Honestly I still believe the future of networked software is #P2P or now (person4person, punk2punk etc).
It's the only way to empower the general public beyond our communities. Self hosting is a dead end outside of hobbyists.
Community hosting is where we are at now and works but ultimately isn't the revolutionary paradigm shift I think we might need to dislodge techno feudalism.
@becha @kawaiipunk in my view, community hosting would be just a small consequence of "revolutionary paradigm shift necessary to dislodge technofeudalism" as you say, indeed, not a shift itself. i think it's more of a fight between general anti-capitalist progressive politics (which needs to spill over to most dimensions of life) versus fear-powered ractionary tu4n to authoritarianism. one works via community organizing, the latter via neoliberal individualism... and isolationism.
@kawaiipunk I used to think the same way – specifically, that community hosting and federated services are only a stepping stone towards p2p solutions. Over the years I concluded that's not the case though.
Mainly because every p2p system I tested inevitably ended up becoming a right-libertarian hellscape.
Humans are a communal, not individualistic, species. Communities are the basic building block of the society. I now believe our tools need to reflect that.
"Humans are a communal, not individualistic, species. Communities are the basic building block of the society. I now believe our tools need to reflect that."
Yes, this. This is why we're working on group communication with overlay multicast. Every individual is part of many (sometimes overlapping) groups. Federated services can represent perhaps one or two groups (one geographic grouping, or a special interest), but isn't flexible or decentralized enough.
there's a false dichotomy in that reasoning
hosting arrangements and community arrangements don't have to fully overlap
just like we form cross-instance communities in federated services, we can form communities in P2P settings
the fundamental difference is that, under P2P arrangements, the community doesn't (have to) end up tied to any particular centralized single point of failure, and under its operator's authority
the communal governance structures that are growing in federated networks would be a perfect fit in P2P communication systems as well, and they'd be even more valuable there. we're not there, but we're not there yet; that's no reason to dismiss P2P systems, or to prefer semicentralized (federated) ones
CC: @kawaiipunk@sunbeam.city
