5 ms·

The entire model is flawed. You don't want federation (small tribes). That's not why people use FB, IG, Twitter. They use it because that's where the people are

by zelly 7y ago

The entire model is flawed. You don't want federation (small tribes). That's not why people use FB, IG, Twitter. They use it because that's where the people are--network effects. The only reason I'm posting here is because this is where your message can reach people. Federation means you will never ever get network effects. Dead on arrival. It's possible to have decentralization with network effects. Just have one canonical network. Tor and Bitcoin are good examples. Downside (or upside?) is that you can't have moderation or else whoever does the moderation becomes the new jack and it's not decentralized anymore.

mathnmusic 7y ago
Why do people use email then? Network effects can be achieved with or without federation. They aren't mutually exclusive.
- zelly 7y ago
  Email is federated at a lower layer. At the UX layer, it is not federated. Fully qualified email addresses are like usernames. If you ask a random email user, they would think it works like this. If you ask a random Mastodon user, they know that they have to join a relatively isolated silo. Also most uses of email are peer-to-peer. In the case of two people emailing each other, the number of peers is 2. This is not directly comparable to public social networks. Email was once the main way social networking was done via mailing lists. This was kind of federated, because you had to ask the listserv to add you to the list. The federated aspects of email are what caused it to die and get replaced by forums which in turn got replaced by Reddit and Twitter. (Notice the trend? Mailing lists -> forums -> Reddit. From federated to centralized. Network effects.)
  - lokedhs 7y ago
    The Fediverse is federated on exactly the same layer as email. You have a username of the form user@domain,this is the same in both Mastodon and email. You can send messages to anyone regardless of the instance they're on. This is also exactly the same on both Mastodon and email. Precisely how are these different in any relevant way?
    - DeadSuperHero 7y ago
      The fediverse has conversation streams that are mostly in public indexes, which other people can observe and interact with. In addition to these conversations comprised of statuses representing activities, it is also possible to follow the authors providing said content so that their latest posts show up in your stream, regardless of whether those posts pertained to that conversation or not. Email, conversely, often is a limited-scope conversation that can only be observed or interacted with between the people participating in said message. Of course, this changes slightly with the use-case of mailing lists, which often provide a public archive of prior messages. But email content is generally not accessible from the web in the same manner that a status is.
      - lokedhs 7y ago
        Sure, but when I said "in a relevant way" I was talking about differences that are relevant in the context of the conversation. There was nothing wrong in your description of the differences between the Fediverse and email, but none of those differences explain the previous poster's assertion that the protocols work at fundamentally different levels.
- whoopdedo 7y ago
  They don't, though[1]. It's often the lowest-common-denominator because everyone has it. But if a more streamlined alternative, like Slack, is available then it will be preferred over email. A quick look at websites talking about email trends finds that the only people who are bullish on email are marketers. And that's why everyone else hates it: it's predominantly spam. So if you want to compare ActivityPub to email you'd better have a strong argument for why it won't just become another vehicle for spam if it ever becomes widespread. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/16/personal-email-is-dead--but-i-still-cant-quit-it.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/16/personal-email-is-dead--but-...
rglullis 7y ago
Federation does NOT mean small tribes. This is the meme that needs to die. You can make the argument that discovery of new people is harder on a federated system, but this a problem analogous to trying to find content on the early web and this is a solved problem already.
- zelly 7y ago
  > this a problem analogous to trying to find content on the early web and this is a solved problem already The early web died. The problem was solved by killing it and replacing it with big institutions. It got replaced by the superior network effects of Facebook feeds, Reddit feeds, Instagram, Twitter, or the very site you're scrolling through now. Twitter is the bar or the town square. Mastodon etc. is people's living rooms.
  - slightwinder 7y ago
    Early web did not died, it evolved. It gained neccessary tools and platforms. The web from the early days still exists, it's just not the only face the web has now.
    - pessimizer 7y ago
      More like they stopped including it in search engine results and starved most of it to death.
  - rglullis 7y ago
    BS. Your argument has two problems: you are confusing ActivityPub with Mastodon, and you are confusing the aggregation part with the content itself. The early web might have been eclipsed by the big companies, but don't be fooled by availability bias. How much of the internet is powered by Wordpress.org? Quite a lot to be considered "dead". How many people still use some kind of RSS Reader? Google killed its offering more for a lack of way to monetization than for a lack of users. (Also, I don't remember people saying "RSS is dead, there is no way to discover who to subscribe to.") Look at messaging protocols, Matrix also is still small compared to WhatsApp/Messenger/iMessage/Slack/Discord/whatever but their are numbers are growing. Far from dead. Mastodon is people's living rooms only because the current users are mostly refugees from the centralized platforms, and yes, they are making this mistake of conflating instances with tribes. But this temporary and specific to Mastodon. As more systems start adopting ActivityPub and the more pulverized the user's become, the less this will be an issue.
slightwinder 7y ago
People want both. Big world and small tribes. People are constantly building new community everywhere for non-technical reasons, even if similar communitys already exist. Why do you think they do that? Small tribes have better control and more trust. Big crowds are lacking this for the individuals.
hippich 7y ago
It is fine for both to exist. FB|ig|Twitter is like getting to NY's times square - a lot of new people/ads, and then coming back home to your federated tribe (perhaps with new friends you found at the times square).
ravenstine 7y ago
I don't disagree, but it's not 100% true that the only people who use centralized social networks do so for the network effects. YouTube in particular is used by a lot of people because of content discovery, not just the network effects.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Content discovery is about having a good search engine. Why couldn't that be federated?
  - zelly 7y ago
    No real reason except no one has tried yet. It's extremely difficult to get search right, although Moore's law and tensorflow has probably made it easier to attempt today. Latency would be significantly worse than major search engines though. I think for the people who care about the open web, having a libre alternative search engine should be the highest priority. It's one of the few classes of software/services that no one has tried replicating open source.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Hmm, doesn't eMule have something like that in place (and nearly 2 decades now) ? (It's more janky than a centralized search engine of course...)
  - cvwright 7y ago
    Because the company with the de facto monopoly on web search is the same company that bought the company with the de facto monopoly on user generated video content.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Yes, but we are specifically discussing boycotting those.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
ivanhoe 7y ago
> The only reason I'm posting here is because this is where your message can reach people Actually you're posting it here because this is where it can reach the niche group interested in the subject, and that you're also interested in belonging to. That's a lot different than "go where the people are" because nowadays there's just too many people online, and unless you're doing mass marketing you probably don't want to talk to all of them. To me the most attractive part of fediverse is exactly that, small niche tribes, so very low levels of noise, off-topics and nonsense. It's not ideal as a general-purpose marketing channel, but for users on a receiving side of it (and that's most of us) it makes it even nicer.

by zelly 7y ago

mathnmusic 7y ago

Why do people use email then? Network effects can be achieved with or without federation. They aren't mutually exclusive.

zelly 7y ago
Email is federated at a lower layer. At the UX layer, it is not federated. Fully qualified email addresses are like usernames. If you ask a random email user, they would think it works like this. If you ask a random Mastodon user, they know that they have to join a relatively isolated silo. Also most uses of email are peer-to-peer. In the case of two people emailing each other, the number of peers is 2. This is not directly comparable to public social networks. Email was once the main way social networking was done via mailing lists. This was kind of federated, because you had to ask the listserv to add you to the list. The federated aspects of email are what caused it to die and get replaced by forums which in turn got replaced by Reddit and Twitter. (Notice the trend? Mailing lists -> forums -> Reddit. From federated to centralized. Network effects.)
- lokedhs 7y ago
  The Fediverse is federated on exactly the same layer as email. You have a username of the form user@domain,this is the same in both Mastodon and email. You can send messages to anyone regardless of the instance they're on. This is also exactly the same on both Mastodon and email. Precisely how are these different in any relevant way?
  - DeadSuperHero 7y ago
    The fediverse has conversation streams that are mostly in public indexes, which other people can observe and interact with. In addition to these conversations comprised of statuses representing activities, it is also possible to follow the authors providing said content so that their latest posts show up in your stream, regardless of whether those posts pertained to that conversation or not. Email, conversely, often is a limited-scope conversation that can only be observed or interacted with between the people participating in said message. Of course, this changes slightly with the use-case of mailing lists, which often provide a public archive of prior messages. But email content is generally not accessible from the web in the same manner that a status is.
    - lokedhs 7y ago
      Sure, but when I said "in a relevant way" I was talking about differences that are relevant in the context of the conversation. There was nothing wrong in your description of the differences between the Fediverse and email, but none of those differences explain the previous poster's assertion that the protocols work at fundamentally different levels.
whoopdedo 7y ago
They don't, though[1]. It's often the lowest-common-denominator because everyone has it. But if a more streamlined alternative, like Slack, is available then it will be preferred over email. A quick look at websites talking about email trends finds that the only people who are bullish on email are marketers. And that's why everyone else hates it: it's predominantly spam. So if you want to compare ActivityPub to email you'd better have a strong argument for why it won't just become another vehicle for spam if it ever becomes widespread. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/16/personal-email-is-dead--but-i-still-cant-quit-it.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/16/personal-email-is-dead--but-...

rglullis 7y ago

Federation does NOT mean small tribes. This is the meme that needs to die. You can make the argument that discovery of new people is harder on a federated system, but this a problem analogous to trying to find content on the early web and this is a solved problem already.

zelly 7y ago
> this a problem analogous to trying to find content on the early web and this is a solved problem already The early web died. The problem was solved by killing it and replacing it with big institutions. It got replaced by the superior network effects of Facebook feeds, Reddit feeds, Instagram, Twitter, or the very site you're scrolling through now. Twitter is the bar or the town square. Mastodon etc. is people's living rooms.
- slightwinder 7y ago
  Early web did not died, it evolved. It gained neccessary tools and platforms. The web from the early days still exists, it's just not the only face the web has now.
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    More like they stopped including it in search engine results and starved most of it to death.
- rglullis 7y ago
  BS. Your argument has two problems: you are confusing ActivityPub with Mastodon, and you are confusing the aggregation part with the content itself. The early web might have been eclipsed by the big companies, but don't be fooled by availability bias. How much of the internet is powered by Wordpress.org? Quite a lot to be considered "dead". How many people still use some kind of RSS Reader? Google killed its offering more for a lack of way to monetization than for a lack of users. (Also, I don't remember people saying "RSS is dead, there is no way to discover who to subscribe to.") Look at messaging protocols, Matrix also is still small compared to WhatsApp/Messenger/iMessage/Slack/Discord/whatever but their are numbers are growing. Far from dead. Mastodon is people's living rooms only because the current users are mostly refugees from the centralized platforms, and yes, they are making this mistake of conflating instances with tribes. But this temporary and specific to Mastodon. As more systems start adopting ActivityPub and the more pulverized the user's become, the less this will be an issue.

slightwinder 7y ago

People want both. Big world and small tribes. People are constantly building new community everywhere for non-technical reasons, even if similar communitys already exist. Why do you think they do that? Small tribes have better control and more trust. Big crowds are lacking this for the individuals.

hippich 7y ago

It is fine for both to exist. FB|ig|Twitter is like getting to NY's times square - a lot of new people/ads, and then coming back home to your federated tribe (perhaps with new friends you found at the times square).

ravenstine 7y ago

I don't disagree, but it's not 100% true that the only people who use centralized social networks do so for the network effects. YouTube in particular is used by a lot of people because of content discovery, not just the network effects.

BlueTemplar 7y ago
Content discovery is about having a good search engine. Why couldn't that be federated?
- zelly 7y ago
  No real reason except no one has tried yet. It's extremely difficult to get search right, although Moore's law and tensorflow has probably made it easier to attempt today. Latency would be significantly worse than major search engines though. I think for the people who care about the open web, having a libre alternative search engine should be the highest priority. It's one of the few classes of software/services that no one has tried replicating open source.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Hmm, doesn't eMule have something like that in place (and nearly 2 decades now) ? (It's more janky than a centralized search engine of course...)
- cvwright 7y ago
  Because the company with the de facto monopoly on web search is the same company that bought the company with the de facto monopoly on user generated video content.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Yes, but we are specifically discussing boycotting those.
- ravenstine 7y ago

ivanhoe 7y ago

> The only reason I'm posting here is because this is where your message can reach people Actually you're posting it here because this is where it can reach the niche group interested in the subject, and that you're also interested in belonging to. That's a lot different than "go where the people are" because nowadays there's just too many people online, and unless you're doing mass marketing you probably don't want to talk to all of them. To me the most attractive part of fediverse is exactly that, small niche tribes, so very low levels of noise, off-topics and nonsense. It's not ideal as a general-purpose marketing channel, but for users on a receiving side of it (and that's most of us) it makes it even nicer.