I'm sorry but I believe I'm missing something here. How does this solve any of the problems that people commonly have with decentralized, federated social networks?

* You're still either hosting your own, or at the whim of whomever hosts your repository. Mastodon.social or GitHub.

* Hosting your own Git is not particularly easier than hosting your own GoTo Social or Akkoma.

* What if you end up with either a big following, or a big follower list? Aren't you going to be rate limited by GitHub?

* Is signing up for GitHub easier than signing up for mastodon.social, especially if Mastodon et al already have good mobile clients?

* What about moderation?

* What about media?

And I mean... Isn't Git federated by nature? Multiple machines store multiple copies of the data. That's defederation isn't it?

But OK, let's put the federated social networks we do have aside for a moment.

The site says: Every user stores their application state in a git repo they own and control.

But you don't do that if you're on GitHub, right? Not really, anyway. What is the benefit from doing this over git? What if I want to delete something? What is the overhead of the git protocol?

If it's just a toy, then that's totally cool with me. But it says that Microsoft Research is involved. I'm a bit confused. What is this?