There’s no lack of open chat protocols and federated services but those have mostly torpedoed themselves: by usability and discoverability problems, holier–than–you attitudes, and plain nerd attention wars. Such as XMPP (used a lot until around 2010 but easily dragged into the mud because XML and overengineering), Mastodon (saw a surge as twitter was faltering but then seemingly stopped to be everyone‘s darling as its limitations became obvious, among them Mastodon admins taking their audience hostage; also ActivityPub fans going around advertising it for each and everything when RSS is just fine for web sites, damaging news feeds alltogether in the process).
Where spamming, or the systematic exploitation of digital communication by the „ad industry“, was killing it in the past (Usenet, and arguably the web), today there‘s also the problem of being consumed by LLMs to push non-public messaging. Though I‘m not sure the latter is really a concern for many, as developers not only are giving away their code, but their entire activity log/issues and their solutions on github such that they can easily be digested and replaced by coding assistant LLMs, git being a distributed system in the first place.
> among them Mastodon admins taking their audience hostage
I was excited first hearing all the "fediverse" stuff, but having to hand over control of your online identity to a particular node forever felt a little bit like "old boss, same as the new boss."
(Yes, I know some folks are working on the identity issue.)
Reminds when I joined the largest mastodon server for my country. Advertised by the owner as a bastion for free speech, democracy and fair treatment. Then in 2020 started mass banning everyone "that went against science" on the covid fraudemia at our country.
Twitter on those days was bad, but that mastodon server sure became even worser. Nowadays found a fresh air of innovation with Nostr. No more servers with your data and followers locked inside.
You can silence the people you don't want to hear, you won't hostage them into forced silence any longer.
Mastodon means you can at least pick your boss, be your own boss, and take your identity and followers to a new boss. (Possibly even taking your content too, though maybe not links)
Picking a ‘boss’ in a system where the average ‘employee’ has no credible way of assessing or evaluating them, or their superiors, and zero prospects of ever getting a face to face meeting with, is effectively no different to having the boss picked by an anonymous shareholder meeting in SF.
If all of the potential bosses have roughly the same degree of accessibility… which is the case for Mastodon for anything over a few hundred users.
Did they ever address the problem of migration from a bad server?
For example, a scenario where your server dies and does not return. Or a malicious actor takes over and bans the user base. Or a honeypot encouraging user account migration, followed by bans.
In all 3 cases, you are effectively screwed the moment you migrate to a malicious server, or your server becomes malicious.
I remember blue sky trying to address this by tying your identity to a DNS record or something, but it's a severe limitation in anything trying to be decentralized
Where spamming, or the systematic exploitation of digital communication by the „ad industry“, was killing it in the past (Usenet, and arguably the web), today there‘s also the problem of being consumed by LLMs to push non-public messaging. Though I‘m not sure the latter is really a concern for many, as developers not only are giving away their code, but their entire activity log/issues and their solutions on github such that they can easily be digested and replaced by coding assistant LLMs, git being a distributed system in the first place.