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> My Claim: Decentralization is a Questionable Goal Hard disagree with this. Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. You can use any e

> My Claim: Decentralization is a Questionable Goal Hard disagree with this. Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. You can use any email provider and interact with any other email provider effortlessly. This is undeniably an improvement over internal direct messages within a centralized service (i.e. Facebook or Twitter DMs). If you leave facebook, you leave your contact list and message history. On email, if using a custom domain, you can switch email providers or even host your own server without anybody on your contact list even having to know this occurred. Lots of people have been banned from platforms, rightly or wrongly. You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do. > On the topic of moderation the very same issue is even more absurd. Some instances want uncontrolled free speech where some instances effectively are pure shit-posting instances which are completely de-federated from the most of the fediverse as a result. Other instances really like to control their content, where some popular ones such as fosstodon ban all languages than English as a result to allow moderation. These are talked about as problems, rather than being the primary selling point.

humanistbot 4y ago
> You can't get banned from email. If you're on Google or spamhaus's blacklist, you're effectively banned.
- fooqux 4y ago
  You != your email address. Yes, a specific server or address can be "banned". But there is nothing stopping you from just opening another gmail / yahoo / whatevermail account.
  - bvrmn 4y ago
    And how to change a dozens accounts on others services to a new email without old one?
    - dalmo3 4y ago
      How does being on a spam blacklist prevent you from receiving email?
      - lzooz 4y ago
        He means that you will no longer receive mails sent to your old addresses.
        dalmo3 4y ago
        That's my question. Say if gmail adds user@example.com to their spam list. Does that mean gmail users won't be able to send emails to user@example.com? That is bizarre.
Semaphor 4y ago
> Hard disagree with this. From me as well. > You can use any email provider and interact with any other email provider effortlessly. This is undeniably an improvement over internal direct messages within a centralized service But the general public went for siloed systems instead. So I’d say you or me want decentralization, but I don’t think that holds true in general.
- dradtke 4y ago
  True, but it's way easier to add centralization to a system that is decentralized by nature than it is to somehow decentralize something that is centralized by nature.
- falcolas 4y ago
  > But the general public went for siloed systems instead. And yet some former Twitter users have identified why this is a problem, and are now moving back towards a decentralized platform. It's why scaling Mastadon is even a topic right now.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    A comparatively tiny group of outspoken people switched. And it's not even clear if they'll stay.
pizza234 4y ago
> Hard disagree with this. Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. That depends on how one looks at it. If spam and illegal content are considered, it may not be "working" in the sense a public service needs to be. Email works because it's private, so the requirements are much looser; a large part of the article is how to solve the bad actors problem, which doesn't apply to email (well, it applies, but spam is more or less accepted as fact of life, while fake news etc. isn't - and it may never be, independenly of being right or wrong).
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > If spam and illegal content are considered, it may not be "working" in the sense a public service needs to be. By that standard, centralized social networks have utterly failed us as well.
  - pizza234 4y ago
    > By that standard, centralized social networks have utterly failed us as well. They're not on the same level; moderation of social networks like Twitter/Facebook can be considered insufficient, but it exists. Contrast to the very low barriers (if any) to send spam emails, where the filter is, ironically, in the hands of centralized services like Gmail.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      No, the filter is in the hands of everyone who runs a mail server. Gmail et al. run the most centralized spam filters, but anyone running their own MX will almost certainly run their own spam filter as well. Likewise, Mastodon moderation falls to the servers.
crazygringo 4y ago
> Email is the example I give people of how federation could work... You can't get banned from email. Except e-mail has been a total failure when it comes to spam/abuse, and in practice it isn't this federated, decentralized paradise at all -- virtually everyone I know uses Gmail for their personal account. And if you want to run your own server, good luck getting Gmail to accept your e-mails at all. And if you can't get Gmail to trust your server, that's pretty much a ban for all practical purposes.
- jmbwell 4y ago
  Plenty of organizations and individuals run their own servers and have no problem exchanging email with Google, Microsoft, and other large providers. The point is that they can and do because the system is not, in fact, centralized. Also, judged only on the volume of spam and abuse, many systems besides email -- decentralized and centralized alike -- could be called a "total failure." And yet somehow these systems remain stable and functional and useful.
  - joecot 4y ago
    The only problem with doing this could be mail deliverability. But if you setup SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and use a mail service, it works fine if you're not spamming. Mailgun, Amazon SES, Mxroute, they'll all deliver your mail and for cheap. There's no single point of failure needed to get your mail delivered.
    - xiaomai 4y ago
      You don't need to use a delivery service. It's true you need to set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC for many peers to accept mail from you, but then you can deliver the mail yourself directly.
      - joecot 4y ago
        Yes, this is true, but I still get better delivery through delivery services. For example a lot of email providers send any email coming from a cloud hosting IP directly to spam.
poulpy123 4y ago
But mail and Facebook/twitter/mastodon are different: one works on the principle of private message, the other work on the principle of agora. And emails grew organically with the web, not the others, it change a lot of things
idlewords 4y ago
Email is an example of how federation fails, not how it works. It is now centralized in the hands of a few providers with the power to blackhole independent actors.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  That centralization mostly occurred due to the economics of below-cost pricing though. It's not necessarily due to federation itself failing as a mechanism for email. In other words, Gmail is the most popular email provider because it's in Google's interest to have people be logged in all the time so they can personalize search results, so that incentivizes them to make a very good email system and then give it away for free. Giving something good away for free because you gain indirect benefits via some other business will rapidly centralize more or less anything, which is why there are at least theoretically rules against market dumping and tying (which aren't really enforced in the software world, but that's another matter). We can imagine a parallel universe in which search is far more competitive, with lower margins, and thus Google couldn't financially justify subsidizing consumer Gmail for so many years. In such a world it's likely that there'd be more players, perhaps they wouldn't be as good but there'd likely be more of them, there'd probably be companies that specialized in selling spam filtering tech to them and it'd look more federated than what we have today.
- panarky 4y ago
  > blackhole independent actors Freedom doesn't mean the requirement to spend the community's resources propagating material that the community agrees is harmful or objectionable. That would be the opposite of freedom. The ability to refuse actors that the community doesn't want to spend resources on is essential to freedom. Every actor has the freedom to choose whether to conform to community norms, or to form their own communities with different norms.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    Freedom for titanic companies like Google to control what can or can't be said through enforcement on their monopolistic platforms is also not freedom for the individual. Your idea here works when the system is fragmented enough that these choices are personal choices, but the existence of so many large platforms makes their choices systemic, not personal.
pwinnski 4y ago
In the article itself, he points out that banking is decentralized and works wonderfully. He doesn't even mention email or phone service, both of which are decentralized and work well enough.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > In the article itself, he points out that banking is decentralized and works wonderfully. Except it isn't actually decentralized in the same sense as Mastodon is. You can't self-host a bank. > He doesn't even mention email or phone service, both of which are decentralized and work well enough. The same with phone service - it's not decentralized in this sense. You can't just run your own phone network, you can only choose from a single-digit number of major providers in your country, which are increasingly just multinationals. The only reason banking and phone service may sometimes feel they're decentralized is because of the high interest governments have in them, and the copious amount of regulation in the industries that prevent the worst kinds of consolidation and abuse of power. Email is, indeed, decentralized. And as many commenters already wrote, it's a disaster and a great example of how federated systems fail.
  - notpushkin 4y ago
    I don't believe that government intervention is needed for banks to stay decentralised. The ability to send money between banks is just too convenient, why would they ruin it?
tootie 4y ago
"Email is the example I give people of how federation could work" That presupposes that federation is actually a goal and not a means to an end. It's amazing how great developers are at not understanding what creates value. Twitter's value is _reach_. Get 400M users in one place, hook them with interesting content, server them ads, nudge them to sign up, track their engagement to make the platform sticky and attract more contributors. Any censorship that has been done has been for one and only one reason and it's protect the value of the platform. Primarily to advertisers, but also to users because users make the platform valuable. Decentralization deliberately cripples the main value of the platform (reach) in exchange for what exactly? Lack of moderation? If you want decentralized, uncensorable communities, we solved that 30 years ago with usenet. Or, like you said, you can't be banned from email or running your own website. That's always been the case. People still write blogs. Yet Twitter sold for $44B and Tumblr was sold for $3M. Why? Because Twitter has reach.
- int_19h 4y ago
  And, conversely, optimizing platforms for advertising cripples them for the users. And there's a lot more users, so if this is an either-or, it's clear where the balance ought to be.
giaour 4y ago
> You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. The platform may not be able to automatically enforce a ban, but you can still be banned via non-technical means. Not using email or the phone can be a condition of bail or parole, for example, like how Kevin Mitnick wasn't allowed (by court order) to use the telephone system in the early aughts.
throwawayacc4 4y ago
>Lots of people have been banned from platforms, rightly or wrongly. You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do. If there's anything to be learned from the KiwiFarms saga, it's that these statements are no longer true.
- voxic11 4y ago
  KiwiFarms was back within days, if anything the KiwiFarms saga showed that it is still true.
  - tommica 4y ago
    And it was down quick after that, but right now it is accessible in some countries. This saga has really muddled up responsibilities of different parts of the chain that makes the internet, where companies that should not be filtering traffic are doing exactly that.
- _a9 4y ago
  KiwiFarms is the perfect example on how that it is still true. The Twitter crew forgot about them after a week and it went back to normal.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
  On the topic of censorship / cancellation my limited experience so far has shown me that defederation happens and plenty of servers are entirely unreachable from the rest of the ecosystem. I’m not sure if this is an argument in favor or against anything, but at least it shows me that there are different standards and ideas at play and they really don’t fit well together into a coherent view of what Mastodon is. It really depends on “which mastodon”. poa.st and hachyderm.io are both Mastodon instances but they generally don’t cross as an example.
TylerE 4y ago
Funny, email is the example I give of why it doesn't.
dmje 4y ago
Someone posted delta chat[0] on here a while back. Basically chat that is email. Or maybe email that is chat. It struck me as a clever idea at the time and got me thinking whether you could make a social network entirely out of email. Sounds bonkers and probably is but you know, gotta think, right? [0] https://delta.chat/en/ https://delta.chat/en/
- pram 4y ago
  Seems like NNTP would be the better choice.
- xnx 4y ago
  Bring back Google Buzz! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
_448 4y ago
> On email, if using a custom domain... The problem starts here. Not many people who are not tech savvy even know what a custom domain is. Let alone having an email with a custom domain. > You can't get banned from email Ask people who get locked out of their gmail account. What we techies miss is that there are more people who don't understand technology and are not willing to spend time learning about it as they have other more important things to do. Tech is just one of the tools they are using to get their tasks done. We cannot expect people to spend time understanding everything about tech. It is not surprising that it took a commercial company with aggressive behaviour when it comes to controlling users data to put BSD on regular non-tech consumer desktops. And why Microsoft Windows succeeded in being on regular consumers desktop OS whereas commercial Linux-based OS struggled; and the company that successful put Linux on mobile devices also has quite a record when it comes to users data. We techies can talk a lot about decentralisation and owning data. But the regular non-tech users really don't care. They just want simple things done quickly using tech and get on with their lives. Recently I saw videos from multiple news channels on how to use Mastodon. They were at pains to explain to users how there are multiple servers and one has to choose a server, which is run by individuals or organisations. And if the server goes down then the user has to move to another server. Regular non-tech users really don't want to get into this complexity. Has anyone ever seen TV channels explain with great effort how to use Twitter?
- gfaster 4y ago
  Like this? https://www.cnet.com/culture/how-to-get-started-using-twitter/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/how-to-get-started-using-twitte...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cbsmith 4y ago
  > They were at pains to explain to users how there are multiple servers and one has to choose a server, which is run by individuals or organisations. And if the server goes down then the user has to move to another server. Regular non-tech users really don't want to get into this complexity. Has anyone ever seen TV channels explain with great effort how to use Twitter? I would point out that the concept is really no different from how ISPs work, and yet the public seems to have wrangled with that one.
jtode 4y ago
>Lots of people have been banned from platforms, rightly or wrongly. You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. This right here is why I can't take anyone seriously who takes the free speech "issue" surrounding corporate platforms. There is no free speech on a platform, ever.
Kalium 4y ago
Email is my go-to example of all the problems of federation. In theory any person can stand up their own server and interact with everyone else. In practice, there's been so much abuse over the decades that it takes a staggering investment in time/energy/money/expertise to do so. Enough that's it's completely beyond the reach of the vast majority of people. This problem is so bad that's it's driven a quiet de facto re-centralization of email.
- cogman10 4y ago
  Spam destroys all. Usenet is another example of the problems with 0 moderation and federation. Sure, it distributed amazingly (many ISPs mirrored usenet data), but once spammers started spamming, it quickly died as a discourse medium. Those with concerns over censorship need to face the fact that we've previously had 100% censorship free platforms and nobody uses them anymore. We dumped those platforms because of the lack of censoring, not in spite of it. Heck, HN is moderated as well, I don't think most of us would be here if it was unmoderated.
  - cbsmith 4y ago
    The problem recurs and yet that never seems to deter the next attempt to build a better mouse trap.
    - piccolbo 4y ago
      How about the web-of-trust a la freenet https://github.com/freenet/plugin-WebOfTrust https://github.com/freenet/plugin-WebOfTrust?
  - spion 4y ago
    How do you spam on a whitelist-based system? Spammers simply... don't get followed...
    - spion 4y ago
      Why the downvotes? Was my question difficult to understand? How does spam work on a social-media-like system where you have to wilfully follow someone to start getting their feed? Do you volontarily subscribe to receive spam?
agentdrtran 4y ago
> You can't get banned from email If your domain gets added to blocklists from gmail/outlook/spamhaus you basically are.
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  There's even been posts about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30222736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30222736
jojobas 4y ago
Email is still holding up, but realistically if Google, Microsoft and perhaps 2-3 other email hosts decided to collude and disallow any other email origins (let's say they would allow outgoing to them still) the majority of people's reaction to those complaining would be "just get yourself a gmail account".
- jrnichols 4y ago
  > the majority of people's reaction to those complaining would be "just get yourself a gmail account". That is the reaction now when issues with self-hosting email are brought up.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >ealistically if Google, Microsoft and perhaps 2-3 other email hosts decided to collude and disallow any other email origins the majority of people's reaction to those complaining would be "just get yourself a gmail account". That's exactly what these big email providers should do: just make a short list of allowed email hosts, including some governments and academic institutions and large corporations, and ban everything else. What are people going to do about it? Start running their own mail hosts? Hahaha. It would solve the spam problem quickly. A better solution would be some kind of Email 3.0 system that's designed for better security and trustworthiness, but we've already proven it's nearly impossible to get people to adopt a new open standard, so we need to stick with a locked-down corporate solution run by an oligopoly.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    > What are people going to do about it? Bring the anti-trust sledgehammer on them?
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      >Bring the anti-trust sledgehammer on them? Hahaha, that's funny! I really hope you aren't serious, because otherwise I would question your grasp of reality.
nickstinemates 4y ago
Do people even use email anymore? Looking at the number of sent emails I have across all email addresses, usage is going down down down.
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  Outside of work I almost never send email these days. I sometimes go weeks in between.
godelski 4y ago
> Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. Why does this example keep coming up? Email is highly centralized these days. It is an example of how decentralized systems BECOME centralized. Not an example of how decentralized systems work. The centralization process here made email far easier to use and was critical to its mass adoption. (centralization/decentralization is a spectrum obviously and not a binary option)
AnthonyMouse 4y ago
> These are talked about as problems, rather than being the primary selling point. The Mastodon implementation of this is legitimately flawed. The issue is you need users to be independent of servers. That isn't hard to implement. Make the user ID in the protocol the user's public key and user@domain is just a human-friendly pointer. If you transition from user@a to user@b, your pointer changes -- or you can use both for an indeterminate amount of time -- but the public key stays the same and so everyone who followed you or signed up for your feed still sees it. The current implementation is broken for multiple reasons. First, it makes you have to care who is hosting you, because if they become adversarial or go out of business or you become large enough to want to self-host, you lose your account. That shouldn't happen. Second, with users tied to hosts, it becomes "convenient" for hosts ban entire other hosts, which is poison because it's the dynamic that led to the bulk of email moving to GMail and Outlook. Once providers are big enough they can ban smaller ones ("for spam filtering") to exclude competitors. The protocol needs to prevent this by making the host fungible. Not doing so is a significant design flaw.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Well, it's too late now, so I guess we're stuck with it. Just look at email for example: its fundamental design is quite flawed as well, since it was conceived before anyone dreamed of spam, but now there's no way to fix it aside from hacked-on additions like spam filtering. The protocol, devised in the 1970s, can't be changed now, and we can't get everyone to upgrade to a new protocol. Why didn't the architects of Mastodon think of this stuff before? It should have been pretty obvious that people might want to move their accounts between servers. But now, they'll *never* be able to. The only way it can happen is if someone creates an entirely different social network like Mastodon and somehow gets everyone to switch to that instead, but it's probably too late now.
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    Mastodon still has like four users compared to any of the major social networks. Fix it now even if it takes a breaking change before it hurts more later, or do better with whatever thing actually does eventually rival the user count of Facebook or email. > The protocol, devised in the 1970s, can't be changed now, and we can't get everyone to upgrade to a new protocol. This is untrue. There is a clear path to adding things like DKIM or SPF. First you add support to the major servers and publish a spec, then you give everyone else a reasonable amount of time to implement it, then you turn it on. This breaks anyone who hasn't implemented it yet, but by then that's only people who suck, and anyway so does dumping all of the mail they send to spam with nothing they can do about it. The problem with email is that the major providers don't want to do more things like that (e.g. implement hashcash or similar), because it's better for them for the smaller providers to be destroyed than to design a protocol improvement that facilitates their existence. Which is why it's better for it to be there from the start. But the best time to do it was yesterday and the second best time is today.
contravariant 4y ago
None of your arguments address his main claim which is that decentralisation should be considered a means to an end and not an end in itself. Which makes sense to me, if you just use a system it can be hard to tell for sure if it is centralised or not, which makes it an implementation detail not a feature. Though there are definitely features that are easier to guarantee in a decentralised system, as well as features that are easier to guarantee in a centralised system, so it makes sense to look at it as a trade-off.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> You can't get banned from email. Sure, you can host your own email server. Doesn't mean your emails are going to actually reach anyone (i.e., GMail, Outlook, etc. email servers). There's not much point in self-hosting your Mastodon service if it's just you and a few of your buddies (might as well just have a private IRC channel). But the website, telephone analogies stand.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  > There's not much point in self-hosting your Mastodon service if it's just you and a few of your buddies That would imply that you did something so gross that everybody blacklisted your server. Currently there's only a couple instances that are blocked everywhere, and those were used solely for spam or mass harassment I think – single user instances are fine.
bobsmooth 4y ago
>You can't get banned from having your own website. You must have missed the Kiwifarms controversy.
cryptonector 4y ago
> Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. Email being store-and-forward and therefore high-latency makes decentralization work reasonably well for email. > You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do. Sure you can. Your site/IPs can get RBLed. Hosting sites can refuse to do business with you. Network providers can refuse to do business with you. DNS registrars can refuse to do business with you. Search engines can deprioritize your site. These things happen less with personal sites than they do with mass social media accounts, but they happen, and eventually they will happen a lot more, and they'll happen to Mastodon instances, I'm sure.
Thorentis 4y ago
Email is only 1 to many of you know the addresses. There's no email "multicast" (unless servers support some kind of wildcard mailing list). Mastodon is trying to support, like Twitter and most of social media, the one to many use case, which is incredibly hard to make distributed. Calling email a good example is like saying SMS is a good example because you can join any carrier and message any number. It's a completely different use case.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  > There's no email "multicast" Sure there is? You can add as many recipients as you want.

humanistbot 4y ago

> You can't get banned from email. If you're on Google or spamhaus's blacklist, you're effectively banned.

fooqux 4y ago
You != your email address. Yes, a specific server or address can be "banned". But there is nothing stopping you from just opening another gmail / yahoo / whatevermail account.
- bvrmn 4y ago
  And how to change a dozens accounts on others services to a new email without old one?
  - dalmo3 4y ago
    How does being on a spam blacklist prevent you from receiving email?
    - lzooz 4y ago
      He means that you will no longer receive mails sent to your old addresses.
      - dalmo3 4y ago
        That's my question. Say if gmail adds user@example.com to their spam list. Does that mean gmail users won't be able to send emails to user@example.com? That is bizarre.

Semaphor 4y ago

> Hard disagree with this. From me as well. > You can use any email provider and interact with any other email provider effortlessly. This is undeniably an improvement over internal direct messages within a centralized service But the general public went for siloed systems instead. So I’d say you or me want decentralization, but I don’t think that holds true in general.

dradtke 4y ago
True, but it's way easier to add centralization to a system that is decentralized by nature than it is to somehow decentralize something that is centralized by nature.
falcolas 4y ago
> But the general public went for siloed systems instead. And yet some former Twitter users have identified why this is a problem, and are now moving back towards a decentralized platform. It's why scaling Mastadon is even a topic right now.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  A comparatively tiny group of outspoken people switched. And it's not even clear if they'll stay.

pizza234 4y ago

> Hard disagree with this. Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. That depends on how one looks at it. If spam and illegal content are considered, it may not be "working" in the sense a public service needs to be. Email works because it's private, so the requirements are much looser; a large part of the article is how to solve the bad actors problem, which doesn't apply to email (well, it applies, but spam is more or less accepted as fact of life, while fake news etc. isn't - and it may never be, independenly of being right or wrong).

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> If spam and illegal content are considered, it may not be "working" in the sense a public service needs to be. By that standard, centralized social networks have utterly failed us as well.
- pizza234 4y ago
  > By that standard, centralized social networks have utterly failed us as well. They're not on the same level; moderation of social networks like Twitter/Facebook can be considered insufficient, but it exists. Contrast to the very low barriers (if any) to send spam emails, where the filter is, ironically, in the hands of centralized services like Gmail.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    No, the filter is in the hands of everyone who runs a mail server. Gmail et al. run the most centralized spam filters, but anyone running their own MX will almost certainly run their own spam filter as well. Likewise, Mastodon moderation falls to the servers.

crazygringo 4y ago

> Email is the example I give people of how federation could work... You can't get banned from email. Except e-mail has been a total failure when it comes to spam/abuse, and in practice it isn't this federated, decentralized paradise at all -- virtually everyone I know uses Gmail for their personal account. And if you want to run your own server, good luck getting Gmail to accept your e-mails at all. And if you can't get Gmail to trust your server, that's pretty much a ban for all practical purposes.

jmbwell 4y ago
Plenty of organizations and individuals run their own servers and have no problem exchanging email with Google, Microsoft, and other large providers. The point is that they can and do because the system is not, in fact, centralized. Also, judged only on the volume of spam and abuse, many systems besides email -- decentralized and centralized alike -- could be called a "total failure." And yet somehow these systems remain stable and functional and useful.
- joecot 4y ago
  The only problem with doing this could be mail deliverability. But if you setup SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and use a mail service, it works fine if you're not spamming. Mailgun, Amazon SES, Mxroute, they'll all deliver your mail and for cheap. There's no single point of failure needed to get your mail delivered.
  - xiaomai 4y ago
    You don't need to use a delivery service. It's true you need to set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC for many peers to accept mail from you, but then you can deliver the mail yourself directly.
    - joecot 4y ago
      Yes, this is true, but I still get better delivery through delivery services. For example a lot of email providers send any email coming from a cloud hosting IP directly to spam.

poulpy123 4y ago

But mail and Facebook/twitter/mastodon are different: one works on the principle of private message, the other work on the principle of agora. And emails grew organically with the web, not the others, it change a lot of things

idlewords 4y ago

Email is an example of how federation fails, not how it works. It is now centralized in the hands of a few providers with the power to blackhole independent actors.

mike_hearn 4y ago
That centralization mostly occurred due to the economics of below-cost pricing though. It's not necessarily due to federation itself failing as a mechanism for email. In other words, Gmail is the most popular email provider because it's in Google's interest to have people be logged in all the time so they can personalize search results, so that incentivizes them to make a very good email system and then give it away for free. Giving something good away for free because you gain indirect benefits via some other business will rapidly centralize more or less anything, which is why there are at least theoretically rules against market dumping and tying (which aren't really enforced in the software world, but that's another matter). We can imagine a parallel universe in which search is far more competitive, with lower margins, and thus Google couldn't financially justify subsidizing consumer Gmail for so many years. In such a world it's likely that there'd be more players, perhaps they wouldn't be as good but there'd likely be more of them, there'd probably be companies that specialized in selling spam filtering tech to them and it'd look more federated than what we have today.
panarky 4y ago
> blackhole independent actors Freedom doesn't mean the requirement to spend the community's resources propagating material that the community agrees is harmful or objectionable. That would be the opposite of freedom. The ability to refuse actors that the community doesn't want to spend resources on is essential to freedom. Every actor has the freedom to choose whether to conform to community norms, or to form their own communities with different norms.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  Freedom for titanic companies like Google to control what can or can't be said through enforcement on their monopolistic platforms is also not freedom for the individual. Your idea here works when the system is fragmented enough that these choices are personal choices, but the existence of so many large platforms makes their choices systemic, not personal.

pwinnski 4y ago

In the article itself, he points out that banking is decentralized and works wonderfully. He doesn't even mention email or phone service, both of which are decentralized and work well enough.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> In the article itself, he points out that banking is decentralized and works wonderfully. Except it isn't actually decentralized in the same sense as Mastodon is. You can't self-host a bank. > He doesn't even mention email or phone service, both of which are decentralized and work well enough. The same with phone service - it's not decentralized in this sense. You can't just run your own phone network, you can only choose from a single-digit number of major providers in your country, which are increasingly just multinationals. The only reason banking and phone service may sometimes feel they're decentralized is because of the high interest governments have in them, and the copious amount of regulation in the industries that prevent the worst kinds of consolidation and abuse of power. Email is, indeed, decentralized. And as many commenters already wrote, it's a disaster and a great example of how federated systems fail.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  I don't believe that government intervention is needed for banks to stay decentralised. The ability to send money between banks is just too convenient, why would they ruin it?

tootie 4y ago

"Email is the example I give people of how federation could work" That presupposes that federation is actually a goal and not a means to an end. It's amazing how great developers are at not understanding what creates value. Twitter's value is _reach_. Get 400M users in one place, hook them with interesting content, server them ads, nudge them to sign up, track their engagement to make the platform sticky and attract more contributors. Any censorship that has been done has been for one and only one reason and it's protect the value of the platform. Primarily to advertisers, but also to users because users make the platform valuable. Decentralization deliberately cripples the main value of the platform (reach) in exchange for what exactly? Lack of moderation? If you want decentralized, uncensorable communities, we solved that 30 years ago with usenet. Or, like you said, you can't be banned from email or running your own website. That's always been the case. People still write blogs. Yet Twitter sold for $44B and Tumblr was sold for $3M. Why? Because Twitter has reach.

int_19h 4y ago
And, conversely, optimizing platforms for advertising cripples them for the users. And there's a lot more users, so if this is an either-or, it's clear where the balance ought to be.

giaour 4y ago

> You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. The platform may not be able to automatically enforce a ban, but you can still be banned via non-technical means. Not using email or the phone can be a condition of bail or parole, for example, like how Kevin Mitnick wasn't allowed (by court order) to use the telephone system in the early aughts.

throwawayacc4 4y ago

>Lots of people have been banned from platforms, rightly or wrongly. You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do. If there's anything to be learned from the KiwiFarms saga, it's that these statements are no longer true.

voxic11 4y ago
KiwiFarms was back within days, if anything the KiwiFarms saga showed that it is still true.
- tommica 4y ago
  And it was down quick after that, but right now it is accessible in some countries. This saga has really muddled up responsibilities of different parts of the chain that makes the internet, where companies that should not be filtering traffic are doing exactly that.
_a9 4y ago
KiwiFarms is the perfect example on how that it is still true. The Twitter crew forgot about them after a week and it went back to normal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
On the topic of censorship / cancellation my limited experience so far has shown me that defederation happens and plenty of servers are entirely unreachable from the rest of the ecosystem. I’m not sure if this is an argument in favor or against anything, but at least it shows me that there are different standards and ideas at play and they really don’t fit well together into a coherent view of what Mastodon is. It really depends on “which mastodon”. poa.st and hachyderm.io are both Mastodon instances but they generally don’t cross as an example.

TylerE 4y ago

Funny, email is the example I give of why it doesn't.

dmje 4y ago

Someone posted delta chat[0] on here a while back. Basically chat that is email. Or maybe email that is chat. It struck me as a clever idea at the time and got me thinking whether you could make a social network entirely out of email. Sounds bonkers and probably is but you know, gotta think, right? [0] https://delta.chat/en/ https://delta.chat/en/

pram 4y ago
Seems like NNTP would be the better choice.
xnx 4y ago
Bring back Google Buzz! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

_448 4y ago

> On email, if using a custom domain... The problem starts here. Not many people who are not tech savvy even know what a custom domain is. Let alone having an email with a custom domain. > You can't get banned from email Ask people who get locked out of their gmail account. What we techies miss is that there are more people who don't understand technology and are not willing to spend time learning about it as they have other more important things to do. Tech is just one of the tools they are using to get their tasks done. We cannot expect people to spend time understanding everything about tech. It is not surprising that it took a commercial company with aggressive behaviour when it comes to controlling users data to put BSD on regular non-tech consumer desktops. And why Microsoft Windows succeeded in being on regular consumers desktop OS whereas commercial Linux-based OS struggled; and the company that successful put Linux on mobile devices also has quite a record when it comes to users data. We techies can talk a lot about decentralisation and owning data. But the regular non-tech users really don't care. They just want simple things done quickly using tech and get on with their lives. Recently I saw videos from multiple news channels on how to use Mastodon. They were at pains to explain to users how there are multiple servers and one has to choose a server, which is run by individuals or organisations. And if the server goes down then the user has to move to another server. Regular non-tech users really don't want to get into this complexity. Has anyone ever seen TV channels explain with great effort how to use Twitter?

gfaster 4y ago
Like this? https://www.cnet.com/culture/how-to-get-started-using-twitter/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/how-to-get-started-using-twitte...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cbsmith 4y ago
> They were at pains to explain to users how there are multiple servers and one has to choose a server, which is run by individuals or organisations. And if the server goes down then the user has to move to another server. Regular non-tech users really don't want to get into this complexity. Has anyone ever seen TV channels explain with great effort how to use Twitter? I would point out that the concept is really no different from how ISPs work, and yet the public seems to have wrangled with that one.

jtode 4y ago

>Lots of people have been banned from platforms, rightly or wrongly. You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. This right here is why I can't take anyone seriously who takes the free speech "issue" surrounding corporate platforms. There is no free speech on a platform, ever.

Kalium 4y ago

Email is my go-to example of all the problems of federation. In theory any person can stand up their own server and interact with everyone else. In practice, there's been so much abuse over the decades that it takes a staggering investment in time/energy/money/expertise to do so. Enough that's it's completely beyond the reach of the vast majority of people. This problem is so bad that's it's driven a quiet de facto re-centralization of email.

cogman10 4y ago
Spam destroys all. Usenet is another example of the problems with 0 moderation and federation. Sure, it distributed amazingly (many ISPs mirrored usenet data), but once spammers started spamming, it quickly died as a discourse medium. Those with concerns over censorship need to face the fact that we've previously had 100% censorship free platforms and nobody uses them anymore. We dumped those platforms because of the lack of censoring, not in spite of it. Heck, HN is moderated as well, I don't think most of us would be here if it was unmoderated.
- cbsmith 4y ago
  The problem recurs and yet that never seems to deter the next attempt to build a better mouse trap.
  - piccolbo 4y ago
    How about the web-of-trust a la freenet https://github.com/freenet/plugin-WebOfTrust https://github.com/freenet/plugin-WebOfTrust?
- spion 4y ago
  How do you spam on a whitelist-based system? Spammers simply... don't get followed...
  - spion 4y ago
    Why the downvotes? Was my question difficult to understand? How does spam work on a social-media-like system where you have to wilfully follow someone to start getting their feed? Do you volontarily subscribe to receive spam?

agentdrtran 4y ago

> You can't get banned from email If your domain gets added to blocklists from gmail/outlook/spamhaus you basically are.

bobsmooth 4y ago
There's even been posts about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30222736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30222736

jojobas 4y ago

Email is still holding up, but realistically if Google, Microsoft and perhaps 2-3 other email hosts decided to collude and disallow any other email origins (let's say they would allow outgoing to them still) the majority of people's reaction to those complaining would be "just get yourself a gmail account".

jrnichols 4y ago
> the majority of people's reaction to those complaining would be "just get yourself a gmail account". That is the reaction now when issues with self-hosting email are brought up.
midoridensha 4y ago
>ealistically if Google, Microsoft and perhaps 2-3 other email hosts decided to collude and disallow any other email origins the majority of people's reaction to those complaining would be "just get yourself a gmail account". That's exactly what these big email providers should do: just make a short list of allowed email hosts, including some governments and academic institutions and large corporations, and ban everything else. What are people going to do about it? Start running their own mail hosts? Hahaha. It would solve the spam problem quickly. A better solution would be some kind of Email 3.0 system that's designed for better security and trustworthiness, but we've already proven it's nearly impossible to get people to adopt a new open standard, so we need to stick with a locked-down corporate solution run by an oligopoly.
- int_19h 4y ago
  > What are people going to do about it? Bring the anti-trust sledgehammer on them?
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >Bring the anti-trust sledgehammer on them? Hahaha, that's funny! I really hope you aren't serious, because otherwise I would question your grasp of reality.

nickstinemates 4y ago

Do people even use email anymore? Looking at the number of sent emails I have across all email addresses, usage is going down down down.

mrtranscendence 4y ago
Outside of work I almost never send email these days. I sometimes go weeks in between.

godelski 4y ago

> Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. Why does this example keep coming up? Email is highly centralized these days. It is an example of how decentralized systems BECOME centralized. Not an example of how decentralized systems work. The centralization process here made email far easier to use and was critical to its mass adoption. (centralization/decentralization is a spectrum obviously and not a binary option)

AnthonyMouse 4y ago

> These are talked about as problems, rather than being the primary selling point. The Mastodon implementation of this is legitimately flawed. The issue is you need users to be independent of servers. That isn't hard to implement. Make the user ID in the protocol the user's public key and user@domain is just a human-friendly pointer. If you transition from user@a to user@b, your pointer changes -- or you can use both for an indeterminate amount of time -- but the public key stays the same and so everyone who followed you or signed up for your feed still sees it. The current implementation is broken for multiple reasons. First, it makes you have to care who is hosting you, because if they become adversarial or go out of business or you become large enough to want to self-host, you lose your account. That shouldn't happen. Second, with users tied to hosts, it becomes "convenient" for hosts ban entire other hosts, which is poison because it's the dynamic that led to the bulk of email moving to GMail and Outlook. Once providers are big enough they can ban smaller ones ("for spam filtering") to exclude competitors. The protocol needs to prevent this by making the host fungible. Not doing so is a significant design flaw.

midoridensha 4y ago
Well, it's too late now, so I guess we're stuck with it. Just look at email for example: its fundamental design is quite flawed as well, since it was conceived before anyone dreamed of spam, but now there's no way to fix it aside from hacked-on additions like spam filtering. The protocol, devised in the 1970s, can't be changed now, and we can't get everyone to upgrade to a new protocol. Why didn't the architects of Mastodon think of this stuff before? It should have been pretty obvious that people might want to move their accounts between servers. But now, they'll *never* be able to. The only way it can happen is if someone creates an entirely different social network like Mastodon and somehow gets everyone to switch to that instead, but it's probably too late now.
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  Mastodon still has like four users compared to any of the major social networks. Fix it now even if it takes a breaking change before it hurts more later, or do better with whatever thing actually does eventually rival the user count of Facebook or email. > The protocol, devised in the 1970s, can't be changed now, and we can't get everyone to upgrade to a new protocol. This is untrue. There is a clear path to adding things like DKIM or SPF. First you add support to the major servers and publish a spec, then you give everyone else a reasonable amount of time to implement it, then you turn it on. This breaks anyone who hasn't implemented it yet, but by then that's only people who suck, and anyway so does dumping all of the mail they send to spam with nothing they can do about it. The problem with email is that the major providers don't want to do more things like that (e.g. implement hashcash or similar), because it's better for them for the smaller providers to be destroyed than to design a protocol improvement that facilitates their existence. Which is why it's better for it to be there from the start. But the best time to do it was yesterday and the second best time is today.

contravariant 4y ago

None of your arguments address his main claim which is that decentralisation should be considered a means to an end and not an end in itself. Which makes sense to me, if you just use a system it can be hard to tell for sure if it is centralised or not, which makes it an implementation detail not a feature. Though there are definitely features that are easier to guarantee in a decentralised system, as well as features that are easier to guarantee in a centralised system, so it makes sense to look at it as a trade-off.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

> You can't get banned from email. Sure, you can host your own email server. Doesn't mean your emails are going to actually reach anyone (i.e., GMail, Outlook, etc. email servers). There's not much point in self-hosting your Mastodon service if it's just you and a few of your buddies (might as well just have a private IRC channel). But the website, telephone analogies stand.

notpushkin 4y ago
> There's not much point in self-hosting your Mastodon service if it's just you and a few of your buddies That would imply that you did something so gross that everybody blacklisted your server. Currently there's only a couple instances that are blocked everywhere, and those were used solely for spam or mass harassment I think – single user instances are fine.

bobsmooth 4y ago

>You can't get banned from having your own website. You must have missed the Kiwifarms controversy.

cryptonector 4y ago

> Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. Email being store-and-forward and therefore high-latency makes decentralization work reasonably well for email. > You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do. Sure you can. Your site/IPs can get RBLed. Hosting sites can refuse to do business with you. Network providers can refuse to do business with you. DNS registrars can refuse to do business with you. Search engines can deprioritize your site. These things happen less with personal sites than they do with mass social media accounts, but they happen, and eventually they will happen a lot more, and they'll happen to Mastodon instances, I'm sure.

Thorentis 4y ago

Email is only 1 to many of you know the addresses. There's no email "multicast" (unless servers support some kind of wildcard mailing list). Mastodon is trying to support, like Twitter and most of social media, the one to many use case, which is incredibly hard to make distributed. Calling email a good example is like saying SMS is a good example because you can join any carrier and message any number. It's a completely different use case.

notpushkin 4y ago
> There's no email "multicast" Sure there is? You can add as many recipients as you want.