Note that the people who made friendica also made hubzilla and (streams), and the latter is more or less the successor: ActivityPub only instead of other, project-specific protocols, continued development, …

Not a chance unfortunately, bluesky doesn’t work without an all-seeing-eye that brings people the content they want. At best there will be some satellites running on atproto, fully decentralized, but the core will still be bluesky and it will still be completely centralized

I can only comment on tooling: fedify is very good, easy to get in and powerful enough for any usecase

https://fedify.dev/

ai;dr

ai;dr

You can use deltachat with a totp app: it’s simple, it’s synchronized, there’s no need to selfhost anything, …

https://codeberg.org/rtn/totp

You can get it directly from deltachat

I really like FeatherWiki as a lighter alternative to TiddlyWiki, it has fewer features but all the important ones are there.

I also need to mention thât the fossil scm has an integrated wiki, stores everything in a sqlite database (it’s made by the same people) and is also very lightweight

That’s a very important question we need to address !

It makes sense for platforms to block reuse of identifiers: they identify something, if the thing changes it should get a new identity.

Identities are fundamentally that: how to recognize that something is not something else. Note that it really is something: the same person can have multiple identities, and an identity can be shared by multiple persons.

The main issue is that we have been immersed inside a State-based system for so long we forget it exists. The first thing that comes to mind when we talk about identities is our state-delivered identity: name, surname, address, driving license number, etc… there’s a central all-powerful authority deciding what identity is given to whom, and they are unique and active as long as the State decides. In practice this has made identities a public-facing concern because the State is in charge of everything.

Centralized platforms, of course, reproduce the model. Both the State and capitalist platforms (or capitalist anything) act under the paradigm of total domination, there’s no surprise here: the platform owns your identity, your data, your you. When we reproduce the same thinking in open/decentralized platforms we inherit the mentality although everything points to not actually wanting it: we don’t want a platform to have control over our identity/identities unless we have control over the platform, yet in practice we do. We link an identity with a name, so of course names must be unique

We need to go back to the roots: what is an identity ? A way to differentiate two things to someone. Who can guarantee the identities we have ? Our connections. “Mom” is an identity in my contacts app; this identity is obvously not the same identity as “Mom” in your contacts app, although the name is the same. That’s because this identity is not the same to me that it is to you. The entity “using” the identity is fundamental. That’s something we forget when using centralized platforms: the entity “using” my identity isn’t my contacts, it’s the platform. To the platform, everyone must be unique, so must have a different name in their “contacts app”. That is not a model that cares about us but about itself.

What model cares about us ? A model that puts the focus back not on the individuals being represented, but on the relationship. An identity can never be defined by biometrics or hardware keys or whatever technic that technosolutionnist rave about. Technosolutionnists by definition do not care about sociology, so they shouldn’t be listened to for sociology issues. An identity will always be defined by who recognizes you as such.

What does it mean in practice ? Basically, we need to build communities of people taking care of each other. My access to the group chat shouldn’t be defined by a technical solution to access the app; if I lose access to the technical solution, the community still knows my identity as the same, so it must be able to re-integrate me without a hurdle, whatever the technical means.

What this means is that identities shouldn’t be public-facing. They should be something inside a community only, defined by it with the means it decides.

It costs $34 a month for an experiment. It doesn’t cost anywhere near that for a node that is running, used by thousands/millions of people, ingesting millions of pdses. Don’t be misled by a nice experiment. You need servers, backups, people to run that. See what real world deployment looks like: a little bit under 100k a year for the only independent full stack.

There’s no need to self host as there’s already public third party instances you can switch to.

Yes it’s possible. It’s just not the default. That’s the issue

it’s not something the fediverse is immune to either.

true, although no one said the contrary

This is just incorrect. RSS is probably one of the least centralised protocols right now, it’s not even federated, which makes me question why the author even included it as an example

The argument isn’t whether something exists, it’s what people use: rss is amazing but it’s far from being mainstream. The default path to following isn’t rss, which is the point (and the problem).

It’s not an argument against federation. It’s an argument to look beyond the niceness of a tech.

No, the main argument is that the main relay is, and for the foreseeable future will be operated by bluesky. This means that bluesky can decide what is and isn’t visible, but that’s not my biggest issue: to me the bigger problem is that bluesky sees everything that everyone says or thinks about anything.

Yes, it is possible to change. As TFA says:

But every counter-argument to the concerns above rests on the same foundation: technically, users can leave. Technically, you can self-host. Technically, you can run your own relay. The capability exists at every layer. But people don’t do these things. They never have with any protocol. Not email, not RSS, not XMPP. The default wins. Always.

It doesn’t matter that a few can be free: the vast majority goes where the lowest friction is because they have their life to live, and the lowest friction leads to the centralized bluesky

I’m sorry, but it’s like you haven’t read the post:

But every counter-argument to the concerns above rests on the same foundation: technically, users can leave. Technically, you can self-host. Technically, you can run your own relay. The capability exists at every layer. But people don’t do these things. They never have with any protocol. Not email, not RSS, not XMPP. The default wins. Always.

It is always technically possible to do differently. It’s computers after all: anything can be coded. And most people won’t because they have their life to live. What matters is the default, and all the incentives point to the default being shittier as time goes on.

The most crucial point is the relay. Yes, appviews can work without, but then you miss everything that is happening which is probably the number one reason people go to bluesky rather than the fedi. Relays are a fundamental part of what makes bluesky attractive and they require large capital to run and maintain, so it all points to bluesky still running the main one that most will connect to

That’s a good idea but you don’t need a full instance, only a community in which you are the sole admin. Start with that, do backups, and evolve from that if you feel too cramped

I don’t understand, how is yunohost not selfhosting ?

That’s historical and can be traced back to how it was formed: some of the people were coming from the instances perspective, where a bunoh of people congregate and network, some from the individual website perspective where you can do absolutely anything and everything you want, you’re home after all. So it landed somewhere in the middle: some very basic use cases were laid out, every platform did whatever they wanted and tried to fit the basic use cases in. Now we have independent platforms doing what they want and if we’re nice we can, maybe, talk with others.

It’s a sad state but some platforms, like emissary and bonfire, are trying to go beyond and offer the possibility for anyone to build their own interface on top. One should also defocus from mastodon and look closer at the friendica family of software which have always looked at fulfilling many usecases, so compability can be better than others

Capitalist propaganda is rampant on the fediverse. We need to discuss ways to combat this. Most big instances -generalist, tech or something are wholly controlled by bourgeois people who would rather uphold state violence than democracy. What do you think?

Your analysis is too light. The state isn’t some magical benevolent entity which is somehow “on the wrong path”. The state is an instrument of domination driven by the dominating class: the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is against everything you cited. It will not slowly act against its own interest, willingly lose power and dominance. It will always fight for, at the minimum, keeping power.

That is why historically the only way to have changes that contradict the dominating entity’s interest is for the dominated entity to band together. It’s the only way anything ever changes: the balance of forces moves in the interest of the dominated. Women didn’t earn the right to vote because men were nice, but because women fought for it. Social progress never happens because the bourgeoisie is nice (that’s a very nice propaganda trick) but because the bourgeoisie has to compromise.

Waiting/wishing/hoping for the state to be nice, which is what asking for ubi is, and the “revolution without violence” the socdem has pushed about, never works. As long as the people who are legitimate are dominated, it will not happen.

Let’s stop dreaming in idealistic what-ifs and act in materialist actions. The material conditions define our existence. Let’s set our material conditions of existence, without asking nicely, and the balance of power will force the dominating power to compromise.

Be the change you want to see. You want the right kind of content to magically come to you, how do you think this content exists in the first place

Yeah but “decentalised” here is not clear. Do you mean a storage that is not controlled by the instance ?

Centralized where ? Each instance is autonomous and independent

I’m curious as to what is wrong with funkwhale ? It does have issues but it also seems to fit your usecase