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Fediverse is such a poor design. It's utterly futile. The ID is tied to a host, so every time you lose your host, there's a lot of work to do, because you don'

by dpc_pw 6y ago

Fediverse is such a poor design. It's utterly futile. The ID is tied to a host, so every time you lose your host, there's a lot of work to do, because you don't own your account - your host do. You basically have to start from scratch every time, so what's the point? Better to use Twitter, at least there's some chance they will not dissapear out of the blue. Identities should be self-generated, and independent of any hosting. Fediverse hosting should just facilitate passing stuff when peers are offline. Then it wouldn't matter if you're on one server or other, because it wouldn't be even visible in the UI. https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork had some more interesting ideas, but AFAIK execution was rather poor.

WorldMaker 6y ago
That ID design has worked well enough for email for multiple decades. Most of the ways of dealing with Fediverse moves are similar to email ("please update your contact book") though the Fediverse has some smarter tools for automatically updating "address books" than email has. Here too the "centralization" problem mirrors email in that there have often been large email hosts that have the majority of users, but a long, long tail of smaller hosts.
- dpc_pw 6y ago
  > That ID design has worked well enough for email for multiple decades. Did it? Oh really? Well if you consider email decentralization a great success, than I retract. Fediverse can totally replicate that "success". I guess it already did. There's Twitter and long tail already. Mission accomplished.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Your sarcasm doesn't appear helpful here. I'm not saying it is perfect (it's definitely not), I'm just saying it is "time tested" and "sufficient" ("well enough"). Perfect is the enemy of the good, and all that. You already pointed out one attempted alternative and its many drawbacks. We don't have a "perfect" solution yet, and that's not a reason to stop trying to build one. I just don't think you should be so quick to criticize the Fediverse for using the well worn trail until someone builds something better instead of blazing a new one on their own.

by dpc_pw 6y ago

WorldMaker 6y ago

That ID design has worked well enough for email for multiple decades. Most of the ways of dealing with Fediverse moves are similar to email ("please update your contact book") though the Fediverse has some smarter tools for automatically updating "address books" than email has. Here too the "centralization" problem mirrors email in that there have often been large email hosts that have the majority of users, but a long, long tail of smaller hosts.

dpc_pw 6y ago
> That ID design has worked well enough for email for multiple decades. Did it? Oh really? Well if you consider email decentralization a great success, than I retract. Fediverse can totally replicate that "success". I guess it already did. There's Twitter and long tail already. Mission accomplished.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Your sarcasm doesn't appear helpful here. I'm not saying it is perfect (it's definitely not), I'm just saying it is "time tested" and "sufficient" ("well enough"). Perfect is the enemy of the good, and all that. You already pointed out one attempted alternative and its many drawbacks. We don't have a "perfect" solution yet, and that's not a reason to stop trying to build one. I just don't think you should be so quick to criticize the Fediverse for using the well worn trail until someone builds something better instead of blazing a new one on their own.