Hey, fediverse! Listen up. You'll like this, I promise.
Yesterday I was on Norwegian national radio, talking about how the "monopoly" of Facebook over the public discourse is dangerous and that politicians need to step in.
My sollution? Enforce federation!
That way the free market of social networks can work and the network effect will no longer be a "social DRM" locking people in.
Based on this text (norwegian): https://nrkbeta.no/2016/12/19/samfunnet-trenger-alternativer-til-facebook/
It's available in Norway here: https://radio.nrk.no/serie/her-og-naa-hovedsending/DMTN01007218/11-04-2018#t=42m15s
@forteller
Would you please define "federation" for some of us newbies?
@DaBishop @forteller
federation is when you can set up your own server and all the other people's serers will automatically interoperate with it.
Like, you can just set up your own email server or mastodon instance, and you'll be able to communicate with people on different servers, without the owners of those servers needing to manually approve your server or anything.
@Wolf480pl
Thank you for explanation. I like it in theory, but would want to see the security of this idea first. I'd be concerned that some malious server could join mine and I have no recourse.
@forteller
@DaBishop @forteller take a look how Mastodon works. It's federated. Any server can join. But there's not much malicious stuff it can do, is there? If you have some specific attack scenario in mind, tell me, maybe I'm wrong, but off the top of my head I can't come up with anything serious that a malicious server could do.
@DaBishop @forteller
Telephone networks are a bit different - they are not a federation, because to join, you need an interconnection argreement with other telcos.
Facebook is even worse than that - no matter what you do, they will not interconnect with you. Ever. There's no way for a facebook user to talk to a non-facebook user.