Could the Fediverse Work in Low Income Countries?

Convener: Moritz Jäger (@genius7@mastodon.social)

Notes

• Attendees introduce themselves.

• Who do we exclude by using services like Whereby - if you need a modern laptop and unlimited data.

• What internationalisation options are there for Fediverse? For example @ names all use ASCII at the moment

• Can things be sparse, fast, and usable while still remaining engaging and beautiful?

• Anecdotes about limitations of low income countries.

  • Phones may be shared in a village, not a personal device.

  • Phones, not computers, are the primary interaction device.

  • Maybe SMS rather than HTTP is the more usable communication layer

  • System Administration is hard

  • In some plans, data rates are cheap at night. So maybe delay data exchange until the night

  • Products must be very very simple.

• If we make it good for low income we make it good for everyone, including rural areas in rich countries

• Would LoRaWAN / MeshCore work for fediverse (text) messages?

  • Devices are expensive and obscure

  • https://meshcore.co.uk/ is MeshCore

• Another use case: a country in conflct where government shuts down the internet.

  • Fediverse uses internet to reach users, so if internet is blocked, the Fediverse is also blocked

  • If specific domain names are blocked, e.g. just Telegram and Facebook, then Fediverse instances with different domain names will not be blocked.

• Idea: host a Fediverse presence on one’s own phone. Distribute data only at night when rates are cheap.

  • Problem: how would readers get the message if my server is turned off during the day?

  • Maybe people know that servers are just online at certain times of day.

  • Maybe a mesh architecture could let servers mirror content as they can when they are on.

• A connection: communication in disaster situations may reproduce limitations of low-income countries in rich countries

  • After a disaster, internet and mobile phone networks go down

  • Millions of people will want to send messages about “I survived” to their family & friends

  • Disaster response planners think of systems to send such messages

  • Sets up a local internet within say 100m of a disaster support hub, let people send messages with their smart phones

  • The support hub forwards the messages as best it can, however it can, whenever it can.

• JDLH: what I hear as main constraints are: shared devices, connection via SMS rather than internet, connection only part-time

• Solutions must be very simple. Open source products are often not simple.