Multi protocol fediverse - David Pierce has a good piece about the current state of social media as 2024 approaches. He's not super into the term fediverse and is sure that we should have only 1 protocol.
Personally I'm totally fine with the term fediverse, though I suppose some central bankers might get a bit confused, but you gotta think a central banker would know the difference between real and virtual by the time they are running a central bank, no? Anyhow, I like that it has the vibe of something vaste, like a virtual universe.
I know that there is a popular saying in software development that 1 protocol is better than many, and I can understand the reasoning, but for some reason my gut feeling in this case is I'm OK with several. I've read through the ActivityPub, Bluesky and Nostr protocols, and I think they are all pretty cool. I think as long as it's clear to all that there are multiple protocols then having many isn't an issue. Shouldn't it be a free market for protocols?
The ones people like will get popular. Though you probably don't want too many. Could be time consuming to learn them all. I imagine they will end up getting progressively more complicated as technology evolves.
It would be cool if they all supported RSS so we can have a mininum of easily implementable interop between them all. It feels like it could be like how there are many flavours of Linux, but they all support reading and writing to files, "everything is a file". Maybe all social networks have file based feeds.
Note: More weird people arrived as I was writting this note. They literally only talk when I'm typing. And in the last hour they were having very bizare conversations indeed. #