Can't Find Your Pixelfed Account? There's a Tool for That

maegul , 10 months ago

So for me, the interesting thing about a service/app like this is the broader architectural question it poses:

How important or valuable to the fediverse will be “middleware” or “hub-like” or “intermediary” services that create functionality between and different from the flat hierarchy of all servers being of the same kind (ie instances hosting users)??

I asked Dansup the same when he first announced this and he said they’ll probably be more valuable over time. And I tend to agree (intuitively). All the attempts at fedi search engines, the community/instance finders for lemmy, the user finders for mastodon are all examples of this that have more or less been rather successful. This service from Dansup leans toward nomadic user accounts, which is a big area. It’ll be interesting to see what else pops up and if the general idea takes root.

deadsuperhero OP , 10 months ago

Yeah, it’s definitely a weird problem. My initial reaction was something along the lines of “Isn’t there a decentralized way to do this?!” and…to my knowledge, there really isn’t? Like, you could distribute knowledge of user account associations across every instance in a peer-to-peer way, I guess, but that’s kind of ridiculous and pretty wasteful.

I think having small central services that improve the quality of life for decentralized services is largely a good thing, so long as they’re open source and not just some corporate product with vendor lock-in. It does kind of feel like a contradiction in terms, sometimes.

maegul , 10 months ago

“Isn’t there a decentralized way to do this?!”

Exactly! Which goes above my pay-grade and understanding … but I can imagine it’s a fundamentally theoretical question at it’s core … for any given decentralised protocol, what’s the set of answerable queries a user and/or instance can make? Or something like that (like I said, above my understanding) … ie, what is and isn’t actually decentralise-able in terms of features and information that a user would find useful?

And intuitively, I’m guessing there’s a bunch of stuff that isn’t really decentralise-able. Even the way the fedi/AP works, AFAIU … is basically just viewing local data that is a duplication of originally external data (that has been subscribed to).

And so the more the fedi (or its users) start asking for utilities and features, with instance recommendations and “Join-x” web pages being perhaps a notable example, the more relatively centralised services make more sense. Though, thinking roughly of the DNS system, I’m wondering whether a more robust system that isn’t really centralised is the sort of thing the fedi needs for ancillary user-friendliness needs.

deadsuperhero OP , 10 months ago

Yeah, that’s a tough one. I have mixed feelings about it.

What I’d really like to see is a benevolent, impartial non-profit act as an umbrella organization that stewards a lot of this critical infrastructure. Non-profits aren’t perfect, and there are lots of questions regarding funding and sponsorships and the ethics of taking money from, say, Meta. But, I think such a thing could be really positive in the right hands.