dreiwert
The comparison with IRC is not very meaningful: moving from one server to another is much easier because IRC users don’t lose followers, bookmarks, posts, etc.
The point is that IRC is normally used in a way that leaves more to the client. ActivityPub services usually expect that users put much more trust in the instances. It might be worth thinking about that.
How would a "built-in protection against centralization" even work?
IMHO, you can only provide tools. You can't prevent people from being stupid and not using them. That's also why by now, e.g. the EU tries to solve such problems through regulation.
Cool. Ich moechte Zugang zu allen Suchmaschinenindizes, fuer deren Erstellung Informationen gescraped wurden, die ich online gestellt habe.
If you don't plan to host free software, you might not care.
For free software, you might consider GNU's criteria for ethical repositories, under which this would already make the hosting unacceptable due to a violation of C2 (see https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.en.html). Even if you don't adhere to GNU's definition, you might then ask yourself why your definition of free software allows for more discrimination and whether that is justified.
Considering the increasing importance of AcivityPub-driven interaction, an interesting choice might be Codeberg as its underlying codebase Forgejo has an initiative heading for federation (see https://lemmy.ml/comment/396978)
Exciting! Might also indicate that @Codeberg@social.anoxinon.de could be a good choice for those willing to switch their #git hosting due to platform lock-in concerns because it's likely that it would benefit from that to-be-implemented #federation support.
Definitely. But I guess the proprietary players will only take part when they are either forced to do so by regulation, or when 80% of the market already federates. So the question is probably which of the open source platforms has the biggest promise for making it happen.
Btw, a similar effort for Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/30672
Federation and task/responsibility distribution would be exciting to solve the storage dimension issue.
Couldn't someone train a model on their university's computing cluster, and share it? This would boost independent research on these things for sure.
On a more positive note: Saxony was the only federal state in Germany which, during times of more strict pandemic-related rules, allowed tracking exposure using the government-funded open source software instead of some app used by the other federal states based on stolen code whose only unique selling point was being advertised by a famous rapper...
And at the same time, Saxon universities coerce students into proprietary solutions, hiding behind university autonomy when members of the parliament criticize this.