The point is so many open source alternatives already exist to Facebook and WhatsApp, all of which can be locally hosted and can federate where required. Local rules can also be set and managed for these networks, and they can be easily branded to suite Ethiopia. Open source means you can see how they work, and even change that if necessary.
Federation means you can host and manage your own instance, and decide whether to open and federate it across other social networks and instances. You have full control over it, and it should not be necessary to create yet another social network from the ground up.
See https://techcentral.co.za/ethiopia-to-build-local-rival-to-facebook-and-whatsapp/110488/
#technology #ethiopia #socialnetworks #fediverse #africa
This is to me the key development with ActivityHub protocol (and others like it). It allows decentralization without losing the wider network. Centralization agents threaten the world with balkanization (splinternet, for example is the common catchphrase) but you often feel the issue is a refusal to support interoperability as that challenges their business logic. They have not built value-exchange systems that can succeed under decentralized networks the same way they have succeeded under centralized networks. So to see Lemmy and others rebutt the splinternet argument without centralization, one can only support its development.