I think federated projects really look at federation as an add on to their platform, not a core feature. E-Mail did this well where everything was automatically federated by default (I.e you can send email from anywhere to anywhere for the most part) whereas some fediverse software, specifically lemmy, require that federation be enabled (and I believe you choose to federate with servers on a per-server basis).
Where I work we're working on a solution to this where your identity remains sovereign between servers [1]. We currently have a Twitter-esque microblogging demo setup [2].
With email, it doesn't really matter if someone is using your email platform to spread controversial political ideas or using it to share pirated media or whatever, because you're not hosting it for the general public to consume.
With the fediverse it's different. If I own fedifoo.app and allow my app to federate with neonazis.app or tankies.app, then eventually neonazi or tankie content will be accessible at fedifoo.app/c/unpleasantcommunity. I don't want that, so I defederate, but now the fediverse is fractured and "it doesn't really matter which instance you choose" is no longer true.
Disabling federation by default helps protect new hosters from the unintended consequences of federation, which is good, but it leaves us starting out on a fractured footing.
Then you don't have to host anything you don't want to but you still have a unified network.
The key is to never let anything like a central party impose censorship that can't be overruled by the user, but still allow them to filter out 99% of the crap by default.
I think many people are just very authoritarian today, and don’t appreciate the internet as we knew it 20 years ago. They’re not content to control how they interact with the internet. They want to control how everyone interacts.
The type of person who we want as moderator don't want to be moderators. A real decentral solution needs to give power and sovereignty to the users and take it away from admins and moderators. Some group of elite privileged few federated servers with all the power, demonstrates how worthless Lemmy and fediverse are.
Second, it appears they have even more moderators than the instances with which they defederated. More than enough to keep illegal content off the instance. But that’s not the intended goal. They want content off the instance which is ideologically opposed to the owner. They make that clear in the instance description. They want more moderation than Reddit, which is already filled with insular ideological spaces.
The users are all very much on board with this ideological purity. They freely admit it, so I’m not sure why you would contend it.
It’s 400. Versus over 3000 linked instances. That does not sound like an insanely long list, considering how many spam instances there are and those with questionable content.
I don’t understand how this argues against my premise. This is decisive evidence that they want strict ideological adherence.
But they also broke the back button
Seems like something they’re thinking about solving.
Being federated doesn't solve the problem of decentralization because it's specifically a middle-ground. It's supposed to be a compromise with some benefits of both centralization and decentralization - and I think a lot of people are happy with that compromise.
Every time I've brought up that content federation and identity federation aren't the same thing and that having centralized IDPs handle the burden of keeping spammers out of the network, people chime in with "yeah, and don't limit me to google and facebook!" and kind of miss the whole point. Centralized is one of the few solutions to the spam problem, it's worked with email for example. The other ways are some kind of a reputation web (finicky and gameable) or to force people to put down cold hard cash (proof of stake/proof of work).
This is all intimately tied up with crypto and spam because this same problem hasn't been solved for 30+ years and keeps popping up over and over again. Reputation networks are hard.
(and, you can do identity federation without actually melding your content with theirs, and that in fact melding content into a global namespace isn't inherently desirable. There there may be cases where you want to do something different with the "domain"/"subreddit" than another instance, or what most other people are doing with that domain/subreddit - reddit "technology" is not the same thing as 4chan "technology" even though these boards share a discriminator, it's not even the same culture or style of discussion even if they shared a mechanical format.)
But yes generally speaking the real problem here is there's like 10 different factions that all want to solve slightly different use-cases. Some people want self-hosted reddit, some people want self-hosted reddit with global boards, some people want explicit networking to specific instances, some people want something much closer to the decentralized/single-person instance with individual custom IDPs, etc. Nobody even agrees what they want to build.
Or "china" (porcelain) versus "china" (a band) versus "china" (one, possibly two countries) etc.
One option would be an explicit mapping step:
1. Communities are only able to stake out boring UUIDs, those are the only official ID and are used in any invites, links, etc.
2. Instances may choose to suggest a "foo"->UUID link for users on that instance
3. Users may choose to override that "foo"->UUID link within their own settings if they disagree
4. When a user references community "foo", what actually gets shared is a link based on their current mapping settings.
5. If someone else sees that link and their settings designate a different "foo", the link should render in a way that makes it obvious that it refers to something contradictory.
Yeah, it's complicated UX-wise, but the thing is it's actually closer to the underlying reality of how humans use names: There is no single global and timeless "Bob Smith", there's just one in a given context between me and whomever I'm talking to.
It would be great to be able to create one identity that if I want to leave an instance and bring all my data with me to a new instance I can do so without friction. That's currently a big issue I have with Matrix for example -- there's no way for me to go from @user:matrix.org to @user:myowndomain.com and have that be the same identity with the same friends list, etc.
Even Whatsapp is using PKI, its just all hidden away from the user.
Of course, the phrase that gains traction won't be "keypair".
A far mor likely outcome is for government-managed identities to become the only way to access certain kinds of services, for better and for worse. Governments already have the identity management part handled, with the legal system acting as the ultimate fall-back for any corner case. The integration is already widely used for certain services (the entire financial system relies on government-managed identities already, all around the world), so it's just a matter of extending this. It also helps solve certain less talked about problems of identity systems, such as preventing children from accessing certain kinds of content.
Ideally, instead of the current solution of every institution having access to all of your personal details so they can check your identity with the government, governments could start working for the opposite model - a government-issued and managed IdP, where only the government knows your personal details, and where enterprises get an opaque token they can use to ask the government about a set of details they need to operate their business.
> Remember, your private key is your identity in Nostr, so if it is compromised you'll lose your followers and will have to start from scratch rebuilding your identity.
This is the same gripe I have with home servers on the fediverse: home servers come and go, and private keys sometimes need rotating. Making you lose all your friends and content when that happens is not an acceptable tradeoff.
I think the solution is entirely separating "identity" from every single other concern such as security (private keys), hosting (home servers), and public identity ("display name").
I'm not sure you can separate it from security (private keys). If there's nothing stopping others from using the same identity then it's not _your_ identity.
Nostr is just going in circles with federated networks all over again.
Clients don’t connect to peers on nostr. They connect to relays.
Relays are not intended to connect with each other. Clients send notes to relays. Relays store notes and send them back to clients.
1. I don't want to trawl through garbage to reach posts I like. Even a single gore video or such is enough to ruin most people's day.
2. It's not enough for me to block content I don't like - in certain situations, I have a legitimate need to block others from seeing content I don't like. Specifically, if someone is spreading lies about me, or pornography of me, the fact that I can block that person is not going to help me, I need a way for the platform to stop showing those lies/pornography to others, or at least to automatically attach my own version of the story to those lies (of course, I should first have to somehow prove those are lies).
The authoritarian approach is that you want to ensure no one else sees what you don’t like. You don’t want to give them the choice.
I'm not talking about preventing other people from listening to flat earth conspiracy theories that I don't like.
The globally distributed nature of the internet complicates jurisdiction, but this has always been true of the internet. If someone uploads porn of you to 300 porn sites and 10,000 tor sites, it’s very difficult to get it all taken down. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the internet. It’s accomplishing its original intent.
Edit: but perhaps that is your complaint? You believe the internet is fundamentally flawed in that there is no central authority which has the power to control all information? I understand the allure of this, but I believe this wound be ruinous for the internet and human progress.
Overall, what I'm saying is that many people who espouse the virtues of decentralized or federated social media forget or minimize some of the actual benefits of centralized social media with strong moderation [0].
While I think it's great that the internet as a whole is uncontrollable, I don't think "living" in the less controlled parts of the internet for most of your online life would be a pleasant or healthy experience.
[0] I should note that I have some serious qualms about the harm some of this content does to the moderators themselves, but I'm not sure how to grapple with that particular issue.
But right now something very conerning is happening in western democracies that threatens to shift the balance very far in an authoritarian direction. And leaning on centralised platforms is at the centre of it.
Platforms are no longer just told "here's this revenge porn video, it's illegal, take it down!". If proposed laws are actually passed it will be more like "if people are discussing stuff on your platform, you better make sure no one comes to harm or else!"
In my view this is a sea change. Pretty soon we may no longer be able to discuss a wide range of subjects on mainstream platforms (such as psychological or health issues for instance). Kids in particular will be severely restricted in who they can talk to about what. In some cases it may prevent harm. In other cases it could be catastrophic.
If the balance moves so dramatically in one direction, I think it is ony reasonable to think about how to mitigate the effects of this to preserve some freedoms and escape hatches. The efforts I see are very very feeble anyway compared to the full force of what we are facing politically.
In my view, no control should ever be total, even if on the whole we cannot wish for a total loss of control.
Sounds like centralization. Now if Activity Pub goes rouge ALL instances are affected.
Making accounts on your favorite instance and communicating with other instances prevents this, in theory. You may need to make a new account if Lemmy dies but you should (again in theory) be able to move your content seemlessly to a new instance. Becsuse Lemmy isn't facilitating the content, simply providing a view for itz based on its usage of ActivityPub's API
You sign up for the moderation you want, and if it or you changes you can jump ship while being able to retain connections (trust me, I've seen several users having migrated instances).
What's great about the Fediverse is that you not only sign up for the network, but the point you start from inside it, and the moderation you want. On a fully decentralized platform you'd either be subject to some form of easily gameable group-moderation or be left to the task of filtering content all by yourself.
I don't care that I might be missing out on some maybe nice person on a instance defederated on my home instance. I care that I feel that I belong on my home instance and my feeds are full of people whose community I can feel like I belong to as well. One that has been very easy to grow organically without an algorithm telling me what I want.
It includes 3 years of free hosting for your domain name, a small web server, and a sync service that copies your files to a central server so they can be made available at that domain name. The default server would be the company that made the product, but you would own the domain, and you'd be able to change where you're syncing to with two clicks. And the canonical version of your files would always live locally (one-way sync).
Could be used for email, website hosting, and local media server capabilities. Throw some solar panels on it, and boom, you have my dream device.
It could be a federated layer of identity & personal content decoupled from social platforms.
The problem with that was that email addresses are easily forged and Usenet lacked adequate spam filtering and content moderation tools because of its decentralized nature and the general lack of effective spam filtering in the late 90s/early 00s. So it was replaced by forums which were in turn replaced by social media.
There's no guarantee that name@majorisp.com is going to stick around forever, but there was a contract relationship plus a certain degree of too-big-to-fail-ness.
If you choose control then you end up with the fediverse, because there is no such thing as the "one big fediverse" if every moderator makes different decisions.
It's the opposite of user choice/power and, ironically, less flexible than reddit in some respects.
I am able to
Follow anyone
Comment on any peertube video
Comment, follow, reply anyone on mastodon, pixelfed
I can reply to anyone on Lemmy or kbin
You will only need an account if you want to post original content on a particular instance, like if you want to upload a video on peertube or pixelfed or Lemmy. For the most part, users are consumers so they WILL only need just a single account
It could be better but its not like something doesn't exist
This is the fundamental tradeoff. What you are asking for cannot be done and still be federated. Sorry.
The problem is that "federation" has only a small technical component; the majority of the "federation" problem is social not technical.
The social problem is "Bad actors exist. 1) How do I identify them? and 2) How do I extend or revoke trust?"
Even email, which everybody holds up as "federated", hits this problem and defers to centralization. For email, we anoint the DNS records as the primary repository of "identity" and are what are used to extend "trust" via DKIM, DMARC, and SPF.
Can't you use a torrent-like discovery system for users?
You can also log in through any instance, including localhost. Links also work on any server because they include a capability to the content in the link.
This is the beauty of content addressing plus public key based addressing.
And when users host things they give of their own resources to other users, which means there is trust involved. And whenever trust is involved we need a better insight into who signs up. For example; request access with a bio, or a donation.
The other reason is that what you describe is centralized authentication, to a decentralized backend, so it defeats the purpose. Who owns the authentication?
If we want freedom from a corporate internet, we'll just have to bite the bullet and accept a certain learning curve.
Which is also why the centralized corporate services will never go away, and most likely remain a majority.
People are fundamentally misunderstanding thier needs and how they can be properly implemented.
Just host one instance, use it only for managing your identity, and tada! you've exactly what you wanted.
You keep using the word 'fediverse'. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The whole point of a 'fediverse' is that there isn't a central authority for accounts. That an account on any of the federated systems is an equal participant in the system. That spinning up your own federated host to issue accounts is allowed.
What if the random one I pick gets defederated? Now I need to find a new instance and make a new account?
This will make federated services into even MORE echo chamber ultra-moderated spaces than Reddit ever was, as the fear of defederation will cause lockdown policing of wrongthink.
I honestly think it may be worse for free speech.
Then again, I’ve never joined a federated service and I have no actual anecdote or evidence to back myself up, I’m kind of just spitballing thoughts.
That already happened. In fact that’s the main selling point of the Fediverse. Make your own bubble and enjoy the likeminded people
'Federation' or decentralization is a fantastic idea. There is really only one way that it truly 'works' as a decentralized service...
Each and every user runs their own instance of a federated server. This way, they can 'defederate' anything they please, without affecting the whole. This way there is still no 'central' service that can be monetized, locked down, etc. and all of the federated data is available to all private instances, akin to BitTorrent or a (and I shudder typing this) blockchain.
Maybe I'm wrong.
That's not federation. Federation is a distinct concept from decentralization; federation does involves trusting a third party of your choice (namely, whoever's running the instance you joined), but simply offers choice of which third-party you choose to trust.
The "everyone can run their own server" thing is just a side-effect of federation not blessing anyone with any sort of exclusivity over power to be a third-party.
Outside of tech circles, your idea is DOA because nobody wants to run their own server just to use facebook. Plenty of people don't even know what a server is, and had the ISP set up their router (and BTW they don't know what a router is either). With federation, you can still have a fairly normal app and get most of the benefits of centralization.
The point of federation is to avoid giving anyone absolute power over the community without recourse, not to completely avoid trusting anyone whatsoever.
Heh I was just reading "The Innovators" by Walter Issacson and found this interesting conflict between the inventor of the WWW and the inventor of Mosaic:
> There was something about Andreessen's browser (Mosaic), however, that disappointed Berners-Lee. It enabled rich media for publishing eye-catching pages, but that came at the expense of making it easy for making normal users to be able to write as well as read web pages. With Berners-Lee's browser, any user could edit web pages just as easily as reading them, just like using a word processor. But users of Andreessen's browser had to write the HTML code themselves and upload it. Berners-Lee feared that this might limit the ability to express themselves on the web to those who were technically astute.
Robust federation works as a distributed overlay network and doesn't require any leader. The irreducible issues become:
0. "Which systems should store what data, i.e., blobs (files), entities, and entity sequences?"
1. "How many copies should there be of 0.)?"
(1.5. "What will keep scrubbing 0.) for integrity and duplicating 1.) below a given threshold?")
2. "Where should functions against 0.-1. run?" #
3. "How many copies of 2.) should execute?" #
4. "How should the operators of persistent systems recoup the microtransactional costs of compute, storage, and networking of 0.-4.)?" (Client has a pool of credits purchased through some crypto means used to rent storage capacity, net transit, and processing of media, metadata, and code #.)
5. "How many copies of next nodes and node paths do you maintain?"
6. "Which nodes should this node remain connected to?"
7. "How many fixed default nodes can be run around the world to always seed a node's initial network topology?"
8. "How much anti-correlation traffic should fill the encrypted link when there is no traffic?" (Otherwise, it becomes very easy to poison and unmask overlay networks.)
# If the platform has a serverless function concept, where it's unknown where it will run until it does.
The real solution would be a regular, centralised service run by a non-profit.
In the RedditAlternatives sub you can find the most hilarious responses to "I don't understand lemmy, it's way too complicated!". Quickly someone will respond with "It's not complicated at all..." then proceeds to type out a paragraph of instructions and FAQs without a hint of irony.
Like you said, users just want to hit the ground running. They don't care if your using php/asp/vbb/[insert a multitude of framework names here]..decentralized, partially centralized...they just don't want to know.
For the record I do like Lemmy, but I'm a sucker for novel implementations.
I'd set up a social benefit company that's co-owned by workers and contributors. We'll create scoring mechanisms for every action, and for hourly w2 work, etc. Pay out dividends based on your points.
Points would also give you power in town meetings, we'd also create the idea of regions so the fantasy and sci-fi region with the GOT, star wars, star Trek, etc subs could meet and decide on matters affecting their subs.
Each major sub with 10k or more could schedule a one on one with the board, but issues and feedback are always accepted.
Protocol wise the major differences are: we'd centralize auth/login as well as taxonomies like channel names or subreddits, or things like tags. We'd also centralize usernames.
Doesn't matter what server you sign up on, your username is still just username, not username@stupidserver.com, and any channel in the Reddit app namespace could only have unique sub names, so AMA could only be added once, so there's that one topic one major community thing Reddit has going for it.
The rest of my ideas are TBD, though I'd like if Reddits could have need subreddits.
Yes, I can’t log in from another instance’s website/frontend, but does it really matter?
The real problem is that my identity/account is coupled to the instance. If the instance disappears, so does my account and I lose everything.
Sure this could lead to echo chambers/filter bubbles, but that is already the case on every platform. I think most people actually want it that way.
This is compounded by the fact that defederation goes both ways. I can’t find an instance which hasn’t blocked at least some other instances. So no matter what, if I want to have access to everything (until such time as I decide to block it), I have to sign up to multiple instances. I also have to regularly check what the owners might have blocked in case I need to sign up for other instances.
I tried really hard to like it, but all in all, Lemmy has been a crappy experience.
So you don't loose followers/follows but can't move posts (but they are kept alive as long as the old instance is active). That is IMO not that bad at all.
Maybe it is just a matter of time we get full account moving, I don't see why that would be technically impossible to do.
https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/170880
tl;dr
For this answer, let's consider an example where:
You want to subscribe to https://lemmy.ml/c/cryptography Your local instance is https://lemmy.ca
Either search in lemmy.ml for https://lemmy.ml/c/cryptography or search in lemmy.ml for !cryptography@lemmy.ml or go to https://lemmy.ca/c/cryptography@lemmy.ml
Nostr does exactly this.
I assume these ideas are blocked partly because companies like Google that have influence over browser features very much do not want a decentralized web.
Tying web pages to specific servers is also maybe something that deep down people won't or can't accept or understand about changing.
Maybe part of it is that it's hard to make p2p protocols work well and so people just aren't willing to try to tackle that and the challenge of getting that technology into browsers at the same time.
The premise though, curated content and forums like Wikipedia meets Usenet, was brilliant. What comes next needs to be maybe partially centralized mostly federated.
We could create a protocol for requesting content-addressable URLs over HTTP, but it wouldn't help with the problem described either.
It's more like an API with multiple implementations.
(Even just JSON serialization differences will pop up. For example, PHP always likes to escape forward slashes.)
web1 -> peer-to-peer decentralized networks without built-in consensus or economics; end up de facto centralized; SMTP, Nostr, RSS, etc.
web2 -> corporate owned networks; from iMessage to Tiktok to Reddit, this is most major networks today
web3 -> networks whose decentralization is enforced by cryptography and economics; Ethereum being one such example of a programmable network/computer
If you don't have cryptographic and economic mechanisms to encourage decentralization and resist centralization, we will just end up with a federated/fragmented system or a centralized one. We will keep repeating this loop over and over again until we fully appreciate that networks need built-in economics or someone else will build it and control them (see git/Github; RSS/Twitter; SMTP/Gmail; many others).
Having different unsynchronized servers has been a gigantic turn off for me.
That's like the one thing that shouldn't be the case with anything social online.
Twitter is just text messages as spectator sport, people can do without it. The real problem is a narrowing range of media in general through active state action, continued consolidation, and the fact that tech multibillionaires just buy outlets like twitter, The Atlantic, the WaPo etc. and use them for egotistical social manipulation instead of to inform and stimulate important discussion. If it weren't for that, twitter would be the celebrity bore that it always was before weird twitter took the piss out of it. Now it's serving as an outlet for every frustration because those frustrations have been censored out of traditional media.
The only issue for microblogs is needing multiple accounts for comment sections, which can be solved by SMTP, anonymous guest posting, social login, or WebMentions (which I don’t really like due to the complexity and federation, but thought I’d mention).
So, wherever you start on, you will access the content of the whole federation.
Also the reason why ppl behind mail and chat never saw social media coming. Social media can't work on top of those protocols so they thought it would fail.
Nor did anyone imagine that everyone has such a desperate craving for Attention or this Need to broadcast their thoughts to the entire planet every day. Its still not clear why this even has any value. Its sort of like trying to build a brain where every neuron has broadcast capability to every other neurons. Our brains would just fry if such capability existed. There would be so much noise nothing would make sense.
But ppl have decided this is what they need to build to escape Google and Facebook or whoever. And the whole story doesn't really make too much sense.
Building an audience is a job for many people. It takes work to have your message be heard.
Telling everyone to build and grow audience is very nice, until you realize (1) the Total Available Eyeballs are not growing. So new problems are being caused by this unescapable fact, as ppl try harder and harder for less and less (2) lot of ppl who deserve attention just get drowned out.
If you ask the decentralizing crowd what should be done about it or whether their work is going to make a diff they haven't thought about it. What's the use of designing essentially decentralised broadcast to replace centraliazed social media broadcasts without thinking about the limited eyeballs/info overload problem?
It's simply human nature. The scale simply increased from a family ornfriend group, to community, to a world population.
Media reflects reality in this case.
That account could authenticate at any time through their email to claim it. You could send a "tweet" by just sending an email to post@this-new-platform.com. [follow-up verification link can be sent to approve with one click to prove email.]
I don't understand how this idea isn't more obvious to all these new platforms. We need to lower barriers to entry to decentralization.
Also, unfortunately eMail has long fallen to spam. If I'm not searching for it, I won't actively look too deeply into an email from an unknown user.
e: but sounds like a correct approach too
fediverse apps do fine as clients to access pieces of content through their own dedicated communication channels, in the same way webmail clients do.
a) you can request the same resource from multiple servers
b) it is not just the address bar which can control the server it's requested from -- servers can link to each other.
Of course, if one server is unavailable, the browser may not know to try another... but that's a small improvement which can be added.
This can be remediated somewhat within fediverse apps, because they can detect cross-server links and convert them into internal links if possible. But that doesn't help following a link from HN.
There might be a browser extension already to solve this problem—it would need to know which instances your server federates with and how to translate links to those instances into links to your server.
And it seems to me that it uses the first option that the author suggests, being example.org/user@example.com/thread
The instance of mastodon that I have an account on is https://techhub.social
I can't interact with the sfba.social toot directly. Clicking 'boost' (retweet) gives me instructions:
> With an account on Mastodon, you can boost this post to share it with your own followers. Since Mastodon is decentralized, you can use your existing account hosted by another Mastodon server or compatible platform if you don't have an account on this one.
> On a different server
> Copy and paste this URL into the search field of your favourite Mastodon app or the web interface of your Mastodon server.
---
Similarly with 'reply'.
So, I can only interact with that toot on my home instance which is a bit of friction. Not necessarily a bad thing, but there's friction there.
Mastadon isn't too bad however. Interacting with it on my home instance only brings that toot over. One and done.
Subscribing to a community or trying to interact with a post in Lemmy, however, puts a larger and ongoing operational cost on the server as new comments appear and votes are cast.
> a URI will repeatably refer to "the same" thing
And further,
> the significance of identity for a given URI is determined by the person who owns the URI, who first determined what it points to.
Which explicitly goes on to say ownership is not well defined because different schemes can have different behaviors.
https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html#same
The trick is to actually have clients know & understand where instead to link people. If a server shuts down how does that alt-location get persisted & spread?
Effort has faced headwind, but I also really dig Signed Exchanges, which let's servers sign the content it sends & then bundle it together (WebBundles) so other servers can serve it in a trusted way. But the browser will only trust the content for 7 days, because as per this article, the dns owner might change & thats the security compromise. But an app could still parse & use that content, which makes extra sense now that we have Certificate Transparency expectations.
A problem with the federation is the combination of the identification, client, and backend into an instance, yet depending on the web/nets dns. I’d like to see more of a separation between the account, client, and data akin to google reader / third party reader client / rss. Before reader shut down, you could log into any reader client with your google account and all your feeds followed.
A good fediverse client would have separate settings pages for your accounts, and what you follow. I should be able to share a link to data that anyone can open in the client of their choice.
Another way to solve the authors problem is to make a new protocol.
Can I? With PeerTube for example it's a massive hit-and-miss. Many mirros don't have the torrents or vice versa. There's no reproducible way to mirror/federate YouTube content and so on.
A different problem: While the federated protocols seem to work quite well, there's not enough work on the business development side of it. Or do you know any profitable Open-Access fediverse server?
There are also already browser extensions which automatically redirect you to your own instance I think, but those need access to all browsing :-/
If I use an aggregator, it can do all kinds of tricks. Think about Usenet, email, RSS feeds.
If you build on top of IPFS or something, there's lots of options.
BitTorrent comes to mind.
There's lots of options.
A "federated web app" is literally just a web app that uses OAuth. You can do "more federation" with OpenID or OpenID Connect. It seems "the fediverse" is intended for more of the same, but with specific data types (e.g. "social media data"), which does not seem scalable.
Is it a server-side or a client-side entity? Seems to use it interchangeably at different points in the text, perhaps purposefully, perhaps not. Or if there is another property that that defines it as an "Application", what is that? (and how is that different from a 'Resource')