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You can have decentralisation or you can have sub-second responses to whole-network search queries, but you cannot have both. Twitter has two killer features:
by muglug 4y ago
You can have decentralisation or you can have sub-second responses to whole-network search queries, but you cannot have both.
Twitter has two killer features: the people who use it, and search functionality that allows you to get near-instant results. Mastodon (and I assume Bluesky) cannot compete on either.
- daniel_iversen 4y agoThe people is just about whichever platform has pull and influence, the architecture and missing out of full text search is something I’m sure people would be happy to live without. Not sure how much the average person searches on Twitter or Facebook (on tiktok and Instagram maybe they search more)
- sempron64 4y agoYou absolutely can have sub-second responses to search queries for publically accessible decentralized content, if it is indexed by a regular search engine. That is what the web is. Privately accessible content tends to be much smaller so local caching works. And if communication is not meant to be instant, email proves that a decentralized system works. What gets a little more difficult is content that is widely available but behind login. Facebook has this but twitter and mastodon tend to not be this way. In fact mastodon is a workable system for decentralized social networking, so I think the skepticism is unwarranted. The only question in my mind is whether a popular social network can be effectively bootstrapped without a core capital incentive.
- sliken 4y agoHow many people care about seeing tweets from the last second vs last minute? Or the difference between 95% of the results of a search and 100%, especially if the 95% is missing the least popular 5%.