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> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients

This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace.

Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will be the dominant players once the ecosystem evolves.

also, I'll repeat my new business model Twitter should adopt -- take the underlying protocol (ActivityPub), white-label their services and sell them to orgs who want Twitter on their own domain (also allowing for control over the username namespace like email / @anyusername@domain.tld). I've been pitching this idea for years and no one's ever given a serious critique of the idea. A global unified namespace like the one Twitter uses is problematic (squatting/trademark disputes, etc) and awful.

> I've been pitching this idea for years and no one's ever given a serious critique of the idea.

It would dilute the Twitter brand and divide internal resources. That's the main critique I can think of. Would never happen while Twitter was a publicly traded corporation. Under private ownership, it very well might happen.

I think the Fediverse idea is great, but people are dumb. @somebody is about as far as most people can handle. @somebody@domain.with.dots is confusing, and nobody will understand. Imagine having to explain bang paths to Fred in accounting so he can send an electronic mail.

Never underestimate how obtuse the average computer user is. They can be taught, but it takes many, many years before it becomes common enough that people grok it without trouble.

(I like your idea, btw.)

It's strange to argue that people are stupid because they don't want to deal with irrelevant technicalities. Are they also stupid because they prefer domain names to IP addresses?

Fair enough, swap out "ignorant" if you want. The learning curve for Internety-thing is pretty steep, which is why people like "Find us on Facebook!" so much.

But what I was doing was comparing Fedi @somebody@some.thing.com to old-school bang paths. It's unlikely to take off among the masses until significant time passes. Heck, even email addresses baffle enough people to make me doubt whether all of this Internet stuff was worth the trouble.

> "Find us on Facebook!"

ah, the modern take on "AOL Keyword:" from the late 90s.

fair critique and absolutely reasonable considering why they've never done it. It just seems like a more ethical business model than selling ads and data licensing (https://octodon.social/@jalefkowit/108216691483123862).

Interesting thing: one of the major ActivityPub platforms (Write.as) offers a white label version of their blogging platform if you don't want to run it yourself.

https://writefreely.host/

I've been waiting for you to join communick, as this has been my plan from the start. ;)

I started with the simple "managed" hosting, now I am hearing things up to do custom hosting and the whitelabel.

Don't hosted services defeat the point of federation in the first place? That's how we've ended up with email being as difficult as it is to self-host.

Same issue with Discord, it's a centralized service where you and your content are at the mercy of the owner of the service, which I think is one of the big things that federated alternatives (like Matrix) are meant to solve, so any single entity can't unilaterally revoke your participation in the entire network.

I don't think so.

Being able to switch what provider hosts your social media without losing your network is valuable (and has pro-social effects) without needing to self-host.

> That's how we've ended up with email being as difficult as it is to self-host.

I'm not sure what you mean, what's the "that", what do you think led to the situation where email is hard to self-host?

Even if hard to self-host, email succeeds in avoiding vendor lock-in if you have your own domain. Which most people don't, because of cost and because _that_ can be hard to manage for a normal person. But if fediverse succeeds at giving a typical person the lack of vendor lock-in that email-with-your-own-custom-domain does, I'd consider that a success on the criteria of what federation is meant to achieve.

>I'm not sure what you mean, what's the "that", what do you think led to the situation where email is hard to self-host?

I was referring to spam filtering, where all the big hosts know to allow each other through, but make it very difficult for smaller hosts to participate by being tight lipped about their filtering criteria and making others have to jump through lots of hoops to not be treated as spam. Which, when considering the high cost of being spam filtered (eg. if you're a business) ends up making it very hard to practically self-host.

Similarly, I wouldn't think fediverse would have succeeded in the goals of federation with large centralized hosting providers. Since upon reaching critical mass, they could easily enact similar policies in the name of preventing spam or for 'safety'. The content would be going through their network and would be stored on their hardware, so they would use the same logic current social media uses to justify their right to moderate without oversight.

Maybe this was the underlying goal in their efforts with Bluesky?[1]

1. https://blueskyweb.org

probably. Fortunately Bluesky is vaporware so the Fediverse and ActivityPub actually have the advantage here of being a standard that has an established community of implementors, and momentum.

EDIT: I've said before, the PBLLC should be working with the W3C, IETF, or other open bodies, and they've always had a seat at the table (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/join).

We're absolutely not vaporware. We're also completely happy to live in a world where both ActivityPub and Bluesky exist, and prioritize different problems with different approaches.

> Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients

Yep. Self-hosting something like Plex (please consider Jellyfin instead) or a social Fediverse server shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone. I think projects like Sandstorm, yunohost, Cloudron, etc have the right idea, but they're still way too complicated for the average person to get up and running. I've been chewing on this problem for about a year, and I believe it's solvable with technologies that are currently available. This is the focus of my current main side project.

https://runyourown.social/#keep-it-small <-- Something like 50, where only 1 or 2 have to have the technical skills, seems reasonable to amortize the admin time. I don't totally know why we're saying that kind of middle number is infeasible.

Platforms should not own content and subscribers graph. Users should own content and subscribers graph, preferably by reliance on public key cryptography. Then you will be notified of your peers' contents on any platform.

Imagine a popular but controversial blogger deplatforming attempt, followed by his 300k subscribers getting an 'Your contact has just uploaded their first video on NextTube' notification in five minutes. You don't need many platforms when platform understands they only have power to de-content themselves.

You also no longer need those rows of social icons since you only need to subscribe to a creator once.

Content should reside in P2P/DHT mesh and platforms would only present, curate, decorate and discover it. But it should also be discoverable via PKI+DHT.

I completely agree, there's such a barrier for entry that's incredibly difficult for not-tech people to emphasize with.

I think there's an interesting case to be looked at with Discord. Not that discord itself is decentralized, but the surprising amount of vibrant and active communities in the form of Discord servers. If the client-side barrier can be sufficiently lowered, I'm sure many communities like that have at least one or two people knowledgeable enough to set up an instance or two

I agree with your points on B and C, but the vast majority of people don't have to know or care about A.

For 2, I wonder if there could be a 'wrapper' service (website) around Fediverse that makes it as easy to set up an instance as Slack or Discord. It would still be decentralized, except the service could abstract away the technical bits entirely.

Bingo. Send payment here, choose a name, your instance spins up, and stays up as long as you've paid for hosting.

When payment runs out, it emails you a download link to export your data which you can take to another provider, or just start paying again and it starts working again.

I'd send a few bucks to such a site, sure.

There is such a thing in masto.host, though I haven't used it personally.

It depends on who "your community" is - if they're people who can set up their own instance, and care about decentralisation - congrats, there are already loads of them on the Fediverse, in terms of users and instances. C) solved.

If your community is "people I'm interested in talking to" then they don't need A) or B, and there are so many of those on the Fediverse that congrats, C) is solved.

The fact of the matter is the Fediverse (and even just Mastodon) is that 1) is not the current reality (plenty of medium and small-ish instances), and 2) does not have to be, and indeed is not the reality, and even if it were, A and C still need not apply.

I sometimes fear people jump into the Fedi but, understandably, aren't versed on how discoverability works, thinks there's no-one interesting there, and leaves. Whether setting up your own instance or using a tiny existing one, you can browse the user directories and posts from other, larger instances, and find interesting souls to connect with, without having to make an account there.

Most importantly one can search tags used in posts and profiles which relate to your interests. Any good / mature client (or the web UI) lets you search for tags and pin them as their own timelines - so a rolling conversation about your fav topics, across all instances that you federate with.