Put another way, what are some examples of software built with federation in mind from the start, rather than on top of a more centralized design?
Put another way, what are some examples of software built with federation in mind from the start, rather than on top of a more centralized design?
I think the question at that point is “How often is there a completely new way to use the Internet socially, either inside or outside of the federated space?”
I don’t think it happens very often. Blogs, messsage boards and dating sites in the '90s; microblogs, photo and video sharing in the '00s; short form video sharing in the '10s if that counts as a separate thing. There’s only like seven types of social network in the three decades or so they’ve existed.
One major change that has happened is: forums used to be linear with thread bumping (phpBB, SMF), now they are mostly conversation trees with sorting by upvotes or similar (Reddit, Lemmy).