Protocols are what computers use to communicate with each other. No protocols means no interaction between different computers/servers. Without protocols, none of the things you ask for can be possible.

By “Protocol” I was referring specifically to ActivityPub and the difficulties of engineering against that standard and then the compute resources required to perform the federation tasks. And in addition, the work of inventing a new protocol and the systems around it, as oppose to relying on the protocols and systems that already exist, which I presume would be mostly sufficient to run what I suggest. Obviously at a general level a “protocol” is required for any interoperation between platforms or servers over the internet, so I’m honestly not sure where you’re coming from with this feedback.

Federated services don’t have single sign on. On the contrary, single sign on is a centralized service …

I’m not talking about the fediverse currently having SSO.

I was brief in the top post, in part to start a conversation but because it was originating from mastodon. But the “platforms … dedicated to …” part of my post was referring to the idea that a system of trust would be committed to amongst the suggested platforms where they’d be mutually trusted sources of authentication.

Duplication is used on federated services for a few reasons …

I said “over engineered” not “just for fun”.

The premise of my post is to question and ponder the tradeoffs involved. Keeping in mind that social media has for a long time and continues to operate through centralised servers with many many people being very happy with it, the UX and development issues created by the underlying design of the fediverse may not be worth the technical features.

Implicit in my post is the idea that decentralised/federated social media might be a bit of technological idea that technologists like without thinking through the practicalities and usability issues. Many have bounced off of the fediverse for essentially this reason … because in the end the point of social media is the social part not the independent decentralised data resilience part.

I like the fediverse as much as anyone … I was here before the reddit migration promoting lemmy and kbin on mastodon. But I’d prefer an open and free social media space that works for people rather than one that’s futilely married to a tech idea and particular implementation (ActivityPub).

In the end, I’m wondering if there’s a middle way and have simply put up my first attempt at a set of ideas.

Otherwise, beyond the substance of your reply, I have to say that your reply was unnecessarily condescending. My post was rather short, so thinking it was without any meaning or coming from a completely ignorant place makes some sense, but without really having much to offer to the actual issues or discussion in your reply (you seem to have missed the essential thrust of simply having a few large servers committed to being open and working together as an easier alternative to big-corp social media), you managed to also make it clear that you thought my ideas were silly or juvenile. Perhaps I am being silly, but I feel your tone and presumptions were unnecessary.

Yea, buy in and network effects are certainly the tricky part. But that’s also true of the fediverse … it’s been going a long time and in many ways was really “gifted” with Musk’s twitter purchase (seriously, if someone else were to take charge there and reset it back to pre-musk, you’d see a bunch of people leave masto) … and Spez’s API pricing. Before these events, the fedi was pretty quiet compared to now. Lemmy, before the reddit migration was very quiet and may very well have failed by now or soon were it not for the migration.

Moreover, ActivityPub doesn’t get you seamless network effects. Lemmy and mastodon mostly don’t have cross-traffic, and that’s because their platforms basically lack any mutual support for each other. If they worked well with each other, Lemmy would be a much busier place (and masto would be better structured). Same probably goes to some extent for things like Peertube and bookwyrm. There’s also the lowest common denominator effect when it comes to features. One platform may support/provide “Quote posts”. But because Mastodon doesn’t, and they have the bigger user base, it doesn’t really matter, as no one else will see the quote posts and so the new platform doesn’t really have much to offer new users, which in turn basically turns the fediverse into the mastoverse (which is actually happening) and undermines the promise of enabling new platforms with built in network effects. Mastodon could just become one big single server or platform today and many probably wouldn’t mind.

Otherwise, RE SSO, I had in mind that trusted platforms would be mutual sources of authentication such that an account on one is effectively an account on all of them.

Exactly. And that’s kinda part of my point. Federation is all about copying content from server to server, so that the central organising structure is the server or instance. Duplicate enough content and a user won’t need to move … is kinda the idea. The reality though is more complex than that, as platforms and their designs get in the way, as does defederation and unpredictable admins. Reality is that the fediverse isn’t user driven, and once you see that, the whole decentralised thing starts to become more questionable (IMO).

So given all of that, I’m wondering what happens if you take away the whole federated idea but still retain some of the aims and principles and try a more straightforward approach that uses the tools and technologies we already have.

I do not know enough about how Usenet worked apart from picking up the impression that much of what was done there is being reinvented in the fedi (however accurate that is).

For me, the commitment to having good aggregating and unifying clients, and the commitment to open APIs that would necessitate, is pretty central to my suggestion. Not sure how much of that was in the usenet system (though probably more than I’m aware!).

Well that’s kinda the point of my quick suggestion in the original post.

Instead of committing to federation, how about committing to aggregating clients that allow you to do exactly this. Right now, there’s no app that will work for both lemmy/kbin and mastodon/microblogging. No way to unify the notifications or even combine the feeds or just have a unified interface for the two platforms (that are, let’s face, both just full of text messages and feeds).

By allowing each platform to be distinct but remain open with their APIs and “play nice with each other” while leaning into the value of aggregators as a primary part of the value proposition of the system, users might be better served.

You are on SJW, are you really concerned about defederation? You guys seem to be doing well over there