rglullis

How about we get some things out of LW a bit? There is a whole instance for football at soccer.forum, waiting for more people to join in.

You know that you can configure minio to only serve images for authenticated requests, right?

Don't reinvent the wheel unless you have a very good reason to do so.

I was using old smartphones as an example of the amount of excess computing power available which goes unused, not what people can do with it.

Your argument is just missing the point and annoying sophistry. Can you please just drop it?

I feel like one of the issues with these "new plan for X" essays or posts is that readers usually interpret it as something to completely replace the status quo. It's not the case. I'm not saying that everyone should start using this. I'm not saying that everyone should leave Mastodon. I'm not saying that all server-focused software using AP needs to go away.

I'm just saying that the current approach is not the only one and that Mozilla could have benefited from trying something different. I'm saying that Federation might be the right unit of organization for some cases, but that there is a whole world of possibilities where Federation is not so suitable.

I get it, it makes no sense to say that a network with 1M+ active users is "doing everything wrong" and that we need to start anew. I am not arguing the case to change those that are already here. I am arguing for changes that could help those that looked at "Federated Social Media" and went away because this model didn't work for them.

Applying for jobs, applying for government services, buying essential items cheaply, cheap/free education.

None of these things are even close to be available to people in extreme poverty.

Think "no access to running water or sewage systems" levels of poverty, not "living in a ghetto area of an European or North American country".

I think you didn't parse the sentence as I meant it.

I am not saying you should make all networks completely connected. What I am saying is that we should not develop Fediverse apps by emulating a closed (as in proprietary, corporate-controlled) service.

I have not once said that we need to get rid of servers, but I am saying that they could (should?) be used only as an proxy for the outbox/inbox. I've said already elsewhere, but it may make it easier to understand: the "ideal" model I have in mind is something like https://movim.eu, but with messages based around the ActivityStream vocabulary.

you really can’t get around this, even if you make every user handle their own stuff, every user will have their database and message queue.

Why is it that a XMPP server can handle millions of concurrent users on a single box with 160GB RAM and 40 cores, yet Mastodon deployments for less than 10k active users have crazy expensive bills?

AP has a great migration system.

Hard disagree, here. Tell me one system where I can take my domain and just swap the urls of the inbox/outbox. Mastodon lets you migrate your follower list and signals the redirect to your followers about your new actor ID, but you can not bring your data. But most importantly, the identity itself is not portable.

silo which holds all posts ever made, indexed to search? (...) that’s centralization

You can have decentralized search indexes. Each server holds a bit of the index, but everyone gets to see the whole thing.

i don’t want my end device to connect to every instance under the sun.

Not every instance, but you'd be connecting to the outboxes from the people you follow. How is that different from, e.g, subscribing to a RSS feed?

my fedi instance db is around 30G, and im a single user instance which only sees posts from my follows

First: How the hell did you get this much data? :) I have an instance running for 4 years, with a bunch of relays, serving ~10 users and the DB has less than 4GB.

But to answer your question: If you are running a single-user instance, then you are already running a client, the only difference is that you are running on a remote machine which proxies everything for you. And how you deal with data wouldn't change: just like you can delete old/stale data in Mastodon, you'd be able to delete or offload messages that are older than X days.

1. On average, we are rich enough to have plenty of gadgets around.

2. Those in extreme poverty need access to more important things than access to these gadgets.

I guess my main issue with your idea is that it will (IMO) encourage people to host more servers

Why? If anything, I believe that it would be the opposite. Less "responsibility" on the servers would mean better capacity to scale and serve more clients on the same hardware and (if the identity is not dependent on the server and can be easily portable) it would mean less attached value to the server itself, so people wouldn't care so much about "what instance they are joining".

The best analog there is to what I am proposing is movim, and if you go take a look at their server list, you will see quite a limited amount of servers even though it has as many active users as Lemmy.

Right, one can never be certain about the future, but AP is showing some staying power and (I think) the main reason that it's not evolving faster is because we are not exploring possibilities beyond "let's clone popular closed networks, and slap some AP to pass data around homogeneous servers".

With your suggestion, every post might come from a different server.

Why? Take our interaction, for example. the community is on lemmy.world, you are on lemm.ee and I'm on communick.news. My response generates an activity that is sent to LW, and LW then announces that activity to all the servers who have at least one subscriber. If LW went down, you wouldn't be able to see this message until it came back up and it started processing the federation queue again. Right?

The same thing would happen in a "message-relay" system. My client would send a message to LW, and LW would then send the activity to lemm.ee, which would then "push" it to you. If any of the servers went offline, the whole process would stop at the node that is offline and would then resume when it came back up.

How will you get a list of users on different servers without connecting to them?

In the same way that a RSS reader knows which feeds to download?

Changing this will require the client to search through a bunch of servers itself, or use a 3rd party search engine.

Yes, but the 3rd party search engine can be specialized. It could be a service that indexes all of the fediverse, or it could be a "standard" search query with some special operators.

How would you fetch posts, their score and comments from servers without connecting to them?

Your application will already receive updates from the communities you are subscribed to. In the case where you want to browse by /all, then yes, on first load your client will be making a bunch of queries to different servers that have communities to get a list of updates. But this would be an issue only on first load, because subsequent queries would be "give me all events that happened since the last time I visited".

But if you really don't want to run this on your device, then how about this: someone develops a "client" which is actually an aggregator of all the different instances which can then be used as web service that provides an API for end-users. This way, we still get to enjoy a distributed system, we still have a client-first application and we also get the benefit of having a service that makes it easier for the people who think that "federation is too complicated for non-techies."