👽 Paul Webb I've been thinking about the problems of the current popular social networks. A lot. They have too much power IMO and some of them do sketchy things at the expense of their users, like sell their data to the highest bidder.

Mark Dain Do you think federated networks can ever be easy enough for the average person to set up and use? That seems like the only solution; we run the servers and keep control over our data

👽 Paul Webb That's probably THE major, if not only, hurdle. The onboarding process is key. For Socii, I don't want to deal with password management either. I've been using passwordless.net for my current SaaS app and I absolutely love it. None of my future SaaS products will utilize passwords again and I believe they are a hurdle as well. It just encourages poor decisions, especially since so many services want our attention. Anyhoo, this was just a brain dump, there needs to be a LOT more thought put into this. I just thought of a network that does onboarding quite well: Slack. They also have a passwordless login (kinda).

Mark Dain As a power user I like password managers but I can see how passwordless.net would be great for the average user. For a federated network to function you'd likely need to use a private key to prove who the user is; the issue then is getting phones to work or if the user buys a new computer. As far as I know there's almost no way to do this nicely. I can imagine scanning a QR code to get the key on the phone but phone -> computer could be harder.