I’ve been thinking — what if, in order to reply to someone, I have to have an account on their server? In a world where there are many servers, and nobody “federates,” how would that even work?
Why would you even need it?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this!
It all seems to come down to managing noise.
Say I follow a bunch of people on a bunch of servers, each of which have their own unique communities with their own senses of identity. Whenever I begin to participate in a conversation I automatically become an interloper. The more interlopers you invite into your midst the more diluted your community identity becomes.
You lose any sense of who is “inside” and who is “outside.”
However, if you are forced to join the community first then all kinds of things change. You automatically are treated as someone who is at least trying to come “inside.” The community’s norms are going to seep in since they can easily tell you to get lost if you aren’t following them.
But, you might say, other systems like ActivityPub and AT allow for defederation! Well.. a few bad apples shouldn’t spoil the bunch right?
In any case, the issue with easy federation, in my view, is that the natural boundaries that protect our attention and safety get blurred. We are forced to figure out how to survive in a high signal, low trust environment.
What if, however, your social networking protocol allowed for you to own both your data and your identity? Joining a server is as simple as signing a request with your identity keys and going through the application process.
Of course, you may not be accepted, but that’s just the nature of the beast. It’s not you, it’s them. Or whatever.
The way this would work — your Streamful app would hold a single set of keys. Whatever servers you sign up to don’t have any idea what those keys are — all they know is that you used the public portion to sign a request to log in.
Also, whenever you publish a message to a server, it also gets saved to your device. You can export the data to iCloud if you want! And if one of the servers you are on has a disagreement with your style, well, just publish them somewhere else!
In any case — what this does is simplify the problem set dramatically. Server operators don’t need to deal with floods of messages coming from badly behaving servers in the federation. If you want to take a message you got from one server and put it on another one you need to be super intentional about it. It’s not as easy as tapping on “boost” and off it goes. You need to say where you want to put it. And maybe even why you wanted to put it there.
The goal here is to allow servers to be sort of like a small town. Things are happening at various venues but it takes work to go to each one and see what’s up. You don’t just get a flood of everything happening everywhere.
It’s just too much!