I spent some time yesterday trying to understand the pattern of Mastodon's growth. Here's what I wrote about what I learned: https://medium.com/@EthanZ/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reason-why-is-uncomfortable-684c036498e5
@ethanz If you like Mastodon, you’re going to poop bricks when you discover the work of Secure Scuttlebutt (https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html) or my favorites, the Dat (https://docs.datproject.org/) and Beaker Browser (https://beakerbrowser.com/) projects!
Unlike federated, these offer real P2P (via distributed hash tables, like BitTorrent), cryptographically secure (also like BT), but with versioning, append-only logs, multi-writer capabilities &c. Would love to read about (or help with 🤓!) your research on these!
@ethanz Ah I see your “Back to the Future” report considers IPFS (just starting to read the report now). IPFS shares many goals & techniques with Dat but is embracing blockchain solutions to resource allocation, about which the Dat community has Strong Views—see, e.g., https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/inside-beaker/other-technologies.html
(Sorry, sorry, I’ll stop bugging you before reading y’all’s work, reading now 📚)
@xj9