Nobody cares about decentralization until they do (2024)

Summary

A recurring line in discussion of federated, decentralized social media is that no one cares about it. They just want their Twitter without the Nazis.Which is okay. But how it looks on the backend matters. When the illusion of a unified user experience breaks, how accessible the escape pod is matters.Consider this scenario: you try to log on to your favorite social media one day and the server you were on is just gone.Mastodon and the broader ActivityPub (AP) network offer little hope here. Everything lived on that server. There was a popular server in the little subculture I inhabit that was ganged up on by some shitposting instances until the mods quit and it shut down. I can't convince anyone in that subculture to try Mastodon whether for the first time or again. They've all heard about what happened. They know there's a different group of servers that picks random instances to attack similarly.And every single one, with few exceptions, that tried Bluesky prefers it. Sign up for Kye Fox It's free No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. There are sparks of discussion of solutions in the spaces of Mastodon and ActivityPub, but the damage is done. If Bluesky can't get word out that Jack Dorsey ragequit, then Mastodon/AP has little hope of reaching the millions who've already chosen their alignment toward it.The response to the thing will always lose a race with the thing.Bluesky and AT protocol (AT) are different. The planned recovery scenario has a little box in your app that says your PDS went away and offers to move your account. How it does that doesn't matter to the user (probably), but it can do it: the keys live in the app, the data is sitting there safely on a relay, or in the app itself. Most likely, the user never encounters this since they start and stay on a Bluesky PDS. But the option is there. The real process is still technical and under development, but that's the goal.Something like the network-gutting mass defederations Mastodon is known for can happen, but ...