A problem with this is that a protocol isn't just a protocol. It's also policy and UI. An example: if you send someone an email, they have a copy of the email and you can't edit or delete it. This...
A problem with this is that a protocol isn't just a protocol. It's also policy and UI.
An example: if you send someone an email, they have a copy of the email and you can't edit or delete it. This is not how Facebook or Twitter or Mastodon work, at least on the surface. (You can cut-and-paste or screenshot.)
Some policies are baked into the protocol, but most policy differences (the ones that aren't simple dumb rules) need to be worked out somehow by people. Different services will have different policies.
A limiting case is something like blogging where everyone starts their own blog and has their own policy for comments. But there are also public conversations between bloggers, which can be done by linking to whatever post you're responding to and notifying them somehow. This is the real protocol-agnostic federation, since it works anywhere that links work. If there's a website you don't like, "defederation" can happen by not discussing or linking to it, which is what happens by default.
A problem with this is that a protocol isn't just a protocol. It's also policy and UI.
An example: if you send someone an email, they have a copy of the email and you can't edit or delete it. This is not how Facebook or Twitter or Mastodon work, at least on the surface. (You can cut-and-paste or screenshot.)
Some policies are baked into the protocol, but most policy differences (the ones that aren't simple dumb rules) need to be worked out somehow by people. Different services will have different policies.
A limiting case is something like blogging where everyone starts their own blog and has their own policy for comments. But there are also public conversations between bloggers, which can be done by linking to whatever post you're responding to and notifying them somehow. This is the real protocol-agnostic federation, since it works anywhere that links work. If there's a website you don't like, "defederation" can happen by not discussing or linking to it, which is what happens by default.