We know how to build protocols for federated systems - there must be at least a dozen serious efforts at federated social media by now.
What we don't know (or what we've forgotten) is how to get people to use federated systems.
What we don't know (or what we've forgotten) is how to get people to use federated systems.
We need to make these things easier to host and deploy though. Having worked on MediaGoblin for many years now, I've found the most depressing part of it is that not only is it hard for people to start hosting things, it's even harder for them to keep it running... and it's not just MediaGoblin; you'll find this of most social network things. Most especially, people become afraid to upgrade their systems. I'm hopeful that systems like Guix will help in that regard, but that's a whole direction to explore itself: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/solving-the-de...
For context, that's 3 days' worth of Twitter signups.