Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

@KuJoe (I also have very strong doubts about it ever having been a legitimate attempt at a solution, as opposed to an attempt at gaining control over the network; Cloudflare has a very long history of superficially neat technical things that somehow always conveniently benefit their position of power within internet infrastructure, so I do not remotely trust their intentions)

@serapath It's "obvious" only in the sense that it removes one specific question ("where do I host this?") from the equation, but in turn it introduces a whole new set of problems (availability, backups, etc.) that are often even more difficult for people to deal with - it's not really an organizational model for federation, as it is a totally different model entirely.

@KuJoe That's the thing, though, they didn't actually do anything new - "something similar but not reliant on a specific platform" would essentially just be Mastodon as it exists today (or, if being generous, a version that runs in IaaS environments specifically).

But it never really solved the problem of "you need to maintain a server" at all, it just changed the shape of "server" from "standard Linux environment" to "Cloudflare-specific environment", which is the usual trick of IaaS providers to make things look superficially easier and hide the complexity. Notably that always blows up in the long term.

The closest thing to a solution that actually does what Wildebeest *implied* it would do, is managed Mastodon hosting - but that crucially costs money, enough that it's not accessible to a good chunk of people. It's also a very individualistic model.

@KuJoe (It's also not quite true that it was shut down due to backlash; they pushed ahead with it *despite* backlash, and then when they lost interest a few months later, they quietly stopped updating it and eventually archived it, with no migration path)

@KuJoe Unfortunately Cloudflare's 'solution' is not really a solution to the problem; it pretty much boils down to "centralizing the network on their infrastructure, and that would lose the core property (and benefits) of a federated network.

@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 :)