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Pretty much in the title. Maybe you wouldn't even use it, but would like to simply see it exist for the sake of having a federated alternative.
For me, it'd be the following:
- Meetup
- Tiktok
I am on the first two, but would prefer a federated alternative. I'm not on Tiktok, but would like to see a federated alternative.
I'll admit these might not be a good idea. But as a thought experiment, I'd be curious about the community weigh in on what you all think this might look like.
I'm not saying "yes, you currently can do this with the activitypub protocol as it is," I'm saying this feature could be added to activitypub, and I've made specific references to protocols like POP and IMAP that handle logging into email servers from various client applications. I'm not going to code it myself, I'm an attorney, but I do know enough about computer science to know that there is no computabilty issue with my proposal, and that you dislike it primarily because you don't currently have an idea for implementing it, which is not my concern at all.
It's not just computability, networks are involved. If this was all on one machine, you're right, there's no reason you couldn't change it, but there's delays and information losses and even bad actors involved. To deal with this, ActivityPub assumes users are confined to servers at the very core of it's concept.
I'm not an attorney, but I know enough about the law - or at least policy - to attempt an analogy. It's like a legislator trying to add a requirement that all corporations are fiduciaries to their clients. Fiduciaries exist, and work. They couldn't work like that, though, because a market economy assumes a certain amount of pursuit of self-interest. How the hell would a corporation handle all the conflicts of interest that would arise? What happens when they inevitably misunderstand what the interest of a client is? What about when there's multiple parties fulfilling different functions in the same project, but who may have competing interests?
You could try and make a non-market system where production is handled by fiduciaries, and you could even call it "capitalism 2.0", but it wouldn't really be capitalism anymore - that would be the blockchain thing. I don't know what the Pixelfed approach would be equivalent to, but it's basically mimicking the functionality of the feature (fiduciary duties) without actually implementing them. Maybe just really strong consumer protection regulations.
To be clear, market principles are ActivityPub here. If I'm imposing funny ideas about law, no offense, but we're even. The takeaway is that decentralisation makes things a lot more nuanced than they ever are on a machine you fully control.