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The "federation is unintuitive" is not an absolute problem. URLs are unintuitive. ".com"? What on earth is that? All new systems require you to learn. If the content is there people will use it. People cluster around one or a handful of servers... that doesn't make federation pointless. People keep thinking of federation as an absolute, everything must be evenly distributed, but it isn't. Email is the perfect example. Most people use gmail or outlook. Imagine if outlook stopped sending or receiving from anyone else. The point of federation isn't to ensure even distribution of content, it is that it can and must be accessible from outside. It cannot be siloed without becoming useless. Even if 90% of users use one or two servers, the minute that server blocks outside access that server becomes a pariah. Authentication... Why would one server let you login to an account on another server? I see the problem from a user perspective, but this is simply a misunderstanding of the architecture. In any case, hubzilla (zot protocol) has an interesting solution to this, and Nostr, which is not a federation, doesnt have this problem at all. I think both of those protocols are fantastic. SEO, with only one engine mentioned... That sounds like a google problem. This technology is cool, if the content is there and google doesnt deliver it, it will affect them in the long run worse than the federated system. I personally don't like the way activitypub works, or even like federation. I don't think community creation, maintenance and engagement are very good use cases for federation. I don't see why a server in a federation needs more than one community, as is the case with Lemmy, and I don't think communities, let's say HN for example, benefit from federation, because it encourages drive by engagement from people with no real commitment to the community. Reddit has this problem, spillover engagement, and the subreddit where it is not a problem aren't really communities, theyre just tags. "Memes" isn't a community, "chicagobears" is. The former could just be a tag in a federated system, the latter doesn't benefit from being in one. At best, two autonomous communities that have overlap could benefit from it, so having software that supports it is good, but on by default federation is not a good paradigm for forum like community software. |