@darius @kissane @DigInfFund The fediverse consists of overly-complex cruft bundles that discovered the most byzantine, memory-hogging, and CPU roasting, and complex ways for shuttling text messages. The servers are mountainous piles of power suckage and bloat. The current logic of sharing and caching the content uses more bandwidth than a bandwidth machine.
Not one project has bothered to create a material design UX that makes any sense for a efficient workflow. Everyone has confused "stylish" and "pretty" with "useful." If you designed an email client for a fortune 500 company that looked like Mastodon the company would sue you for their money back.
If you want a safe and productive "fediverse" then tell everyone to stop being prima donnas and focus on building one server platform that uses ONE AND ONLY one stable, compiled programming language (C99 or C11 or a Wirthian language, of course, or possbily even Go) and uses ONLY that one language and NOTHING ELSE.
No node, no python, no ruby, no rust, no boutique languages like scheme, lisp, haskell, et al but an old school language that has passed the test of many decades of systems usage.
Remove all JavaScript from the web front ends and instead of asynchronous polling with JavaScript and web sockets and all that fluff just use CSS-styled iframes and meta-refresh and html forms in the frames.
Use envelope encryption on all direct messages so they are end-to-end encrypted not just between the servers but between the user client applications.
Ditch JSON and all its variants completely and just use plain text files with lines of text as key:pair data entries. Text parsed by lines is simpler, requiring less overhead to parse data. Language compilers already have the line logic built in when reading files in text mode.
Use server signatures to sign hashes of remote content instead of caching remote content on the user server. Enforce this. That way the client will request content from the server pointed to in the signed hash.
Here's to a bloat-free, JavaScript free, Erlang free, safe 'fediverse'.