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Comment on Decentralized Syndication – The Missing Internet Protocol

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While everyone is waiting for Atproto to proto, ActivityPub is already here. This is giving me "Sumerians look on in confusion as god creates world" vibes.

https://theonion.com/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-god-c...

These are still too centralized. The protocol should look more like BitTorrent.

- You don't need domain names for identity. Signatures are enough. An optional extension could contain emails and social handles in the payload if desired.

- You don't need terabytes of storage. All content can be ephemeral. Nodes can have different retention policies, and third party archival services and client-side behavior can provide durable storage, bookmarking/favoriting, etc.

- The protocols should be P2P-first rather than federated. This prevents centralization and rule by federated cabal. Users can choose their own filtering, clustering, and prioritization.

Nodes can have different retention policies, and third party archival services and client-side behavior can provide durable storage, bookmarking/favoriting, etc.

That's completely achievable in AP. Most current servers use reasonable retention, extended for boosted posts.

Then it is a bit strange why it wasn’t designed to be ‘BitTorrent-like’ from the beginning as the parent suggests.

There's no known way to make this work well yet, but feel free to invent that. Until that happens, federated is mostly the best we have, because most people don't want to be responsible for their own servers.

P.S. ActivityPub is a euphemism for Mastodon's protocol, which isn't just ActivityPub.

Isn't this ipfs?

Isn't this Nostr?

Isn't this nntp?

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