I really want a place to talk about things that make the web (and the world) so wonderful! New things keep popping up all the time, and it's hard to keep up with it all. But here I will try to at least note things down as I come across them.
Along with this list I'll throw in some thoughts and opinions (free of charge!) Otherwise this just becomes another listicle.
I tend to have a strong preference to projects that are FLOSS. And if I don't draw a line somewhere, the list of interesting things in this list would probably get out of hand, and probably reflect the confusion and chaos I so much want to try and avoid by making this list in the first place!
What's so great about...
This section was originally written with a focus on Mastodon, but since then, decentralization has spread to other major players such as when Bluesky decided to decentralize.
There are a fair few differences between how Bluesky and Mastodon work, and i'll refer to the link above if you want to get more into the specifics. In short: From what I can tell Mastodon wants to maximize decentralization, whereas Bluesky wants to retain certain "centralized features" to help fill the niche left by social media platforms of the past.
The idea behind Mastodon is to contrast with how "traditional social media" platforms operate. It uses a free and open source protocol called ActivityPub, and it's designed in such a way that it facilitates the sharing of information between several (usually smaller) servers that aren't owned by any single entity (parent company), they can (and usually are) hosted by anyone who wants to.
The ActivityPub protocol and what Mastodon is doing is what I can only describe as "democratic" in nature. Where the network of servers is more collectively owned than anything else, and there is no "amassed wealth" within one server, as the value lies in the connection network each account has, and it stretches across the boundaries of a single server instance. Mastodon tries to further empower the users too, where users can easily migrate between servers should they want to. Bringing with them all of their accounts "value" (connections, past posts etc... any "resource" on the platform).
Although an upside, a downside is also that it is federated. As such, each server can be quite different in its focus, appearance, culture / the rules they operate by etc... A server can be operated as a complete dictatorship by a single user, or as is more likely the case with the bigger instances, a few admins that get help from another few moderators. This means that "finding your server" becomes a thing you didn't usually have to think about.
There's also a thing worth mentioning about echo chambers too, since a server instance could decide to defederate from all other instances that don't also align with its worldview. It is possible that we would end up with isolated networks of federated servers rather than one single federated network. Mastodon is not immune to the problem of echo chambers, despite it sounding like such a silver bullet to existing social media problems. Defederation is hopefully considered as a dire last resort by Mastodon admins.
Check out MastodonCheck out BlueskyThough serverless doesn't mean "no server", and though there has been a lot of hype (maybe too much?) around it. I still think it's one of the greatest ways of dealing with application deployment as of 2024.
Now I don't have to think about provisioning as much, and tooling is really starting to "get there" as well. I currently use a service / platform (called fly.io) that has pretty decent auto-detection of what type of software you are currently developing, and generates a Dockerfile for you. This dockerfile is by no means beholden to deployment on their specific service either.
In short, "serverless" is in my opinion a great thing, and it lets me think more about the "what" that I want to make, and less about the "how" I want to make it.
I think the only way to become a fan is to try it out.
Check out Fly.ioCheck out HerokuCheck out Docker