Considering the dial one turns when building social software, between emphasis on people and emphasis on the spaces they occupy.
Compare being "in" a channel or rooms vs. "following" an individual. Systems focus on one or the other (yet always support both: DMs and privmsg; hashtags and groups)
Anyway this all needs to be rebuilt atop matrix.org or something because content addressing. Seriously it's 2017 and we're back at "overloaded server, can't load". Not even like zooko's triangle.
@graydon content addressing ~= magnet links for toots?
@Gankro chained history graph => same data no matter where you pull it from (bonus: these days p2p in the browser works too)
@graydon does that force some kind of transitivity of federation?
e.g. if neutral.site communicates with nazis.site, do I have to transmit nazi.site's content to transmit netural.site's?
@Gankro My general feeling on this is that we should build for the "friend-of-friend" threshold (and not friend-of-friend-of-friend): i.e. assuming each person has order-100 friends, you handle order-10,000 people's traffic, which is probably fine on a modern machine. There'll be plenty of redundancy, and not _much_ room for abuse.
@Gankro Clearly I haven't explained of my _other_ Clever Design Intuition for Social Software, which is to cap graph-degree for each person / each room at some reasonably low number. Set a speed limit / fixed amount of human oversight on propagation. No super-propagators.
@graydon so what you're saying is that you would ban @sarahjeong for Literally Destroying Mastadon 🙃
@graydon but jokes aside, I have a vague discontent towards the idea that participation in a social network should require a "good" computer/network. Also p2p seems like a nightmare given the way phone networks currently operate?
@Gankro Sometimes. Native phone apps (including web pages on phones -- https://wicg.github.io/netinfo/) can change behaviour when they're on a fast/cheap network like local wifi and/or mains power.
When on both, your phone might as well mesh. Agreed that when only on battery and lousy 3G it should drop to dumb client mode.
(Laptops and desktops more-likely to default-mesh)
@graydon *thinks about how those features are pretty much only used for fingerprinting*
@graydon (to say nothing of battery concerns)