Decentralizing Schemes

Summary

I’m a fan of decentralized social media and that’s partly because I enjoy using it. But mostly because history teaches that decentralization is the best basis for sustainable, resilient online conversation. (Evidence? Email!) For the purpose of this essay, let’s assume that you agree with me. Let’s also assume that our online life is still Web-flavored. I’m going to describe a few unfortunate things that can happen in a decentralized world, then look at a basic built-in feature of the Web that might make the problems go away. Let’s start with bad-experience scenarios Sharing pain · Suppose I post a picture to my social-media feed and since Ash follows me, it shows up in their stream. They can favorite or boost it, but let’s suppose they think their friend Layla might like it too, so they grab the link and drop into their chat window with Layla, or maybe they send her an email. By “link” I mean “URL”, and by “URL” I mean “URI” (the distinction will matter in a bit). Here’s what that looks like, first on the Fediverse: https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/114361121438267145 And on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/tbray.org/post/3lmxrkmwz5k2u Layla sees the link and clicks it or taps it and yay, there’s the picture. She dislikes it and wants to add a negative comment. On the Fediverse, if it turns out she’s logged onto CoSocial.ca like me she’ll have no trouble, she can fire away. If she’s logged into another instance (and the Fediverse has thousands) she’s out of luck, even though she’s got a live Fediverse session. She can paste the URL or just “@timbray” into her search window and that might get her there indirectly if she’s lucky. This is a bad experience. On Bluesky, it’ll probably just work. Well, for now. Because while Bluesky is based on the AT Protocol (ATproto for short) which is in theory decentralized, at the moment Ash is logged into the “App View” at bsky.app just like I am, because in practice everybody on Bluesky is. But in a future where there are multiple AT...