10 ms·

The problem for the Fediverse will always be domains, in my opinion. It sounds silly to the technical demographic, but to a normal person, it is a massive issue

• encom 6y ago
  >When I sign up for gmail, I can just be myself. I don't have to be myself + something else. I don't understand this sentence. What is the "something else" here that Gmail uniquely lacks?
  • FalconSensei 6y ago
    When someone asks your email, you say 'myemailhandle' and they will already ask if it's gmail. Way easier to speak and remember than if you have your own domain.
  • olah_1 6y ago
    > What is the "something else" here that Gmail uniquely lacks? The unique domain that I would otherwise have to associate myself with. "gmail" is so ubiquitous that it just doesn't mean anything anymore. It's just... the protocol. Tell someone that your email is "alice@alice.website" and even _that_ is saying something significant about yourself that you may not want to say. A big aspect of appearing "cool" is not letting on that you care so much. Social networks and messaging systems should allow people to be "cool" if they want to be.
    • encom 6y ago
      What @gmail.com says to me, is that the user is okay with Google reading their email.
      • olah_1 6y ago
        That's exactly why I said "It sounds silly to the technical demographic". Many people on HN just straight up won't understand what I'm talking about. To a normal person, "@gmail.com" doesn't say _anything_. Give someone a different domain and they will literally look at you funny.
        • mellow2020 6y ago
          Mine is firstname@firstname-lastname.domain, never had that problem. Plenty of email addresses require spelling out the part before the @ anyway, spelling the part after it out too poses no fundamental challenge to anyone I interacted with (who asked for my email address, that is).
          • xaqfox 6y ago
            It's not a problem, but it does send a signal--probably one that is a slight benefit as an adult in a technical line of work, but it might send a different signal for let's say, a teenager who is already struggling to fit in with peers. It may be a stereotype, but stereotypes exist regardless of how easy you or me think it is to register a domain. Sure someone could follow just a few simple steps found on the internet, but why does that person even care to?
            • judge2020 6y ago
              Although, teenagers exchanging email addresses has fallen out of style recently in exchange for sharing Discord tags or Snapchat usernames/showing snapcodes.
    • kevmo314 6y ago
      It's nice to see someone else have this point of view. I have a personal domain but still run @gmail.com because I get the impression that having my own domain makes me look like a complete nerd to my friends. Of course, I am, but no need to reinforce that.
• FalconSensei 6y ago
  THIS! Also, if someone asks me for my YT channel, I just say the channel name and they know where to look, youtube.com. With peertube you have to: give your channel name, remember then it's NOT youtube, tall then the correct instance, hope they won't type peertube on google and try to search for you in the first instance that comes up.
  • toomuchtodo 6y ago
    How would you suggest we improve on this?
    • jbob2000 6y ago
      Maybe some kind of centralized lookup? Oh wait...
      • FalconSensei 6y ago
        And how do you handle all the @pewdiepie@someotherinstance? The original creator has to create an account on all instances to avoid fakes, or give up on the platform?
        • olah_1 6y ago
          In a P2P model, there's multiple ways of going about this. But I tend to think that a true web of trust model makes the most sense. There may be 250 pewdiepie's on the network, but I'll just follow the one that (1) is closest in my network (followed by my friends) and (2) has the most follows (AKA highest trust). We already follow this logic of #1 and #2 today even on centralized networks. Web of trust just makes sense to people intuitively. Who do I know that already knows you? How else can I determine that you're legit? I'm gonna snoop your profile and see what looks legit. Ah, looks like a lot of normal people follow you already. Of course this isn't full proof. But it's not full proof on centralized networks either. We just need reasonable certainty.
        • input_sh 6y ago
• detaro 6y ago
  How is @gmail.com different than any other @domain.com?
  • FalconSensei 6y ago
    Do a social experiment. When you are at a store and they ask your email for your receipt, try giving then your email, and compare their expressions and the time they need to input it in the system if it's gmail or your own domain.
    • detaro 6y ago
      But the choice never was "gmail or your own domain". Pre-gmail it already was likely to be one of a few large providers, (and to a good degree still is). The argument sounds a bit like "gmail won because gmail won": For gmail to be the default assumption, they already have to have won.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • inetknght 6y ago
        > the choice never was "gmail or your own domain" Before I had gmail, I used my ISP email address. While using my ISP email address, I set up an email server with a dynamic hostname -- homeip.net at the time. It 100% worked. There absolutely was a choice. You just had to be technical to know it existed in the first place.
        • detaro 6y ago
          You misunderstand what I'm saying. There was no binary "gmail or own domain", because there always was "large mail provider or own domain", which turned into "large mail provider, large mail provider N+1 (gmail) or own domain"
      • samatman 6y ago
        Arguments from networks effects are basically "X won because X won". The argument is that, at some critical point, X became the default choice, and stayed that way. Why it was gmail was interesting at the time, but isn't anymore; now it's literally just "people pick gmail because it's gmail".
• api 6y ago
  It also means that if these get popular they will coalesce into an oligopoly. Those huge domains will then be pressured by the costs of hosting and the need to improve the protocol to monetize their users with ads or surveillance. Congratulations, we reinvented Facebook. Anything with any hierarchy in its namespace will follow this path. Only pure P2P has a chance of avoiding it, and pure P2P is very hard to build and scale. It also faces a serious protocol ossification challenge with no good solution (yet). Federated protocols face it too, but less as there are fewer cats to herd.
  • M2Ys4U 6y ago
    >It also means that if these get popular they will coalesce into an oligopoly. That's true of pretty much any system, though: The Iron Law of Oligarchy[0] always applies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
  • eitland 6y ago
    Eh. The Fediverse actually try hard already to avoid this. Fpr instance by blocking signups to popular instances an redirecting people elsewhere.
  • thekyle 6y ago
    I fail to see what the problem is here. So you end up with a couple big free providers that serve ads (like Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, etc.) and some smaller premium providers (like Fastmail, G-Suite, ProtonMail, etc.) and if someone really wants to they can even host their own. Also, if someone had a neat idea for a new Fediverse business they can launch it and interoperate with all the existing ones (like starting a new email service). How is that anything like reinventing a monolithic social network like Facebook?
    • fzeroracer 6y ago
      Consider how Facebook got started. It didn't appear out of thin air and immediately dominate the market, it was a competitor fighting against LiveJournal, MySpace etc and it managed to achieve monolithic control through becoming the defacto standard. As a separate analogy, consider a server for a MMO. MMO servers live and die based off the usercount, and lower count servers are considered less desirable for other incoming users. So what ends up happening is that players congregate around the server that has the most users, which in turn drives up costs for said server requiring them to take in more money (through donations or ads or subscriptions) and soon they become the standard for other servers to follow. Even if other servers end up hosting, few reach the same numbers because most new users are instead redirected or drawn to existing servers with a high user count. So we're back to stage 1 where the fediverse hasn't really solved anything at all. Said competitor may then choose to instead jump off the fediverse and take their users with them (because you become associated with certain other negative groups which are bad for your image), the fediverse starves because your average user doesn't care and then we have Facebook again.
• vertex-four 6y ago
  GMail won because I had to keep deleting email from my old provider, Google was pretending to "not be evil", and they offered me an ever-increasing amount of storage. Then I told my friends about it. Eventually, everyone used it because everyone who should've known better (myself included) recommended it to them.
  • twomoretime 6y ago
    I don't doubt that Google pre IPO probably believed in their motto. It's the investor influence that has gradually steered Google into lucrative but ethically questionable domains.
    • FriendlyNormie 6y ago
      Ah yes, the evil voiceless investors steered Google, not the totally trustworthy Jews who ran the company since day one.
  • einpoklum 6y ago
    Not everyone recommended it to the masses. Some cautioned against it from the get-go - and Google was a problematic company with too much power already when GMail was being rolled out.
• paroneayea 6y ago
  Hi! I'm one of the co-authors of ActivityPub, and I agree with you. I wrote a very out-of-date writeup about bridging ActivityPub and P2P networks some time ago: https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot5-boston/blob/master/final-documents/activitypub-decentralized-distributed.md https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot5-boston/blob/master/f... I think you'll find it agrees with your assessments. DNS and SSL Certificate Authorities centralize an otherwise sensible decentralized system. It's out of date because work has continued. Here's some hints as to how we can improve the situation: - Decrease importance of server you're on by allowing easy account migration. One easy way to do this is to use mutable data to represent your activitypub profile in a content-addressed store... you can look at mutable links in IPFS as an example (the work that we're doing on Datashards is also relevant). (ActivityPub actually does support other URI types that are not https so this is no problem...) Don't like the server you're on? Update your actor profile to point its inbox URI at another place. - Support hosting over more p2p, easily self-hostable, NAT-punching and secure systems where you know you have a secure connection because the name of the server is actually the fingerprint of the key. That's actually what tor .onion servers and I2P servers are. There's no reason you can't run ActivityPub over such servers, and some people do, but it isn't widely supported because... - ... because of the way we've chosen to do names. The right answer isn't webfinger (which isn't in the ActivityPub spec but is what's popularly deployed), it's petnames: https://github.com/cwebber/rebooting-the-web-of-trust-spring2018/blob/petnames/draft-documents/petnames.md https://github.com/cwebber/rebooting-the-web-of-trust-spring... - And now you need a way to handle anti-abuse in a system that doesn't assume that domain names and instances are all too important. OcapPub outlines some of that (sadly unfinished, but the core ideas are there) https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org - On top of all that, maybe add store and forward messaging to support nodes being offline. This can be done and we have plans but I need to write them in a more visible place. So in short, as one of the main authors of the biggest fediverse specs out there, not only do I agree, work is happening.
  • olah_1 6y ago
    Hello! Thanks so much for the reply. This is exactly why I post critiques. I want to spur conversation. Everything I'm reading in your comment and in the links you shared, I agree with. I think the main difference is in our choice of tools. For the network mapping (for trust and petnames), I believe that a graph structure is required. Having this at a foundational layer is important for scalability and mathematical simplicity imo. Other than that, I think we agree on offline-first and multi-casting being requirements. And bonus points for keypair management through shamir's secret sharing and multi-device key management. Can I contact/keep up with you directly somewhere to continue the conversation?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• emersion 6y ago
  >When I sign up for gmail, I can just be myself. I don't have to be myself + something else. Well, it's still you + gmail.com. It could be you + fastmail.com, it could be you + posteo.de, it could be you + <insert other e-mail provider>. You still chose gmail over another provider, like you could choose cucumbers.pizza over another provider in the case of the Fediverse.
  • krainboltgreene 6y ago
    The point was that GMail became so ubiquitus as to no longer be a part of the equation. I remember in 2009~ forms automatically adding @gmail.com.
    • rajman187 6y ago
      Then this could not be the reason they won—initially it was not the “ubiquity of gmail” as it was just new to the market and could not be synonymous with email. They won by providing a good service for free with an ever-increasing capacity and iterating over features. Note that I’m not suggesting it was perfect or the best solution; plenty of questionable decisions made along the way (the way inbox was handled comes to mind)
      • afiori 6y ago
        That is the argument, that for a time it was in practice a default choice, just a bit before that the default choice was hotmail, at least in italy.
    • wuunderbar 6y ago
      The problem (if we're assuming it was one) still existed in the initial days of Gmail. Point still stands.
    • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      ...but gmail isn't that ubiquitous! A large majority of the emails I receive are from non-gmail addresses. True, most of these are related to where people work, but still, it drives decentralization, and I think most people understand that email ≠ gmail.
• untog 6y ago
  > I believe that gmail won email not because of security and good user experience. I think they won because it removed the complexity of this problem. I can’t agree with that because Gmail was far from the first to provide this. Growing up all my friends and I had Hotmail addresses. Gmail won because of unlimited storage and to a lesser extent a far superior UI. The invitation system also gave it a “cool” factor others never had.
  • amelius 6y ago
    And the "beta" tagline gave it something magical.
• jccalhoun 6y ago
  not having a .com and one standard domain does make it tough. I know when Mastadon first got hyped I went to sign up and it asked to pick a federated server. I have no idea which one I picked.
• JoshTriplett 6y ago
  While I don't agree that "gmail" is "be myself", I do think the biggest missing piece from the Fediverse is an easy, straightforward way to handle "I already have a domain and an email at that domain, I want to use that domain for the fediverse, without hosting anyone else's content that might create liability or annoyance". I have an email address. That unique identifier is also what I'd want to use for the fediverse. So how do I most easily do that? (This isn't going to be a universal expectation; email at your own domain is not incredibly common. But it's also not exceedingly rare, especially among technical folks, or among folks with a personal "brand" and social media presence.)
  • staticvoidmaine 6y ago
    I can’t agree with this enough. I’d love to hear more about how to accomplish what you’re asking in the current state of the fediverse. I’ve been reading into it but am not sure how to use my own instance as my “who I am” and “where I am from” while not allowing others to be from my “home” yet still safely connecting and conversing with others. It’s marketed as easy, but once you start digging into the details, it quickly becomes more complex than I was expecting. I’ve been looking into Mastadon, Pixelfed, and Matrix to use in this way, but it seems pointless since I don’t want to host my friends and family’s content, and they’re not going to sign up for some random odd sounding instance. I’m then left with an empty social network or communication tool that’s little more than a tech demo.
  • chrismorgan 6y ago
    This is what I say every time; and combined with that, I want to be able to use different ActivityPub software all from my own domain. I don’t want to run Mastodon at foo.chrismorgan.info, publish blog posts via ActivityPub at bar.chrismorgan.info, handle videos at baz.chrismorgan.info, &c. I just want to be me@chrismorgan.info (I’ll settle for @me@chrismorgan.info if I must) everywhere.
• lxdesk 6y ago
  To get a little philosophical, there's a kind of "lack of self" inherent in minimizing oneself into a normalized default like GMail. Someone with a common name ends up being "bob.jones.23@gmail.com" - and if you were the first "bob.jones", you will get no end of messages erroneously addressed to you and consequent exposure to the secrets of the others. The irony is that because email is so broken as an open platform, this normalized default so prone to collision has become the legitimate one, and everything else is filtered out...just like what tends to happen in other domains of society. It's easy upfront, but we're finally getting past the initial adoption of these technologies, and overall quality of service - from initial UX to issues like these - is going to become an increasingly large factor.
• narrator 6y ago
  You guys forget how big of a problem spam was before gmail. They won the AI arms race and basically eliminated spam as a major problem.
  • barney54 6y ago
    This is right on, along with the large amount of free storage.
    • chasd00 6y ago
      also, Gmail invented the conversation format. People forget that all email prior was displayed by receive datetime desc only. finally, Gmail was the first to get Ajax right in a webmail setup, new mail just showed up without having to click a refresh or send/receive button.
      • oarsinsync 6y ago
        It’s a shame that gmail ignored long-standing methods of threading email chains that other clients already had been doing for years, in lieu of their subject based 100 email limit conversations. It’s also a shame that they also helped enforce top posting, especially considering how ludicrous it is in the context of threaded emails.
• faehnrich 6y ago
  > Do you want alice@cucumbers.pizza? Or do you want alice@witches.bike? I agree, it's hard to choose from so many awesome domains.