Distributed toxicity and the IndieWeb
This tweet has been making the rounds in IndieWeb spaces, and reflects a thing I’ve been thinking about on and off lately for obvious reasons:
I was building a decentralized, WebMention-based social network (way before Mastodon/ActivityPub), and if anyone had cared back then, it would be a nazi darling today and that just sucks. https://t.co/jXaZTsUNz8
— Hendrik Mans (@hmans) January 12, 2021
I’ve seen several other related sentiments lately; with a certain prominent politician being deplatformed from all of the mainstream social media platforms, and all of the platforms that accept him being in turn shut down or otherwise made ineffective, people have been (quite reasonably!) wondering what happens if he ends up starting up his own IndieWeb site, and causes a resurgence in self-hosted or otherwise privately-run, single-author blogs.