4 ms·

I hesitate to get all Clay Shirkey here, but I think this is fundamentally different from media conglomerates and Bell Systems, given that now anyone has the ab

by moxie 10y ago

I hesitate to get all Clay Shirkey here, but I think this is fundamentally different from media conglomerates and Bell Systems, given that now anyone has the ability to build their own overlay service with relatively minimal investment. Part of what I've been noticing is that we have these "walled gardens" today that people consider to be synonymous with "lock in," but it's actually easier for people to move from Viber to WhatsApp to Telegram to Signal today than it is for people to move from gmail to yahoo mail. In a sense there's less lock-in with centralized messaging services than there is with the federated ones, due in part to the move towards user-owned identifiers like phone numbers.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cortesoft 10y ago
I get what you are saying about it being easier to move from one walled garden to another (based on the evidence that those moves happen more often than moves from between email providers)... but there is such a huge caveat that those moves are never a move chosen by an individual. I cannot, as an individual, choose to move from one walled garden messenger app to another - if I do, I cannot message those people that don't. I am stuck going along with the group. This is ok in a lot cases (when the group's priorities line up with mine), but sometimes the things that are important to the group are different than the things that are important to me. For example, I might prioritize security over ease of use, but since the group doesn't, I will never get my wish, and I am stuck on a service that sacrifices security for ease of use.
- schwarrrtz 10y ago
  Wouldn't you still have that problem with a federated system? You could roll your own uber-secure decentralized messaging protocol right now, if you wanted, but if nobody else adopts it then you're basically SOL.
  - TuringTest 10y ago
    The difference, I think, is that with federated system you can have a partial state where you communicate securely with those that have also adopted the security extensions, while making insecure connections with those who didn't, all within the same application/protocol (by using protocol extensions). Therefore, such features can be gradually adopted by an increasing amount of users. If the system is centralized and it doesn't support security, it's all or nothing; to enable secure protocols, both you and the other party must change to a different app, and you'd have to support both systems in order to communicate with secure and insecure users.
marcosdumay 10y ago
> it's actually easier for people to move from Viber to WhatsApp to Telegram to Signal today than it is for people to move from gmail to yahoo mail. That's only because those apps aren't used for anything complex, while email goes in all kinds of automation and long term storage. Ant that's only because email is some stable technology that you can count on working without "staying in contact", or "checking you got it". (Even if many people will do those things.)
marssaxman 10y ago
Okay, I guess I see some value there. The problem is that my motivation is fundamentally political, and centralized services are basically autocracies. I suppose it's a good thing that people can emigrate more easily now, thereby forcing dictators to compete with each other to attract subjects - but I wasn't looking for a benevolent dictatorship, I wanted us to kick the whole hierarchy over and use our shiny new communication tools to organize a happy self-regulating democracy. What frustrates me about your article is not that I think you're wrong, because I don't have sufficient knowledge to make such a claim: what bugs me is the fear that you're right, which would mean that we failed to get the job done and now the window of opportunity has closed. I guess a more benevolent dictatorship is an improvement, but it's a sufficiently small improvement that it leaves me feeling like the last 15 or so years of Internet development were basically a waste of time.
xg15 10y ago
Part of what I've been noticing is that we have these "walled gardens" today that people consider to be synonymous with "lock in," but it's actually easier for people to move from Viber to WhatsApp to Telegram to Signal today than it is for people to move from gmail to yahoo mail. I wonder how much of this is specific to messaging services, though: After all, messagers are both real-time and strongly biased towards current information. This means it's both very easy no notify people of a new account and relatively painless to close down an old one - you rarely have valuable archieved Whatsapp messages that you can't afford to lose. Finally, thanks to platform notification APIs, it's very easy to run different messengers at once, so if your social network is split between different services, that's usually not a problem. I don't see how those qualities are present in other services which have become more centralized - e.g. email, cloud storage, more persistent social networks or publishing. If I'd like to shut down my Facebook account and switch to some other hypothetical network, without losing all my contacts, that's going to be a lot more difficult than switching messengers. Also note that smartphone apps are pretty much "walled gardens within a walled garden" as of now: Yes, it's easy to port my contacts from one android app to another android app or to run different messenger apps in parallel. But that's because I'm actually just giving different apps permission to the same underlying APIs and database. Shutting down my Google account and migrating to a cempletely open alternative: not so easy. I do agree with the post that centralized services de facto are more sucessful than federation in the current ecosystem. But I'd argue that centralized services still have a lot of disadvantages for their users. So maybe we should start analyzing why this is the case instead of just shrugging and saying this is how the works works.

by moxie 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

cortesoft 10y ago

I get what you are saying about it being easier to move from one walled garden to another (based on the evidence that those moves happen more often than moves from between email providers)... but there is such a huge caveat that those moves are never a move chosen by an individual. I cannot, as an individual, choose to move from one walled garden messenger app to another - if I do, I cannot message those people that don't. I am stuck going along with the group. This is ok in a lot cases (when the group's priorities line up with mine), but sometimes the things that are important to the group are different than the things that are important to me. For example, I might prioritize security over ease of use, but since the group doesn't, I will never get my wish, and I am stuck on a service that sacrifices security for ease of use.

schwarrrtz 10y ago
Wouldn't you still have that problem with a federated system? You could roll your own uber-secure decentralized messaging protocol right now, if you wanted, but if nobody else adopts it then you're basically SOL.
- TuringTest 10y ago
  The difference, I think, is that with federated system you can have a partial state where you communicate securely with those that have also adopted the security extensions, while making insecure connections with those who didn't, all within the same application/protocol (by using protocol extensions). Therefore, such features can be gradually adopted by an increasing amount of users. If the system is centralized and it doesn't support security, it's all or nothing; to enable secure protocols, both you and the other party must change to a different app, and you'd have to support both systems in order to communicate with secure and insecure users.

marcosdumay 10y ago

> it's actually easier for people to move from Viber to WhatsApp to Telegram to Signal today than it is for people to move from gmail to yahoo mail. That's only because those apps aren't used for anything complex, while email goes in all kinds of automation and long term storage. Ant that's only because email is some stable technology that you can count on working without "staying in contact", or "checking you got it". (Even if many people will do those things.)

marssaxman 10y ago

Okay, I guess I see some value there. The problem is that my motivation is fundamentally political, and centralized services are basically autocracies. I suppose it's a good thing that people can emigrate more easily now, thereby forcing dictators to compete with each other to attract subjects - but I wasn't looking for a benevolent dictatorship, I wanted us to kick the whole hierarchy over and use our shiny new communication tools to organize a happy self-regulating democracy. What frustrates me about your article is not that I think you're wrong, because I don't have sufficient knowledge to make such a claim: what bugs me is the fear that you're right, which would mean that we failed to get the job done and now the window of opportunity has closed. I guess a more benevolent dictatorship is an improvement, but it's a sufficiently small improvement that it leaves me feeling like the last 15 or so years of Internet development were basically a waste of time.

xg15 10y ago

Part of what I've been noticing is that we have these "walled gardens" today that people consider to be synonymous with "lock in," but it's actually easier for people to move from Viber to WhatsApp to Telegram to Signal today than it is for people to move from gmail to yahoo mail. I wonder how much of this is specific to messaging services, though: After all, messagers are both real-time and strongly biased towards current information. This means it's both very easy no notify people of a new account and relatively painless to close down an old one - you rarely have valuable archieved Whatsapp messages that you can't afford to lose. Finally, thanks to platform notification APIs, it's very easy to run different messengers at once, so if your social network is split between different services, that's usually not a problem. I don't see how those qualities are present in other services which have become more centralized - e.g. email, cloud storage, more persistent social networks or publishing. If I'd like to shut down my Facebook account and switch to some other hypothetical network, without losing all my contacts, that's going to be a lot more difficult than switching messengers. Also note that smartphone apps are pretty much "walled gardens within a walled garden" as of now: Yes, it's easy to port my contacts from one android app to another android app or to run different messenger apps in parallel. But that's because I'm actually just giving different apps permission to the same underlying APIs and database. Shutting down my Google account and migrating to a cempletely open alternative: not so easy. I do agree with the post that centralized services de facto are more sucessful than federation in the current ecosystem. But I'd argue that centralized services still have a lot of disadvantages for their users. So maybe we should start analyzing why this is the case instead of just shrugging and saying this is how the works works.