An old fashioned single hosted forum is a lot simpler.
Yes but also good luck trying to get everyone to sign up for the same forum website, especially since most forums are for some specific interest. The point is that it’d be really nifty if there was a way to connect all these forums together so you wouldn’t have to sign up for 1000 different websites to talk to everyone - and that’s what the Fediverse does :)
This also makes it much better for users, as they can choose an instance (forum) that fits what they want without being in a closed garden. They can choose based on their interests, their desired rules, their desired mods/admins. The Fediverse is about choice! :)
Well, let me go by example: The strength of E-Mail lies in the fact that its a robust standard that, instead of siloing users into their platforms, brings people together into one single userbase.
Similarly with federation in social media, this makes userbases not compete but collaborate. If I created an ActivityPub-Powered project right now, I’d have to convince nobody to use it and still be part of a community.
One difference however is that social media is public. As the person that runs the server, you do have to put in some measures to make sure that your users are actually feeling safe. The most extreme of these measures is defederation, where you just completely cut off another server, but there’s also other ways to limit other servers, like for example, hiding their accounts by default in say the “federated” feed in Mastodon and co.
What is the point of federation then? An old fashioned single hosted forum is a lot simpler. I’d rather that any filtering be done on the client side.
Yes but also good luck trying to get everyone to sign up for the same forum website, especially since most forums are for some specific interest. The point is that it’d be really nifty if there was a way to connect all these forums together so you wouldn’t have to sign up for 1000 different websites to talk to everyone - and that’s what the Fediverse does :)
This also makes it much better for users, as they can choose an instance (forum) that fits what they want without being in a closed garden. They can choose based on their interests, their desired rules, their desired mods/admins. The Fediverse is about choice! :)
@solrize
Well, let me go by example: The strength of E-Mail lies in the fact that its a robust standard that, instead of siloing users into their platforms, brings people together into one single userbase.
Similarly with federation in social media, this makes userbases not compete but collaborate. If I created an ActivityPub-Powered project right now, I’d have to convince nobody to use it and still be part of a community.
One difference however is that social media is public. As the person that runs the server, you do have to put in some measures to make sure that your users are actually feeling safe. The most extreme of these measures is defederation, where you just completely cut off another server, but there’s also other ways to limit other servers, like for example, hiding their accounts by default in say the “federated” feed in Mastodon and co.