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I find that people being confused by federated network really telling on what it mistake it has been to let a few companies getting there hand on most of the co

by boudin 4y ago

I find that people being confused by federated network really telling on what it mistake it has been to let a few companies getting there hand on most of the content creation and distribution. I don't if it's the fact of having known the prime time of IRC, BBS, Usenet, and overall the web being a network of diverse communities, but I'm much more confortable with Mastodon than Twitter. Not having the possibility to host the service myself feels wrong. It's not that I want to, but I should be able to.

dmix 4y ago
> what it mistake it has been to let a few companies getting there hand on most of the content creation and distribution Centralized services drove massive adoption of consumer technology (see: Hotmail/Gmail for email). They paved the way… via marketing, customer support, design, infrastructure (even OSS services will probably run on AWS), etc. That all takes big investments that OSS typically can’t compete with. So it’s a good thing they paved the roads for which OSS can take over. All services and companies eventually stagnate or mess up, with rare exceptions. If OSS can eventually mature enough to legitimately compete in terms of UX/UI/features then there will always be opportunities in the various market to transition in that direction. People haven’t been trained or brainwashed to hate OSS, they just saw what was offered and aren’t willing the make the various sacrifices that typically come with most services like Mastodon. At least until the gap in offerings narrows.
- boudin 4y ago
  I'm not sure how much it actually helped. Customer support is really poor for a big chunk of those companies (I'm thinking Google, Facebook, not Apple or Amazon). People also got the concept of emails quite easily way before gmail existed or hotmail was popular. I don't think having a lot of providers was much of an issue. A lot of people still use providers which are not as big as google or hotmail, at least where I live. So I wonder if centralization was really something that helped people that much or it was more of a business strategy that was efficient for quick growth and that is the reason we are in this situation.

by boudin 4y ago

dmix 4y ago

> what it mistake it has been to let a few companies getting there hand on most of the content creation and distribution Centralized services drove massive adoption of consumer technology (see: Hotmail/Gmail for email). They paved the way… via marketing, customer support, design, infrastructure (even OSS services will probably run on AWS), etc. That all takes big investments that OSS typically can’t compete with. So it’s a good thing they paved the roads for which OSS can take over. All services and companies eventually stagnate or mess up, with rare exceptions. If OSS can eventually mature enough to legitimately compete in terms of UX/UI/features then there will always be opportunities in the various market to transition in that direction. People haven’t been trained or brainwashed to hate OSS, they just saw what was offered and aren’t willing the make the various sacrifices that typically come with most services like Mastodon. At least until the gap in offerings narrows.

boudin 4y ago
I'm not sure how much it actually helped. Customer support is really poor for a big chunk of those companies (I'm thinking Google, Facebook, not Apple or Amazon). People also got the concept of emails quite easily way before gmail existed or hotmail was popular. I don't think having a lot of providers was much of an issue. A lot of people still use providers which are not as big as google or hotmail, at least where I live. So I wonder if centralization was really something that helped people that much or it was more of a business strategy that was efficient for quick growth and that is the reason we are in this situation.