there is a critical ‘relay’ component that only they control. so you can setup your own ‘node’, but only connected to their instance.
only a single instance of the relay exists and they are not releasing that code and a few other pieces. it federates only with itself.
That pretty much sounds centralised. But I guess people don’t care if they don’t have to worry about “picking a server” which is “too complicated” 🤷
i think the new paradigm of the distributed fediverse is going to take a long time to propagate to the masses. its going to be lots of platforms advertising their corner of the 'verse and the features they permit… but we really need to get the idea of the ‘fediverse’ into their heads that its content accessible by any of those platforms.
the thing ive noticed is no one cares about ‘sites’ anymore… the kids all want ‘apps’ which is drivin me bonkers. spent decades building mobile-friendly, dynamic viewports only for them to get ignored cuz kids dont want to type in a URL/domain.
My impression is that it hasn’t been users that have pushed everything into apps, it’s been publishers. This is all a part of a general trend where software has become much less about what it can do for the user, and much more about what data it can extract from a user for the publisher. Websites generally have a lot more protections against such data scraping, meanwhile you can put who knows what code into an app.
If you look at how RSS fell from use, there were two major issues. On the user side, users had to go out to find content as there wasn’t an inherent way to search for content within the system. On the creator side, creators had to deal with advertising themselves to users and they had to handle the monetization by themselves.
Social media created the algorithm to find content and developed some revenue sharing with creators.
If federated media takes off, it will probably look like Threads or Truth Social, where control of a front end monetizes development of the platform.
OT, but most of my students in their 20s can barely use keyboards. It really stresses them out and they get mad about it. Papers are either copy-paste then AI filtered a few times, or speech-to-text with a quick grammerly scan. Drives me bonkers too. Just to say, I’m sorry your work isn’t appreciated.
“The Digital Native generation are technological geniuses because they can usually intuit which icon to click. Let us praise them and give them as much screentime as we can.” - All the news pieces and academic articles from 2000-2010ish
