but dedicated to ...
* Shared/Single Sign On
* Easy cross posting
* Enabling and building universal Multi-platform clients.
* Unlike email, supporting small servers

No duplication/federation/protocol required, just software.

#fediverse
@fediverse

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[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

E-mail. E-mail does support small servers.

Btw, I think you are mixing up a few topics here, so let's see what you actually want.

Protocols are what computers use to communicate with each other. No protocols means no interaction between different computers/servers. Without protocols, none of the things you ask for can be possible.
Federated services don't have single sign on. On the contrary, single sign on is a centralized service not a distributed one. To clarify that: I cannot log into lemmy.world with my feddit.de accout, same as I cannot log into hotmail with my gmail account. In both cases I log into my instance/provider and this allows me to communicate with people on other instances/providers. Federation is the process of sharing content between instances. SSO on the other hand is a centralized service that then communicates with other services to let you log into these other services. For example, I can log into my Google account and then use this to login to other sites. This only works because people trust Google. This would not work as a decentralized service with untrusted servers.
Duplication is used on federated services for a few reasons. First, it's a kind of caching mechanism distributing the load. If someone posts something on one instance, it's transferred only once to the other instances which then serve it to all their users. Without duplication, each individual view would have to be requested again from the original instance. The other advantage is that the admins of all the instances retain control over the content. If the other instance goes offline, users can still see "their" copy of the content. And if the other instance doesn't moderate their content, the mods/admins of your instance can do that themselves.

So as you see, these concepts aren't there just for fun, but for a purpose.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Protocols are what computers use to communicate with each other. No protocols means no interaction between different computers/servers. Without protocols, none of the things you ask for can be possible.

By "Protocol" I was referring specifically to ActivityPub and the difficulties of engineering against that standard and then the compute resources required to perform the federation tasks. And in addition, the work of inventing a new protocol and the systems around it, as oppose to relying on the protocols and systems that already exist, which I presume would be mostly sufficient to run what I suggest. Obviously at a general level a "protocol" is required for any interoperation between platforms or servers over the internet, so I'm honestly not sure where you're coming from with this feedback.

Federated services don’t have single sign on. On the contrary, single sign on is a centralized service ...

I'm not talking about the fediverse currently having SSO.

I was brief in the top post, in part to start a conversation but because it was originating from mastodon. But the "platforms ... dedicated to ..." part of my post was referring to the idea that a system of trust would be committed to amongst the suggested platforms where they'd be mutually trusted sources of authentication.

Duplication is used on federated services for a few reasons ...

I said "over engineered" not "just for fun".

The premise of my post is to question and ponder the tradeoffs involved. Keeping in mind that social media has for a long time and continues to operate through centralised servers with many many people being very happy with it, the UX and development issues created by the underlying design of the fediverse may not be worth the technical features.

Implicit in my post is the idea that decentralised/federated social media might be a bit of technological idea that technologists like without thinking through the practicalities and usability issues. Many have bounced off of the fediverse for essentially this reason ... because in the end the point of social media is the social part not the independent decentralised data resilience part.

I like the fediverse as much as anyone ... I was here before the reddit migration promoting lemmy and kbin on mastodon. But I'd prefer an open and free social media space that works for people rather than one that's futilely married to a tech idea and particular implementation (ActivityPub).

In the end, I'm wondering if there's a middle way and have simply put up my first attempt at a set of ideas.

Otherwise, beyond the substance of your reply, I have to say that your reply was unnecessarily condescending. My post was rather short, so thinking it was without any meaning or coming from a completely ignorant place makes some sense, but without really having much to offer to the actual issues or discussion in your reply (you seem to have missed the essential thrust of simply having a few large servers committed to being open and working together as an easier alternative to big-corp social media), you managed to also make it clear that you thought my ideas were silly or juvenile. Perhaps I am being silly, but I feel your tone and presumptions were unnecessary.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 9 months ago

Sorry, no condescension intended.

Your post read like one written by someone with very minimal knowledge about the subject, which might have been a misunderstanding on my part. So I tried to cover the basics before talking about the rest.

There is really no shame in asking questions about something where you don't have experience. There are far more topics I have no idea about than there are topics where I do have a deep understanding.

So to get on the same page, I'll summarize what I understood, please correct me if you mean something different.

You don't like ActivityPub, you want a new protocol
The system should make it easy to create new, small instances
The instances should share sessions with the other instances (=single sign on) based on trusting them
You prefer a centralized system?
You want the system to not use a single protocol (ActivityPub), but use multiple protocols?
ActivityPub based services have bad UX due to the complexity of the protocol

Is this correct?

We have a few contradictions here.

You cannot have a system where anyone can easily create servers and at the same time have shared sessions based on trust. These two requirements conflict with each other.

Either servers only work with servers they trust, and then you can't just create a new small server and interact with the network.

Or anyone can easily create a new small server, but then you can't do anything based on trust, since you never know if that server was created with malicious intent.

Regarding centralized/decentralized you have to differentiate between implementation and management.

All major social networks run distributed systems. If you want to serve billions of users, you need to run millions of servers. These servers are distributed around the globe to give fast access to users everywhere. Chances are pretty high that your ISP has a few racks of Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and Tiktok servers.

Their distributed system is orders of magnitude more complex than everything running ActivityPub combined.

But their system works, because they have tens of thousands of highly paid specialists to make them work.

ActivityPub based services on the other hand have almost no funding and manpower.

Mastodon is the best in this respect. They have 6 people who are actually working on the system.

Lemmy has two developers who earn close to minimum wages.

Kbin has a single guy developing it.

That's the real reason why the UX is crap.

If anything, ActivityPub and the services running on them are extremely underengineered and underdeveloped.

Btw, there is something rather close to what you seem to want: online forums with Google single sign on.

The forums are not interacting at all with other forums. No federation or anything at all. There are enough commercial solutions that work really well. And with Google Single Sign On you also don't have to register for each forum.