from the make-the-right-choice dept So, it’s been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media — and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet — the EU’s are coming into force shortly, but possibly too late to matter).But, after all of that, the big question that kept coming up about it was “sure, but how would you get anyone to actually use it.” For years I had argued that the best bet was for one of the big companies to embrace this model and move away from a centralized model to a decentralized protocol setup.The Bluesky project has continued to move forward, despite all this mess, though it seems like quite the longshot that Twitter will ever adopt it.My vision wasn’t about federation (where you basically have a large number of “mini” centralized players who can all talk to each other), but something that was truly decentralized, where you controlled your own data, and could choose who can connect to it.I think I may have become too focused on what I saw of as the limits of a federated setup (putting yourself into someone else’s fiefdom), without recognizing that if it started to take off (as it has), it would become easier and easier for people to set up their own instances, allowing those who are concerned about setting up in someone else’s garden the freedom to set up their own plot of land."