[grishka]

Every time I see news like this I can't help but wonder what would happen if federated social media becomes mainstream. All these attempts to regulate social media generally revolve around there being a "platform", it being a company, it caring about profits, it having a legal department etc. It all falls apart spectacularly if you frame social media as something intertwined with the internet itself, with no central authority whatsoever.

[ipnon]

We see that the convenience of centralized social media is more valuable than the autonomy of federated social media. This is because the centralized social media is easily accessible, practically free and tolerably open regarding opposing viewpoints.

Solve for the equilibrium. We would expect federated social media to increase in popularity when the convenience of centralized social media is jeopardized. I believe in Russia, where people don't feel safe voicing their opinions publicly on centralized social media, ad hoc social networks have appeared on safe chat platforms like Telegram to take their place.

[grishka]

I have some ideas about making social media decentralized while keeping global search possible. They need practical testing though, which is something I haven't gotten around to yet.

> I believe in Russia, where people don't feel safe voicing their opinions publicly on centralized social media, ad hoc social networks have appeared on safe chat platforms like Telegram to take their place.

I'm Russian. Today is the last day of 7-day voting for the very controversial constitution amendments that would grant Putin two additional 6-year terms, among other things. My both VK and Twitter feeds are chock-full of posts about this. People are posting about how asinine these amendments are. People are posting about incessant violations in the voting process itself. People are posting pictures of their ballots. The feeling that people are afraid to publicly voice their opinions is certainly not there.

[ipnon]

Thanks for explaining this to me, I am clearly misinformed.

[luckylion]

It will require TOR or similar systems though, otherwise each federated instance transporting some content that is deemed illegal will be targeted. Authorities can't win the war, but they can make the damage for individual targets very large, thereby making most people shy away from it at all, like they are doing for TOR exit nodes in many jurisdictions.

But once it's on TOR, it'll be similar to the DNMs for drugs: once it's out of the bag, you can stamp out individual sites, but the system is there to stay.