Just wanted to ask your opinion before I waste too much time in a new open source project that nobody wants.
Lemmy, Mastodon and Co are federated but users are concentrated on a few large instances which somewhat contradicts the original idea.
What do you think of a truly decentralised app where each instance is one user.
I am aware that there many reasons why this is a bad idea but I would like to hear from you why I should leave it, or encourage me to try it out.
If there are no groups, everyone has to be their own mod. The amount of shit will quickly overwhelm any one persons abilities to deal with, so people will share their blocklists.
This recreates similar structures to what we have now, except the moderation power is even less transparent. (Ask your local email admin how much fun it is to get un-blacklisted)
Im replying to your reply of another person. I have to say what they describe is exactly what I would like to see. sharing and even subscribing to blocklists. Sure its a recreation of a similar structure but thats fine because the user controls it and the transparency thing to me is not an issue because again the user controls it. I really don’t see an issue in what they said. That being said I think I looked into nostr before and might again. Honestly I think keeping track of the key is the main thing.
The difficulty is always groups, trustworthiness, and what to do when people are offline.
The main problem here is persistance. Most users are on machines that get turned off. I could kinda see it for chat. If you think about walkie talkies people on on or not. A chat where each instance was a user would be like that. You get on and participate or not. CB’s even have channels yeah.
The main problem here is persistance. Most users are on machines that get turned off.
This! It only works if you have a server that’s online 24/7. Can be a VPS in a data centre, can be some Raspberry Pi running at your home with a DNS name pointing to it.
Sounds like a good idea if you want to have around 5 active users.
Sorry for the sarcasm but I don’t like the idea that only people privileged with a VPS can join.
For Lemmy and PieFed much of the server load comes from communities, not users. It’s communities that do the activity fan out, not users.
Sounds almost but not quite like what holos is working on
Also to answer your question, there are other projects that exist that offer a better single-user instance experience (gotosocial comes to mind). But unless you can make the setup as easy as installing an app on your phone, actually running a single-user instance will still be something for hobbyists and enthusiasts. Far be it from me to dissuade someone from starting a project, I’m the proud owner of two partial activitypub server implementations myself, but unless you’re doing it for fun I’d suggest contributing to an existing project instead.
Gotosocial is basically that.
I ended up going with akkoma for my instance, its not just for single user setups but its simpler then mastodon with more customizability.
Nostr is also something you might want to look into, its a pretty neat system.
I have built a network that can be used for that, the tenfingers sharing network. It’s completely decentralised, and each user can host or share its own webpage/presence.
HMU if you try something.
PS. It solves ‘the offline user’ among other things, and would be perfect for a distributed social network.
