One way it may turn out different than email is if running the server portion of the platform is sufficiently easy & cheap for random individuals with inexpensive hardware & residential internet connections.
I'm kind of surprised to see OStatus & pump.io get a nod before ActivityPub, given that OStatus is essentially dead and ActivityPub is an actual successor to pump.io... and powers the Fediverse, the biggest decentralized social network that I'm aware of in terms of active users. Mastodon is the best-known of the (many) Fediverse platforms.
The Fediverse today has about ~4000 nodes and somewhere between 500K to 3M active users, in pretty much every country. It's big enough that some ends of the social graph are pretty well disconnected - ask users on nodes that primarily use Asian languages how often they rub shoulders with users on nodes using some version of the Latin alphabet, for example.
In other words, there's already a functioning, scaled example of decentralized microblogging right now, but the people who built it have the concerns of advertisers dead last on their priority list, so that might be why it hasn't got more press. Marketing droids & old media can't figure out how to make money from it, and that's emphatically a feature - not a bug.
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One way it may turn out different than email is if running the server portion of the platform is sufficiently easy & cheap for random individuals with inexpensive hardware & residential internet connections.
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That is precisely what the people building ActivityPub imagine. Adtech need not apply.
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I'm kind of surprised to see OStatus & pump.io get a nod before ActivityPub, given that OStatus is essentially dead and ActivityPub is an actual successor to pump.io... and powers the Fediverse, the biggest decentralized social network that I'm aware of in terms of active users. Mastodon is the best-known of the (many) Fediverse platforms. The Fediverse today has about ~4000 nodes and somewhere between 500K to 3M active users, in pretty much every country. It's big enough that some ends of the social graph are pretty well disconnected - ask users on nodes that primarily use Asian languages how often they rub shoulders with users on nodes using some version of the Latin alphabet, for example. In other words, there's already a functioning, scaled example of decentralized microblogging right now, but the people who built it have the concerns of advertisers dead last on their priority list, so that might be why it hasn't got more press. Marketing droids & old media can't figure out how to make money from it, and that's emphatically a feature - not a bug.