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Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now peopl

• detaro 4y ago
  Not really, no. Imagine the reversed situation: Everyone is on Mastodon, and now this cool new thing called "Twitter" comes along and some people are switching to it. "find everyones Twitter account and follow it" would still be a useful thing to have, over manually checking for every single person you follow if they have an account, if they maybe have an account with a different username, ... and following those you find.
  • colesantiago 4y ago
    But we all know this hypothetical isn't the case. Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)
    • nerdponx 4y ago
      It proves the value of centralized search and discovery, but it says nothing about centralized hosting in moderation. There is probably quite a bit of value in a system where decentralized instances can volunteer to submit their own discovery database to a central search platform, and where individual users could opt in to being part of that database.
      • nopenopenopeno 4y ago
        This is commonplace for decentralized protocols. Torrents are probably the most obvious example.
    • etchalon 4y ago
      Email remains decentralized.
      • colesantiago 4y ago
        Doesn't matter when we are talking about Mastodon. People don't use email as social network or instant form of social communication.
        • SantalBlush 4y ago
          I may be mistaken, but it looks like you brought up email in the first place. >Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)
          • colesantiago 4y ago
            Okay? My point still stands and users don't want to host their own email or Mastodon instance and prefer centralised solutions when it comes to a social networking.
    • Zak 4y ago
      People do, however use multiple email providers, sometimes small ones like the small business they work for or their local/regional ISP. If federated social sharing becomes popular, the story will likely be similar: a few big providers have most of the users, but a limited ability to dictate how the system works.
    • ttepasse 4y ago
      That hypothetical was the case: back in 2007/2008 people of the blogosphere slowly stopped blogging and started tweeting. And if you had a good but suddenly more empty feedreader you’d then had to follow the great migration and re-find those people on Twitter.
      • colesantiago 4y ago
        this means that centralisation works better?
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • soundnote 4y ago
          It depends on the thing at hand. Some things have value because others use them. Chat apps tend towards monopolies because of this. Email's just so damned old everyone uses the standard and it kind of dodges the issue. Email's also structurally a bit different - it's a set of one-way sends to select recipients, with chats you moreso go to a place and read the place's signboard. You could in principle just use mailing lists under the hood instead if the UI wasn't garbage.
      • mahathu 4y ago
        This whole comment chain has been an interesting discussion for me, I just checked out of curiosity: Blogspot vs Twitter popularity on google trends 2004-today https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=blogspot,twitter https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=bl...
    • shafyy 4y ago
      Decentralization doesn't mean hosting your own instance. It's about open protocols. There are hundreds or thousands of email providers that you can use and still send an email to a Gmail user without hosting your own instance.
      • colesantiago 4y ago
        Yet gmail is the biggest and email isn't a social network, choice is the problem. People cannot find their friends on Mastodon because: + They can't search all instances across Mastodon. + There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk to. So they just go back to a centralised service like Twitter and they definitely not use email as a social network.
        • kixiQu 4y ago
          > + There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk to. I have found that this is an accurate description of the first impression one gets; this is not true, but we're all so used to recommendation algorithms easing discovery that the impression is equivalent.
        • supportlocal4h 4y ago
          What kind of friend do you have that you can't just say, "Hey, what's your handle?"?
          • colesantiago 4y ago
            The one that can't be bothered to say "Hey what's your Mastodon handle" to like 500+ of my friend group on Twitter where is the main Mastodon instance is closed. Twitter is just fine and everyone knows it.
    • p1necone 4y ago
      Email is decentralized. It's mature enough that there's a bunch of trusted providers out there and you can use it without caring about the technical details, it's basically a perfect example of a successful mature decentralized service.
      • colesantiago 4y ago
        many people don't care that it is decentralised, hence gmail, an open protocol is irrelevant. In mastodon's case decentralisation is a hindrance since they want centralisation back. email isn't a social network and lots people outside of HN don't self host them as such.
        • kortilla 4y ago
          I think you’re quite confused about email users. Very few of the companies I worked for outside of startups used google for email hosting. Business email is very dependent on the fact that it’s an open protocol.
          • p1necone 4y ago
            Likewise, gmail would be totally useless if it was actually centralized and you couldn't email non gmail users.
            • wrycoder 4y ago
              But they can’t necessarily email you, given Google’s procedures regarding “spam”, i.e. anything from a small email server.
              • doctor_eval 4y ago
                This is true. My last company used fastmail, but one guy insisted on using Gmail. Sometimes fastmail didn’t arrive at Gmail. We (tech team) said, this is a problem with gmail. C-suite said this is a problem with fastmail. And so the word comes down, we have to move to Gmail. It’s believable decision making, but that’s how it works.
    • kodah 4y ago
      I would call the GMail situation pseudo-centralization. As it has more actual competitors who aren't just hosting but also actively developing their own platform it'd go back to decentralization.
    • jupp0r 4y ago
      Of course people use a variety of email providers, what are you talking about?
  • contravariant 4y ago
    In that scenario is Mastodon not centralized?
    • georgyo 4y ago
      No, it's still federated. But my account of alice@foo.com follows bob@bar.com Bob registers his new Twitter handle so I, Alice, can find it on the central service of Twitter. A mapping of users to users can be across any service, including centralized to centralized (ie Twitter to Facebook) or decentalized to decentralized (IE Diaspora to Mastadon). It is just saying this string registered somewhere else as that string.
      • contravariant 4y ago
        Ah I see, thanks for the explanation.
    • detaro 4y ago
      No, that scenario is assuming a federated Mastodon (and other Fediverse software) as today.
  • Abimelex 4y ago
    For only username based have a look at Fedifinder: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
    • detaro 4y ago
      that seems like a substantially more useful way of building such a thing
• barbazoo 4y ago
  Once imported, what would be the benefit of the centralized system? This just sounds like overcoming the barrier that the centralized system put up.
• themodelplumber 4y ago
  Or maybe if a distributed platform embraces some additional centralization (it already does some), it becomes more like the decentralized platform everybody wants, and keeps the best aspects of the federated approach for those who mainly want those... It's not so important to force any dichotomous perspectives on the whole here, as the situation has a lot of nuance to it in the details.
• anotherrandom 4y ago
  Honestly the fact that more tools are needed to make Mastodon usable shows that federation technology is "not there yet." I hope we are able to improve stuff to the point where it is usable. Something I'm keeping an eye on is the @ protocol that is being designed specifically for the creation of federated social media applications -- it allows for portable identity and your social graph is portable, these things are not tethered to an instance of something. Hopefully that will be an upgrade so there will be less "jury-rigging" like this required to make federated applications usable
  • prmoustache 4y ago
    If anything, they just shows they were late to the party.
• kemenaran 4y ago
  To find someone on Mastodon, I would either enter their nickname in the search bar (no need for the domain, it will search on all instances) – or simply click on their profile on a post I like. Just like a centralized network. This tool just exists to do this automatically and in bulk. It seems to me that finding someone on a federation is as easy as on centralized systems. Do you have a use case in mind where centralization makes it easier to find someone?
  • masukomi 4y ago
    it will not search "all instances". It will search a subset of instances. How do we know this to be true? a) there is no central listing of all mastodon instances, or even all public ones. b) it would take FREAKING AGES TO COME BACK because there are so damn many, you can only make so many parallel requests at a time, and you have to process the results from all of them.
    • qchris 4y ago
      Can you expand on b)? I'm not sure I understand why this would be difficult. If you already had a list of instances, as it seems like asynchronous clients could probably handle the scale of instances (source below list about 4k, which isn't out of scope for simultaneous async tasks), and processing the results is probably fairly simple. Especially if you were to cache that list and just do an updated request every few minutes (so not a new full-network request set every query) it seems like this wouldn't be too crazy complicated. Have I missed something? [1] https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/ https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/
  • jacooper 4y ago
    > To find someone on Mastodon, I would either enter their nickname in the search bar (no need for the domain, it will search on all instances) Nope, It will only show accounts followed by local accounts. Mastodon doesn't do any kind of per server search, And your "federated feed" is basically accounts on other instances followed by local accounts. This makes hosting a private Mastodon server, for personal or family use, incredibly hard as discovery is basically impossible. This can be fixed by using Activity pub relays, but guess what? Mastodon's official servers don't use them, which are the servers that really matter. Its a big part of why I'm hesitant to use Activitypub, as I believe discovery is a big part of modern social media, and Mastodon absolutely sucks at it. This is coming from someone hosting his own Matrix server.
• echelon 4y ago
  > Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? Not at all. These types of centralized platforms won because they raised capital to grow fast and meet market needs before anything else. Email is still king, but if it were to be designed today, it would have been designed as some proprietary centralized system. Distributed systems are hard. In any case, I don't think federation goes far enough to save us from the problems we're seeing. I want a peer-to-peer social feed / social news app that doesn't depend on federation or servers at all. Takedowns (DeCSS), takeovers (Twitter, FreeNode), shutdowns (Google+, Orkut, Digg, mastodon.technology), censorship (everywhere; should be an individual choice), maintainer-imposed spying (Apple CSAM), and maintainer-imposed changes or limits (Digg, modern Reddit, Twitter API) seem an order of magnitude harder to pull off if we have full control at the protocol and node level. Federation would be nice for anonymity and aggregation of interest graph metadata, but at the core we should just have a swarm of content to sample and consume. It's fine if the content is naturally ephemeral as a consequence. We can use a constellation of opt-in 3rd party distributed (federated) services to provide durability, ranking, recommendation, filtering, etc. where desired. Bittorrent, but for Twitter/Reddit/HN.
  • rakoo 4y ago
    Briar and Manyverse (based on ssb) come to mind
  • account42 4y ago
    Agreed - the fediverse is already run by little gatekeepers who want to decide who you can and cannot communicate with (if you are on their instance). That should simply not be possible on the protocol level, meaning your account must be fully separated from any kind of "instance" except your own client.
• johnchristopher 4y ago
  Or an opt-in for submitting a piece of private information like a phone, an email, a public key, etc. so you can prove who you are to your friends. Who am I kidding, these people are looking for an audience, not their friends.
  • jeena 4y ago
    I wonder how email as private information would be different to the mastodon username, aren't both practically identical with the exception of one additional @?
    • johnchristopher 4y ago
      The way I see it your mail is not publicly displayed on mastodon, only used to confirm/identify. Does @handle on mastodon has the email associated to my friend Peter ? If so it's a match. Of course it's a whole other can of worms, reminds me of Linkedin/Fb that would spam me because they had access to my friend's rolodex..
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tootie 4y ago
  I've said before the answer is just Better Twitter. One with clear moderation rules that aren't reactionary or flexible based on popularity. Non-profit Twitter would be ideal. Keep ad revenue just ahead of operating costs. Publish all the financials. Open source the code.
• numpad0 4y ago
  [fill in here with an insightful texts on distinction between identity and content distribution being centralized] - I don't want to sort out which one of {prefix}username{suffix}{duplicate identifier}.{domain}.tld is the person I had been talking with just 5 minutes ago, nor he would appreciate such a situation, but I do not care who serves the content for me so long it's valid within contexts i.e. if it comes from amazonaws.com or onmicrosoft.com. Imagine you could find me as @numpad0 anywhere, and you can validate shadydomain.shadywebsite.tld/uuid.htm with my pubkey to hold me accountable for weird things I'd say, and that /uuid.htm URL may be ephemeral, or could be more permanent for more respectable posts at non-shady venues, and either ways I wouldn't have to be perfect wrt handling of privkey, yet somehow usernames matches someone anywhere would be verifyably that someone. That would be ideal. But I believe social media operators recognize the exploitable value in conflating both; this has to be why no one use cross-OAuth between social medias and web apps anymore, and rather focuses on own ID systems and federated signups. Consistent set of identities is a value, media is a means to monopolize on it.
• notatoad 4y ago
  even if this were true, which i'm not sure it is, it isn't a reason to make the whole platform centralized. you could argue that there's benefit to centralized friend-finder tools, but there's no reason that has to be tied to a centralized platform. a decentralized and open-access platform allows for choice and competition amongst friend-finder tools
  • jeena 4y ago
    Also wouldn't it make sense to have different friend finder tools with different content/parts of the fediverse? I'm thinking if I'm a Nazi I mostly care about other Nazis and would not go to the normie mastodon friend finder tool but the one which finds all my friends on our Nazi mastodon instances and vice versa.
• EnKopVand 4y ago
  I think it has more to do with the way Mastodon decentralised and I imagine the people who figure out to do e-mail as a platform first, will be the next twitter. The big issue with Mastodon is that your "twitter handle" depends on the server you join, which makes it hard to find you. If it was just your e-mail address, however, then everyone would be able to find you, and keep finding you even if you decided to change servers.
  • zaik 4y ago
    Ironically, Mastodon addresses work just like email addresses.
    • EnKopVand 4y ago
      until you need a new server.
      • zaik 4y ago
        Just like email.
        • EnKopVand 4y ago
          Your e-mail address isn't tied to a server. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. I've had many e-mail services without changing my e-mail address. I can use g-suite, fastmail, outlook for business and a range of other things, and the people sending me mails won't notice. I can't swap my Mastodon server.
    • WorldMaker 4y ago
      Some hosts/domains even mirror Mastodon addresses and email addresses. There is nothing stopping an address from being both, especially if you control your own domain.
  • jeena 4y ago
    So instead of Mastodons @user@server.tld we would use user@server.tld and that would help how?
• dotnet00 4y ago
  This is in part due to Mastodon's weird style of federation which almost comes off as a second thought compared to using it as a centralized service, since to federate with others you have to either know who to follow already or need to use a relay. This, I feel is especially notable for Western nodes since they don't really seem to bother with relays (which I think largely defeats the point of federation by creating incentives to stick to large nodes). A lot of the relay lists are either super sanitized/focused on uninteresting topics or are dead. In comparison, in the Japanese community there are several fairly active open relays (with some moderation to prevent abuse) and thus it's pretty easy to setup a custom node and have it populated with some basic content to build off of. As a result of which, ~75% of the traffic to my node comes from Japan, ~20% from the US and ~5% from Europe.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• remram 4y ago
  This tool would look the same if you were moving from a centralized platform to another centralized platform.