Yup. Up until roughly the times of early Twitter, federated, decentralized communication systems were the obvious norm to any engineer designing one.

Twitter was even meant to be federated and decentralized. I had interviewed one of their first engineers (this piece is about BlueSky, and in Polish; the Twitter thing is important background), who was there and working on that in the very early days. They had a proof of concept. But then the VCs got involved and the decision was that it would be harder to make money on a decentralized service. Rest is history.

Facebook is trying with Threads. Threads is directly targeting Fedi. Thankfully, it does not seem to be working the way Meta wanted it to work – that is, to start sucking people in from fedi due to sheer size and presumably better UI. Turns out people who had moved to fedi really hate Meta, who’da thunk it.

Yup, I really appreciate he did reply. Gotta say that it did improve my opinion of him.

Yeah, I had an account on identi.ca. I even wrote about this: https://rys.io/en/168.html

Transparency though. 🫠