federation is just one way to achieve some form of decentralization... but only on one axis. the axis of "service provider choice". what is needed alongside this is a great "unbundling" of services. in the usa, if you want to sign up for just internet, companies often (more often in the past) force you to bundle in phone and tv service as well. we can think of one of fedi's current problems as the bundling of several services into a single provider -- identity, data, communication.

trying to get changes adopted by mastodon at a software or protocol level reminds me of the general frustrations of electoral politics. it's only slightly less ineffectual

question mainly to proponents of quote posts, but anyone can respond: what would you say is the semantic relationship between a “quote post” and “the post being quoted”? Are there any semantics at all, or is it a generic link/reference? What’s the difference between a “quote” and a “link preview”? By semantic, I mean “meaning”. What does it mean to “quote” something? If “quote posts” never existed, how would you design an equivalent? boosts welcome, i’m trying to get a wide range of answers

the web was not made to be federated imo because the web is not a messaging platform, it's a publishing platform. in messaging, you federate between systems; in publishing, you *syndicate* to other sites. there is a difference, and the difference matters.

i want to Kill

idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something). it's what you might call a "hot take", certainly a heterodox one to some parts of the broader #fediverse community. this is in response to recent discussion on "what do you want to see from AP/AS2 specs" (in context of wg rechartering) mostly devolving into people complaining about JSON-LD and extensibility, some even about namespacing in general (there was a suggestion to use UUID vocab terms. i'm not joking) 1/?

welcome to the fediverse! it's easy to get started, just pick one of these 30,000 nation-states you want to swear absolute allegiance and fealty to. you WILL be judged for this decision later. good luck!

O_o