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None of the reasons they give -- difficulty of user acquisition, conflict between security and convenience, curation, or economies of scale -- are fundamental o
by panic 9y ago
None of the reasons they give -- difficulty of user acquisition, conflict between security and convenience, curation, or economies of scale -- are fundamental obstacles to making a decentralized social network. Mastodon has found some success despite facing the same problems.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoMastodon is not successful by any metric compared with even the smallest social networks, let alone the giants
- panic 9y agoWhere would you find these metrics? Looking at the federated timeline, I see posts appearing at a pretty fast rate (more than one per second), though most of them are in Japanese.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agogo and ask everyone you meet in person today if they've heard of mastodon
- zemnl 9y agoI bet that few of them will reply that it is an extinct animal, some others that it is a cool band, and most of them that they have never heard of such a thing.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dest 9y agoIt's very popular in Japan because of the "lolicon" phenomenon (cultural sexy drawings of youth people), which is not accepted by Twitter because of the occidental culture in which this is a taboo.
- lxrbst 9y agoMastodon is not successful, at all. Apparently content that was not accepted on twitter, such as lolicon, has found a new home on Mastodon. The average user would never bother to migrate to decentralized services for any other reason then necessity, lack of choice, or to escape rules/laws.
- panic 9y agoSure, but centralized services have the same user acquisition problem. Is there something that makes decentralized services uniquely bad at getting users to switch?
- marian0_ 9y agoDecentralised services always come out years later centralised services are launched and their only raison d'etre is not having the rules of those services.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoYeah, I still remember when the web was only a product of Web Inc., and how long it took for independent webserver implementations to take off. Or, before then, do you still remember when email was this walled garden where everyone had an account with Electronic Messaging Solutions Inc.? It took decades until sendmail, exim, qmail, postfix, and so on came along, largely thanks to Google's help in breaking open the former monopoly, and people could finally host their own email servers!
- marian0_ 9y agoI mean the decentralised services of today, no need to write a snark response. THink XMPP, or Mastodon.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoAh, yeah, true, I still remember the days when the walled garden or IRC was the only option around before XMPP was invented. Are you sure you aren't just saying "those decentralized services that happen to be built as replacements for centralized services come out later than what they intend to replace"? Well, yeah, of course they do. While those that happen to be invented decentralized first come out decentralized first. Also, I think email still is a decentralized service of today? And yet, gmail seems to be going strong in centralizing email, doesn't it?!