First thing I like about Hometown is the ability to post “unfederated”, i.e. “tight-knit to the server” ; the support of event is also interesting, any chance you share it with Mastodon and/or discuss it in Federated Events?
@darius, I tried to find your implementation of Hometown to look at the Event code, but friend.camp announces itself as Mastodon and sends to the original Mastodon code, and I could not find anything on your GH account.
Thank you for thinking about infrastructure and service providers. At this level there’s another issue: many independent ISPs use the same datacenters, which makes decentralization difficult. Supporting initiatives like FOSShost.org and other librehosters may help alleviate this problem as they would be able to diversify the location of their servers. As always with the alternatives, it’s the attention and love of the community that makes it possible. For too long have we been fed with the illusion that the Internet is “free” (as in gratis), and that prevents fair competition, because you cannot compete at zero cost.
Signs that something can’t exist on centralized networks
I love this slide:
- Doesn’t meet a profit motive
- Doesn’t “scale well”
- nodes can/should remain small anyway, only has to scale across a network
- Looks like something that “failed” in the past
- BBS, gopher, universal feed readers, etc etc
- Is something that you don’t understand the utility of
- Many puzzling ideas are in fact just useless but it’s still a positive indicator
Looking forward to the live session!