> I guess one could solve this with buffering proxies
That’s essentially Nostr. There the servers are untrusted relays and cryptography is used to enforce authenticity.
(One of the) issues with Mastodon is that it was initially designed for browser-based use and browsers require an origin (aka a domain or IP) to talk to, because originally there were no clients. Having actual clients would remove the need for this since they can talk any protocol to any host and implement their own logic to authenticate messages. I think Mastodon was just never expected to become this big.
I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse” if you’re curious, just search for my username and those keywords. Maybe one of these days I’ll write a blog post.
> I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse”
Same here. And I too, have planned such a blog post for a while now. Just not sure if it's worth criticizing something that's far from perfect but in many ways still better than many other systems. A bit like the vegan criticizing the vegetarian for not being animal-friendly enough (or worse, the carnivore criticizing my vegetarian diet for not being good enough because I wear a leather belt).
The issue with the current iteration of fedi is that it misses the main problems that average, non-technical people experience with social media, so those people remain unaware of fedi and/or can't get past the friction of using it, as a result they remain on the mainstream services, all while fedi remains a nerd echo-chamber with significant unsolved issues around funding, moderation, spam protection, etc (the only reason it doesn't collapse under spam/unsavory content is that it's mostly just not even worth spamming due to its irrelevance).
I'm not particularly sure the current iteration of fedi being around is better than other systems... it sucks the oxygen out of the room and reduces/fragments demand for an actually good replacement for FB/X/etc...
That’s essentially Nostr. There the servers are untrusted relays and cryptography is used to enforce authenticity.
(One of the) issues with Mastodon is that it was initially designed for browser-based use and browsers require an origin (aka a domain or IP) to talk to, because originally there were no clients. Having actual clients would remove the need for this since they can talk any protocol to any host and implement their own logic to authenticate messages. I think Mastodon was just never expected to become this big.
I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse” if you’re curious, just search for my username and those keywords. Maybe one of these days I’ll write a blog post.