I’ve thought about it a bit and the Fediverse has been around for a while now. There are some really cool applications being made to replace the mainstream ones, but they just aren’t taking off.
Why do you guys think that might be? Ease of use? Addiction to the mainstream platforms? Lack of marketing?
Even though it’s a bit more scary, its actually likely to be more secure. If there are many smaller instance, unless there is a fatal security flaw with the software itself, it is unlikely that more than one instance at a time gets compromised, which leads to much less total damage done than if a GAFAM is hacked (and that happens, recently twitter was hacked , which lead to a bunch of CEO’s account being hacked and being used for a scam).
Distributed networks obviously distribute risk, but with more attack vectors and more non-professional instance managers it definitely is less secure.
This does not solve the problem of reliability. Also, better solutions are possible: Briar, for example, does not require a server to store and forward (cleartext) messages.