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People talk about email as the prime example of federation that we all use every day, but... gmail.com alone has a 30% market share, and 61% of 18-29 year olds[

People talk about email as the prime example of federation that we all use every day, but... gmail.com alone has a 30% market share, and 61% of 18-29 year olds[0]. The only reason that number isn't much higher is work emails, and a goodly number of work emails these days are actually Gmail behind the scenes as well! People don't want federation, people don't like federation, people are actively annoyed by federation. Of course, people also don't want to have an AI model decide they've broken unwritten rules and have their digital lives walled off, but if federation is the only solution to that (I'm not convinced) then people will take their chances. 0. https://techjury.net/blog/gmail-statistics/ https://techjury.net/blog/gmail-statistics/

kodah 4y ago
Federation didn't drive people to GMail. A modern interface and someone building on top of the protocol did.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  My point wasn't that people fled federated email to congregate at gmail. My point was that most people don't care one wet slap about federation, and will happily use whatever people point as easily usable (and free), whether Hotmail, or Yahoo, or Gmail.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  IIRC, what really drove people to Gmail was the huge storage space. Finally, no more having to manage your own quota, no more dealing with bounced email, etc. I think that's a far easier sell than 'modern interface', although I'm not sure what the equivalent for Mastodon users would be — maybe simply "it's free" if Twitter becomes a paid service.
  - sockaddr 4y ago
    Yup. I think the alternatives at the time were things like Hotmail offering a whopping 4MB.
  - derbOac 4y ago
    My reason for Gmail was pretty simple: it was free and free from the constraints of a work email account, and reasonably trustworthy. People aren't annoyed by federation. They just want something reliable, trustworthy, that connects them to content and people, and costs as little as possible. Twitter gained ascendance for the same reason: it gave everyone a free personal RSS feed. The formula is simple: make it possible to have your own personal X for free (where X is some widely used but technically challenging or costly tool) and it will take off.
    - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
      > People aren't annoyed by federation. I would go even further: people don't want to think about federation, for the most part. It doesn't matter whether I use Gmail, my company work email, or my own local email server; if I send an email to somebody, they'll receive it, regardless of what they're using. All I need is their email address. A federated microblog needs to be just as accessible, imo — if I have to adapt my behaviour based on whether somebody is on the same server as me, that's a problem.
colinsane 4y ago
my brother, the www as a whole is federated and people eat that shit up. visit foo.net and it loads fonts from google.com, embeds from twitter.com or reddit.com, images from some-other.site, and forwards a user to another-place.org when they perform an action, and all these sites will happily back-link to you. maybe hopping from one site to another really is more annoying than hopping between pages on the same site, and you install a monolithic app to avoid having to interact with more than one site. bad news for you my friend, your packets are still being sent through internet exchanges following some route based on which providers choose to federate (peer) with each other! i don't think people are necessarily annoyed by federation: they're annoyed by obstructive UX. make it so they don't notice, or that it feels natural, and they won't be annoyed.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  And a huge percentage of people consume the web via centralized, non-federated platforms like Facebook! When the federation is invisible, people aren't bothered, but Mastodon hardly makes it invisible.

kodah 4y ago

Federation didn't drive people to GMail. A modern interface and someone building on top of the protocol did.

pwinnski 4y ago
My point wasn't that people fled federated email to congregate at gmail. My point was that most people don't care one wet slap about federation, and will happily use whatever people point as easily usable (and free), whether Hotmail, or Yahoo, or Gmail.
oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
IIRC, what really drove people to Gmail was the huge storage space. Finally, no more having to manage your own quota, no more dealing with bounced email, etc. I think that's a far easier sell than 'modern interface', although I'm not sure what the equivalent for Mastodon users would be — maybe simply "it's free" if Twitter becomes a paid service.
- sockaddr 4y ago
  Yup. I think the alternatives at the time were things like Hotmail offering a whopping 4MB.
- derbOac 4y ago
  My reason for Gmail was pretty simple: it was free and free from the constraints of a work email account, and reasonably trustworthy. People aren't annoyed by federation. They just want something reliable, trustworthy, that connects them to content and people, and costs as little as possible. Twitter gained ascendance for the same reason: it gave everyone a free personal RSS feed. The formula is simple: make it possible to have your own personal X for free (where X is some widely used but technically challenging or costly tool) and it will take off.
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    > People aren't annoyed by federation. I would go even further: people don't want to think about federation, for the most part. It doesn't matter whether I use Gmail, my company work email, or my own local email server; if I send an email to somebody, they'll receive it, regardless of what they're using. All I need is their email address. A federated microblog needs to be just as accessible, imo — if I have to adapt my behaviour based on whether somebody is on the same server as me, that's a problem.

colinsane 4y ago

my brother, the www as a whole is federated and people eat that shit up. visit foo.net and it loads fonts from google.com, embeds from twitter.com or reddit.com, images from some-other.site, and forwards a user to another-place.org when they perform an action, and all these sites will happily back-link to you. maybe hopping from one site to another really is more annoying than hopping between pages on the same site, and you install a monolithic app to avoid having to interact with more than one site. bad news for you my friend, your packets are still being sent through internet exchanges following some route based on which providers choose to federate (peer) with each other! i don't think people are necessarily annoyed by federation: they're annoyed by obstructive UX. make it so they don't notice, or that it feels natural, and they won't be annoyed.

pwinnski 4y ago
And a huge percentage of people consume the web via centralized, non-federated platforms like Facebook! When the federation is invisible, people aren't bothered, but Mastodon hardly makes it invisible.