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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Which is the opportunity. It's unnecessarily complex: so solve that.

It's possible that I'm missing something here, but I'm not sure what's the point of the 'fediverse' is. Looks like a solution looking for a problem, or an overcorrection to the trend from the 2010s to move everything to silos (independent forums -> facebook groups / subreddits / twitter).

Wouldn't it be better and simpler to just revert that trend to how it was before the big tech behemoths put everything behind walled gardens?

>Wouldn't it be better and simpler to just revert that trend to how it was before the big tech behemoths put everything behind walled gardens?

That's... kind of the point of the fediverse? A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible. Identity is controlled by the end user.

But the web is already descentralized, isn't it? What I mean is, why don't we go back to the early 2000s phase where there were popular forums for everything, each of them with disctint styles and idiosyncrasies. You could have a separate identity in each of them, and I don't remember ever once thinking "oh, it would be cool to be able to somehow connect this account with this other one in this other forum".

It brings me back a few years ago where everyone just had to use blockchains instead of... a database, when it made no sense. It should be decentralization in the sense of offer, not technical decentralization.

Mastodon and the like feel flat to me. Again, maybe I'm missing a key piece here.

> A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible

I don't think so. I don't think any of this will gather enough momentum to make a dent to the established networks (Twitter, FB, TikTok, Reddit, etc). That ship has sailed, imho

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