squaresinger

You seem to have no arguments for your opinion, otherwise why would you have to resort to personal attacks?

These kinds of comments are usually the internet equivalent of a white flag.

Sorry, no condescension intended.

Your post read like one written by someone with very minimal knowledge about the subject, which might have been a misunderstanding on my part. So I tried to cover the basics before talking about the rest.

There is really no shame in asking questions about something where you don't have experience. There are far more topics I have no idea about than there are topics where I do have a deep understanding.

So to get on the same page, I'll summarize what I understood, please correct me if you mean something different.

• You don't like ActivityPub, you want a new protocol
• The system should make it easy to create new, small instances
• The instances should share sessions with the other instances (=single sign on) based on trusting them
• You prefer a centralized system?
• You want the system to not use a single protocol (ActivityPub), but use multiple protocols?
• ActivityPub based services have bad UX due to the complexity of the protocol

Is this correct?

We have a few contradictions here.

You cannot have a system where anyone can easily create servers and at the same time have shared sessions based on trust. These two requirements conflict with each other.

Either servers only work with servers they trust, and then you can't just create a new small server and interact with the network.

Or anyone can easily create a new small server, but then you can't do anything based on trust, since you never know if that server was created with malicious intent.

Regarding centralized/decentralized you have to differentiate between implementation and management.

All major social networks run distributed systems. If you want to serve billions of users, you need to run millions of servers. These servers are distributed around the globe to give fast access to users everywhere. Chances are pretty high that your ISP has a few racks of Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and Tiktok servers.

Their distributed system is orders of magnitude more complex than everything running ActivityPub combined.

But their system works, because they have tens of thousands of highly paid specialists to make them work.

ActivityPub based services on the other hand have almost no funding and manpower.

Mastodon is the best in this respect. They have 6 people who are actually working on the system.

Lemmy has two developers who earn close to minimum wages.

Kbin has a single guy developing it.

That's the real reason why the UX is crap.

If anything, ActivityPub and the services running on them are extremely underengineered and underdeveloped.

Btw, there is something rather close to what you seem to want: online forums with Google single sign on.

The forums are not interacting at all with other forums. No federation or anything at all. There are enough commercial solutions that work really well. And with Google Single Sign On you also don't have to register for each forum.

But not nearly the required amounts. We currently use about 6 million metric tons of helium per year.

If fusion plants ever become a commercially viable thing (and that's a big if), they will never be able to supply anything close to that.

There's quite a large amount of the usage which could be labelled "for fun".

Murder is still murder, no matter if it's legalized.

And an execution is a premeditated murder in cold blood, even a systemic one. It's pretty much the worst kind of murder.

And yes, every kind of murder is problematic. Using gas chambers just gives it the correct appearance: state sponsored serial murder.

Mostly though through revolutions, wars or some other extreme crisis.

But we are consuming about 6 million tons per year (https://www.chemanalyst.com/industry-report/helium-gas-market-578).

The 3000 tons are just a drop in the water and it's pretty much impossible to get to all that.

Not in a way that could be scaled up to even cover the childrens birthday parties of a medium sized city.

So, a gas chamber? Back to 1938, are we?

One relevant part that I couldn't really find in the article is that helium is so light that it escapes Earth's atmosphere when released into the air.

So any helium that is released to the air is permanently gone.

There is also no known way to synthesize helium, and it also doesn't renew itself at all on Earth.

It's also the only substance we have to cool stuff really far down. That's why e.g. MRIs depend on it.

And we put this precious, finite and often life saving substance into kids' balloons to make them bobble nicely through the air.

The problem is that only people who came into power using the current system would have a chance to change the system. And why would anyone want to change the system that brought them to power?

E-mail. E-mail does support small servers.

Btw, I think you are mixing up a few topics here, so let's see what you actually want.

• Protocols are what computers use to communicate with each other. No protocols means no interaction between different computers/servers. Without protocols, none of the things you ask for can be possible.
• Federated services don't have single sign on. On the contrary, single sign on is a centralized service not a distributed one. To clarify that: I cannot log into lemmy.world with my feddit.de accout, same as I cannot log into hotmail with my gmail account. In both cases I log into my instance/provider and this allows me to communicate with people on other instances/providers. Federation is the process of sharing content between instances. SSO on the other hand is a centralized service that then communicates with other services to let you log into these other services. For example, I can log into my Google account and then use this to login to other sites. This only works because people trust Google. This would not work as a decentralized service with untrusted servers.
• Duplication is used on federated services for a few reasons. First, it's a kind of caching mechanism distributing the load. If someone posts something on one instance, it's transferred only once to the other instances which then serve it to all their users. Without duplication, each individual view would have to be requested again from the original instance. The other advantage is that the admins of all the instances retain control over the content. If the other instance goes offline, users can still see "their" copy of the content. And if the other instance doesn't moderate their content, the mods/admins of your instance can do that themselves.

So as you see, these concepts aren't there just for fun, but for a purpose.