alt Hacker NewsConceptually 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 biggest failing of the fediverse seems to be societal - federation is split along political boundaries even before the system really caught on. How can we possibly get out of digital feudalism if Eve will only let us talk to Bob if we don't talk to Alice. We need an open system that is actually universal like phones or email - both of which would be shut down or severy limited today for allowing all kings of unfavored characters to send heretical messages to each other, if they were not alredy well entrenched before the latest cultural shift.