Nobody cares about decentralization until they do (2024)

kyefox.com

39 points·Kye··5 comments

> Mastodon and the broader ActivityPub (AP) network offer little hope here. Everything lived on that server.

> we don't all run our own copy of the entire stack

Why can't we do just that in a user-friendly way?

What if every user had all their content stored locally on a (or multiple) device, whether that's their phone, a desktop, server, anything, just something that keeps a local copy of their data and then federates that with other servers... that way they can always easily move wherever they want, and the data is still visible from some other server so they don't have to run their own.

There are apps in development for AT that do this. I just wish I could remember any of their names. There's a backup tool but it's not quite the same: https://bsky.app/profile/storacha.network/post/3lrgja7t6uc24

I don't know what keeps this from happening with AP.

You can back it up, but how do you restore it? are there ActivityPub servers that let you backfill posts? And since the unique id of the post is a URL, any references would break if you moved the post.

One of the great things with Mastodon is that in case of your instance shutting down you can just move to another one. I have moved from Mastodon -> Firefish -> Mastodon without issue. In the case of Firefish the instance shut down... So I do not follow your point.

> Nobody cares about decentralization until they do

... and then they, rounded to the nearest meaningful whole percentage point of the population, still don't care.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com