The concept of making a solution out of federated technologies that could scale for all of fandom, ie the hypothetical 'social network of our own', is definitely supremely uncertain, and is way way way far in the future from where the people working with federation are now. Even if their explorations end up producing a possible solution, it's not one they can see clearly from where they are now.
They might be right that there isn't a way for fandom to create a centralized solution instead, or they might not. There's nothing stopping other people from pursuing the possibility of a centralized solution - or a solution based on anything other than federated network technology. There were people who were talking about non-federated solutions as well in the early conversations around the Tumblrpocalypse, at least; I don't think I've heard anything else about that recently, but maybe some people are still working on it.
But either way, anything that started being planned within the last four months or so is going to be a long way off. I mean, if you look at how long it took AO3 to reach open beta, or how long it took Dreamwidth even, years and years.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2019-02-03 02:47 pm (UTC)They might be right that there isn't a way for fandom to create a centralized solution instead, or they might not. There's nothing stopping other people from pursuing the possibility of a centralized solution - or a solution based on anything other than federated network technology. There were people who were talking about non-federated solutions as well in the early conversations around the Tumblrpocalypse, at least; I don't think I've heard anything else about that recently, but maybe some people are still working on it.
But either way, anything that started being planned within the last four months or so is going to be a long way off. I mean, if you look at how long it took AO3 to reach open beta, or how long it took Dreamwidth even, years and years.