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> 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 ha

> 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.

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.