So how do people go about defederating? Is it just a matter of making new servers, or does it require anything else?

I’m happy to stand up against The Man, but it seems like once the masses get involved they don’t feel personally responsible to preserve what they enjoy. They seem to give general consensus to [Big Tech Company], then [hard-working FLOSS developer] comes in later to fix it.

If I’m going to get “political” here, I almost think people need to be sold more on the importance of self-reliance. One prior historical precedent was around the 1750’s about taxation, and that’s had a nearly non-trivial impact on society. People intuitively grasp land ownership, so it should translate to data ownership as well.

I may be speaking in defense of something I don’t know, but I don’t see a direct problem with other apps (e.g., Threads, Twitter if they change up what they’re doing) to start talking with the fediverse.

The bigger problem is when they start throwing their weight around. The W3C (and groups like Mozilla) have had many strong battles with Google trying weird stuff because they’re the biggest guys in the room (e.g., FLoC).

As long as we can rally behind the loyalist FLOSS geeks, we’ll always be alright.

They might flee into the rest of the world and learn social skills. The horror!

This will be funny how bad it’ll go. I expect ridiculous blocking coming.

Then come the AI bots who comment…

This plays out like things I’ve seen in real life:

1. Get a community/club/church/workplace going with a good set of leaders.
2. The system becomes unwieldy through bureaucracy, excessive rules, whatever.
3. Leadership can’t change it, so they storm off in a huff after nobody listens to them.
4. Power-mongering Assistant to the Regional Manager takes their shot to run the show.
5. Everything becomes awful.

In all fairness, that’s how Twitter did things from what I can understand.

Of course, that can be quite the payroll expense, especially with a weird model with a panoply of interest-based domains.

I’m sure the Reddit employees will be up to it and has all the equipment necessary for it. That protest was about the amazing internal tooling the mods loved using, right?

It’s the emergence of a new community. When things get big, people feel less individually responsible, and that’s how trouble starts.

You’ll always have to rely on someone else, unless you build the thing yourself.

The beauty of the fediverse concept is that it’s about as easy as possible to build it yourself.

The cost of running a host is a matter of economical management:

• It costs almost nil to run text-based content.
• Images take a bit of memory and bandwidth, but are even manageable with an old cellphone under a set number of users.
• Videos are a major drag, and very expensive unless you’re embedding them.

Most open-source is funded as passion projects by devoted geeks who typically already make a living doing other computer things anyway, and fediverse is a bit of the same.