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@wakest
so just logging on and hearing that witches.town is shutting down. did the users of this instance get a say? this is the reason #federation is not enough and we need #distributed systems.
@cult scuttlebutt is currently the most interesting project in this space. I don't think account migration is the answer here. think of all the people who may not even be online in the next month who might not even know their accounts are going to be dead. and maybe have already printed business cards with their @witches.town URI's on them. this is just a tiny instance and here its not the biggest problem at the moment but look into the future.
@wakest I'd take a guess but in the future people will mainly flock to instances that can keep running mostly continuously. Mastodon is a very usable tool right now and for the foreseeable future, I don't think there are any solutions for the problems P2P has. I think P2P has better problem spaces to enter than social networking. The neighbourhood organization of mastodon is more friendly IMO than a purely decentralized network. Bigger instances are more likely to keep online indefinitely.
@cult have you played on #scuttlebutt yet? its a bit annoying to get set up but once its running its really super usable and working. The mobile client should be coming this year which should make it easier for some people to get into it.
@wakest @cult That is the catch surely? with a distributed system "annoying to set up" is what scares people off, it's something admins can handle behind the scenes when things are federated, but for a system you have to run yourself there has to be work to fix it and make is usable by *anyone* or it doesn't get adopted by a lot of people. If you think that's a difficult/unreasonable/impossible goal you may be right, which is why federated services can work better.
@wakest @cult I can see that could happen but i have also seen a lot of software go south when they have a coder/designers eye for what easy means. Even if it's possible 'easy' and 'easy as twitter' aren't the same and a lot of people working on tools will be (rightly) happy to get to the first one and see the second as unreasonable.
@wakest I do think a federated overlay of trust, filtering, and topic coalescing/boosting ON TOP of a distributed system of accounts and content is the Right Way, though.
Although, there are no designs/thoughts for that, as yet.
@wakest I think that's more of a reason to develop account migration. That would solve the issue entirely.
Decentralized tools have historically been rather clunky in UI and UX, so if you truly want something distributed it would have to be as easy to use as mastodon without needing significantly more bandwidth (I live on a 100MB data plan, most P2P networks are impossible to use on that kind of cap)