You can't spin up your own Kiwi Farms with blackjack and hookers and interact with Null's Kiwi Farms from your own Kiwi Farms
True, so long as everyone is playing nice, you are correct. If Fediverse stuff was just trying to be a techie platform for tech people to hang out with, I would say that it fulfills that job rather well. It's a better 4chan and a better kiwifarms, but its lack of actual concern for entirely handling the web janny problem ultimately makes it a piss-poor solution for the centralization of normal people's communications day-in and day-out.
It's like with email, again. Yes, you and your buddies can set up an email server to chat with each other that doesn't auto-block outsider emails or have absurd anti-spam rules that just try to squash competition, but good luck sending those emails to the places where people actually are: the big instances.
Because of the difficulty of being a hosting node in most federated networks, it necessarily precludes large amounts of non tech wizard people from participating. Normies gravitate to the successful and stable stuff. If Matrix started to take off, don't be shocked when matix.amazon.com is the number one instance everyone uses in a similar vein to how gmail.com is the mail provider everyone uses.
I love my obscure tech-bros as much as anyone, but I often go to the internet to talk about non-tech as well. If Google ends up being your webmaster, you're just as fucked as how email is today. The incentives don't work for federation long-term and the actual solution to this would be to remove or lower the barrier of entry to hosting content on the network itself, which the best solution to that is a P2P system.
go look up why organizations like the NCMEC or IWF keep their hash lists private.
The Soyjak.party thread is one of my home threads and I am acutely aware of the abysmal CP problem, it's a game of cat and mouse constantly. I actually disapprove of NCMEC and other organizations hording hashes instead of promoting collaboration as it silos people into their specific solutions rather than engaging in something a bit more collaborative. Hash banning CP is not a very effective method all things considered and a better solution must be invented, but having something as a stop gap to stop the common attacks.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I get that Dorsey buck broke you while he was still at Twitter but that doesn't mean centralized or federated services are le evil bad and peer-to-peer is the final solution.
Centralized and Federated are not in themselves evil, it all depends on your webmaster. I just do not think that Fediverse people are being honest with their goals of decentralizing the web or removing censorship. They're trying to take us back to email as it originally was, which is noble, but misguided given how garbage and centralized email is these days. I think the resources would be better spent on something else, but if it's there I will use it.
DNS zones are centralized, which is bad... Your mechanic is not going to be able to type out an onion or eep domain...
Oh I absolutely agree, making decentralized identifiers human readable is a hard topic and is one of the major problems plaguing p2p development and its adoption among real people. It's something that should be solved. Both centralized and federated systems usually do a good job with this because they're owners of the identities provided; Null is the one who decrees who is and isn't "LarpBait" on kiwifarms and we just trust Null to do the right thing.
If you want a trustless system though that can actually promise a lack of centralized censorship and a large amount of user autonomy then identity must not have an absolute central verifier.
The two best systems for that are the
Web of Trust system, which, I don't think ever actually got a chance to really live in a modern implementation, and some kind of Cryptocurrency based DNS (where people pay to have names and identities verified by putting up a cost for it, which is basically how modern DNS works except you have to answer to ICANN or the companies who own TLDs).
I know people instinctively cringe at memecoin shit, which I do too, but I am only advocating for the crypto solution on a technical level. The reputation that technology has garnered from grifting fintech bros has sent the project for internet freedom back decades. If a crypto system was adopted, it could never be advertised as a cryptocurrency without having the vultures around that ecosystem rip it apart.
Still, the lack of a clear answer with a clear implementation does mean that P2P is just inferior in this way and will not succeed at all unless people can fix it. I think with the right effort, that task is way more doable than trying to prevent the gmailification of the fediverse.
Even BitTorrent, the darling of P2P, was only 35% of internet traffic at it's peak. Now,
it's less than 5%.
Yes, I'm aware of this. Torrenting did get outcompeted by centralized services who offered streaming for cheap. It's the like with Valve's Steam: Why go through hunting for files if you can just pay X amount of dollars to have them all delivered to you. That's a real service real people want and the problem isn't that they want it, it's that the people behind BitTorrent didn't keep up and instead decided to bend their protocol with the internet piracy people (and to some extent archivists) to keep that niche. They did a good job of keeping that niche, but BitTorrent's relevance is tied to piracy because piracy can't be done on centralized services that one lawsuit can easily kill.
That being said, I can still send you a file over BitTorrent to this day and its just as decentralized as it used to be (If not more due to the various extensions added to it like the DHT Tracker). There just isn't a flagship BitTorrent client anymore (outside of the Brave Browser!) that's very user friendly and useful.
That's the crux of the normie problem: it's never technical. it's UI/UX, stability, and marketing. You put any techincal solution under the hood of your project and it does not matter so long as it interfaces well, is stable, and can be marketed. Discord is the worst piece of shit ever created from a technical point of view, but due to good UI/UX and S-tier marketing was able to dominate the world despite being awful. If that's the case, actual P2P and decentralized solutions can use the exact same tactics to get ahead and just use a P2P back end.
BitTorrent needs a niche to make money from, which it can then use to market itself and improve its accessibility to developers so people adopt the technology. I think a P2P chat system is in the same boat too and might have a bit easier of a time since a need for standard communication protocols is ubiquitous.
Adoption of P2P services is low because they are often much more difficult to understand and use compared to federated or centralized alternatives.
I would agree with this generally. P2P has not had a normie-friendly attempt at it in quite some time. I think this is due to the lack of profit incentive, the difficulty of making a solid p2p system, and the lack of UI/UX competency among the people who try to make these systems. People try to make a protocol first and a service second, usually forgetting that they're trying to convince people to get away from convienent but centralized sources.
This is also a problem with the Fediverse too, especially for actually decentralized fediverse spaces like XMPP. The clients are usually archaeic and not up to modern tastes, janky, and otherwise "sovlful", but not perfectly grandma-friendly. The more normie-friendly ones (Mastadon, Matrix, Bluesky [Only by technicality]) tend to air on the side of centralization around a certain server as most users do not shop around. They're normies, they're going to go with the defaults. The defaults in fediverse instances often push people towards a couple instances. The result: The gmailification of the fediverse, where everyone is on a couple instances and you are practically the same as using something like Kiwifarms (so long as your webmaster cares about you).
Regardless of if you're pro-P2P or pro-fediverse, both systems have to escape their techisms to actually reach normal people and be usable. They have to offer real service and real utility to normal people that isn't just a vague concept of "freedom". It has to be stable, sleak, clean, and pointed in its utility. Normies don't care about freedom even if they whine and complain about a lack of it, they will never make an inconvienent switch. It's kind of like how Wordpress got away with being Open Source and dominating the web just from actually being really good. There must be a fediverse/p2p version of that.
There shouldn't have to be blocklists for CP. CP is illegal and should be immediately removed from any server.
In a p2p system there would ideally be no servers, only people hosting content on their own devices. If someone was outright hosting CP themselves the solution would be a report to the FBI so they can have a chat with the person, not mere removal with no consequences (which is what happens 99% of the time currently, someone drive-by shoots CP at a service to host, the webmaster finds it, and then no consequences happen after its removed).
So long as that person is seeding that content, a blacklist (Personally, I would prefer a whitelist system for contact or a friends-of-friend system) should filter that person's content from ever being seen, seeded, or otherwise engaged with. I even think the clear net would benefit from some kind of publicly available hash list of known CP for clients to implement as an extension or augment to users who want that utility when web browsing.
