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I've been on the fediverse for years and while I enjoy it, I think it's naive to think it'll replace Twitter. Fundamentally it lacks good discovery, features ta

I've been on the fediverse for years and while I enjoy it, I think it's naive to think it'll replace Twitter. Fundamentally it lacks good discovery, features take too long to implement (or simply can't be implemented), and verification is impossible without setting up your own server which seems like too much overhead imo. Further it just doesn't scale, although Andrew Torba was never known for his coding ability there's a reason he left the fediverse and I think the issues are fundamental to a federated site.

simonw 4y ago
"verification is impossible without setting up your own server" I don't think that's right. You don't need to run your own server in order to add verified links to your profile - but you do need to have pages you can link to on trusted domains which can rel=me back to your Mastodon page.
- shagie 4y ago
  There's different "levels" of trust (for me) on the verified. There's "this random person on a random instance is who they say they are" (after clicking on their name and checking the verified part). There is also "this person, by value of the name of the instance is who they say they are." @mfowler@toot.thoughtworks.com - I don't even need to go click through to their name to see if they are an employee of thought works (and thus very likely Martin Fowler). (One of the challenges with this is also finding the company sites - I'd love an old school yahoo directory of them)
- guywithahat 4y ago
  I guess in my mind I meant in order to know it's Ford's official account, the username url would have to be something like ford@ford.com. Every instance will end up with a ford@poa.st or ford@mastodon.social and it's not going to be clear who is the real one and who isn't (at least without being deep into fediverse drama). I don't think people will want to (or have time) to check whether every post they come across is from the official account or not
tptacek 4y ago
I don't know what it even means for this to "scale". I think people right now are hung up on Mastodon-the-social-network, the way it's been principally used until fairly recently, where people share servers and servers have a discernible culture, moderation, rules, community, that kind of thing. I don't think that's going to last long at all. The Mastodon that stands a very good chance of killing Twitter is Mastodon-the-software; "ActivityPub", if we have to call it that. This Mastodon isn't a coherent social network at all; it's a successor to RSS. People run their own servers; "scaling" them means the same thing as scaling a blog would. Of course, most people don't want to run their own servers, but that isn't going to matter by the end of the year, when 10 different providers will boot up a "Mastodon instance" for you with a single button push. Nobody is going to be thinking about instances at all; they'll just have an address, the same way they do for email. In this world, "Mastodon" is sort of a combination of most of the good features of Twitter, Blogger, and Google Reader, all at once. Users are as "discoverable" as blogs were --- meaning: very discoverable.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Everyone is approaching the social media issue as if it was a technical problem - it's not. No amount of decentralisation or protocols address (or even attempt) the root cause. The closest would be the crypto-based social networks, which while they have their own problems at least attempt to address the issue of funding the platform. You know it's bad when the closest thing to a solution comes from crypto grifters. Same issue with the rest of the "alternative" world, whether it's OSes or software. Lots of time spent on technicalities or ideologies, zero time spent on addressing the actual problem - that's why the "year of the Linux desktop" is still a recurring joke. The problem with social media right now is the lack of a non-adversarial, sustainable business model. All these changes stem from the fact that advertising-based business models are on their last legs and are fundamentally flawed because they are adversarial to the users - the Twitter API shutdown is at least partly because they want to drive everyone to use the official client where it's easier to impose user-hostile functionality. Decentralisation merely side-steps this problem which works on a very small scale but not only will break down at a larger scale (operating a social media platform costs money) but also brings a lot of its own issues. Part of the appeal of a social media platform is its popularity, network effects and a sense of community where most people are happy with or at least tolerate the rules and moderation policy. A Mastodon-powered future will have 2 outcomes: 1) every instance federates with everyone and the entire thing becomes flooded with spam and other unsavoury (or outright illegal, at least in some jurisdictions) content because there is no common moderation policy. Users eventually get fed up and leave to a centralised competitor. 2) instances federate on a case-by-case basis which fundamentally breaks network effects and makes global conversation and community building impossible. Good luck explaining to non-technical users why they can't see/interact with the same posts as their friends because they happen to be on different instances that don't federate with each other, or because the content they both want to see is on a separate instance that doesn't federate with theirs. Users get fed up & leave or can't get started to begin with and sign up on a centralised competitor instead. In both cases I haven't even addressed the issue of funding the network itself - there is still no business model (and any business model where users pay would require the service to have enough value for them to begin doing so - chicken & egg problem when the value of a social network is in its network effects), and even if there was, it will be more expensive because decentralisation requires a lot more system resources.

simonw 4y ago

"verification is impossible without setting up your own server" I don't think that's right. You don't need to run your own server in order to add verified links to your profile - but you do need to have pages you can link to on trusted domains which can rel=me back to your Mastodon page.

shagie 4y ago
There's different "levels" of trust (for me) on the verified. There's "this random person on a random instance is who they say they are" (after clicking on their name and checking the verified part). There is also "this person, by value of the name of the instance is who they say they are." @mfowler@toot.thoughtworks.com - I don't even need to go click through to their name to see if they are an employee of thought works (and thus very likely Martin Fowler). (One of the challenges with this is also finding the company sites - I'd love an old school yahoo directory of them)
guywithahat 4y ago
I guess in my mind I meant in order to know it's Ford's official account, the username url would have to be something like ford@ford.com. Every instance will end up with a ford@poa.st or ford@mastodon.social and it's not going to be clear who is the real one and who isn't (at least without being deep into fediverse drama). I don't think people will want to (or have time) to check whether every post they come across is from the official account or not

tptacek 4y ago

I don't know what it even means for this to "scale". I think people right now are hung up on Mastodon-the-social-network, the way it's been principally used until fairly recently, where people share servers and servers have a discernible culture, moderation, rules, community, that kind of thing. I don't think that's going to last long at all. The Mastodon that stands a very good chance of killing Twitter is Mastodon-the-software; "ActivityPub", if we have to call it that. This Mastodon isn't a coherent social network at all; it's a successor to RSS. People run their own servers; "scaling" them means the same thing as scaling a blog would. Of course, most people don't want to run their own servers, but that isn't going to matter by the end of the year, when 10 different providers will boot up a "Mastodon instance" for you with a single button push. Nobody is going to be thinking about instances at all; they'll just have an address, the same way they do for email. In this world, "Mastodon" is sort of a combination of most of the good features of Twitter, Blogger, and Google Reader, all at once. Users are as "discoverable" as blogs were --- meaning: very discoverable.

Nextgrid 4y ago
Everyone is approaching the social media issue as if it was a technical problem - it's not. No amount of decentralisation or protocols address (or even attempt) the root cause. The closest would be the crypto-based social networks, which while they have their own problems at least attempt to address the issue of funding the platform. You know it's bad when the closest thing to a solution comes from crypto grifters. Same issue with the rest of the "alternative" world, whether it's OSes or software. Lots of time spent on technicalities or ideologies, zero time spent on addressing the actual problem - that's why the "year of the Linux desktop" is still a recurring joke. The problem with social media right now is the lack of a non-adversarial, sustainable business model. All these changes stem from the fact that advertising-based business models are on their last legs and are fundamentally flawed because they are adversarial to the users - the Twitter API shutdown is at least partly because they want to drive everyone to use the official client where it's easier to impose user-hostile functionality. Decentralisation merely side-steps this problem which works on a very small scale but not only will break down at a larger scale (operating a social media platform costs money) but also brings a lot of its own issues. Part of the appeal of a social media platform is its popularity, network effects and a sense of community where most people are happy with or at least tolerate the rules and moderation policy. A Mastodon-powered future will have 2 outcomes: 1) every instance federates with everyone and the entire thing becomes flooded with spam and other unsavoury (or outright illegal, at least in some jurisdictions) content because there is no common moderation policy. Users eventually get fed up and leave to a centralised competitor. 2) instances federate on a case-by-case basis which fundamentally breaks network effects and makes global conversation and community building impossible. Good luck explaining to non-technical users why they can't see/interact with the same posts as their friends because they happen to be on different instances that don't federate with each other, or because the content they both want to see is on a separate instance that doesn't federate with theirs. Users get fed up & leave or can't get started to begin with and sign up on a centralised competitor instead. In both cases I haven't even addressed the issue of funding the network itself - there is still no business model (and any business model where users pay would require the service to have enough value for them to begin doing so - chicken & egg problem when the value of a social network is in its network effects), and even if there was, it will be more expensive because decentralisation requires a lot more system resources.