Sam Liebeskind

Just as important, they wanted information that was directly relevant to their lives and reflective of their communities. They were not interested in paying for a bundle of content that felt distant from their daily concerns. If local news is to earn financial support, it must first demonstrate local value.

In short, they wanted consistent, reliable... See more

Federation is a misfeature for hosted platforms

When it comes to decentralization, federation is a huge buzzword and selling point. It seems like in theory a good middle ground of peer-to-peer and entirely centralized. However, I think in the case of a chat platform, which hosts a community, it causes more problems than it solves. For things like... See more

What is the purpose of protocols? To guarantee the rights of individuals and communities.

Traditional federation lacks modularity. Hosting, distribution, moderation, algorithms, and business logic are located in the hosting instance. This creates a weak separation of powers. Ideally, users reduce the power of a popular instance by devolving specific functions to other providers. We want to preserve rights in the default course of... See more

A logical extension of personal computing is a belief that everyone ought to possess maximal personal rights and make all decisions on their own.

This view runs into scale problems. One-way broadcast is relatively easy to make perform well and the shape of the problem supports low-coordination meshes (BitTorrent). Likewise, small-group chat and... See more