💾 Archived View for cadence.moe › documents › castledon.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 15:52:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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"Castledon"

I want a federated social media that’s like medieval castles. Each instance is a castle and federation to other castles does not happen automatically.

For people in the same castle as you, you can all post messages to each other and they’ll be seen.

But if another castle wants to subscribe to posts from your castle, they first have to send over a diplomat bearing a message of who they are and what they’re about. Then if you agree, the diplomat can come and pick up the mail from your castle and deliver it back to their castle every so often.

How often? Well, since this is the medieval network, we should simulate medieval travel times. It would take a few hours for the messengers to travel between castles. Instead of a fixed time for all castles, castles that are placed closer to each other have a shorter travel time. The castle placement is based on their location in the real world. How can you enforce this real world location, you might ask? Ping time. Every millisecond of ping is one minute for the messenger to travel.

Of course, the messengers can only carry so much mail at a time. Only the top 100 or so most noted posts from each castle are sent in the mail because there’s no room in the mailbag for the others. This helps one of the current problems with the fediverse which is network centralisation. In the medieval network, if a castle gets too big it won’t be a very pleasant experience, because few people will get in the outgoing mailbag, encouraging them to move to other, smaller, castles.

Networked castles also solves the other big problem of the fediverse: drama!!! With castles, instead of cancelling each other online, you GO TO FUCKING WAR AGAINST EACH OTHER. Form an alliance with the castles that agree with you and stage a war against the castles that you hate. No holds barred. Only the strongest will survive. The others will be COMPLETELY OBLITERATED.

Details of precisely how the war will operate are left to the reader’s imagination.

In conclusion I think this would be a much better, and most importantly much sillier, format of social media compared to the fediverse.