This is the best summary I could come up with:
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Instead of a half-dozen platforms competing to own your entire life, apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and others are building a more interconnected social ecosystem.
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In the last year or so, though, particularly after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition alerted users to how quickly their platforms can change or die, POSSE has gotten some traction again alongside ActivityPub and other more open ideas.
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POSSE’s problems start at the very beginning: it requires owning your own website, which means buying a domain and worrying about DNS records and figuring out web hosts, and by now, you’ve already lost the vast majority of people who would rather just type a username and password into some free Meta platform.
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Reece says he’s interested in building tools to aggregate and make sense of replies, likes, comments, and the rest, but it’s a much harder prospect.
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Reece mentions a tool called Bridgy, which both allows cross-posting and aggregates social media reactions and attaches them to posts on your site.
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Modern social networks are not a single product but a giant bundle of features, and the next generation of tools might be all about unbundling.
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The original article contains 1,805 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The title seemed quite negative but the article is quite good.
I hope that POSSE is the future but the layperson will not host their own site that serves as their “identity” which makes me feel that at some point we will have “identity management” services which will again centralize part of the web (in a less worse way)
I can see it happening if it becomes an “appliance”, similar market to what the home assistant green doodad is going for. “put this shiny blue cube full of hard drives into your kitchen, and join the identiverse! it also comes in purple!”
No.
And even if they did, there’s literally 1234567x different, better ways to solve that problem or any problem than “blockchain”.
This sounds nice on an abstract level but how do you implement communities with that?
I mean, if I don’t want my regular persona connected with my Chuck Testa erotica that can be solved by having two domains and two POSSE stacks. Costs money but is easy enough in principle.
I might be perfectly fine with the same persona/domain being associated with both my work (Befunge enterprise software development) and my more normal hobbies (interpreting D&D characters as rappers). But the people interested in the hottest developments in two-dimensional ERP software will probably not be interested in my new article on how ill Illmater really is.
So how do I separate these? Tags don’t seem powerful enough for this task; if I have to tag every article with every group of interested people then most posts will drown in tags and careless use of a tag might lead to the equivalent of posting an emphatic affirmation of LGBT rights to a version of Truth Social where the only form of moderation consists of raiding the offender’s blog.
For that matter, how do you moderate POSSE? I can’t come up with a reasonable way to do so.
In the end it seems that it’s a really cool concept if used by renowned tech evangelists and just about nobody else.
I’m doing POSSE to mastodon, but for everything else I host my own instance like Lemmy, PeerTube, blog (RSS), Pictures (RSS), Matrix.
Will this happen before or after the year of the Linux desktop?
