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Comment by bdw5204 | Hacker News Reader

The strange thing to me is how everybody keeps trying to make distributed Twitter happen when distributed Reddit is the low hanging fruit for federated social media.

You don't want to end up banned from a movies forum because you also participate in a political forum. Federation solves that problem because you can use separate accounts without either forum knowing that you also use the other.

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This exists with Lemmy already and is fostering nice communities (and due to ActivityPub is interoperable with Mastodon accounts)

They had this years ago, and they were called "forums."

>The strange thing to me is how everybody keeps trying to make distributed Twitter happen when distributed Reddit is the low hanging fruit for federated social media.

Honestly, it's strange to me how hard people are trying to make distributed anything happen. Federation mostly solves a problem that real people don't have or care about.

>Honestly, it's strange to me how hard people are trying to make distributed anything happen.

IMO, something federation is very good at is solving one slow-moving problem - enshittification of social platforms. It's not immune, of course, but an Elon Musk-style takeover is much harder with Mastodon than Twitter, and it would be hard to run it into the ground in other ways because the platforms are owned by different people and groups.

Is this not just what the internet was before reddit? What features would "distributed reddit" have that an internet full of independent community forums be missing?

I like it principle, but after watching the situation with Twitter clones, I'm not too optimistic on federated services taking off.

I would like to see a wikipedia-style system for Twitter/Reddit: open access data, non-profit.

It's not possible because the most common problems with running a forum are spam and moderation, and both of those are too much work unless it's centralized.

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