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What we’ve lost: The MySpace war files and the impact of a digital 'Dark Age'
(spectrumlocalnews.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Decentralized architecture is a pretty good middle-ground between centralized and distributed, though (see). Moving to a fully distributed social media -- which would look something like everyone running their own servers -- would carry costs and problems of its own, one of which is very few people have the time and inclination to learn how to do that and massive duplication of effort (everyone becomes responsible for creating and storing their own archives for posterity's sake, which means lots and lots of data will just go to the bit bucket to die)
The data being shared across federated servers allows people to set up 3rd-party archives, which is beneficial, without needlessly burdening instance operators with archival work (sort of a problem for sites like MySpace, there's nothing in it for them except maybe good PR, except digital archiving for posterity is such a niche interest there would likely be little PR benefit to doing so)
I increasingly suspect there are false dichotomies here. A user need not take full responsibility for their personal server/instance on the federation for them to truly own their data and presence. They only need to own a discrete component in the network that is easily moved and that contains their own personal information and identity. This component could just as easily be hosted on a large cloud service as it could on a bedroom Raspberry Pi, and, if truly nomadic, moved from being on one and then the other as is necessary.
It seems to me that most architectural thinking on this point fails to consider anything other than the "hardware" or server, in more or less traditional network terms, when, it seems to me, the issues concern the presentation and address-ability and mobility of the user as a discrete object.