ActivityPub and Mastodon brought new incentives into the world of decentralised communication platforms, even so far as I would call it a serious alternative to platforms like Twitter. But all efforts made by hundreds of individuals every day – administrating servers, developing software and moderating communities – have a weak spot which needs to be addressed in the near future: who has control over the underlying computing infrastructure of the Fediverse? And are users aware of the conditions?
This is absolutely true, but expected.
One of the reasons why I see federation only as a stepping stone. The real deal is not a federated system, but a distributed one, and I hope I will live to see one becoming mainstream. Ah, and I hope it is not scuttlebutt … but that’s another question, right? :D
Do you think holochain will be the answer?
Never heard of it.
Depending on what you mean with distributed it already exists for the Fediverse: Hubzilla and Zap have build in channel clones and nomadic identities, meaning your channel can live on multiple servers the same time and you can easily move between then and onto new servers.
The problem is that this is mostly incompatible with ActivityPub, but Zot network internally it works great.
That’s not distributed if there are servers involved.
Hence my “depending on what you mean with distributed” ;)
But I hate to break it to you: servers are also just computers and there is no fundamental technical difference between a federation of servers and a p2p network of “clients”.
yeah, well that’s true :D But what I mean is real distribution. Every client is a Server (think IPFS, or scuttlebutt fwiw).