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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

federated means your bookgroup could set up their own instance & everyone could either post their book reviewws there, or you could aggregate your own reviews into that instance. it's the freedom to start new communities, while still being able to participate worldwide.

it means that there's a protocol there, at the heart, for having multiple parties cooperating. it means anyone is free to build their own server or client. it meams we're not all trapped in one walled garden, one silo, it means the freedom to innovate & evolve.

right now there is not a lot of models for how we the peoe can host things online in an interoperable way. we can still use http & the technology that we have (unlike block chain), but we can use well defined vocabulary (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#activity-t...) & protocols as a base to communicate & interweave social networking systems.

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I agree with everything you’ve said, but most users will never want to host their own instance. It might even be an anti feature, since it sounds like a bunch of work! This is not a benefit that most people are going to care about - at least in the way you have explained it.

I think it’s a different view. Technical-savvy people who know how the web was conceived and thought like decentralization because it promises freedom. In my (limited) experience users just want ease of use and nice UX, and just don’t take into account the long term implications of their choices. I’m afraid, like someone said earlier, that decentralization solves a problem mainstream don’t have and don’t want to have.

I think the mainstream does care about decentralisation, but only in so far as it affects the final experience. Censorship on major social networks is a great example. People absolutely do care, but starting their own Reddit (for instance) is far outside of their abilities. Where would you even begin?

They also don’t care about how it is implemented, just so long as it works. Sometime I feel like the HN crowd cares more about what language a product was written in than how well it serves their needs!

What is required is a platform which combines the UX of a centralised service with the ability to easily spin up new instances, is open-source, security audited, etc. etc.

I agree. And also I really believe that any good software is made up of a lot of tedious and boring tasks, like editing the copies, making the QA, fixing bugs, and so on, and that these kinds of tasks are seldom done as voluntary work; what I'm trying to say is that without a company paying developers for doing this, it's difficult to have good software. Let alone to keep a service up and running 24/7.

To my knowledge, very few companies have found a way of monetizing decentralization in a sustainable and efficient way (I really hope someone proves me wrong with some replies to this comment).

I'm still trying to understand how this works at a functional level.

I see you can find reviews via ActivePub services, like Mastodon, but you can only post from BookWyrm instances? i.e., you can't have one federated social identity that can post reviews and post other fediverse content?

No. Unfortunately, the fediverse has kind of given up on the idea of a single identity using a variety of services. Every new ActivityPub services wants to own the user account and the interactions are one way or extremely limited (likes/reposts).

You're correct that each server has separate accounts, and you can't log in to, for example, but mastodon and bookwyrm and pleroma using the same account. You can do more than just like or repost though - a bookwyrm user and a mastodon user can do a variety of things like follow on another, send DMs, and reply to each other's posts.

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