3 ms·

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

by api 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
Eh. The Fediverse actually try hard already to avoid this. Fpr instance by blocking signups to popular instances an redirecting people elsewhere.
thekyle 7y 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 7y 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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - thekyle 7y ago
    Why do MMO players gravitate towards the server with the most players? I don't play MMOs but I'm guessing it's because they can only play with users on the same server as them. Federated services don't have this limitation. As a counter example, if the behavior you described really did happen in federated systems then why hasn't it happened to email?

by api 7y ago

M2Ys4U 7y 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 7y ago

Eh. The Fediverse actually try hard already to avoid this. Fpr instance by blocking signups to popular instances an redirecting people elsewhere.

thekyle 7y 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 7y 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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- thekyle 7y ago
  Why do MMO players gravitate towards the server with the most players? I don't play MMOs but I'm guessing it's because they can only play with users on the same server as them. Federated services don't have this limitation. As a counter example, if the behavior you described really did happen in federated systems then why hasn't it happened to email?