I’m certainly way late on commenting on this and probably shouting into a void, but…
The bigger sociotechnical challenge, though, that would absolutely be necessary to solve to make this viable in practice would be making this kind of setup not only possible but absolutely trivial - trivial to set up, trivial to use, trivial to manage, and trivial to back up and restore. For this kind of setup to ever take off, it has to be the kind of thing you could give to your grandparents and have them be able to use at least as easily as an iPhone.
I really like the idea of giving everyone an “internet box” of sorts; plug it into your network and power, and off it goes. And I don’t think we necessarily need to make it trivial to manage. I believe we can delegate that responsibility to more technically inclined people that the owner trusts. It feels an awful lot like the BOINC project: install the software, and let other clever people write the code that does socially useful computation on top of your device. Only, for the Internet Box, it is instead “choose which entities you want to give shell access to.”
Bluesky users may not know or understand what ATproto is, or what PDS they’re on, or how their messages are federated - but, they are on federated social media, and they are (at least moderately) happy about it.
However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.
Moving on…
That being said, I think we’re overlooking that these people do exist. I’d actually really like to see organisations like Mastodon gGmbH use some funding not just on development, DevOps and DevRel, but what I’d like to call CitRel: citizen relationships. We should be focus grouping onboarding strategies to get people to choose their communities; we should be designing communications toolkits for people to talk about federated social media; hell, we should be producing memes on centralised social media that push people over!
I like the concept of CitRel. Part of me suspects that the computer education I received as a child – what is a file, what is a filesystem, what is a network connection, what is a program, etc – is no longer given, instead relying on “intuitiveness” from major players. Perhaps starting User Groups back up is an option for establishing a more “competent computation baseline” for citizens.
I’m certainly way late on commenting on this and probably shouting into a void, but…
I really like the idea of giving everyone an “internet box” of sorts; plug it into your network and power, and off it goes. And I don’t think we necessarily need to make it trivial to manage. I believe we can delegate that responsibility to more technically inclined people that the owner trusts. It feels an awful lot like the BOINC project: install the software, and let other clever people write the code that does socially useful computation on top of your device. Only, for the Internet Box, it is instead “choose which entities you want to give shell access to.”
Not really:
Moving on…
I like the concept of CitRel. Part of me suspects that the computer education I received as a child – what is a file, what is a filesystem, what is a network connection, what is a program, etc – is no longer given, instead relying on “intuitiveness” from major players. Perhaps starting User Groups back up is an option for establishing a more “competent computation baseline” for citizens.