It's not a clear one-way trip though. The "original" blogosphere of the 2000s was heavily federated with MovableType supporting trackbacks and then later systems automating that further with pingbacks. Ultimately it all fell to spam and hosting complexity though, and now almost all blogs are on a handful of centralized hosts again.
Spam/moderation is going to be the biggest hurdle to overcome with any distributed forge effort. It'll likely come down to some kind of web-of-trust/vouching system, but it's delicate balancing ease of access with not making it a slog to constantly manage spam.
At least with atproto, we can see if an account has history and activity, see if their public data looks at all legit. The ability to deal with spam and disinformation seems so much radically better than anything else we've been able to work from.
Is Mastodon successful enough to be called "the future" of its niche? MAU is 1/3rd what it was at the peak, and bluesky + mastodon MAU combined is microscopic compared to twitter (I use none of these services, no dog in this fight, just looking at numbers).
It's not a clear one-way trip though. The "original" blogosphere of the 2000s was heavily federated with MovableType supporting trackbacks and then later systems automating that further with pingbacks. Ultimately it all fell to spam and hosting complexity though, and now almost all blogs are on a handful of centralized hosts again.
Spam/moderation is going to be the biggest hurdle to overcome with any distributed forge effort. It'll likely come down to some kind of web-of-trust/vouching system, but it's delicate balancing ease of access with not making it a slog to constantly manage spam.
At least with atproto, we can see if an account has history and activity, see if their public data looks at all legit. The ability to deal with spam and disinformation seems so much radically better than anything else we've been able to work from.
Has it ever worked?
Mastodon, Discord?
Is Mastodon successful enough to be called "the future" of its niche? MAU is 1/3rd what it was at the peak, and bluesky + mastodon MAU combined is microscopic compared to twitter (I use none of these services, no dog in this fight, just looking at numbers).
Discord is not federated.
1 reply →