In the past week, I've been catching up real fast on the federated/distributed internet. Gins brought it up in the 'fannish apothecary' post linked above.
The federated internet (aka the distributed internet, aka the social web) is the concept of a decentralized internet where, instead of a single platform--say, Facebook, or Reddit, or Asana--you have a piece of software that anybody can take and install on their own machine to create an instance of that platform. And then those instances can find each other and talk to each other, and users on them can talk across them.
Take email. You have a Gmail account. Someone else has a Yahoo account. But Yahoo and Gmail know how to talk to each other, because they both use the 'protocol' for email.
In the same way, in a federated social network, some enterprising folks snag copies of the code and install it on their own web servers. Other people, less enterprising but interested in participating in the community, join those servers, forming communities. We now have oh, say, 10 copies of Dreamwidth. You set up house on one of those copies, but it doesn't matter because you can talk across those instances--because part of the code is that they all know how to talk to each other and how to find each other. It's just a matter of having a 'home address' so to speak, so that the code (and people) know which installation to go to in order to find you.
For example, I don't know who has messed with Mastodon. Mastodon IS Twitter. Except anybody can build and own their very own Twitter (Twitter the site, not just an account). So on Mastodon, my username is @prettyarbitrary.arbis-mastodonserver--note that it has two parts, both my name and my home-base server (I set up my own installation, because I'm crazy like that). Now, you're my buddy and you have the username @zeldalover.flippers-mastodon (it's not YOUR server, because you don't know or care to know how to run a Mastodon server; you signed up on a friend's installation, and they've got about 30 other people who use it along with you). We can talk to each other because when I make a post, Mastodon says, "Ah, zeldalover is susscribed to read this. Wait, where's zeldalover? Oh, this says they're over on flippers-mastodon. I'll just toss it over there and flipper-smastodon will be able to hand it off to the right user."
And then also, because I own my own Mastodon, and flipper owns THEIR own Mastodon, a bunch of things happen: 1: Nobody has to foot the bill for a $200,000/year server farm, the way the AO3 does (I love them but they're terrifying) 2: Nobody has to organize god's own moderation squad, because we're all spread out into loads of small communities, and it's way easier to manage a 30 person community than, like, all of Tumblr 3: Nobody can come along and shut down the whole social network, because no single person or even small group OWNS it all. If somebody took out flippers-mastodon, I could throw open my doors and say, "Come on over here, y'all, I'm still up and running."
It ALSO means that the rules of behavior could vary enormously from one server to another. So if we're over on my server posting gross but legally neutral monster porn (look, I have my kinks, okay), but...I'm fond of imaginary flipper, now, I can't pin this on them...so let's say GrunterTheMRAGuy is over on HIS server, wheeling and dealing in child porn with his cesspool buddies (flipper and I both blocked his entire fucking server wholesale, because GTFO, scumbag). Grunter gets faceplanted by the FBI (and nothing of value was lost), but none of the rest of us are held accountable because we aren't even on the same machines as he is.
Depending on the network, we might even be able to build in the ability to make backup mirror copies of peoples' personal accounts. Maybe flipper and I mirror each other's stuff, so if flipper goes down, you guys can all come over and copies of all your info will still be there waiting for you. Nobody even lost a blog, yay!
But the real power of this setup rests in layering. If we have a bunch of these things going, what if we built a way for them to talk ACROSS platform types? So, let's say, we have a distributed system on which we can set up our core personal profile (and could this, perhaps, could be Gins' 'fannish apothecary chest?'). This is where a copy of all our information lives. We attach it to a set of OpenID login credentials. OpenID doesn't own our profile, and if we wanted to change names, we could detach that profile from that OpenID and move it to a new one. We use that OpenID to log in to our distributed social platforms: Mastodon, say, and also, distributed-Dreamwidth. Neither of those own our profile, OR our login credentials. BUT, because they send our info back to our profile, and also pull info from our profile, we can copy our posts from Mastodon over to distributed-Dreamwidth.
Many of these technologies already exist. OpenID is well-established (in fact it's on version 3, OpenID Connect). There are some early attempts at distributed profile-hosting out there. There are LOADS of distributed social platforms, including Twitter-clones (Mastodon), Reddit-clones (Steemit), Youtube-clones (PeerTube), and stuff that offers an unholy mix of different functionality. Wordpress--the set of code that you can install anywhere, not Wordpress.com, which is just one company's commercialized installation of it--is an early attempt at distributed blogging that's been around for ages.
As far as I know--and I may well be wrong, I'm still catching up on recent developments--we don't yet have a good way to talk ACROSS all these things. But W3C, the folks who design and organize the internet, DOES have a set of standards for building this stuff. It's called ActivityPub, and it was released at the beginning of 2018. This has the potential to kick development of this kind of technology forward at a faster pace, because now everybody can basically agree on what they're fundamentally doing.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 04:46 pm (UTC)The federated internet (aka the distributed internet, aka the social web) is the concept of a decentralized internet where, instead of a single platform--say, Facebook, or Reddit, or Asana--you have a piece of software that anybody can take and install on their own machine to create an instance of that platform. And then those instances can find each other and talk to each other, and users on them can talk across them.
Take email. You have a Gmail account. Someone else has a Yahoo account. But Yahoo and Gmail know how to talk to each other, because they both use the 'protocol' for email.
In the same way, in a federated social network, some enterprising folks snag copies of the code and install it on their own web servers. Other people, less enterprising but interested in participating in the community, join those servers, forming communities. We now have oh, say, 10 copies of Dreamwidth. You set up house on one of those copies, but it doesn't matter because you can talk across those instances--because part of the code is that they all know how to talk to each other and how to find each other. It's just a matter of having a 'home address' so to speak, so that the code (and people) know which installation to go to in order to find you.
For example, I don't know who has messed with Mastodon. Mastodon IS Twitter. Except anybody can build and own their very own Twitter (Twitter the site, not just an account). So on Mastodon, my username is @prettyarbitrary.arbis-mastodonserver--note that it has two parts, both my name and my home-base server (I set up my own installation, because I'm crazy like that). Now, you're my buddy and you have the username @zeldalover.flippers-mastodon (it's not YOUR server, because you don't know or care to know how to run a Mastodon server; you signed up on a friend's installation, and they've got about 30 other people who use it along with you). We can talk to each other because when I make a post, Mastodon says, "Ah, zeldalover is susscribed to read this. Wait, where's zeldalover? Oh, this says they're over on flippers-mastodon. I'll just toss it over there and flipper-smastodon will be able to hand it off to the right user."
And then also, because I own my own Mastodon, and flipper owns THEIR own Mastodon, a bunch of things happen:
1: Nobody has to foot the bill for a $200,000/year server farm, the way the AO3 does (I love them but they're terrifying)
2: Nobody has to organize god's own moderation squad, because we're all spread out into loads of small communities, and it's way easier to manage a 30 person community than, like, all of Tumblr
3: Nobody can come along and shut down the whole social network, because no single person or even small group OWNS it all. If somebody took out flippers-mastodon, I could throw open my doors and say, "Come on over here, y'all, I'm still up and running."
It ALSO means that the rules of behavior could vary enormously from one server to another. So if we're over on my server posting gross but legally neutral monster porn (look, I have my kinks, okay), but...I'm fond of imaginary flipper, now, I can't pin this on them...so let's say GrunterTheMRAGuy is over on HIS server, wheeling and dealing in child porn with his cesspool buddies (flipper and I both blocked his entire fucking server wholesale, because GTFO, scumbag). Grunter gets faceplanted by the FBI (and nothing of value was lost), but none of the rest of us are held accountable because we aren't even on the same machines as he is.
Depending on the network, we might even be able to build in the ability to make backup mirror copies of peoples' personal accounts. Maybe flipper and I mirror each other's stuff, so if flipper goes down, you guys can all come over and copies of all your info will still be there waiting for you. Nobody even lost a blog, yay!
But the real power of this setup rests in layering. If we have a bunch of these things going, what if we built a way for them to talk ACROSS platform types? So, let's say, we have a distributed system on which we can set up our core personal profile (and could this, perhaps, could be Gins' 'fannish apothecary chest?'). This is where a copy of all our information lives. We attach it to a set of OpenID login credentials. OpenID doesn't own our profile, and if we wanted to change names, we could detach that profile from that OpenID and move it to a new one. We use that OpenID to log in to our distributed social platforms: Mastodon, say, and also, distributed-Dreamwidth. Neither of those own our profile, OR our login credentials. BUT, because they send our info back to our profile, and also pull info from our profile, we can copy our posts from Mastodon over to distributed-Dreamwidth.
Many of these technologies already exist. OpenID is well-established (in fact it's on version 3, OpenID Connect). There are some early attempts at distributed profile-hosting out there. There are LOADS of distributed social platforms, including Twitter-clones (Mastodon), Reddit-clones (Steemit), Youtube-clones (PeerTube), and stuff that offers an unholy mix of different functionality. Wordpress--the set of code that you can install anywhere, not Wordpress.com, which is just one company's commercialized installation of it--is an early attempt at distributed blogging that's been around for ages.
As far as I know--and I may well be wrong, I'm still catching up on recent developments--we don't yet have a good way to talk ACROSS all these things. But W3C, the folks who design and organize the internet, DOES have a set of standards for building this stuff. It's called ActivityPub, and it was released at the beginning of 2018. This has the potential to kick development of this kind of technology forward at a faster pace, because now everybody can basically agree on what they're fundamentally doing.