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Federated and decentralized solutions have significant UX issues compared to leading products in the area. They're not only harder to use and slower, but are mu

by ve55 6y ago

Federated and decentralized solutions have significant UX issues compared to leading products in the area. They're not only harder to use and slower, but are much worse at converting and keeping users to begin with, since they're not ran like businesses are, which take in more funding and try hard to optimize all of these user metrics as KPI. It will be a long time before this can change I think, users still do not (and won't) care if what they're using is federated or not. I say this as someone who loves the idea of federated platforms, but we cannot truly succeed until we have a way to convince large amounts of (normal) users to give them a try.

ddevault 6y ago
On the other hand, the fact that no one is thinking about "optimizing KPIs" is a major reason why people like the up and coming federated systems.
- jcims 6y ago
  Eh, KPIs aren't inherently bad...they just trend that way because of the typical audience for them.
tylerchilds 6y ago
I agree about your UX notes, but I disagree with the success criteria. I've wholly quit social media apart from the mastodon instance I'm on. There are enough quality people I'm connected with now that it's a success for me. Am I missing out on content from Facebook/Twitter/Instagram because I'm not connected indirectly to everyone in their gardens? Sure, but I'd argue it's low quality content that was only a drain on my mental health. I guess I'm trying to say, I think it's about the individual success and not the % of market share.
- ve55 6y ago
  I've enjoyed them myself too, and I still use things like IRC on a daily basis. The two impluses I see to get federation to a larger market share are A) to 'save' people from the platforms they're currently stuck on, but also B) get rid of, or at least diminish, their network effects. You could argue maybe A) won't work or isn't possible or needed, but I feel B) myself a lot. For example I meet someone and want to talk to them, but it's likely they might suggest we chat via Skype or Discord or something like that, and if I don't want to use that service I'm often out of luck. That, personally, is what bothers me the most - that network effects seem inherently anti-competitive because they force me to use a platform I wouldn't otherwise want to use, only because they purposefully make their software unable to communicate with competing platforms. For all of the open protocols and specifications we have from HTTP to TLS to HTML and literally one thousand others, we just re-use them over and over to create closed systems that can't talk to each other, which feels like going backwards. Sure it's great all of our computers speak TCP, UDP, TLS, HTTP, and so on. But they don't all speak iMessage, Zoom, Skype, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Mastdodon, Matrix, Slack, etc etc. I still feel constantly locked-in to all of these platforms just when I want to communicate to someone that happens to be on it, and the area is certainly not progressing because the fight to gain this huge market share of users is never-ending. Ideally, that is what I would love to end via federation. If I could actually use some type of FOSS and open protocol, and actually talk to any other person I wanted to with it, and I wasn't forced to use a certain platform, service, company, and give them all of my data in the process. I don't see any way for this to be achieved, but I can always dream.
  - tylerchilds 6y ago
    I think you just described email. My favorite video game is Halo 3. It never died, I just left.
  - teraku 6y ago
    It reminds me of a rant by an anime youtuber / analyst, who complained that various video streaming platforms (amazon, netflix, crunchyroll, ...) are not innovative in design, but their only selling point is their closed catalogues. And. It. Drove. Him. Mad. Okay, so you should subscribe to 5 services to see all the latest anime you should see. You want to support the artists. But, some of them have horrible experiences, and you are locked into it because you want to _legally_ watch this show. It's that if your platform is exclusive enough, you also become very slow to innovate. We've seen time and again that most innovation comes from constrained settings. But big corps just want to maximize money, they don't care about improvements. That is IMHO the block stopping us from actually tackling a lot of identified and solveable problems we face this century.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
grishka 6y ago
KPIs that are being optimized result in increasingly user-hostile products, like Facebook and Twitter. There certainly are UX problems that the current federated social media projects have. They're not technically unsolvable, it's just that current federated social media projects don't want to solve them for some reason. That's what I'm trying to address with my project (that's not yet ready to be demonstrated, sorry). The primary problem that the current federated social media projects are facing is that there's no global user search. At all. You sign up for a Mastodon account on the instance of your liking, and now what? Sure you can follow Eugen and like the cat pictures he reposts. Cats are cute. But how do you find people you already know without asking every one of them whether they have a Mastodon account? You don't. And that's how you not build a useful social media service. Every single social media service that has had any semblance of success offered an easy way to bootstrap your social graph — be it a detailed global search feature and rich profiles to go with it or the ability to import your friend/contact list from somewhere else. That alone should be telling. There are technical solutions to this, like making a DHT out of instance servers that could be used to link the user IDs on centralized platforms to ActivityPub URLs. Even if said centralized platforms refuse API access to instance admins, there's still machine-readable GDPR data export to take advantage of. It can be done. It's just going to take some time.
- qlk1123 6y ago
  The problems are big. What are the plans for your not-yet-ready project? Are they purely technical like what you stated in the final paragraph?
  - grishka 6y ago
    To me they're more technical than not. I've worked at VK for 5 years, so I think I know a thing or two about building a competitive, easy to use, and user-respecting social media service. It's also somewhat of a curse because I keep seeing all the flaws other fediverse projects have but refuse to address.

by ve55 6y ago

ddevault 6y ago

On the other hand, the fact that no one is thinking about "optimizing KPIs" is a major reason why people like the up and coming federated systems.

jcims 6y ago
Eh, KPIs aren't inherently bad...they just trend that way because of the typical audience for them.

tylerchilds 6y ago

I agree about your UX notes, but I disagree with the success criteria. I've wholly quit social media apart from the mastodon instance I'm on. There are enough quality people I'm connected with now that it's a success for me. Am I missing out on content from Facebook/Twitter/Instagram because I'm not connected indirectly to everyone in their gardens? Sure, but I'd argue it's low quality content that was only a drain on my mental health. I guess I'm trying to say, I think it's about the individual success and not the % of market share.

ve55 6y ago
I've enjoyed them myself too, and I still use things like IRC on a daily basis. The two impluses I see to get federation to a larger market share are A) to 'save' people from the platforms they're currently stuck on, but also B) get rid of, or at least diminish, their network effects. You could argue maybe A) won't work or isn't possible or needed, but I feel B) myself a lot. For example I meet someone and want to talk to them, but it's likely they might suggest we chat via Skype or Discord or something like that, and if I don't want to use that service I'm often out of luck. That, personally, is what bothers me the most - that network effects seem inherently anti-competitive because they force me to use a platform I wouldn't otherwise want to use, only because they purposefully make their software unable to communicate with competing platforms. For all of the open protocols and specifications we have from HTTP to TLS to HTML and literally one thousand others, we just re-use them over and over to create closed systems that can't talk to each other, which feels like going backwards. Sure it's great all of our computers speak TCP, UDP, TLS, HTTP, and so on. But they don't all speak iMessage, Zoom, Skype, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Mastdodon, Matrix, Slack, etc etc. I still feel constantly locked-in to all of these platforms just when I want to communicate to someone that happens to be on it, and the area is certainly not progressing because the fight to gain this huge market share of users is never-ending. Ideally, that is what I would love to end via federation. If I could actually use some type of FOSS and open protocol, and actually talk to any other person I wanted to with it, and I wasn't forced to use a certain platform, service, company, and give them all of my data in the process. I don't see any way for this to be achieved, but I can always dream.
- tylerchilds 6y ago
  I think you just described email. My favorite video game is Halo 3. It never died, I just left.
- teraku 6y ago
  It reminds me of a rant by an anime youtuber / analyst, who complained that various video streaming platforms (amazon, netflix, crunchyroll, ...) are not innovative in design, but their only selling point is their closed catalogues. And. It. Drove. Him. Mad. Okay, so you should subscribe to 5 services to see all the latest anime you should see. You want to support the artists. But, some of them have horrible experiences, and you are locked into it because you want to _legally_ watch this show. It's that if your platform is exclusive enough, you also become very slow to innovate. We've seen time and again that most innovation comes from constrained settings. But big corps just want to maximize money, they don't care about improvements. That is IMHO the block stopping us from actually tackling a lot of identified and solveable problems we face this century.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

grishka 6y ago

KPIs that are being optimized result in increasingly user-hostile products, like Facebook and Twitter. There certainly are UX problems that the current federated social media projects have. They're not technically unsolvable, it's just that current federated social media projects don't want to solve them for some reason. That's what I'm trying to address with my project (that's not yet ready to be demonstrated, sorry). The primary problem that the current federated social media projects are facing is that there's no global user search. At all. You sign up for a Mastodon account on the instance of your liking, and now what? Sure you can follow Eugen and like the cat pictures he reposts. Cats are cute. But how do you find people you already know without asking every one of them whether they have a Mastodon account? You don't. And that's how you not build a useful social media service. Every single social media service that has had any semblance of success offered an easy way to bootstrap your social graph — be it a detailed global search feature and rich profiles to go with it or the ability to import your friend/contact list from somewhere else. That alone should be telling. There are technical solutions to this, like making a DHT out of instance servers that could be used to link the user IDs on centralized platforms to ActivityPub URLs. Even if said centralized platforms refuse API access to instance admins, there's still machine-readable GDPR data export to take advantage of. It can be done. It's just going to take some time.

qlk1123 6y ago
The problems are big. What are the plans for your not-yet-ready project? Are they purely technical like what you stated in the final paragraph?
- grishka 6y ago
  To me they're more technical than not. I've worked at VK for 5 years, so I think I know a thing or two about building a competitive, easy to use, and user-respecting social media service. It's also somewhat of a curse because I keep seeing all the flaws other fediverse projects have but refuse to address.