Is decentralised federated social media over engineered?
Can’t get this brain fart out of my head.
What would the simplest, FOSS, alternative look like and would it be worth it?
Quick thoughts:
* FOSS platforms intended to be big single servers, but dedicated to …
* Shared/Single Sign On
* Easy cross posting
* Enabling and building universal Multi-platform clients.
* Unlike email, supporting small servers
No duplication/federation/protocol required, just software.
Maybe good old blogosphere with comments pingbacks and pubsubhub(?) was a sort of simpler proto version of the fediverse.
@joeldebruijn
Yep. Add a good aggregator client (hmmm, Google should make one) and you’re cooking.
@maegul @joeldebruijn I think you have something there. a simple protocol, something like the blogosphere with RSS but with some additions:
- a properly defined markup language that can be read by clients, not the HTML5 monstrosity.
- it would work like RSS in the client fetching new entries from servers, but extend it so it can submit comments directly from the client.
- make something like WordPress, but orders of magnitude smaller, that can make hosting your own blog or server a breeze.
- ideally some other software like WriteFreely where multiple less technically inclined people can sign up and have their social blog without any setup required. this would be hosted by volunteers, like mastodon instances.
I’m not sure if something like this would work, but wanted to share it.
@maegul @joeldebruijn clients would also have an option to send new blog entries to your own server. this would allow for a seamless UI not too different from Mastodon clients, but simpler and less cluttered of course.
everything properly defined in a protocol as simple as possible so there can be as many implementations of clients and servers as there are RSS readers.
@strife @joeldebruijn
Yea this is the essence of the idea. Strip down the interop requirements as much as possible, relying on existing tech as much as possible, and allow software and norms to solve all the other problems, where, TBF, it seems that software is doing all the heavy lifting in the fediverse anyway, but also has to handle federation and the protocol.
@maegul @joeldebruijn yeah servers of this protocol should be much simpler than mastodon. just exposing a file per blog, with all the posts entries that clients can fetch. no cross-server communications like AP, just clients requesting the feed file to servers.
have some simple authentication to let clients comment on entries of the feed, thus adding them. it would need to have some moderation system for that, tho.
and another authentication for the blog owners to push new blog entries and add them to the top of the feed.
although for the federated identities for comments to work, it would probably need some kind of public key system to verify identities, idk.
Is the Google thing a joke?
Yeah, RIP Reader
Yea this. Also a reference to how many believe (and not wrongly IMO) that the death of Google reader put the internet backwards or sent it down a darker path than necessary.