Core Tenets:
- You get one account – that’s it.
- There is no “one” algorithm
- There are no community moderators, only sherpas
- It’s all attribute tags
- AI acts as a helper, NEVER as a creator
- A centralized platform (this post!)
Tenant #6: A centralized platform
Federation has a lot of merits to it – and whether you believe in the AT Protocol by BlueSky or the ActivityPub protocol, both have noble goals in trying to decentralize a user’s content from any specific platform, allowing users to not feel “locked” into any specific system.
Federation is also a great way for your website to gather a ton of new content. Take a look at the BlueSky firehose for example (https://firesky.tv/) – imagine you could ingest this into your platform, you would not have any of the cold start problems many social media platforms have!
The problem with federation, however, is that it will always lead to bots. Unless you are very careful with who you federate your content with, if it goes to a platform where they don’t validate users as strongly, and those users can respond to your content, it will be consumed by bots, used by AI, and those bots will try to engage with you.
The same works in reverse – if you open up an avenue that content can flow into your platform automatically from an outside source, it’s easy for non-human content to slip in, and then your real users are engaging with fake users, fake content, dead internet, etc.
A strong, centralized platform will always beat out a user’s want for privacy and their want for their content to be decentralized – otherwise TikTok would not be nearly as popular, and Mastadon/BlueSky would be way bigger than what they are today.