Signed up. pretty neat. However, I do not see how a niche social media contribute to “a working interchange”.
The problem with social media is that its value totally depends on network effect. At the beginning, you have no network effect, thus nobody cares. If at some point you gain some network effect, what prevent the big guys from incorporating this functionality into their much popular social media and starve you?
Well, fediverse does to some extent. Still, I was building the app I needed in the first place. I’m selfish enough to first satisfy my own needs and only then contribute to the humanity happiness 
Technically, nothing. Practically, on the other hand, I am not after billions of users. All I want is a neat community, paying bills for S3 and my cat’s food. Will they incorporate the functionality?—Well, good luck, it’s far from being easy with their stack, in the first place. Facebook bought WhatsApp and it’s still WhatsApp past almost a decade because they could not just duplicate the functionality. Thanks to Joe, Robert and José, it’s still a BEAM-only niche.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, that I don’t love money as much as to sell the app to bigcorp.
I would think Elixir will shine at people writing forever online apps. The OTP model makes it a touch easier for a dropped connection to be restarted. Though on the other hand, holding on to big binaries (the >64 bytes problem) and the sometimes impossible-to-untangle graphs of processes that are deadlocked on each other so a big binary can never be released make this more difficult than it should.
So a bit more realistically Elixir might not be a very interesting player in what is coming.
IPFS has been dead for years. People abandoned it in droves after the organization made it perfectly clear that it will introduce facilities for certain content blocks to be deny-listed and not shown when people try to download a file. Agencies like the RIAA and others de facto murdered IPFS very early on.
It seems to me at this point that web3 has conclusively failed. If I had to hazard a guess as to why, I would say that maybe making everything about money attracts the wrong people. And that’s kinda what web3 was: what if we turned everything into money.
I remember a while ago now I read through the ActivityPub spec, which many were excited about, and I was left feeling rather dismayed. It was blindingly obvious it was never going to replace Twitter/Reddit/GitHub. It’s architecturally nonviable for that use-case. To this day they are still coping with this by claiming it’s not supposed to replace those things and that the “fediverse” is something else. Okay, fine, whatever I guess. I’m glad they’re happy.
I took a very good look at ATProto, I think early this year, and it was like watching a dark cloud get blown away. A group of brilliant engineers had actually sat down and done the work. Maybe we actually have a chance!
Of course I still didn’t think that chance was very good, but over the past few months things have been looking increasingly positive. Bluesky has grown large enough to property test ATProto at scale and people are starting to use the protocol to build other things. I think the most promising so far has been Tangled, a social git forge. Git has always been decentralized but PRs, issues, and stars and other social features have not been so lucky.
It’s really starting to look like ATProto has a nonzero chance of being the “new internet”. I’m not saying this is going to happen. What I’m saying is if there’s a chance then those of us who care should be doing everything we can to stay on that path.
I will have to make a separate thread for this, but I think Elixir could play a big part. I don’t need to explain this on here but this sort of thing is literally our bread and butter. There is not a better stack on Earth for building this type of software. Right now my impression is that Go has a lot of mindshare for ATProto stuff. I think this community should go all-in, kinda like we did with AI (Nx and so on).
Of course I will have to put my money where my mouth is, so I’ll probably start writing some proper ATProto tooling soon. AFAICT we don’t really have anything right now. Just implementations of the HTTP APIs which are not the “real stuff”.
It’s great to see so many people passionate about this topic! I was going to try and respond to everyone who took part but I think I’d be here all day 
For now I will quickly add a tweet from the creator of telegram as it’s a good fit for this topic (I don’t really go on Twitter myself these days so only saw it because it got posted on DT):
I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating.
Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers.
What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.
Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).
Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.
A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast — while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms — and allowed them to be taken away.
We’ve been fed a lie.
We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech.
By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.
So no, I’m not going to celebrate today. I’m running out of time. WE are running out of time.
https://twitter.com/durov/status/1976420399970701543
I don’t agree with everything he’s saying btw (I don’t like how he says built by our fathers when numerous women have played a key role/just because something is tradition doesn’t mean it’s good/if by the free market he means capitalism as we see it today, then I think most would say no thank you! Etc) but the bit about the internet and our time running out is very much what this topic is about.
Let’s not mix up internet (web of millions of sites) and social media (twitter, telegram). The free internet is still here, and I believe we can preserve it. On the other hand, the free social media was an illusion conjured up by VCs , and likely gone for good. The reason is simple: A social media made no sense unless it is massive. Anything massive need serious money to run, and is a force in politics, Then they will be taken over by the capitalists or the politicians or both.
I’m definitely not conflating the two Derek - and I agree with much of what you say about the current state of social media, I have always been cautious/distrustful of it in the form that we saw it 
The freedom of the internet as a whole though is under threat - and while that does also impact social media (through various new laws/practices etc) it’s not just about social media, it’s much much more than that.
Some of the things he mentions are covered in some of the links I included in the OP:
I was referring to the tweet of the telegram guy you quoted, there is no disagreement here.
As for the threats from the government, I am not too worried. Our good friend @mudasobwa summed up perfectly in the other thread:
As much as I wish he were right, I have a feeling that’s just what they want us to believe (because nothing has really changed for hundreds of years - they are still hoarding all the world’s land, resources and wealth, and things are actually getting worse)…
I think more people realising this has actually accelerated the desire for change, so at some point, I hope what Aleksei said finally comes to pass..
Hoarders are going to hoard. The world will be fine as long as there is still healthy amount of social mobility. I think the core of Aleksei’s point is that our job as hackers is not to go to the street, it is to evolve the reality, so the reality that beget those draconian laws no longer exist.