Conceptually the fediverse points towards the "right" direction, but imho it still falls way short from being a fully developed and sustainable new proposal. Both on the technical side and (maybe more importantly) on the economic side.

Don't get me wrong, it is admirable what a handful of highly motivated people have achieved with activitypub, atproto etc. (to mention just some currently trending designs). But what needs to be done to deprecate the pattern of digital feudalism is a much bigger challenge.

The main way to move forward will be to incentivize (through legislation) many more actors (not just social media reformers) to invest and experiment in this direction, away from the feudal hypersurface that is crushing our horizon. Its the only way to explore the vast number of technical possibilities and economic patterns without being hampered by biases and blind spots.

We don't know what a digital democratic economy and society exactly looks like. Its not been done before. Maybe more than one patterns are equally viable and it becomes a matter of choice and/or random historical accidents.

But we do know that we are far from anything remotely compatible with our purported norms and values.

The fediverse is probably the best answer you're gonna find to digital feudalism that is compatible~ish with the real world. Which is to say; it theoretically divides the risk that any single castle and king could hijack the entire process up into many smaller castles, meaning that if a king turns hostile, you can go somewhere else with relatively little friction.

The reality is that if you truly want to get rid of digital castles and kings, you're essentially going to have to operate a distributed digital firehose (cynically: digital sewage pipe) that anyone can submit to with no preconditions whatsoever. For many reasons (first one that jumps to mind: spam, second reason: illegal shit, third reason: trolls) most people don't want to operate something like that, and that's before the law gets involved.

Pet projects exist of course, but pretty much zero of them are made to scale up against the idea of truly nuking kingdoms; the closest to a realization of this sort of network is something similar to TORs peer2peer, and you can consider pretty much all legal risks of running a TOR exit node for a service like this.

The fediverse just moves the problem to multiple servers. The solution is a content addressed network.

It’s one of the better options.

There’s a few other neat technologies that are toying with being social network protocols.

There’s some fascinating angles for combating AI fake content compared to human ones.

No. Network effects + turbo-capitalism being able to lose 100s of millions a month to build market share, mean excessive concentration which we cannot get rid of simply by providing alternatives, even if they are "better".