Ask HN: The Fediverse looks promising. Do you agree? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The Fediverse looks promising. Do you agree?

8 pointsrapnie4 comments

I really like how the fediverse is coming along, and is evolving. Started mostly by driven FOSS developers sharing a vision of a future decentralized internet, who created niche applications based on cool but incomplete standards, and who are now bundling forces to knit them together.

A lot of this development is a bit off the radar, because communications occur mostly on the fediverse itself, i.e. via dogfooding.

Unlike W3C (standards-first) standardization takes a practical-application-first approach, which is interesting.

Check e.g. https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks

Some cool apps to be discovered: Mastodon, Pleroma (Twitter alternative), PeerTube (YouTube alternative), PixelFed (Insta alternative), ForgeFed (federated git) and many others in development (Medium, Meetup alternatives, etc.)

Look here for a large list of AP projects: https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps

Seems to me the fediverse has a bright future. Do you agree?

I agree, but I do wonder if the developers ideology will make it unsustainable.

I currently maintain two federated services - https://pixelfed.uk, which hasn't yet grown beyond a few people but costs next to nothing to host, and https://peertube.co.uk, which has a bit of a tendency for exponential growth. While it's not especially expensive right now, I'll only be able to allow it to grow so far before hosting costs will make it unsustainable.

I don't want to include any advertising, primarily because I don't want to deviate from the standard PeerTube experience, but because the developers provide no way for instance administrators to cover their hosting costs, the size of any one instance is self limiting. That may be a good or a bad thing depending on your position, but either way, I think the Fediverse will have difficulty becoming mainstream while running an instance can only really be viewed as a hobby rather than a potential income stream.

I very much agree ;) But I think a lot of hosting is still provided via commodity cloud architecture. Whether its truly decentralized under stress remains to be tested.

There was a flurry of articles in Summer 2018 about how FOSTA was encouraging sex workers to use Switter and Bitcoin. I think they are probably still using Twitter / Instagram / CashApp instead. In lieu of outside oppressive pressure, most folks won't have a compelling reason other than ethics.

And therein lies the rub. These platforms need to get easier for regular people to use. You could even imagine a broker service, where you just hit submit on a piece of digital content, its data type is detected automatically, and its stored on the appropriate service. You are returned a persistent URL that can be embedded anywhere. And you earn revenue for content consumed and / or compute resources provided. Like providing liquidity to an exchange.

I think its too early to tell if it will be sustainable economically.

I believe it will be sustainable, due to cloud hosting costs going down every year. If the trend continues federation/self-hosting might become the default way to operate software services (even non-social stuff). However, another trend that needs to continue is automation of monitoring and security updates.

In the meantime, if you want to take the fediverse for a spin. I am working on a few aggregator projects to help you explore the fediverse with minimal friction.

https://mastodonia.club

https://pixelfed.club

Clickable links:

- ActivityPub Rocks discussion forum: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks

- Watchlist for ActivityPub apps: https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...

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