this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
739 points (98.6% liked)
Microblog Posts
101 readers
407 users here now
Shareworthy Microblogs.
- Always link to the original post.
- Only recent microblogs(Past 30 days/Month).
- Only text based microblogs, don't share microblogs that is based on photos or using mainly photos.
Blacklisted websites:
- X/Twitter.
- Tumblr.
founded 3 weeks ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Tbh, the federated stuff also isn't fully decentralized. It still has quite a few of the pitfalls of a centralized system, even if it's setup on a distributed technology.
We are still relying on mostly one provider of software, there's still one network, large instances still have a ton of power (e.g. if a few large instances defederate a small instance, it's pretty much dead in the water).
If you want to really go decentralized, look back to the old stuff: dedicated bulletin boards and personal websites.
The wrong thing is distributed.
If an instance grows to some massive size (for whatever reason), it will just be the new Reddit, the new Twitter. If that instance gets purchased, the exact same issues await as on Reddit or Twitter.
It's the back-end that should be decentralised while the front-end (all the user-generated content) should be uniformly distributed with backups across the entire fediverse. That way, if an instance goes down, the content and user accounts don't go down with it.
So you are suggesting something akin to a classic distributed data storage system (e.g. something like a torrent) which is used as a backend for purely client-side frontends? Yeah, that could work.
Another option would be something akin to mailing lists. All the data is distributed among the clients and each client is responsible for backing up stuff they care about.
That would work decently for text-only messages, but with images and video, data and bandwith requirements would snowball like crazy.
It's not exactly easy.
I think the easiest option would really be oldschool forums.
Yeah, the main problem is the storage required. A p2p kind of setup but with the back-end capable of RAID10-like redundancy, allowing for servers to keep varied amounts of data. With enough distributed servers/clients, no single instance could grow large enough to threaten the whole system.
As for oldschool forums - I think they'd just be a slight downgrade to something like Lemmy. You CAN operate Lemmy like a forum, you just get all the extra stuff on top.