Mastodawn

I am thinking out loud in prep for my talk. And I should unpack this in a blogpost because the following observation is a DENSE one.

One thing that really became clear to me is that the topology of power of Bluesky vs the Fediverse does really matter, and id checks makes this *really* clear.

You can put a graph of

Discord -- Bluesky -- The greater ATmosphere -- the Fediverse -- Spritely's tech (esp Brassica Chat)

The power distribution of this stuff is going to matter a lot for regulatory moats

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ahoyboyhoy Feb 24

@cwebber couldn't agree more. Hadn't heard of brassica chat, but reads like interesting tech. In the meantime I'm using #xmpp as it's both extremely easy to self-host or buy managed hosting for and delivers a very good experience (at least for my set of requirements).

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dave Feb 24

@ahoyboyhoy @cwebber brassica chat is a little demo we made to show chat without servers. it's not something that can be deployed today like xmpp, but we think the design is worth further exploration if we can get resources to dedicate to it. if you're interested in getting into the weeds, you can read about how it works here: https://spritely.institute/news/composing-capability-security-and-conflict-free-replicated-data-types.html

Composing capability security and conflict-free replicated data types — Spritely Institute

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Émilio Gonzalez Feb 24

@cwebber This goes for any institution, no? The bigger/more influent the org, the more it needs to adhere to laws "by default"? For age verification, couldn't governments just force the mastodon developpers to include age verification features? And then it'd be easier to go asking all instances to comply, starting with the big ones

Decentralization just slows this process, but does not stop it. Maybe it's enough, but I guess it depends on the resources said adversary has