6 ms·

Start this labyrinth from the end point. Why are giants attracting 95%+ of users? 1. Among other things, because of a dead-simple user experience that lets eve

by dzink 6y ago

Start this labyrinth from the end point. Why are giants attracting 95%+ of users? 1. Among other things, because of a dead-simple user experience that lets even grandpa post content after a few clicks. Federation, if it adds any level of complexity past the grandpa UX, would defeat the goal. 2. Next, identity. If grandpa can post, so can the bots, how do you ensure accounts don’t go to fake entities? What if an account has to pass a quality threshold before it can publish in public, but can be used privately any time. HN has similar model, but here you limit public posting until 10 random other users have seen and upvoted the new user’s post. Add to that possible additional authentication for payment of a pro feature, or a human check mark, and you’ve put a hurdle on spam. 3. To keep culture from running amuck provide positive and negative feedback. Public content has a span problem, not so much private behavior. Content ratings and discussion licenses can come into play as well, where any group can limit posts to PG content, or discussion that gets moderated automatically or manually if it passes certain thresholds. Happy to suggest more if needed. I run https://www.dreamlist.com https://www.dreamlist.com

donmcronald 6y ago
> Next, identity. If grandpa can post, so can the bots, how do you ensure accounts don’t go to fake entities? Invite only. If I'm running a federated service for me and my family, the moderation is going to be astronomically better than anything big providers are doing because a couple minutes of moderation by me every week is astronomically more on a per user basis than what someone like Google or Facebook is doing.
- chc 6y ago
  That's a nonstarter for a service that's for anyone but the geekiest of geeks, though. If you have to be close to someone with both the tech know-how and interest to host an instance of a federated service, the service is effectively off-limits to approximately everyone. Non-technical users have to be able to use the service and have a good experience doing so.
  - trynewideas 6y ago
    That's part of the point, though — can a federated service become easy or self-managing enough for people to run without needing sysadmin expertise? Drew's point is that people who can have or acquire that expertise are force multipliers — it's easy _enough_ that one person can run a node that carries less-technical users into the ecosystem. But I don't think we're really there yet, and worse the value isn't there in federated social media to offset the costs of time, money, and change. We've seen distributed networks capture enough imagination and be usable enough to get mass adoption, but they did things like distribute tremendous proprietary media libraries on the cheap and without permission. Services like Mastodon aren't as easy to spin up for a group as, say, running Napster was, or even seeding a torrent is now. But people, even non-techincal ones, either put up with those services' occasional unreliability or recruited more technical users to work them on their behalf because the relative value was so great. So to me the problem with federation is making the value exceed the cost. It's a squeeze from both sides. We won't get there until an ActivityPub service is as easy to stand up as running an app on your device, AND the value of running one is large enough to make it worth the trouble. It feels like messaging should be where the value end should have already taken off, but federated group chat is still a rat's nest of incompatible or feature-starved services. Federated social is still just on the wrong side of complexity and the value it provides honestly isn't that great to a mass audience.
    - dsign 6y ago
      > But I don't think we're really there yet, and worse the value isn't there in federated social media to offset the costs of time, money, and change. Not for 99% of the users, for now. But there is an increasing faction that is taking issue with what any company does with their data. At first, caring about one's own data was mostly a political thing. Now, abuse of data is getting so ridiculous that how much time you spend in the supermarket queue may depend on the aggregated data supermarkets have on you (and yes, supermarkets often aggregate their customer data via third-party reputation aggregator companies). Not to mention credit interest rates, insurance premiums, visas, and airport security checks. Soon people will too realize that taking their data off from ad networks is a good way to save money. At that point, one either goes silent or searches for a limited, well-protected social network.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  How does that work with interacting with other nodes in the federation? Now you have the whole huge userbase to deal with again, and only you to moderate.
- bawolff 6y ago
  If you're not talking to wide internet, what's the point of federating? If you are, while i think email has proven that moderation is much much easier at scale if the attackers are spammers (astroturfing is a bit of a different story though)
- synctext 6y ago
  > Next, identity. If grandpa can post, so can the bots Yes, protection against a million fake accounts is the key scientific problem to solve (Sybil attack). Our university lab has worked on this problem for 15+ years, its hard. Early indications are that ActivityPub and federation are not going to scale. Bot attacks are too ferocious for amateur admins. Big instances attract more people, however a single instance fails to scale. Nobody knows how to build trustworthy self-organising systems with "self-governance". Somehow you need to deduce the reputation of others from their signed interaction history. Their privacy needs to be protected, but you can still calculate a reputation score. After 20 years of scientific progress around "distributed reputation systems" with 100+ scientific articles they have one thing in commons: they don't protect from the Sybil attack. Server federation is not going to help if there is no trust fabric to build upon. The effortless onboarding plus mobile-first requirement of today means you even need to have smartphones talking to eachother directly, P2P-style. <plug> thankfully students in our lab now have carrier-grade NAT traversal operational between Android devices. Google: "Technology Stack for Decentralized Mobile Services" (quotes required).
tmaly 6y ago
I totally agree, the interface has to be simple. First movers always take the majority of the market share if there are no compelling reasons to use a similar service.
- MentallyRetired 6y ago
  I also agree. "Federated" is not a killer feature. Simplicity is, and that needs to be a priority.
  - jariel 6y ago
    'Federated' is not even a feature. 'Privacy' itself is barely a feature - people do care, but it's rarely #1 on their list. Techies viewing this from the more strategic, systems perspective have to get into the headspace of individuals to see it from a 'user centric' perspective - because the answer to many of the questions lie there. For starters, very few people care that Facebook for example is 'centralized' - they care about the material value offered to them 'right now' which is to say, access to their friends, posts, information etc.. Everything is is a distant second. Issues that do not directly affect their experience an even more distant third.
  - robjan 6y ago
    I remember attending a talk where the conclusion was that you should never market a product as "green" or "eco-friendly". The reason being that if that's your value proposition then you are now limiting your product to people who care about "green" and "eco-friendly". It's better to market a product that is really good but happens to be eco-friendly. The same seems to be pretty much true of "federation".
- drran 6y ago
  I totally disagree. There must a high bar to entry, for useful discussions, instead of talks about tits and shits. Look at HN, for example.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
bawolff 6y ago
I think also a certain amount of non freedom helps. One of the big things facebook did is you couldn't customize your page. No autoplaying midis with seizure inducing gifs. Also helps with brand cohesion. Federation gives people freedom. Quite frankly users cannot be trusted to maintain a good experience if given freedom.
- andyroid 6y ago
  So instead of we’ve got rampant racism, conspiracy theories, fake news and attempts to sway elections in that direction all over the world. If that’s the good experience, bring back the midis!
  - Shared404 6y ago
    Midi's are also easier to content block as another user.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    They are unrelated. You can have bigots both with autoplaying midis and without autoplaying midis.
- marksbrown 6y ago
  Most of us here presumably recall the early iterations of Twitter and Facebook. Both succumbed to dark patterns a very long time ago. Your argument seems to be a slow death is preferable to a fast one.
throwaway33339 6y ago
>Among other things, because of a dead-simple user experience that lets even grandpa post content after a few clicks. Federation, if it adds any level of complexity past the grandpa UX, would defeat the goal. You could have stopped there, that's pretty much the only reason. But that has little to do with federation though. And yeah the ugliness and bad UX problems of free software - software that's freely unusable - have been known for literal decades.
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
>1. Among other things, because of a dead-simple user experience that lets even grandpa post content after a few clicks. Federation, if it adds any level of complexity past the grandpa UX, would defeat the goal. That's the point though, design for the lowest common denominator has been the modus operandi for the giants because it gets them the most profit. There is no proof that this is the way to create the most "useful" social network. Often I'm tired of the "organic spam" that users with easy access create non-stop in a lot of the communities I'm in. A technical barrier to entry isn't necessarily a bad thing in this case.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Being networks, a fundamental definition of "usefulness" is directly (or exponentially, rather) related to the size of the network. It's not the only aspect of value, but it is exponential, ad hard to beat. One of the reasons amoral commercial efforts like fb won is because this modus operandi happens to harmonize standard commercial MO with what a network is. There's definitely value in alternative MOs. As you say, a technical barrier to entry can have its uses. Wikipedia is a nice example. I don't think simplifying the editor UX to an intuitive one would necessarily be useful. But wikipedia needs a throttle on editing. I'm not sure this relates to federation though. Niche communities don't need to be federated.
  - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    >a fundamental definition of "usefulness" is directly (or exponentially, rather) related to the size of the network. It's not the only aspect of value, but it is exponential, ad hard to beat. No that is not true. Judging from my experience with various subreddits anything above 100k quickly becomes trash. You don't need as many users as possible. >One of the reasons amoral commercial efforts like fb won is because this modus operandi happens to harmonize standard commercial MO with what a network is. For what facebook wants to be i.e. a profile for all your contacts that is indeed the case. For hobby/activity related communities that's not true. >I'm not sure this relates to federation though. Niche communities don't need to be federated. It does relate to federation because right now if I open a new subreddit I am bound to the wishes of the company and they can change the UI in such a massive way that any community that benefits from long-form text posts quickly dysfunctional. I have noticed the gradual decline in content and comment quality on reddit since the redesign and the push for mobile app usage and it's slowly creeping into every subreddit out there. With a federated alternative to reddit I could launch a server on my own and have control over how the community evolves over time( or rather, people who have the community's best interests in mind can in general). I hope someone takes what Mastodon does and make a reddit alternative.
dalbasal 6y ago
I think the "feed" aspect needs to be considered also. The power of Facebook, Twitter and such is largely their feed. The feed is an answer to point #1: grandpa simplicity. The feed is the thing that needs to be protected from points #2 & 3: identity and culture. The feed is that will motivate participants, content creators, etc. IE, many will create content for the feed. Reddit/Digg/HN upvoting were a simple way of doing the feed that proved this point and paved the way for Facebook & Twitter. A lot of mass adoption services created after went extreme. Feed only. The Tinder UX is a feed of datable people, for example. Spotify's importance is being solidified by being a feed. Importance in spotify's context is largely "being the place where music gets popular." One way or another, the feed issue must be addressed. New content UIs will either have a successful feed or transcend the feed some way. I'm not sure how this relates to federation. A feed seems a centralizing element by nature. Successful federated systems of the past (the the WWW) tended to leave the feed ("discovery," in a pre-feed context) to someone else... which turned out to be google, fb, etc. However the labyrinth is is designed, what matters is how the feed works.
jondubois 6y ago
>> Why are giants attracting 95%+ of users? Because they get free money from the Federal reserve through cheap loans and government contracts and money attracts people. They can use the money to saturate the media with their brand until everyone ends up using them. Then they can use the money to crush all potential competitors.

by dzink 6y ago

donmcronald 6y ago

> Next, identity. If grandpa can post, so can the bots, how do you ensure accounts don’t go to fake entities? Invite only. If I'm running a federated service for me and my family, the moderation is going to be astronomically better than anything big providers are doing because a couple minutes of moderation by me every week is astronomically more on a per user basis than what someone like Google or Facebook is doing.

chc 6y ago
That's a nonstarter for a service that's for anyone but the geekiest of geeks, though. If you have to be close to someone with both the tech know-how and interest to host an instance of a federated service, the service is effectively off-limits to approximately everyone. Non-technical users have to be able to use the service and have a good experience doing so.
- trynewideas 6y ago
  That's part of the point, though — can a federated service become easy or self-managing enough for people to run without needing sysadmin expertise? Drew's point is that people who can have or acquire that expertise are force multipliers — it's easy _enough_ that one person can run a node that carries less-technical users into the ecosystem. But I don't think we're really there yet, and worse the value isn't there in federated social media to offset the costs of time, money, and change. We've seen distributed networks capture enough imagination and be usable enough to get mass adoption, but they did things like distribute tremendous proprietary media libraries on the cheap and without permission. Services like Mastodon aren't as easy to spin up for a group as, say, running Napster was, or even seeding a torrent is now. But people, even non-techincal ones, either put up with those services' occasional unreliability or recruited more technical users to work them on their behalf because the relative value was so great. So to me the problem with federation is making the value exceed the cost. It's a squeeze from both sides. We won't get there until an ActivityPub service is as easy to stand up as running an app on your device, AND the value of running one is large enough to make it worth the trouble. It feels like messaging should be where the value end should have already taken off, but federated group chat is still a rat's nest of incompatible or feature-starved services. Federated social is still just on the wrong side of complexity and the value it provides honestly isn't that great to a mass audience.
  - dsign 6y ago
    > But I don't think we're really there yet, and worse the value isn't there in federated social media to offset the costs of time, money, and change. Not for 99% of the users, for now. But there is an increasing faction that is taking issue with what any company does with their data. At first, caring about one's own data was mostly a political thing. Now, abuse of data is getting so ridiculous that how much time you spend in the supermarket queue may depend on the aggregated data supermarkets have on you (and yes, supermarkets often aggregate their customer data via third-party reputation aggregator companies). Not to mention credit interest rates, insurance premiums, visas, and airport security checks. Soon people will too realize that taking their data off from ad networks is a good way to save money. At that point, one either goes silent or searches for a limited, well-protected social network.
nicoburns 6y ago
How does that work with interacting with other nodes in the federation? Now you have the whole huge userbase to deal with again, and only you to moderate.
bawolff 6y ago
If you're not talking to wide internet, what's the point of federating? If you are, while i think email has proven that moderation is much much easier at scale if the attackers are spammers (astroturfing is a bit of a different story though)
synctext 6y ago
> Next, identity. If grandpa can post, so can the bots Yes, protection against a million fake accounts is the key scientific problem to solve (Sybil attack). Our university lab has worked on this problem for 15+ years, its hard. Early indications are that ActivityPub and federation are not going to scale. Bot attacks are too ferocious for amateur admins. Big instances attract more people, however a single instance fails to scale. Nobody knows how to build trustworthy self-organising systems with "self-governance". Somehow you need to deduce the reputation of others from their signed interaction history. Their privacy needs to be protected, but you can still calculate a reputation score. After 20 years of scientific progress around "distributed reputation systems" with 100+ scientific articles they have one thing in commons: they don't protect from the Sybil attack. Server federation is not going to help if there is no trust fabric to build upon. The effortless onboarding plus mobile-first requirement of today means you even need to have smartphones talking to eachother directly, P2P-style. <plug> thankfully students in our lab now have carrier-grade NAT traversal operational between Android devices. Google: "Technology Stack for Decentralized Mobile Services" (quotes required).

tmaly 6y ago

I totally agree, the interface has to be simple. First movers always take the majority of the market share if there are no compelling reasons to use a similar service.

MentallyRetired 6y ago
I also agree. "Federated" is not a killer feature. Simplicity is, and that needs to be a priority.
- jariel 6y ago
  'Federated' is not even a feature. 'Privacy' itself is barely a feature - people do care, but it's rarely #1 on their list. Techies viewing this from the more strategic, systems perspective have to get into the headspace of individuals to see it from a 'user centric' perspective - because the answer to many of the questions lie there. For starters, very few people care that Facebook for example is 'centralized' - they care about the material value offered to them 'right now' which is to say, access to their friends, posts, information etc.. Everything is is a distant second. Issues that do not directly affect their experience an even more distant third.
- robjan 6y ago
  I remember attending a talk where the conclusion was that you should never market a product as "green" or "eco-friendly". The reason being that if that's your value proposition then you are now limiting your product to people who care about "green" and "eco-friendly". It's better to market a product that is really good but happens to be eco-friendly. The same seems to be pretty much true of "federation".
drran 6y ago
I totally disagree. There must a high bar to entry, for useful discussions, instead of talks about tits and shits. Look at HN, for example.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago

bawolff 6y ago

I think also a certain amount of non freedom helps. One of the big things facebook did is you couldn't customize your page. No autoplaying midis with seizure inducing gifs. Also helps with brand cohesion. Federation gives people freedom. Quite frankly users cannot be trusted to maintain a good experience if given freedom.

andyroid 6y ago
So instead of we’ve got rampant racism, conspiracy theories, fake news and attempts to sway elections in that direction all over the world. If that’s the good experience, bring back the midis!
- Shared404 6y ago
  Midi's are also easier to content block as another user.
- bawolff 6y ago
  They are unrelated. You can have bigots both with autoplaying midis and without autoplaying midis.
marksbrown 6y ago
Most of us here presumably recall the early iterations of Twitter and Facebook. Both succumbed to dark patterns a very long time ago. Your argument seems to be a slow death is preferable to a fast one.

throwaway33339 6y ago

>Among other things, because of a dead-simple user experience that lets even grandpa post content after a few clicks. Federation, if it adds any level of complexity past the grandpa UX, would defeat the goal. You could have stopped there, that's pretty much the only reason. But that has little to do with federation though. And yeah the ugliness and bad UX problems of free software - software that's freely unusable - have been known for literal decades.

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago

>1. Among other things, because of a dead-simple user experience that lets even grandpa post content after a few clicks. Federation, if it adds any level of complexity past the grandpa UX, would defeat the goal. That's the point though, design for the lowest common denominator has been the modus operandi for the giants because it gets them the most profit. There is no proof that this is the way to create the most "useful" social network. Often I'm tired of the "organic spam" that users with easy access create non-stop in a lot of the communities I'm in. A technical barrier to entry isn't necessarily a bad thing in this case.

dalbasal 6y ago
Being networks, a fundamental definition of "usefulness" is directly (or exponentially, rather) related to the size of the network. It's not the only aspect of value, but it is exponential, ad hard to beat. One of the reasons amoral commercial efforts like fb won is because this modus operandi happens to harmonize standard commercial MO with what a network is. There's definitely value in alternative MOs. As you say, a technical barrier to entry can have its uses. Wikipedia is a nice example. I don't think simplifying the editor UX to an intuitive one would necessarily be useful. But wikipedia needs a throttle on editing. I'm not sure this relates to federation though. Niche communities don't need to be federated.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  >a fundamental definition of "usefulness" is directly (or exponentially, rather) related to the size of the network. It's not the only aspect of value, but it is exponential, ad hard to beat. No that is not true. Judging from my experience with various subreddits anything above 100k quickly becomes trash. You don't need as many users as possible. >One of the reasons amoral commercial efforts like fb won is because this modus operandi happens to harmonize standard commercial MO with what a network is. For what facebook wants to be i.e. a profile for all your contacts that is indeed the case. For hobby/activity related communities that's not true. >I'm not sure this relates to federation though. Niche communities don't need to be federated. It does relate to federation because right now if I open a new subreddit I am bound to the wishes of the company and they can change the UI in such a massive way that any community that benefits from long-form text posts quickly dysfunctional. I have noticed the gradual decline in content and comment quality on reddit since the redesign and the push for mobile app usage and it's slowly creeping into every subreddit out there. With a federated alternative to reddit I could launch a server on my own and have control over how the community evolves over time( or rather, people who have the community's best interests in mind can in general). I hope someone takes what Mastodon does and make a reddit alternative.

dalbasal 6y ago

I think the "feed" aspect needs to be considered also. The power of Facebook, Twitter and such is largely their feed. The feed is an answer to point #1: grandpa simplicity. The feed is the thing that needs to be protected from points #2 & 3: identity and culture. The feed is that will motivate participants, content creators, etc. IE, many will create content for the feed. Reddit/Digg/HN upvoting were a simple way of doing the feed that proved this point and paved the way for Facebook & Twitter. A lot of mass adoption services created after went extreme. Feed only. The Tinder UX is a feed of datable people, for example. Spotify's importance is being solidified by being a feed. Importance in spotify's context is largely "being the place where music gets popular." One way or another, the feed issue must be addressed. New content UIs will either have a successful feed or transcend the feed some way. I'm not sure how this relates to federation. A feed seems a centralizing element by nature. Successful federated systems of the past (the the WWW) tended to leave the feed ("discovery," in a pre-feed context) to someone else... which turned out to be google, fb, etc. However the labyrinth is is designed, what matters is how the feed works.

jondubois 6y ago

>> Why are giants attracting 95%+ of users? Because they get free money from the Federal reserve through cheap loans and government contracts and money attracts people. They can use the money to saturate the media with their brand until everyone ends up using them. Then they can use the money to crush all potential competitors.