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Is volunteer-run servers with open registration the right governance model for the Fediverse?

So, I am a Strong No. First, because I agree with a lot of commenters that there is no single governance model for the Fediverse. But second, because I don't think volunteer-run servers with only loose affinity with users is a good structure for admins' mental health and for users' account reliability. I'd like to see more people using household servers, servers from their employer or university, coop servers, and servers as public infrastructure.

Cassandrich

@evan "servers from their employer or university"

This is an utterly horrible idea. Your employer should not be holding your social media presence hostage, controlling if or when you can migrate and keep your followers, what kind of moderation you'll be subjected to, etc.

@dalias imagine finding out you've been laid off because you can't shitpost

@smn @dalias Not for shitposting, but for official communication like you'd find in their webpage on news, open positions, new releases etc

@dalias @evan thanks - very much agreed, and glad we didn't need to say it. we already know that institutions resolve conflict in favor of the institution's survival, not in favor of justice. the whole point is to be outside that.

@dalias @evan anyway yeah we think open registration might be a thing to stop treating as a natural default

@evan Likewise "household servers". No no no. This is utterly stupid. Your parents should not be the ones deciding queer instances are defederated.

@dalias @evan It is is related to your employer or university, then it should be fine. Not all social media must be personal.

@pkal @evan If it's an account to use specifically in the role of your relationship to the employer or uni, sure. But that's a rather unattractive type of social media account, and such accounts should almost always be for the institution or role in the institution, not for a person's name in the institution.

@pkal @evan For example, journalist accounts at a particular publication are an antipattern that chills expression and raises doubts about journalist's entitlement to take content & followers with them when changing jobs.

All around it's just a bad idea contrary to fediverse values.

@dalias This is an argument I see for ATProto PDS-style content servers. If the journalist could store their content on their own “PDS” and then associate their identity variably as their career moves it would be a big win for these kinds of accounts.

I don’t like much else about ATProto but I think there’s a win to be found here somehow for portability and migration

@amd As long as the identity consists of an identifier belonging to a potentially malicious party that party could deny continued control. I don't see how this helps. All the ATProto decentralization is fake.

@dalias Sure, ATProto is fake decentralization. The DID:PLC nonsense is a farce and the relay/app-view situation is anti decentralization in its design.

But there is validity to being a user being able to control their corpus of content, follows, and followers as they move within the federation.

I don’t see why this couldn’t be achieved while following ActivityPub, even if Mastodon doesn’t seem interested.

@amd @dalias this is obviously possible with ActivityPub.