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Presumably your comment is directed at me, but I think we probably have overlapping wants and disagree on how to get those results. I think you're wrong about

Presumably your comment is directed at me, but I think we probably have overlapping wants and disagree on how to get those results. I think you're wrong about Musk, but that aside - I want us to escape the ad-driven model we're trapped in. I want users to have actual control over their computing. I want hackers back. I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail. It's not a disagreement about the goals - it's a disagreement about the focus and the tactics to get the goal we want. I want more than some system that serves a handful of highly technical niche users (arguably poorly) in a mostly centralized fashion. I want a path to actually achieving the goals the cypherpunks of the 90s web originally set out to achieve.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I mean, I'm active on Mastodon this week and I'm boosting it because it's having its moment. But I don't disagree with many of the criticisms of it. But it doesn't really matter, because this is something having a growth moment right now and it's overall a positive thing and it's something that can actually be built on. Mastodon itself is fairly meh software. ActivityPub itself is reasonable as a potential starting point, though it won't satisfy the purists. In the meantime, we are potentially seeing the beginning of an exponential growth curve on Mastodon. It could fizzle out. But it's a net positive thing, from the POV of this old wizened/grouchy Internet veteran.
red_trumpet 4y ago
> it's a disagreement about the focus So what would you like to focus on instead?
- gonehome 4y ago
  Something like Urbit - actual decentralized computing where users really own their stuff.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail. Email seems pretty successful by any measure… All this really needs is an overlay (app or something) so people don’t have to care about the underlying technology. With all the newfound interest there’s probably someone working on such a thing and other people looking for somewhere to throw a bunch of money to cash in on the new trend. Just look a the pandemic and WFH, video conferencing went from some niche thing to something my 70 year old parents were doing on a regular basis to keep in touch with the family. The first month or so it was a bigger mess than the current twitter exodus and an almost direct comparison. IDK, having the beeb give a pretty balanced overview doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Unfortunately nobody cares about that and just want to go on about how Elon is the worst human ever.
- gonehome 4y ago
  People have been bringing email up a lot, but it’s really a good example of why federated systems end up centralizing and fail to accomplish their goals. Almost nobody runs their own email server, the few that do struggle with not getting blacklisted by Google and the tiny number of other companies everyone else uses. Even the tiny number of highly technical users that persist despite that are communicating almost entirely with people on gmail anyway. This is a failure. It’s a failure for the same reasons mastodon will fail: spam is a hard problem, servers are too hard to run, centralization has UX advantages that can’t be overcome without changing underlying problems with the software stack (dependencies, general complexity, how updates are deployed across a federated network). Urbit is trying to do this, as far as I can tell nobody else is taking it seriously.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

I mean, I'm active on Mastodon this week and I'm boosting it because it's having its moment. But I don't disagree with many of the criticisms of it. But it doesn't really matter, because this is something having a growth moment right now and it's overall a positive thing and it's something that can actually be built on. Mastodon itself is fairly meh software. ActivityPub itself is reasonable as a potential starting point, though it won't satisfy the purists. In the meantime, we are potentially seeing the beginning of an exponential growth curve on Mastodon. It could fizzle out. But it's a net positive thing, from the POV of this old wizened/grouchy Internet veteran.

red_trumpet 4y ago

> it's a disagreement about the focus So what would you like to focus on instead?

gonehome 4y ago
Something like Urbit - actual decentralized computing where users really own their stuff.

UncleEntity 4y ago

> I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail. Email seems pretty successful by any measure… All this really needs is an overlay (app or something) so people don’t have to care about the underlying technology. With all the newfound interest there’s probably someone working on such a thing and other people looking for somewhere to throw a bunch of money to cash in on the new trend. Just look a the pandemic and WFH, video conferencing went from some niche thing to something my 70 year old parents were doing on a regular basis to keep in touch with the family. The first month or so it was a bigger mess than the current twitter exodus and an almost direct comparison. IDK, having the beeb give a pretty balanced overview doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Unfortunately nobody cares about that and just want to go on about how Elon is the worst human ever.

gonehome 4y ago
People have been bringing email up a lot, but it’s really a good example of why federated systems end up centralizing and fail to accomplish their goals. Almost nobody runs their own email server, the few that do struggle with not getting blacklisted by Google and the tiny number of other companies everyone else uses. Even the tiny number of highly technical users that persist despite that are communicating almost entirely with people on gmail anyway. This is a failure. It’s a failure for the same reasons mastodon will fail: spam is a hard problem, servers are too hard to run, centralization has UX advantages that can’t be overcome without changing underlying problems with the software stack (dependencies, general complexity, how updates are deployed across a federated network). Urbit is trying to do this, as far as I can tell nobody else is taking it seriously.