4 ms·
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 intere
by 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 agoThat'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.
- wmf 6y agocan a federated service become easy or self-managing enough for people to run without needing sysadmin expertise? Sandstorm is/was most of the way there; it makes installing server apps really easy (assuming a hosting provider installs Sandstorm for you).
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoIt would be interesting to see a multi-tenant social network: you start a network for your family/household/whatever as easily as if you were signing up to Facebook or whatever, and then you connect to friends by sending a request to them at their instance. Mastodon/pixelfed may be like 90% already: just need to come up with a good ux for automated deployments and a way to monetize it
- TeMPOraL 6y agoInvite-only with a chain of responsibility. That is, if I invite you, I'm responsible for you behavior; if you screw up and get banned, I may lose privileges or get banned with you. Perhaps extend that one or two levels into the graph, with exponential decay. So if you invite someone, and that someone turns out to be a spammer, they get banned, you get banned, and I lose posting privileges for a week. And the person who invited me loses some privileges for a day. Etc. Add some level of manual review and algorithmic detection of clusters of accounts that exist only to invite other accounts that invite spammers, and... ... well, did anyone ever try this out? What are the obvious holes in this system that I'm missing?
- Jetrel 6y agoI'm not really aware of anything like this, besides how mastodon instances connect to each other, and I think this idea has massive promise. It's worth not just "a shot", but lots of earnest attempts.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ergl 6y agoThat's basically how lobste.rs works. The invite graph is also public (see https://lobste.rs/u https://lobste.rs/u). It works fine, but I wouldn't derive too much data from it, since it is a small community, and spammers / vote rings are rare enough that a manual approach works. Another feature that I wish other places adopted is a public moderation log (https://lobste.rs/moderations https://lobste.rs/moderations) where users can see all the actions by the mod team. This helps keep the mods accountable.
- mro_name 6y agoYour assumption is that hosting is way more difficult than posting. What if it weren't? I research in that direction: http://mro.name/ShaarliGo#install--update http://mro.name/ShaarliGo#install--update