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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
by 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 agoBut 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 agoIt 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 agoThis is commonplace for decentralized protocols. Torrents are probably the most obvious example.
- etchalon 4y agoEmail remains decentralized.
- colesantiago 4y agoDoesn't matter when we are talking about Mastodon. People don't use email as social network or instant form of social communication.
- SantalBlush 4y agoI 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 agoOkay? 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 agoPeople 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 agoThat 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 agothis means that centralisation works better?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- soundnote 4y agoIt 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 agoThis 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 agoDecentralization 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 agoYet 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 agoWhat kind of friend do you have that you can't just say, "Hey, what's your handle?"?
- colesantiago 4y agoThe 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 agoEmail 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 agomany 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 agoI 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 agoLikewise, gmail would be totally useless if it was actually centralized and you couldn't email non gmail users.
- wrycoder 4y agoBut they can’t necessarily email you, given Google’s procedures regarding “spam”, i.e. anything from a small email server.
- doctor_eval 4y agoThis 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 agoI 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 agoOf course people use a variety of email providers, what are you talking about?
- contravariant 4y agoIn that scenario is Mastodon not centralized?
- georgyo 4y agoNo, 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 agoAh I see, thanks for the explanation.
- detaro 4y agoNo, that scenario is assuming a federated Mastodon (and other Fediverse software) as today.
- Abimelex 4y agoFor only username based have a look at Fedifinder: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
- detaro 4y agothat seems like a substantially more useful way of building such a thing