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The article says the indie web won’t succeed because it lacks the engineered addictivity of the regular, ‘big tobacco’ web. In reality, it doesn’t even come to

The article says the indie web won’t succeed because it lacks the engineered addictivity of the regular, ‘big tobacco’ web. In reality, it doesn’t even come to that. The indie web is, as of now, inferior to the point that no honest product comparison could make it seem an alternative. It requires you to learn concepts (like Mastodon’s federation and servers) that does not benefit you in any real way in your day-to-day use, adds additional complexity, and makes things less practical on the user end in the real world, even if in abstract it does improve the ideas underlying. P2P is still trying to win based on the goodness of people’s hearts. That does not work - I’m saying this as someone who built and is running a P2P platform myself (Aether, https://getaether.net https://getaether.net) so I struggle with the same thing. You have to be decentralised and a better product. The only way to make this is to play to the strengths of P2P networks. If you try to copy a centralised service to make it P2P you will always be at a huge disadvantage, since centralised networks will be always better at running centralised systems. If you do something that’s only really possible on a P2P system though, then you can offer the centralised internet an actual alternative. I don’t think anyone does that yet. (Though for whatever it’s worth, I’m trying.)

Karrot_Kream 7y ago
You don't need to understand federation to use Mastodon.
- theoh 7y ago
  If you want to comment on a post on a different instance, you need to know what is going on at some trivial level to get the addressing/login right. It's not obvious, and some instances have surprising restrictions that make life more complicated. That's probably what is meant here by "understanding federation". The zero institution of federation is... The thing is broken up into multiple parts.
  - daveid 7y ago
    Most of the time you'd come across a post on a different instance in your home feed which just takes a click to reply to, the same as any other post.
    - theoh 7y ago
      To get to the point of having a "home feed" you have to choose an instance. It's not like Usenet where there was a default local NNRP server, no decision to be made Having a basic grasp of what federation means is about as important in Mastodon as knowing what a "group" was on Usenet: it's the first concept one needs to learn.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - tgragnato 7y ago
    I wonder why the fediverse decided to deviate from the email syntax. It's anecdotal, but when I tried to push for ActivityPub the major source of confusion was the prepending @: once I started aliasing <account>@<instance> to @<account>@<instance> everybody stopped asking.
mindgam3 7y ago
As someone who was an early social media insider (FB, Bebo) — I completely agree. I can't speak for the larger indie web space, but within the social media niche, the concept of friend portability would go a long way towards making indie platforms viable again. See https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/12/friends-wherever/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/12/friends-wherever/
weinzierl 7y ago
> It requires you to learn concepts [..] that does not benefit you in any real way in your day-to-day use, adds additional complexity, and makes things less practical on the user end in the real world, even if in abstract it does improve the ideas underlying. No offense, but this is a good summary of what people were saying about the www in the 90s.
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  And the web fixed these issues, one by one, on one end by being simplified by generations and generations of technologists, and on the other end by adding actual real world uses like making shopping easy. Most importantly, it did not have a full blown competitor that everyone was already using that it had to contend with. The past is a foreign country. Web of the ‘90s has almost no likeness to the web we have today. Had it stayed like that, we’d still be faxing things around.
  - h2odragon 7y ago
    The web of the early 90s had little resemblance to the web of the late 90s, for that matter. Aether looks cool (I want to dig in deeper); the continual revivals and evolution of the Usenet-like ideas keep me hoping that something like it will catch and get big again. The latest wave of the eternal September is using terminals that make it damn hard to enter text, and I wonder if that is a killer stumbling block, or a critical and necessary filter.
  - weinzierl 7y ago
    > And the web fixed these issues, one by one, on one end by being simplified by generations and generations of technologists, and on the other end by adding actual real world uses like making shopping easy. All of this can happen with "Indie" Social Media too. > Most importantly, it did not have a full blown competitor that everyone was already using that it had to contend with. We had telephones and fax machines, which many people were happy with. Just as an example: Things like Internet Chat were seen as toys by the grown-ups and few people had the foresight that 25 years later people will spend more time sending messages than they spend on the phone. The so called "Indie" Social Media could have benefits that will kill traditional Social Media one day - or maybe there are good reasons this will never happen. Not practical, hard to use and not having a real use case are no good reasons. They just apply to any new technology in the early stages. > The past is a foreign country. Web of the ‘90s has almost no likeness to the web we have today. Had it stayed like that, we’d still be faxing things around. Agreed. Same applies for "Indie" Social Media.
kickscondor 7y ago
I see all of your points about ‘success’ and ‘inferiority’ if I look at this from the perspective of Facebook being an ‘upgrade’ to the Web - ease of use, friends at your fingertips, a landslide of short simple updates. However, I don’t actually see it that way. I would have preferred to fork the Web back in 2007 or so. This is going to sound out of touch, perhaps, but the future of the Web for me, personally, consists of entirely different things. Something like: a place to store my writings/conversations that’s mine and can be organized and designed like I prefer, a good way of finding new people (random little out-of-the-way folks of any stripe), and I don’t want a big feed of random garbage - I want to visit other sites now and then, like I would visit friends IRL - I don’t need everyone in my life everyday. I don’t even care about decentralization or P2P - I actually don’t see that as a central part of the Indieweb. The above is what is important to me. And the Indieweb has been surprisingly satisfying in this way. And it’s actually growing. Not much, but I’m happy with the friends I’ve made. I’m happy with HN as well, for learning things and staying out of my face - but it gets to feel a bit faceless at times because it’s just a bunch of gray comments with often very little to distinguish the people here.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  > However, I don’t actually see it that way. I would have preferred to fork the Web back in 2007 or so. This is going to sound out of touch, perhaps, but the future of the Web for me, personally, consists of entirely different things. Something like: a place to store my writings/conversations that’s mine and can be organized and designed like I prefer, a good way of finding new people (random little out-of-the-way folks of any stripe), and I don’t want a big feed of random garbage - I want to visit other sites now and then, like I would visit friends IRL - I don’t need everyone in my life everyday. that's nice but it's not what prints money
  - walterbell 7y ago
    > that's nice but it's not what prints money Then it's a self-authenticating firewall / Grail quest. Search engines found a way to scale and profit from the long tail.
  - 7y ago
eitland 7y ago
> In reality, it doesn’t even come to that. The indie web is, as of now, inferior to the point that no honest product comparison could make it seem an alternative. Here's one user that prefers the distributed alternatives. Yes, they are less polished but waaay more exiting and usable.
- trickstra 7y ago
  and Mastodon is pretty polished actually

Karrot_Kream 7y ago

You don't need to understand federation to use Mastodon.

theoh 7y ago
If you want to comment on a post on a different instance, you need to know what is going on at some trivial level to get the addressing/login right. It's not obvious, and some instances have surprising restrictions that make life more complicated. That's probably what is meant here by "understanding federation". The zero institution of federation is... The thing is broken up into multiple parts.
- daveid 7y ago
  Most of the time you'd come across a post on a different instance in your home feed which just takes a click to reply to, the same as any other post.
  - theoh 7y ago
    To get to the point of having a "home feed" you have to choose an instance. It's not like Usenet where there was a default local NNRP server, no decision to be made Having a basic grasp of what federation means is about as important in Mastodon as knowing what a "group" was on Usenet: it's the first concept one needs to learn.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- tgragnato 7y ago
  I wonder why the fediverse decided to deviate from the email syntax. It's anecdotal, but when I tried to push for ActivityPub the major source of confusion was the prepending @: once I started aliasing <account>@<instance> to @<account>@<instance> everybody stopped asking.

mindgam3 7y ago

As someone who was an early social media insider (FB, Bebo) — I completely agree. I can't speak for the larger indie web space, but within the social media niche, the concept of friend portability would go a long way towards making indie platforms viable again. See https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/12/friends-wherever/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/12/friends-wherever/

weinzierl 7y ago

> It requires you to learn concepts [..] that does not benefit you in any real way in your day-to-day use, adds additional complexity, and makes things less practical on the user end in the real world, even if in abstract it does improve the ideas underlying. No offense, but this is a good summary of what people were saying about the www in the 90s.

rolleiflex 7y ago
And the web fixed these issues, one by one, on one end by being simplified by generations and generations of technologists, and on the other end by adding actual real world uses like making shopping easy. Most importantly, it did not have a full blown competitor that everyone was already using that it had to contend with. The past is a foreign country. Web of the ‘90s has almost no likeness to the web we have today. Had it stayed like that, we’d still be faxing things around.
- h2odragon 7y ago
  The web of the early 90s had little resemblance to the web of the late 90s, for that matter. Aether looks cool (I want to dig in deeper); the continual revivals and evolution of the Usenet-like ideas keep me hoping that something like it will catch and get big again. The latest wave of the eternal September is using terminals that make it damn hard to enter text, and I wonder if that is a killer stumbling block, or a critical and necessary filter.
- weinzierl 7y ago
  > And the web fixed these issues, one by one, on one end by being simplified by generations and generations of technologists, and on the other end by adding actual real world uses like making shopping easy. All of this can happen with "Indie" Social Media too. > Most importantly, it did not have a full blown competitor that everyone was already using that it had to contend with. We had telephones and fax machines, which many people were happy with. Just as an example: Things like Internet Chat were seen as toys by the grown-ups and few people had the foresight that 25 years later people will spend more time sending messages than they spend on the phone. The so called "Indie" Social Media could have benefits that will kill traditional Social Media one day - or maybe there are good reasons this will never happen. Not practical, hard to use and not having a real use case are no good reasons. They just apply to any new technology in the early stages. > The past is a foreign country. Web of the ‘90s has almost no likeness to the web we have today. Had it stayed like that, we’d still be faxing things around. Agreed. Same applies for "Indie" Social Media.

kickscondor 7y ago

I see all of your points about ‘success’ and ‘inferiority’ if I look at this from the perspective of Facebook being an ‘upgrade’ to the Web - ease of use, friends at your fingertips, a landslide of short simple updates. However, I don’t actually see it that way. I would have preferred to fork the Web back in 2007 or so. This is going to sound out of touch, perhaps, but the future of the Web for me, personally, consists of entirely different things. Something like: a place to store my writings/conversations that’s mine and can be organized and designed like I prefer, a good way of finding new people (random little out-of-the-way folks of any stripe), and I don’t want a big feed of random garbage - I want to visit other sites now and then, like I would visit friends IRL - I don’t need everyone in my life everyday. I don’t even care about decentralization or P2P - I actually don’t see that as a central part of the Indieweb. The above is what is important to me. And the Indieweb has been surprisingly satisfying in this way. And it’s actually growing. Not much, but I’m happy with the friends I’ve made. I’m happy with HN as well, for learning things and staying out of my face - but it gets to feel a bit faceless at times because it’s just a bunch of gray comments with often very little to distinguish the people here.

jcelerier 7y ago
> However, I don’t actually see it that way. I would have preferred to fork the Web back in 2007 or so. This is going to sound out of touch, perhaps, but the future of the Web for me, personally, consists of entirely different things. Something like: a place to store my writings/conversations that’s mine and can be organized and designed like I prefer, a good way of finding new people (random little out-of-the-way folks of any stripe), and I don’t want a big feed of random garbage - I want to visit other sites now and then, like I would visit friends IRL - I don’t need everyone in my life everyday. that's nice but it's not what prints money
- walterbell 7y ago
  > that's nice but it's not what prints money Then it's a self-authenticating firewall / Grail quest. Search engines found a way to scale and profit from the long tail.
- 7y ago

eitland 7y ago

> In reality, it doesn’t even come to that. The indie web is, as of now, inferior to the point that no honest product comparison could make it seem an alternative. Here's one user that prefers the distributed alternatives. Yes, they are less polished but waaay more exiting and usable.

trickstra 7y ago
and Mastodon is pretty polished actually