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)
@joepie91 Cloudflare had a solution for this, but they shut it down because of the backlash from the Fedi community.
Maybe another, more trustworthy company can take up the torch and offer a similar solution?
@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.
@joepie91 I didn’t say it was a good solution, but it was an attempt at a solution. If somebody else could implement something similar but not reliant on a specific platform then that would be a good solution. The core of their project was a good solution, just implemented in a way that didn’t benefit the Fediverse.
@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 (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)
