# The Fediverse is dumb, and why it doesn't matter

Continuing on the theme of 'how to fix the web' let's talk about the "Fediverse", or any other attempt at distributed social media for that matter.

Fediverse

## Why it's dumb

All federated social protocols have attempted to do everything, from blogging to comments to aggregation and most of it is completely unnecessary.

Why do they do this? They are stuck in thinking that Facebook is how things should be, but that it needs to be disrupted or some other such. They see the problem only in the centralization and ownership of the platform, without looking at the centralization of the features itself.

This, in my opinion, is a fundamental flaw in thinking. One only sees Facebook and can not imagine how things would work without it. Despite Newspapers, Academic Journals, and Magazines having solved this problem (better) hundreds of years ago.

## I don't need to be 'fed' content

Most people have nothing of merit to write about, myself included. An increasing number of technical articles and blogs are self-promotion, or light content designed to 'engage' and market. I've worked at multiple companies who treat their engineering blog as a marketing tool rather than something meaningful and rarely find blogs that post good stuff (although a few still exist).

Bottom line, if I am interested in consuming high quality content, written by people of merit I will seek it out. It does not need to be 'fed' to me.

## The new protocol

  1. I don't require validation from strangers
  2. If I care about your opinion, I will seek it out directly through other means (email)
  3. If you read one of my posts and care enough to engage just send me an email.
  4. If I think your opinion or comment has merit, I will update my post to include it and details of the discussion.
  5. On the off chance I write something of merit, people will share it informally, in slack channels, emails, aggregators.
  6. I don't care about discussions off-site. Again if there is a comment of merit, email me.
  7. Maybe RSS is good. So good, the top dogs killed it.

It's email, it's always been email. "Spammers have won" you'll say, we need to create a new protocol/system/company that they haven't figured out how to game yet. No! We need to make better spam filters.

USENET was killed because of spammers, but now there are (almost) no spammers left. USENET is still there, waiting to be reclaimed if people wanted to.


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