Article goes over the embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy that Microsoft and Google have used against open document and chat formats. There is speculation that Meta could do something similar by joining the Fediverse.
Article goes over the embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy that Microsoft and Google have used against open document and chat formats. There is speculation that Meta could do something similar by joining the Fediverse.
Possibly, I've worked on a few totally distributed ones but I guess the userbase was small enough and they're basically immune to commercialization. I worry about federated versions for different reasons, just the usability and accessibility. I've worked on Freenet for nearly 15 years now, which someone slapped a social network called Sone on top of it years and years ago. There's also forum functionality in Freenet Messaging System and an older one that emulates the newsgroups/NNTP experience very faithfully.
I think the jump to smartphones made this kind of network less feasible, basically everyone using it just has a web server running on localhost and the daemon interacts with the P2P network underlying the data exchange. Identities are cryptographic and not tied to an instance as such, so the forums are truly global & decentralized. You have to build small world networks amongst yourselves though, anti-DDOS/spam is based on a web of trust and client-side filtering. In my opinion the entire Web needed to work this way from the beginning, but early networking technology really pushed people to the client-server model we ended up with.
peer to peer networks don't scale at all. And they more they work the more they're actually just doing client-server communication.
And IP addresses are ephemeral so you need a server to actually connect people.