I'll take it a step farther. One of the consequences of building a distributed network is that individual nodes are much more likely to fail than a centralized node. The overall network health is going to be better, but for a given random article or person you find online somewhere, the odds that the server does something screwy are a lot higher because the server is smaller and has less backing.
It's not just about separating identity from hosting so that content creators can move around - content itself needs to be separated from its hosting. I want to be confident that if I share a link to some content, that content is still going to be available at that link 4 or 5 years from now. Minus that solution, in some ways ActivityPub actually makes my life worse because it means content moves around more often.
Mastadon and PeerTube are great examples of this - instances are not an implementation detail of these platforms that we could swap out later for something more robust - they're a core concept that's talked about at a user-facing level. That's insane to me. Why on earth do we even have the concept of an instance or a server? Why is it baked so hard into our protocols as to guarantee that we can't possible get rid of it in the future?
Sure, someday maybe IPFS will completely solve the problem and we'll switch off of URLs. But probably not soon. So we should be trying to find mid-term solutions that allow us to separate identity and content from a location regardless of whether or not we're using IPFS. We should be designing everything around that constraint.
I think there are a lot of blockchain projects working on exactly that issue now - I like to think about an internet that is totally distributed yet (because of blockchain) totally secure. I'd like to think it would make the internet at large even more secure, avaliable, and faster, but I don't know enough of the technicals to know if that is actually feasible or just a pipe dream.
I'll take it a step farther. One of the consequences of building a distributed network is that individual nodes are much more likely to fail than a centralized node. The overall network health is going to be better, but for a given random article or person you find online somewhere, the odds that the server does something screwy are a lot higher because the server is smaller and has less backing.
It's not just about separating identity from hosting so that content creators can move around - content itself needs to be separated from its hosting. I want to be confident that if I share a link to some content, that content is still going to be available at that link 4 or 5 years from now. Minus that solution, in some ways ActivityPub actually makes my life worse because it means content moves around more often.
Mastadon and PeerTube are great examples of this - instances are not an implementation detail of these platforms that we could swap out later for something more robust - they're a core concept that's talked about at a user-facing level. That's insane to me. Why on earth do we even have the concept of an instance or a server? Why is it baked so hard into our protocols as to guarantee that we can't possible get rid of it in the future?
Sure, someday maybe IPFS will completely solve the problem and we'll switch off of URLs. But probably not soon. So we should be trying to find mid-term solutions that allow us to separate identity and content from a location regardless of whether or not we're using IPFS. We should be designing everything around that constraint.