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> virtually everyone I know uses Gmail for their personal account. Which, ironically enough, is the answer to everyone’s problems with mastodon. Does everyone

> virtually everyone I know uses Gmail for their personal account. Which, ironically enough, is the answer to everyone’s problems with mastodon. Does everyone you know use gmail for their business accounts? Does absolutely, 100% of the people you know use gmail for personal accounts? I’m going to go out on a limb and say no to both the above. There’s no reason mastodon has to be everyone runs their own server just like everyone doesn’t have to run their email server today. People use the company server for work stuff and fluffycat233575@yahoo.com for personal stuff. I don’t know if it’s just the HN bubble but all people post is why it can’t (or shouldn’t, because, get off my lawn) work. It’s like people have a vested interest in making sure non-adtech doesn’t succeed, almost like their very livelihoods depended on it. —edit— And, back in the day, spam filtering was something you had to do on your own or just dealt with all the spam. The big email providers became big in part because they solved that problem for most everyone. In ‘97 nobody (OK, nobody but the US postal service) was saying there needed to be this gigantic corporation monitoring everyone’s emails for wrongthink or only a central entity could solve the spam problem. People just bucked down and solved the problem enough to get a sizable portion of the population using email…I’m genuinely curious if there’s ever been a technology with higher uptake than email now.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> The big email providers became big in part because they solved that problem for most everyone. Yes, and the major way in which they did it also made it hard to self-host an e-mail server. > I don’t know if it’s just the HN bubble but all people post is why it can’t (or shouldn’t, because, get off my lawn) work. It’s like people have a vested interest in making sure non-adtech doesn’t succeed, almost like their very livelihoods depended on it. Perhaps it's true in some cases, but I think it's more likely that people here recognize the new federated communication services are structurally equivalent to e-mail, so there's little reason to expect they'll end up in a better state than e-mail did. On the contrary, there are reasons to expect they'll end up worse, because e-mail had the benefit of predating the commercialized web and mass adoption of the Internet by not tech-savvy people.
- spion 4y ago
  They are not structurally equivalent though. Social networks are whitelist-based (i.e. follows). A spammer has to somehow make people follow them to send them spam.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    It doesn't; most (all?) social networking sites allow unsolicited messages, and if they have a feed, it tends to accumulate second-hand spam. The issue here isn't spam, though, it's about who sets the rules. Spam is just one of the strongest drivers that make a federated network evolve into an oligopoly. It was the driver in case of e-mail, but e.g. for Mastodon, I'd say political extremism is the primary force. The result ends up being the same, because the dynamics are content-agnostic: users migrate to nodes that offer most reliable communication, and as those nodes grow in usercount, it makes it easier for them to fight undesired communication with blunt tools (e.g. instance or IP blocklists). It's a positive feedback loop.
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      That’s what people want though, a twitter replacement with all the filters and whatnot Musk is talking about dismantling. And they show up on mastodon, because everyone is talking about it, and find it isn’t the safe space they carefully curated with their twitter blocklists and write a blogpost (because they can’t complain on twitter anymore) about how it’ll never work. I don’t understand why these tech-savvy folks can’t give positive criticism to maybe fix the problem instead of “it’ll never work, can’t we just have our twitter back, pretty please?”
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        > a twitter replacement with all the filters and whatnot Musk is talking about dismantling. All the filters and whatnot people talk about people talking about Musk dismantling. There's a mass hysteria happening. Pretty much nothing of consequence has happened on Twitter on user side, except for what people make it in their heads, or talk about to show off in front of the group, one-upping each other in their newly discovered deep hatred for Musk. They check out Mastodon and are disappointed, because despite the fact it does give you more control and tools to "carefully curate your safe space", it's not the "Twitter but without Musk" they hoped it to be. It's not, and can't be, because the userbase isn't there, and the culture isn't there. Fediverse is still driven by political extremists crafting their own safe space to stew in their own vitriol, and the very identity is still defined as "we're not Twitter". Fediverse won't grow until it develops its own identity, that's not just negative space between commercial social media (and until it insulates the federation against political crazies). Federation is hard. E-mail and Mastodon are both, simultaneously, large successes and huge failures. There's a lot to learn from it, there's a potential to do better - but now is not the time, not when the topic is covered by the wannabe Internet stars doing performative anti-Musk dances. > “(...) can’t we just have our twitter back, pretty please?” They still have it, and guess what, they're still on it - because all this whining is just for show.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> The big email providers became big in part because they solved that problem for most everyone. Yes, and the major way in which they did it also made it hard to self-host an e-mail server. > I don’t know if it’s just the HN bubble but all people post is why it can’t (or shouldn’t, because, get off my lawn) work. It’s like people have a vested interest in making sure non-adtech doesn’t succeed, almost like their very livelihoods depended on it. Perhaps it's true in some cases, but I think it's more likely that people here recognize the new federated communication services are structurally equivalent to e-mail, so there's little reason to expect they'll end up in a better state than e-mail did. On the contrary, there are reasons to expect they'll end up worse, because e-mail had the benefit of predating the commercialized web and mass adoption of the Internet by not tech-savvy people.

spion 4y ago
They are not structurally equivalent though. Social networks are whitelist-based (i.e. follows). A spammer has to somehow make people follow them to send them spam.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  It doesn't; most (all?) social networking sites allow unsolicited messages, and if they have a feed, it tends to accumulate second-hand spam. The issue here isn't spam, though, it's about who sets the rules. Spam is just one of the strongest drivers that make a federated network evolve into an oligopoly. It was the driver in case of e-mail, but e.g. for Mastodon, I'd say political extremism is the primary force. The result ends up being the same, because the dynamics are content-agnostic: users migrate to nodes that offer most reliable communication, and as those nodes grow in usercount, it makes it easier for them to fight undesired communication with blunt tools (e.g. instance or IP blocklists). It's a positive feedback loop.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    That’s what people want though, a twitter replacement with all the filters and whatnot Musk is talking about dismantling. And they show up on mastodon, because everyone is talking about it, and find it isn’t the safe space they carefully curated with their twitter blocklists and write a blogpost (because they can’t complain on twitter anymore) about how it’ll never work. I don’t understand why these tech-savvy folks can’t give positive criticism to maybe fix the problem instead of “it’ll never work, can’t we just have our twitter back, pretty please?”
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      > a twitter replacement with all the filters and whatnot Musk is talking about dismantling. All the filters and whatnot people talk about people talking about Musk dismantling. There's a mass hysteria happening. Pretty much nothing of consequence has happened on Twitter on user side, except for what people make it in their heads, or talk about to show off in front of the group, one-upping each other in their newly discovered deep hatred for Musk. They check out Mastodon and are disappointed, because despite the fact it does give you more control and tools to "carefully curate your safe space", it's not the "Twitter but without Musk" they hoped it to be. It's not, and can't be, because the userbase isn't there, and the culture isn't there. Fediverse is still driven by political extremists crafting their own safe space to stew in their own vitriol, and the very identity is still defined as "we're not Twitter". Fediverse won't grow until it develops its own identity, that's not just negative space between commercial social media (and until it insulates the federation against political crazies). Federation is hard. E-mail and Mastodon are both, simultaneously, large successes and huge failures. There's a lot to learn from it, there's a potential to do better - but now is not the time, not when the topic is covered by the wannabe Internet stars doing performative anti-Musk dances. > “(...) can’t we just have our twitter back, pretty please?” They still have it, and guess what, they're still on it - because all this whining is just for show.