@liaizon as long as I get #NomadicIdentity I’m good. I don’t need the fediverse to be a reliable storage of my data; that’s what my website/blog is for.
I think of my fedi posts as letters I send out into the ether.
@liaizon One trick I use to stir up new ideas is to ask whether a technology will work when we use a genetically inherited biological mesh network and a locally shared second imagination.
I want to work towards infrastructure meant to last 100 years. Domain names (ICANN based at least) are so so fragile. I think content hashed URIs are still the best bet we have at the moment. We need a large cultural movement that is invested in building for the future generations as opposed to the now tho.
I am feeling less and less sure that the design of the fediverse is the foundation we should be building off of. It feels at once both too complicated and too fragil.
@narF domains can disappear at any point. Instances being run by independent people who change their minds at any point and the users have zero power to keep the paths of their messages alive on instances other then single user ones.
@narF I read your thread and agree it would be lovely to have something like this, but the reality of the situation is that it would only be useful if everyone adapted to it and that would take a massive effort that would ultimately be impossible cause as soon as the standard got any traction a corporation would try to enclose it. I could imagine an open system of personal search spider agents might be more practical in the long run.
@liaizon where did I hear that before… 😅 it’s all a cycle, isn’t it? 🌱
I’d love to hear you elaborate, hope ther will be time next week. OTOH what it achieved adoption wise compared to more… opinionated(?) efforts, like ssb, is quite amazing.
@cryptix Where did you hear that before? There are many parts of the fediverse that are still more exciting to me then any other project in this area but this is more because of the type of diversity that is involved here more then anything
@liaizon yea sorry, that wasn’t really well spelled out.
IMHO aiming for 100 years stability is a bit of a sisyphusian task, especially if you aim for adoption at the same time.
My ssb reference was aiming for the fact that while it does have much better longevity (no need for domains & self-contained PKI) it also still is way too arcane and inaccessible, like a pocket dimension.
@cryptix there is a reason I was following all the work on SSB while also being more personally excited by the fediverse. SSB looking more into the future and fediverse being "lets use what we have available now" But watching the institutions step into using Mastodon or Bluesky or even Theads and feeling like its everyone just takes these little steps instead of building lasting things. And SSB feels like its at a dead end.
Looking out at cultural institutions that have lasted 1000s of years and feeling like there is little thought of making things even for the next ten years.
@PaulDavisTheFirst I dont think thats a very useful question in this context. I think anything thats lasts a long time has some context for lasting a long time and understanding what that context is may give some insight. The fediverse is a great thing I am not trying to say that it is not. I just dont think the technological underpinnings are designed for the longevity I desire and I dont see many working on fixing the underlying problems that need the most work.
@liaizon my point was that contrasting the lack of apparent longevity of things being made/designed today with things that have lasted a long time may be a red herring or even a dead end.
i'm not sure that the things that have lasted a long time generally have longevity designed into them. i suspect it's mostly an accident, and not a design decision. that would in turn suggest that trying to design for longevity may be a fools errand.
how much this is true of computer-related stuff .. unclear
@PaulDavisTheFirst I started this thread talking about a specific point in the longevity of the fediverse's design which is the reliance on domain names. There are other parts of this system that are designed around things that have temporality designed INTO them. When data availability is linked to a yearly bill being payed to a corporation, the chances that that link will no longer work in a few years is very high.
@liaizon I still like the idea of community networks. Screw the internet altogether. There's complexity there, but that seems like something that could last longer than our current cables running through the ocean business. However, I am just imagining the dystopia we've created with the climate crisis.
@liaizon it’s not described very deeply, but the Walkaways network with its adaptive protocols/frequencies and “polite” spectrum usage, as well as being decentralized and resilient, seemed like a good start for a physical layer. Such things could be built on something like LoRa I suppose, but there’s not a lot of bandwidth there. And you quickly get into “how far should I propagate this message?” decisions for such networks.
Add comment