Does anyone know of any interesting theories on dealing with the federation ownership problem? I'm not looking for "just use fedi" comments, I'm looking for frameworks of reasoning that can be applied to different or new federated systems.
(The federation ownership problem: not everyone is able to maintain a server, so a significant share of users relies on other instances, often public ones because their tech friends do not use the system, but how do you encourage those instances to remain up and running? Especially once people get bored of running them as a hobby)
1) more resources to teach new people about servers and how to run them so it is more accessible.
2) could servers be swapped between people? In that case, places to facilitate the swap between someone who no longer wants to run the server and someone new who does.
3) could servers be open to anyone? Like an open source idea, anyone who knows how can join and help. Then, the people most motivated to see it work, do the work to see it
I’m not very techy so I don’t know if this helps lol
@runaway_anarchist They're reasonable directions, though all of them have their own issues, which make the problem complicated:
1. There's going to be a significant set of people who simply will never have any interest in running a server themselves, because they have other things in their life, regardless of how easy it is. So some delegation is necessary.
2. In theory, yes, but in practice a server is a trove of private data - historically fedi instances have shut down instead of changing ownership, for example, because admins feel that it's not their place to hand over people's private information to some new person without their consent (which would be difficult to obtain at larger scale).
3. It could be, as long as you trust everyone involved (see above); the more difficult problem is how you *ensure* that there is someone around to deal with the problems at all times, because at least judging from how federated networks have worked so far with current tech, that doesn't happen organically.
None of these are automatically unsolvable problems, to be clear, and they are avenues worth exploring! But more detailed solutions are probably going to be needed to make them work in practice, and that's what I'm looking for :)
