19 ms·

The Federated App Problem

107 points by plug_world 3y ago

jojobas 3y ago
If you're thinking of federation in terms of "apps" yes it's doomed. Like with email, you have to think about it in terms of "service". The "gravitate to one provider" problem is there (as with gmail), but those who care can still have their own email services or use reasonable third parties. The tragedy of course is that very few people care.
- evouga 3y ago
  Well since circa mid-2010s the Internet is apps. Or app-like centralized web sites (like Hacker News). People want to install a single “Lemmy” app on their phone that shows them all Lemmy content and lets them post to all instances, using a single account and a *simple* user interface. If Lemmy cannot provide that user experience (abstracting away the federation), then yes it is doomed.
  - Arn_Thor 3y ago
    I have been actively looking for alternatives since the Reddit API fiasco started but I just don't have time to sit down and grok Lemmy or any of the other federated instances. And I'd argue I'm more tech curious than most. If this is such an obstacle for me, I imagine very many people won't bother either.
  - assbuttbuttass 3y ago
    There isn't even a single Reddit app. And the whole point of federation is that you can use a single account to post on any instance
    - jojobas 3y ago
      Why would you post on many instances? Shouldn't you be posting on _your_ instance, that people you authorized can view?
      - assbuttbuttass 3y ago
        You make posts on a particular community (through your home instance), and federation means all the other instances will mirror your post
        jojobas 3y ago
        Federation doesn't mean anything like that per se, you're talking detail of a particular implementation (I assume Mastodon but what do I know). Federation just means multiple independent servers/domains can talk to each other, such as with email or Matrix, without the need for central authority (other than for discovering each other).
        mariusor 3y ago
        The concept that you get wrong is that nobody mirrors content. Servers receive the content from the one of the original content creator, if they exist in its recipients list. Public content usually is distributed to all servers that the original server knows about. However it's always a PUSH of the content.
        assbuttbuttass 3y ago
        How is that different from mirroring? I just meant the same content is available on multiple domains.
        mariusor 3y ago
        To me they are entirely different, mirroring represents a pull model, what ActivityPub does is (mostly) push based.
    - StephenAmar 3y ago
      The problem is that Twitter, reddit, and other social platforms are mostly read, not posted to.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    I suspect when you're saying "apps" you mean "companies". There has to be a better way.
  - tspike 3y ago
    Could someone smarter than me explain why we can’t use a Bittorrent-like protocol to achieve this effect with federated servers?
    - mariusor 3y ago
      If you think bittorrent like protocols are better suited for your usage, there are networks that use that: nostr and scuttlebut. They are not part of what people call the fediverse, because the underlying data format is different, but you can still try it. To answer the question, and I have just a superficial understanding of the concept, the main issue with decentralized vs. federated protocols is that you have to store the whole (or quite a large chunk of the) social tree locally on your device. That's a lot of data that you don't really care about. It might be fine if you access the network from a computer with plenty of space, but a mobile device might be more problematic.
- apocalyptic0n3 3y ago
  I think it's worth pointing out here that we (on HN) are not average users. I have had a number of actually average users asking me about the Reddit blackouts recently. Most of them don't know of Reddit beyond the first party app. 3 or 4 didn't even know Reddit had a website. None of them could even comprehend how you could use a third party app to access Reddit and their minds were blown when I told them that Reddit didn't have an app at all originally and the Reddit app today was originally Alien Blue. For most people, the word "service" doesn't even enter into their minds. It's an app. It either does what they want or it doesn't. The inability for many in our group, including myself, to comprehend and understand this is why the fediverse, Linux, crypto for non-investment/gambling purposes, etc. continue to fail to gain much popularity. For most people, they don't care how it works... they only care that "it just works".
predictabl3 3y ago
The big one here that is compelling for me is Identity (sort of Auth as touched on in the article). My understanding is that there are multiple working groups trying to tackle this, but I don't know of any federated networks with a sizeable userbase that has implemented any of the decentralized identity mechanisms yet. (Please let me know if you're aware of one). That said, Matrix is quite large, and growing, and being adopted by multiple national governments. And I know they want to eventually tackle decentralized identity, there are open issues and some brainstorming about it. I am hoping that a federated alternative to HN will emerge because this is the only non-federated social platform I (will) participate on, post-reddit. And probably the only one that has reasonably stood the test of time in the face of tech capitalism, and it's certainly unique in that regard. I like building software that is aspirational and going to stand the test of time, and I wish I had spent more energy til now working to the same end in terms of "knowledge-bases" ala those that have grown in now-private subreddits and semi-private Discord servers.
sxg 3y ago
I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantage of federation I keep hearing is that servers can block other servers if their users become problematic. My question is this: why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane? I do see the potential advantages of federation to prevent the same fate that overcame Twitter and Reddit, but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful. Without solving that piece of the puzzle, I don’t see any practical advantage to federated services.
- 7e 3y ago
  Yes, all problematic users don’t congregate on the same server. Problematic users can pop up anywhere. However, a server could fail to moderate effectively and become a source of misinformation and trolling. That’s the benefit of federation: it ensures a minimum level of moderation quality. Servers that don’t moderate are blocked, which sets up the proper incentives.
  - sxg 3y ago
    Sure, but as the number of users on the federated service grows, how do we not end up in the same place as email today? Does it not become good moderation policy to auto-block all new and small servers (e.g., self-hosted email servers) if you're a big server (e.g., Gmail)? If that happens, wouldn't all users migrate to the big server (e.g., Gmail) and effectively re-establish centralization and undermine federation?
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      The inverse happened recently on Lemmy. Beehaw.org, a community focused on good behavior, defederated lemmy.world and another smaller site because those sites caused a lot of unwanted content and moderator intervention. Lemmygrad.ml, a bunch of communist extremists, also gets blocked quite often, not just by principled servers like beehaw. A lot of people got mad for being blocked, but honestly I can't blame the admins for trying to reduce the amount of moderation necessary. There are thousands of people per moderator on those sites and that combined with open registration is a recipe for toxic bullshit nobody wants to deal with. Smaller instances don't get blocked, though. I doubt they will be until the low quality shitposters will figure out a way to host a server of their own, but without a central gathering place I think even then the abuse will be easily prevented. That said, Lemmy used to be set to whitelist-only by default for ages. This has been changed, but if someone wants to federate with just their servers of choice, they can just toggle a setting. Lemmy also comes with an approval form by default, which is used manually to vet users during signup. Open signup servers disable that field, obviously, but those servers are often also the ones that get blocked. I can see this evolving to a situation where only closed or manually approved servers get federated by default. Requiring manual reduces the probability that a small team of admins will get overwhelmed by a large influx of users.
eddythompson80 3y ago
The problem with federation is that “HTTP browsers” simply just don’t work that way. There is nothing you can do to make Firefox or Chrome to understand what a “federated network” even is. For a browser, an “Origin” is an extremely well defined concept. You can’t just decide to amend it because that’s how you feel it ought to be. If you can’t make mastodon.social be relates to social.mastodon in the browser, then you’ll have a rough edge. And that’s just to start. Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues that all could be attributed to what a “browser” interrupts HTTP or the internet to be vs what is actually possible.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  There's absolutely nothing stopping browser vendors from implementing ActivityPub. I don't think the browser is the right place, but browsers also implemented automatic RSS feed detection for more than a decade so it's not exactly unprecedented either. Browsers don't need to care, anyway. There are some problems that need solving (notably, following/interacting with users on other platforms) but there are ways to do that. I'm not quite sure why nobody has come up with a good standard for a web-activitypub: URL handler, but once everyone agrees on a format adding support for cross-server stuff should be easy. Web browsers can access webmail clients and mailing lists just fine. They even have mailto: as a means to cross the federation gap. All of these problems are implementation issues, not conceptual impossibilities.
- ikt 3y ago
  > Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues I like how you're talking about it like it's some abstract underground BBS style system that requires a modem, ISDN line installed, custom software running on a unix subsystem I mean I found https://fosstodon.org/home https://fosstodon.org/home signed up, clicked on local, liked posts, followed people, now I get a stream of posts to my home feed every day Maybe your everyday facebook user might struggle with the idea of signing up to a site and interacting with it but I'm just not seeing why anyone who can sign up to discord or reddit would struggle with it
  - bobsmooth 3y ago
class4behavior 3y ago
> I mean that’s the whole point of federation right?? The point of federation is not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that. >It kinda loses its point. Even if it comes to this, it doesn't. Another migration can happen at any point, but this time you wouldn't lose your social contacts - and in the future hopefully neither your content. >But Google and Microsoft got in the game. That's like your common anti-Linux argument. >Search engine indexing for these federated services SUCKS. Decentralized content/link aggregators just became popular so we'll see what'll happen, but personal social media shouldn't be as public for most people as it right now anyway.
- pndy 3y ago
  > not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that. The oligopolies from a single country might get replaced by groups of instances who will claim they're holders of the Truth and who are the Service, while rest is dangerous. Nothing also stops countries from running own instances or compatible services by dedicated companies or people to either dominate or lure people out of the federation. A good campaign, attractive interface and features and people will follow. The remaining option is to "run your own instance" but in time when the federation will most likely solidify enough it might be hard to do so. Hard as in getting people to join your new playground. What we're seeing right now it's a boom period. Don't get me wrong, I do like concept of federated services but there's too many sides where it might fail in long-term and help create a highly tribalized echo-chambered communities
_HMCB_ 3y ago
One problem I see is the lack of cohesiveness between clients. What one client/app chooses to name a “repost” is different than another client. Icons for said features also vastly differ. So it’s hard to build unity through the ecosystem without a common language (visual and vocabulary). This is just my brand developer’s take.
- SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago
  This is a big part of why I'm skeptical when folks point to email as an example of a successful federated system: most of the common language and conceptual model was established thousands of years ago.
  - mariusor 3y ago
    I believe it's safe to say that in a thousand years ActivityPub will be equally well understood and uniform. You're just here for the ride. Try to enjoy it.
jacooper 3y ago
I think the only reason people know about email supporting multiple providers is because its old, if email was made today, you bet its going to be centralized. Heck people already scratch their heads when an email isn't hosted @gmail.com or @hotmail/outlook.com. And the learning curve exists because unprofitable companies like Twitter and Reddit made centralization possible by burning money, the old internet was decentralized because centralization was impossible, it was too expensive. If these failing companies die, federated services will be the mainstream again. But as long as there is money to be burned to try to make a poor business model out of social interaction, federation is never going to be able to compete.
- copperx 3y ago
  > Heck people already scratch their heads when an email isn't hosted @gmail.com or @hotmail/outlook.com. What people? Are they in the room with us right now? Anyone that works at a small/medium/large company has an email address @company.com
  - audiodude 3y ago
    I've heard plenty of stories of people saying "my email is fred@fredsmith.com" and it being input by a customer rep as "fred@fredsmith.com@gmail.com". Or them asking "At gmail.com or hotmail?" and you have to explain "No, at fredsmith.com".
    - _lnwk 3y ago
      I use some Polish email provider - the amount of times websites say my email must not be valid because it's @[service].pl was way too high :(
  - Pathogen-David 3y ago
    Except most normal people don't use their corporate email address for personal stuff. I've always used a custom domain for my main email addresses and whenever I've had to give it to someone else verbally it inevitably leads to some amount of confusion. At the very least they get thrown off by the fact that I didn't say gmail/outlook/yahoo after the @ and I have to repeat the domain name.
asnyder 3y ago
As far as email is concerned, one reason why you don't see as much as self-hosting or any frankly, is due to deliverability. Doesn't help to have your own mail server when all the mail coming from it is classified as spam and filtered out of inboxes leaving you to have to use a "trusted" hosted provider to ensure your email actually works as you'd expect.
- copperx 3y ago
  Is it really a problem or cargo culting? I certainly thought it was a problem, but I know a sysadmin that runs two small businesses's email on prem and he says that deliverability, even to major providers, has never been a problem, as long as you set up everything right.
  - asnyder 3y ago
    I don't know how cargo culting figures into this. Nobody is setting up cardboard boxes and thinking it's a mail server :). What does it mean to set everything up right? Out of the box postfix, sendmail, dovecat, etc., no longer generally work, even with DKIMs, and other necessary domain verifications. I have heard of some admins opening cases with some of the large hosts to ensure their mail goes through, but seeing how those are all big cos with little no guaranteed lines of contact or follow through I wouldn't hold my breath on it working or being a long-term solution as they can easily blacklist you at any time with you having no recourse. I'd love to hear a counter argument, as it's also the same thing for basic transactional mail sending, there's a reason everyone switched to SMTP hosts such as Mandrill, Sendgrid, and AWS, deliverability.
    - copperx 3y ago
      > I don't know how cargo culting figures into this. Hosting email at big provider as a default option because it is "well known" that self-hosting email is unviable can be considered cargo culting.
spicyusername 3y ago
The handful of things mentioned in that article are definitely frictional, but I think people are willing and open to learning if they start to see value. Smaller Lemmy instances feel more personal to me than subreddits did, and I think that is something people will find valuable.
docheinestages 3y ago
The article sums up my current frustrations with federated platforms. Maybe it just needs some time for reliable communities to be known. But until then, I'll be happy to use centralized platforms. Alternatively, people can adapt the culture of self-hosting their own instances. Then you don't have to worry about reliability and content moderation.
armchairhacker 3y ago
A big problem is that you don't actually see content on other instances. Also, you can't link accounts between instances (EDIT: you can post and subscribe to communities on other instances, but it's not obvious. You can't link 2 accounts on separate instances though) There are several rust instances: https://lemmy.ml/c/rust https://lemmy.ml/c/rust, https://programming.dev/c/rust https://programming.dev/c/rust, https://lemmyrs.org/ https://lemmyrs.org/, and probably more. Why aren't they linked together, so that you see posts from one instance in another and can post and comment in one instance from an account on another? (I get there is e.g. https://lemmyrs.org/c/rust@lemmy.ml https://lemmyrs.org/c/rust@lemmy.ml, but you should see and make posts from https://lemmy.ml/c/rust https://lemmy.ml/c/rust on the page https://lemmyrs.org https://lemmyrs.org, not a specific subpath). Even better, why can't Rust lemmy link with rust kbin (https://kbin.social/m/rust https://kbin.social/m/rust) link with Rust discourse (https://users.rust-lang.org/ https://users.rust-lang.org/) link with Rust Zulip (https://forge.rust-lang.org/platforms/zulip.html https://forge.rust-lang.org/platforms/zulip.html), so you can see and make posts on all instances from one? This is what I initially thought the Fediverse was like. Right now it honestly just seems like many people running completely different servers and communities using the same software. (This could even help with the decentralization aspect, because ideally the content and accounts would be replicated. So if one instance goes down, its content is still on connected instances, and possibily "ghost accounts" from that instance which let users there continue to post).
- vin047 3y ago
  > This could even help with the decentralization aspect, because ideally the content and accounts would be replicated. So if one instance goes down, its content is still on connected instances, and possibily "ghost accounts" from that instance which let users there continue to post So Usenet?
  - gremlinsinc 3y ago
    Or, IRC. For all the major support systems (most I think now have moved to discord), they all had a freenode channel, but what if they'd all chosen different networks, so you'd need to connect to maybe a different network for mysql, another for postgres, another for php, another for rust, etc... To make it more confusing though, all of those networks EACH have their own smaller channel for those technologies, just the official one is on x server. Reddit is awesome because it's one place to get ALL content related to a niche under one umbrella, and because you can use awesome 3rd party apps -- the next reddit replacement doesn't need to be federated, but it could be community-ran as a sort of DAO, where users can vote on features/etc...
remram 3y ago
Isn't this entire point about SEO negated by judicious use of Link rel=canonical? Or just excluding foreign content via robots.txt? I don't see why this is described as such an insurmountable fundamental flaw.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
evbogue 3y ago
The Federated App Problem has already been solved a couple of times using replicated gossip networks of signed messages. Sometimes they use append-only logs, other times they use only relays, and the implementations are all highly creative and experimental. The trouble with decentralized federation social media servers is the weight of the network falls upon whoever volunteered to host the program at the domain name in the first place, and sometimes the weight is too much to handle. The solution is, as we all already know, self-authenticating messages that do not rely on any one server. Do we want to call this Scuttlebot? Do we want to call this Nostr? Does Bluesky even qualify? Well, I'm sure we'll figure it out eventually with enough minds trained upon the problem.
bluedemon 3y ago
Here's a rant by a person that is annoyed that redditors are not understanding the fediverse: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59927/rant-Why-is-this-so-hard-for-people https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59927/rant-Why-is-th... And they still state that it's easy and the other posters are scratching their heads as to why don't people understand this. "Whyyyy???" They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them. That's why the fediverse is going to get a bump for a bit during this reddit situation, but then calm down as users aren't going to want to stick around. The same happened when others were leaving Twitter. This fediverse situation reminds me of that Silicon Valley episode in which they're testing an app with a focus group. The group just doesn't understand the app and find it too complicated. Richard tries to explain the app to them, but it's too technical for them to comprehend.
- mariusor 3y ago
  > They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them. In all fairness those were the exact same comments when people moved away from Digg to reddit, only in the opposite direction. History is just repeating itself.
  - David_SQOX 3y ago
    I remember vividly when the digg exodus happened, I don't ever remember a single person complaining that reddit, nor digg, were too technical/difficult to understand/use. Both sites you simply clicked the register link, input your username/pass/email then done. The fediverse does not have a clean onboarding that lends itself to comprehension by a regular non-technical person. It seems way over the head of your average user. I've tried to get friends to check out Lemmy and it's a solid no-go. If you need an entire matrix of understanding of a concept before feeling comfortable to use it then it is simply too much cognitive friction.
    - seanclayton 3y ago
defanor 3y ago
"Federated App" sounds odd: protocols are federated, and apparently they are criticized in the article, not software. The "Learning curve" argument suggests that oligopolies tend to form, so it is not worth bothering. But that applies to pretty much any organizational activity, not just federated protocols, and often people try to push back against oligopolies or monopolies; often it is desirable and possible. The "Authentication" one only applies to web-based clients, but you can login to remote instances even with those: converse.js supports it for XMPP, for instance. Possibly not in the way the author imagines it should though; perhaps that is closer to OpenID/WebID/OAuth. Still, generally users are not meant to login to every instance directly: even with just Google and Microsoft, you do not login to a Microsoft server to send them a message from your Gmail account, as you do not login into the receiver's email account to place a message for them. Maybe this section should have been titled "learning curve" instead. The "Search Engine Optimization" probably describes the current state of things (I am not familiar with that), though does not apply to many federated protocols (e.g., I do not want my email or XMPP messages to be SEO'd), and I do not see a technical reason for that when it may be useful (e.g., public blogging or discussions); certainly does not sound like a drawback of federation itself to me, but maybe that of certain search engines' policies. I personally usually saw discoverability/exploration as the primary issue with both federated and distributed protocols, especially when it comes to social ones, and hoped that RDF with FOAF will help with it. But ActivityPub and Mastodon seem to handle it rather well now, out of fairly widely used protocols.
Animats 3y ago
Yes. The usual problems. Discovery, identity, storage. Identity is the hardest problem. Yes, there's stuff like OpenID. But few non-programmers use it. We badly need some kind of ID system that doesn't depend on a vendor that's in the advertising business. Discovery is a problem mostly because Google has a monopoly in search. The problem with federated storage is that storage is currently organized by "where", not by "what". There's the BitTorrent approach, where the address is the hash of the content. There's IPFS, but it's 90% Make Money Fast with crypto and 10% actually storing stuff. Whatever happened to the DOI concept? There's distributed caching, like PeerTube, which works better. Every file has a home location, but if lots of people want something, it gets replicated. So if your cat video goes viral, your tiny server won't be overloaded. That solves the problem of popular content, but not the long tail.
- ranguna 3y ago
  Re:discoverability And because the option to not index posts is enabled by default and a good chunk of the fediverse is opposed to indexing due to their irrational fear of bots: https://fedsearch.io/ https://fedsearch.io/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546937 https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_s https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_s...
  - badtension 3y ago
    > https://fedsearch.io/ https://fedsearch.io/ > Due to extreme backlash from the Mastodon community we decided to end the project, it is obviously not wanted by server admins.
nologic01 3y ago
This discussion could be a movie scene: Prison door malfunctions and lets prisoners free. Prisoners step out in the sun and get confused by their freedom to move in all directions. They gloomily walk back to their well understood confines. The door locks again, this time for good. Ok, fair enough, we don't want them prisoners to go back to the "comfort" of their cell. What is needed? Not much. A few damn signposts would do. This way to inanity. This way to bliss. This way to scratch your itch. Etc. To frame freedom as a problem because nobody put up some signs (because honestly who expected serious traffic?) shows how far we have fallen.
- ranguna 3y ago
  Funny analogy, here's another one: Prison door malfunctions and lets prisoners free. Prisoners step out in the sun to find themselves confused in a never ending maze full of branches in all directions. They have difficulties finding shelter and food. They walk back to their well understood confines, in relief. The door doesn't lock, but they choose to stay either way.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    > The door doesn't lock Assuming you are not a prison operator this smacks of complacency. In the digital age where rules are there to be broken fast, any and all complacency will be used against you (us). The era of web 2.0 social media, damaging as it was, is drawing towards a close. The next phase will be an ever tighter "embrace", with airtight control of digital identity, access to financial transactions and unprecedented AI manipulation. Of-course the inmates will enjoy Cloud Atlas type amenities. Freedom was never easy and is not an exportable good either. It is either in your real constitution or not. I just hope that there is a critical mass of countries that actually mean it.
- Kiro 3y ago
  I definitely prefer prison to all this nonsense.
Kiro 3y ago
Mastodon (and Lemmy) had the opportunity of its lifetime and failed to capture it. It honestly feels like crypto with lots of smart people wasting time on a doomed concept.
- maeln 3y ago
  I feel like we are comparing apple and oranges here. Mastodon and Lemmy are free project, run by a community and, in the case of Mastodon, backed by a non-profit. Depending on who you ask, they don't really give a damn about capturing the opportunity. It is not a for profit venture where capturing new user is essential and critical. It is about creating something they think are cool, neat and want to use.
bawolff 3y ago
Honestly these all seem like solvable albeit hard problems. Learning curve is a ux problem. Yes federated is a bit harder, but i think this is more the general problem that open source is terrible at ux, especially when it doesn't have sonething to copy, not a fundamental federated issue. (Cross-instance) Authentication - definitely hard, but seems solvable as well. Whether with fancy crypto or maybe some federated oauth thing. SEO - meh, who cares. Do people really use these sites for googling. Also seems like could be solved by getting everyone to shove some rel=canonical all over the place. Personally i think the fundamental issue (as opposed to just engineering challenge issues) is that its hard to modify/adapt federated protocols. I very much agree with moxie's critique of federation at https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ . Everything else is a simple matter of programming - an inability to rapidly iterate is on the other hand is an unsolvable problem.
- valdiorn 3y ago
  > SEO - meh, who cares. Do people really use these sites for googling. Given that I, and probably half of hacker news, preface most of my searches with "site:reddit.com", I'd say Yes. Definitely Yes.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    I guess it depends a bit on the site. I can't imagine prefacing my search with site:twitter.com
INTPenis 3y ago
I thought this would address the scaling of federating activitypub messages, but it's really just problems from an end user perspective. Those problems we can easily solve. Mastodon auth is already a thing, allowing the same app to authenticate against multiple types of backend software, and oauth can also be enabled to use a central identity. When I hosted a fedi node I disabled search engine crawling with robots.txt, but it can easily be enabled. Learning curve is all about giving it time and earning experience in accessibility. But regarding the scaling out of messages; I am writing a small activitypub app in Python, because it's just so fast to prototype in, but I want the option to rewrite heavily used components in another language. So instead of passing pickled or serialized Python/Ruby code around background job processing, I aim to only pass ActivityStream objects, simple JSON that is language agnostic. Just put it in different queues depending on its destination. Then any background job processing program can process the queues and put the data into DB, or whatever needs to happen.
stereolambda 3y ago
If the goal is to talk about your interests with strangers (and not pull in your whole family and political and journalistic class), some minimal federation friction could be beneficial actually, as a soft filter. Maybe it's worth it to have some common pre-Eternal September spaces on the Internet, even it means not building unicorn empires. The latter seems to be a mindset people aren't able to shake off for some reason, applicable to the given case or not. If a person can write and read two sorta coherent paragraphs of text for a internet forum, they are already on the level of being willing to learn and a little curious, above what the tech giants expect from their model user. There are enough of such people to have interesting and diverse discussions. Don't tell me Discord is easy to figure out. I'm not saying the devs should be working to make the experience easier, but it starts to be one of those topics where the discussion is meme-based. You can tell search engine robots not to index your copies of different forums. I don't think they are viewable by default anyway? Avoiding small instances to avoid outages sounds like 4D strats to most users, who might prefer cosiness, personal connections and camaraderie, like on Minecraft servers, say.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I wonder if the rise in smartphones as people’s default device has indeed reduced the likelihood of gathering such knowledgeable and worthwhile strangers together. Even many people with intellectual acumen and adventurousness, who might have tried an alternative community, are using devices that discourage longform text and logging into obscure websites. Case in point, I am a member of some hobby and travel communities where, a decade ago, many people had blogs where they described their experiences with rich, detailed text. Now those same people hardly even touch a keyboard and are content to maybe just post a few pictures. They also are more likely these days to engage in political battle, since political polarization is so much greater than it used to be.
- badtension 3y ago
  The problem is discoverability. You don't know where to look for stuff or people. I wanted to check out this whole Lemmy thing and found almost completely dead (no comments) communities linked from their project page. Where do I go? How do I search for something worthwhile? There's no central space to find it, compare communities etc. I was curious but now I am kind of put off.
Ylpertnodi 3y ago
Registered at Lemmy.world - jumped accross to kbin.sh have to register but my details are 'already in use'. Can not log in, can not register. Can not be bothered (for today, at least). I will try again, maybe with different credentials, but it shouldn't be this difficult. Quick edit: happened on other fed sites, too. Worked on others, too.
ccppurcell 3y ago
I don't get these posts. I've yet to hear someone developing federated social media whose goal is mass uptake. Mastodon is designed to avoid viral posts for instance. I use latex and vim to produce pdf documents. I wouldn't write a long post saying "I don't see this replacing ms office any time soon".
- andybak 3y ago
  > I don't get these posts. I've yet to hear someone developing federated social media whose goal is mass uptake. In which case it's being mis-sold. It will never replace the thing that people are claiming it will replace. > Mastodon is designed to avoid viral posts "viral posts" aren't inherently a bad thing. It's part and parcel of some of the good aspects of social media - the sense of having a collective conversation among a large group. Fragementation is fine up to a point (We're already fragmented between half a dozen large social networks) but I want people to find me easily if they are interested in what I'm posting.
  - ccppurcell 3y ago
    Who's claiming that? And why do you want to be found easily, really? In case you get your 15 minutes? I think the goal is to build community. Large numbers and reach are actually not so important.
    - andybak 3y ago
      > In case you get your 15 minutes? Cheap.
hosh 3y ago
That’s interesting. I don’t hear some of the other issues, such as updating and propagating changes to servers and clients. (Although, I wonder to what extent AI can help with that).
vaylian 3y ago
> Here’s the biggest kicker for me. Search engine indexing for these federated services SUCKS. That's a rather odd argument as "the biggest kicker". I'm fairly sure the teams at Google and other search providers are very aware of the fediverse and its rising relevance. It might be hard to find something today, but eventually the search engines will be improved so that they understand federated content.
ktosobcy 3y ago
Has the author complained the same way about email? it's hard to decide and if my <email server> goes down I <can't send email>...
madeofpalk 3y ago
> I mean that’s the whole point of federation right?? To distribute the server load This is the first I've ever heard of "server load" as being any factor of federation, let alone the primary point.
clnq 3y ago
It also costs money to host instances. And I wonder how will we be able to monetize them. Will we have ad-supported and premium instances? Is that possible with Lemmy? As much as people don’t like websites making their behavioural profiles and selling that data or advertising with it, most people are also not willing to pay for access to social media. There are many who would be willing, but will there be “critical-mass” many? So it will be very interesting to see how the instances can be made self-sustainable. Right now (but correct me if I’m wrong), I think it doesn’t make financial sense to run one. People can do this for a while to support “the movement”, but I wonder what happens when “the movement” is over.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
The "federation is unintuitive" is not an absolute problem. URLs are unintuitive. ".com"? What on earth is that? All new systems require you to learn. If the content is there people will use it. People cluster around one or a handful of servers... that doesn't make federation pointless. People keep thinking of federation as an absolute, everything must be evenly distributed, but it isn't. Email is the perfect example. Most people use gmail or outlook. Imagine if outlook stopped sending or receiving from anyone else. The point of federation isn't to ensure even distribution of content, it is that it can and must be accessible from outside. It cannot be siloed without becoming useless. Even if 90% of users use one or two servers, the minute that server blocks outside access that server becomes a pariah. Authentication... Why would one server let you login to an account on another server? I see the problem from a user perspective, but this is simply a misunderstanding of the architecture. In any case, hubzilla (zot protocol) has an interesting solution to this, and Nostr, which is not a federation, doesnt have this problem at all. I think both of those protocols are fantastic. SEO, with only one engine mentioned... That sounds like a google problem. This technology is cool, if the content is there and google doesnt deliver it, it will affect them in the long run worse than the federated system. I personally don't like the way activitypub works, or even like federation. I don't think community creation, maintenance and engagement are very good use cases for federation. I don't see why a server in a federation needs more than one community, as is the case with Lemmy, and I don't think communities, let's say HN for example, benefit from federation, because it encourages drive by engagement from people with no real commitment to the community. Reddit has this problem, spillover engagement, and the subreddit where it is not a problem aren't really communities, theyre just tags. "Memes" isn't a community, "chicagobears" is. The former could just be a tag in a federated system, the latter doesn't benefit from being in one. At best, two autonomous communities that have overlap could benefit from it, so having software that supports it is good, but on by default federation is not a good paradigm for forum like community software.

107 points by plug_world 3y ago

If you're thinking of federation in terms of "apps" yes it's doomed. Like with email, you have to think about it in terms of "service". The "gravitate to one provider" problem is there (as with gmail), but those who care can still have their own email services or use reasonable third parties. The tragedy of course is that very few people care.

evouga 3y ago
Well since circa mid-2010s the Internet is apps. Or app-like centralized web sites (like Hacker News). People want to install a single “Lemmy” app on their phone that shows them all Lemmy content and lets them post to all instances, using a single account and a *simple* user interface. If Lemmy cannot provide that user experience (abstracting away the federation), then yes it is doomed.
- Arn_Thor 3y ago
  I have been actively looking for alternatives since the Reddit API fiasco started but I just don't have time to sit down and grok Lemmy or any of the other federated instances. And I'd argue I'm more tech curious than most. If this is such an obstacle for me, I imagine very many people won't bother either.
- assbuttbuttass 3y ago
  There isn't even a single Reddit app. And the whole point of federation is that you can use a single account to post on any instance
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Why would you post on many instances? Shouldn't you be posting on _your_ instance, that people you authorized can view?
    - assbuttbuttass 3y ago
      You make posts on a particular community (through your home instance), and federation means all the other instances will mirror your post
      - jojobas 3y ago
        Federation doesn't mean anything like that per se, you're talking detail of a particular implementation (I assume Mastodon but what do I know). Federation just means multiple independent servers/domains can talk to each other, such as with email or Matrix, without the need for central authority (other than for discovering each other).
      - mariusor 3y ago
        The concept that you get wrong is that nobody mirrors content. Servers receive the content from the one of the original content creator, if they exist in its recipients list. Public content usually is distributed to all servers that the original server knows about. However it's always a PUSH of the content.
        assbuttbuttass 3y ago
        How is that different from mirroring? I just meant the same content is available on multiple domains.
        mariusor 3y ago
        To me they are entirely different, mirroring represents a pull model, what ActivityPub does is (mostly) push based.
  - StephenAmar 3y ago
    The problem is that Twitter, reddit, and other social platforms are mostly read, not posted to.
- jojobas 3y ago
  I suspect when you're saying "apps" you mean "companies". There has to be a better way.
- tspike 3y ago
  Could someone smarter than me explain why we can’t use a Bittorrent-like protocol to achieve this effect with federated servers?
  - mariusor 3y ago
    If you think bittorrent like protocols are better suited for your usage, there are networks that use that: nostr and scuttlebut. They are not part of what people call the fediverse, because the underlying data format is different, but you can still try it. To answer the question, and I have just a superficial understanding of the concept, the main issue with decentralized vs. federated protocols is that you have to store the whole (or quite a large chunk of the) social tree locally on your device. That's a lot of data that you don't really care about. It might be fine if you access the network from a computer with plenty of space, but a mobile device might be more problematic.
apocalyptic0n3 3y ago
I think it's worth pointing out here that we (on HN) are not average users. I have had a number of actually average users asking me about the Reddit blackouts recently. Most of them don't know of Reddit beyond the first party app. 3 or 4 didn't even know Reddit had a website. None of them could even comprehend how you could use a third party app to access Reddit and their minds were blown when I told them that Reddit didn't have an app at all originally and the Reddit app today was originally Alien Blue. For most people, the word "service" doesn't even enter into their minds. It's an app. It either does what they want or it doesn't. The inability for many in our group, including myself, to comprehend and understand this is why the fediverse, Linux, crypto for non-investment/gambling purposes, etc. continue to fail to gain much popularity. For most people, they don't care how it works... they only care that "it just works".

predictabl3 3y ago

The big one here that is compelling for me is Identity (sort of Auth as touched on in the article). My understanding is that there are multiple working groups trying to tackle this, but I don't know of any federated networks with a sizeable userbase that has implemented any of the decentralized identity mechanisms yet. (Please let me know if you're aware of one). That said, Matrix is quite large, and growing, and being adopted by multiple national governments. And I know they want to eventually tackle decentralized identity, there are open issues and some brainstorming about it. I am hoping that a federated alternative to HN will emerge because this is the only non-federated social platform I (will) participate on, post-reddit. And probably the only one that has reasonably stood the test of time in the face of tech capitalism, and it's certainly unique in that regard. I like building software that is aspirational and going to stand the test of time, and I wish I had spent more energy til now working to the same end in terms of "knowledge-bases" ala those that have grown in now-private subreddits and semi-private Discord servers.

sxg 3y ago

I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantage of federation I keep hearing is that servers can block other servers if their users become problematic. My question is this: why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane? I do see the potential advantages of federation to prevent the same fate that overcame Twitter and Reddit, but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful. Without solving that piece of the puzzle, I don’t see any practical advantage to federated services.

7e 3y ago
Yes, all problematic users don’t congregate on the same server. Problematic users can pop up anywhere. However, a server could fail to moderate effectively and become a source of misinformation and trolling. That’s the benefit of federation: it ensures a minimum level of moderation quality. Servers that don’t moderate are blocked, which sets up the proper incentives.
- sxg 3y ago
  Sure, but as the number of users on the federated service grows, how do we not end up in the same place as email today? Does it not become good moderation policy to auto-block all new and small servers (e.g., self-hosted email servers) if you're a big server (e.g., Gmail)? If that happens, wouldn't all users migrate to the big server (e.g., Gmail) and effectively re-establish centralization and undermine federation?
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    The inverse happened recently on Lemmy. Beehaw.org, a community focused on good behavior, defederated lemmy.world and another smaller site because those sites caused a lot of unwanted content and moderator intervention. Lemmygrad.ml, a bunch of communist extremists, also gets blocked quite often, not just by principled servers like beehaw. A lot of people got mad for being blocked, but honestly I can't blame the admins for trying to reduce the amount of moderation necessary. There are thousands of people per moderator on those sites and that combined with open registration is a recipe for toxic bullshit nobody wants to deal with. Smaller instances don't get blocked, though. I doubt they will be until the low quality shitposters will figure out a way to host a server of their own, but without a central gathering place I think even then the abuse will be easily prevented. That said, Lemmy used to be set to whitelist-only by default for ages. This has been changed, but if someone wants to federate with just their servers of choice, they can just toggle a setting. Lemmy also comes with an approval form by default, which is used manually to vet users during signup. Open signup servers disable that field, obviously, but those servers are often also the ones that get blocked. I can see this evolving to a situation where only closed or manually approved servers get federated by default. Requiring manual reduces the probability that a small team of admins will get overwhelmed by a large influx of users.

eddythompson80 3y ago

The problem with federation is that “HTTP browsers” simply just don’t work that way. There is nothing you can do to make Firefox or Chrome to understand what a “federated network” even is. For a browser, an “Origin” is an extremely well defined concept. You can’t just decide to amend it because that’s how you feel it ought to be. If you can’t make mastodon.social be relates to social.mastodon in the browser, then you’ll have a rough edge. And that’s just to start. Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues that all could be attributed to what a “browser” interrupts HTTP or the internet to be vs what is actually possible.

jeroenhd 3y ago
There's absolutely nothing stopping browser vendors from implementing ActivityPub. I don't think the browser is the right place, but browsers also implemented automatic RSS feed detection for more than a decade so it's not exactly unprecedented either. Browsers don't need to care, anyway. There are some problems that need solving (notably, following/interacting with users on other platforms) but there are ways to do that. I'm not quite sure why nobody has come up with a good standard for a web-activitypub: URL handler, but once everyone agrees on a format adding support for cross-server stuff should be easy. Web browsers can access webmail clients and mailing lists just fine. They even have mailto: as a means to cross the federation gap. All of these problems are implementation issues, not conceptual impossibilities.
ikt 3y ago
> Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues I like how you're talking about it like it's some abstract underground BBS style system that requires a modem, ISDN line installed, custom software running on a unix subsystem I mean I found https://fosstodon.org/home https://fosstodon.org/home signed up, clicked on local, liked posts, followed people, now I get a stream of posts to my home feed every day Maybe your everyday facebook user might struggle with the idea of signing up to a site and interacting with it but I'm just not seeing why anyone who can sign up to discord or reddit would struggle with it
- bobsmooth 3y ago

class4behavior 3y ago

> I mean that’s the whole point of federation right?? The point of federation is not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that. >It kinda loses its point. Even if it comes to this, it doesn't. Another migration can happen at any point, but this time you wouldn't lose your social contacts - and in the future hopefully neither your content. >But Google and Microsoft got in the game. That's like your common anti-Linux argument. >Search engine indexing for these federated services SUCKS. Decentralized content/link aggregators just became popular so we'll see what'll happen, but personal social media shouldn't be as public for most people as it right now anyway.

pndy 3y ago
> not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that. The oligopolies from a single country might get replaced by groups of instances who will claim they're holders of the Truth and who are the Service, while rest is dangerous. Nothing also stops countries from running own instances or compatible services by dedicated companies or people to either dominate or lure people out of the federation. A good campaign, attractive interface and features and people will follow. The remaining option is to "run your own instance" but in time when the federation will most likely solidify enough it might be hard to do so. Hard as in getting people to join your new playground. What we're seeing right now it's a boom period. Don't get me wrong, I do like concept of federated services but there's too many sides where it might fail in long-term and help create a highly tribalized echo-chambered communities

_HMCB_ 3y ago

One problem I see is the lack of cohesiveness between clients. What one client/app chooses to name a “repost” is different than another client. Icons for said features also vastly differ. So it’s hard to build unity through the ecosystem without a common language (visual and vocabulary). This is just my brand developer’s take.

SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago
This is a big part of why I'm skeptical when folks point to email as an example of a successful federated system: most of the common language and conceptual model was established thousands of years ago.
- mariusor 3y ago
  I believe it's safe to say that in a thousand years ActivityPub will be equally well understood and uniform. You're just here for the ride. Try to enjoy it.

jacooper 3y ago

I think the only reason people know about email supporting multiple providers is because its old, if email was made today, you bet its going to be centralized. Heck people already scratch their heads when an email isn't hosted @gmail.com or @hotmail/outlook.com. And the learning curve exists because unprofitable companies like Twitter and Reddit made centralization possible by burning money, the old internet was decentralized because centralization was impossible, it was too expensive. If these failing companies die, federated services will be the mainstream again. But as long as there is money to be burned to try to make a poor business model out of social interaction, federation is never going to be able to compete.

copperx 3y ago
> Heck people already scratch their heads when an email isn't hosted @gmail.com or @hotmail/outlook.com. What people? Are they in the room with us right now? Anyone that works at a small/medium/large company has an email address @company.com
- audiodude 3y ago
  I've heard plenty of stories of people saying "my email is fred@fredsmith.com" and it being input by a customer rep as "fred@fredsmith.com@gmail.com". Or them asking "At gmail.com or hotmail?" and you have to explain "No, at fredsmith.com".
  - _lnwk 3y ago
    I use some Polish email provider - the amount of times websites say my email must not be valid because it's @[service].pl was way too high :(
- Pathogen-David 3y ago
  Except most normal people don't use their corporate email address for personal stuff. I've always used a custom domain for my main email addresses and whenever I've had to give it to someone else verbally it inevitably leads to some amount of confusion. At the very least they get thrown off by the fact that I didn't say gmail/outlook/yahoo after the @ and I have to repeat the domain name.

asnyder 3y ago

As far as email is concerned, one reason why you don't see as much as self-hosting or any frankly, is due to deliverability. Doesn't help to have your own mail server when all the mail coming from it is classified as spam and filtered out of inboxes leaving you to have to use a "trusted" hosted provider to ensure your email actually works as you'd expect.

copperx 3y ago
Is it really a problem or cargo culting? I certainly thought it was a problem, but I know a sysadmin that runs two small businesses's email on prem and he says that deliverability, even to major providers, has never been a problem, as long as you set up everything right.
- asnyder 3y ago
  I don't know how cargo culting figures into this. Nobody is setting up cardboard boxes and thinking it's a mail server :). What does it mean to set everything up right? Out of the box postfix, sendmail, dovecat, etc., no longer generally work, even with DKIMs, and other necessary domain verifications. I have heard of some admins opening cases with some of the large hosts to ensure their mail goes through, but seeing how those are all big cos with little no guaranteed lines of contact or follow through I wouldn't hold my breath on it working or being a long-term solution as they can easily blacklist you at any time with you having no recourse. I'd love to hear a counter argument, as it's also the same thing for basic transactional mail sending, there's a reason everyone switched to SMTP hosts such as Mandrill, Sendgrid, and AWS, deliverability.
  - copperx 3y ago
    > I don't know how cargo culting figures into this. Hosting email at big provider as a default option because it is "well known" that self-hosting email is unviable can be considered cargo culting.

spicyusername 3y ago

The handful of things mentioned in that article are definitely frictional, but I think people are willing and open to learning if they start to see value. Smaller Lemmy instances feel more personal to me than subreddits did, and I think that is something people will find valuable.

docheinestages 3y ago

The article sums up my current frustrations with federated platforms. Maybe it just needs some time for reliable communities to be known. But until then, I'll be happy to use centralized platforms. Alternatively, people can adapt the culture of self-hosting their own instances. Then you don't have to worry about reliability and content moderation.

armchairhacker 3y ago

A big problem is that you don't actually see content on other instances. Also, you can't link accounts between instances (EDIT: you can post and subscribe to communities on other instances, but it's not obvious. You can't link 2 accounts on separate instances though) There are several rust instances: https://lemmy.ml/c/rust https://lemmy.ml/c/rust, https://programming.dev/c/rust https://programming.dev/c/rust, https://lemmyrs.org/ https://lemmyrs.org/, and probably more. Why aren't they linked together, so that you see posts from one instance in another and can post and comment in one instance from an account on another? (I get there is e.g. https://lemmyrs.org/c/rust@lemmy.ml https://lemmyrs.org/c/rust@lemmy.ml, but you should see and make posts from https://lemmy.ml/c/rust https://lemmy.ml/c/rust on the page https://lemmyrs.org https://lemmyrs.org, not a specific subpath). Even better, why can't Rust lemmy link with rust kbin (https://kbin.social/m/rust https://kbin.social/m/rust) link with Rust discourse (https://users.rust-lang.org/ https://users.rust-lang.org/) link with Rust Zulip (https://forge.rust-lang.org/platforms/zulip.html https://forge.rust-lang.org/platforms/zulip.html), so you can see and make posts on all instances from one? This is what I initially thought the Fediverse was like. Right now it honestly just seems like many people running completely different servers and communities using the same software. (This could even help with the decentralization aspect, because ideally the content and accounts would be replicated. So if one instance goes down, its content is still on connected instances, and possibily "ghost accounts" from that instance which let users there continue to post).

vin047 3y ago
> This could even help with the decentralization aspect, because ideally the content and accounts would be replicated. So if one instance goes down, its content is still on connected instances, and possibily "ghost accounts" from that instance which let users there continue to post So Usenet?
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  Or, IRC. For all the major support systems (most I think now have moved to discord), they all had a freenode channel, but what if they'd all chosen different networks, so you'd need to connect to maybe a different network for mysql, another for postgres, another for php, another for rust, etc... To make it more confusing though, all of those networks EACH have their own smaller channel for those technologies, just the official one is on x server. Reddit is awesome because it's one place to get ALL content related to a niche under one umbrella, and because you can use awesome 3rd party apps -- the next reddit replacement doesn't need to be federated, but it could be community-ran as a sort of DAO, where users can vote on features/etc...

remram 3y ago

Isn't this entire point about SEO negated by judicious use of Link rel=canonical? Or just excluding foreign content via robots.txt? I don't see why this is described as such an insurmountable fundamental flaw.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

evbogue 3y ago

The Federated App Problem has already been solved a couple of times using replicated gossip networks of signed messages. Sometimes they use append-only logs, other times they use only relays, and the implementations are all highly creative and experimental. The trouble with decentralized federation social media servers is the weight of the network falls upon whoever volunteered to host the program at the domain name in the first place, and sometimes the weight is too much to handle. The solution is, as we all already know, self-authenticating messages that do not rely on any one server. Do we want to call this Scuttlebot? Do we want to call this Nostr? Does Bluesky even qualify? Well, I'm sure we'll figure it out eventually with enough minds trained upon the problem.

bluedemon 3y ago

Here's a rant by a person that is annoyed that redditors are not understanding the fediverse: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59927/rant-Why-is-this-so-hard-for-people https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59927/rant-Why-is-th... And they still state that it's easy and the other posters are scratching their heads as to why don't people understand this. "Whyyyy???" They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them. That's why the fediverse is going to get a bump for a bit during this reddit situation, but then calm down as users aren't going to want to stick around. The same happened when others were leaving Twitter. This fediverse situation reminds me of that Silicon Valley episode in which they're testing an app with a focus group. The group just doesn't understand the app and find it too complicated. Richard tries to explain the app to them, but it's too technical for them to comprehend.

mariusor 3y ago
> They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them. In all fairness those were the exact same comments when people moved away from Digg to reddit, only in the opposite direction. History is just repeating itself.
- David_SQOX 3y ago
  I remember vividly when the digg exodus happened, I don't ever remember a single person complaining that reddit, nor digg, were too technical/difficult to understand/use. Both sites you simply clicked the register link, input your username/pass/email then done. The fediverse does not have a clean onboarding that lends itself to comprehension by a regular non-technical person. It seems way over the head of your average user. I've tried to get friends to check out Lemmy and it's a solid no-go. If you need an entire matrix of understanding of a concept before feeling comfortable to use it then it is simply too much cognitive friction.
  - seanclayton 3y ago

defanor 3y ago

"Federated App" sounds odd: protocols are federated, and apparently they are criticized in the article, not software. The "Learning curve" argument suggests that oligopolies tend to form, so it is not worth bothering. But that applies to pretty much any organizational activity, not just federated protocols, and often people try to push back against oligopolies or monopolies; often it is desirable and possible. The "Authentication" one only applies to web-based clients, but you can login to remote instances even with those: converse.js supports it for XMPP, for instance. Possibly not in the way the author imagines it should though; perhaps that is closer to OpenID/WebID/OAuth. Still, generally users are not meant to login to every instance directly: even with just Google and Microsoft, you do not login to a Microsoft server to send them a message from your Gmail account, as you do not login into the receiver's email account to place a message for them. Maybe this section should have been titled "learning curve" instead. The "Search Engine Optimization" probably describes the current state of things (I am not familiar with that), though does not apply to many federated protocols (e.g., I do not want my email or XMPP messages to be SEO'd), and I do not see a technical reason for that when it may be useful (e.g., public blogging or discussions); certainly does not sound like a drawback of federation itself to me, but maybe that of certain search engines' policies. I personally usually saw discoverability/exploration as the primary issue with both federated and distributed protocols, especially when it comes to social ones, and hoped that RDF with FOAF will help with it. But ActivityPub and Mastodon seem to handle it rather well now, out of fairly widely used protocols.

Animats 3y ago

Yes. The usual problems. Discovery, identity, storage. Identity is the hardest problem. Yes, there's stuff like OpenID. But few non-programmers use it. We badly need some kind of ID system that doesn't depend on a vendor that's in the advertising business. Discovery is a problem mostly because Google has a monopoly in search. The problem with federated storage is that storage is currently organized by "where", not by "what". There's the BitTorrent approach, where the address is the hash of the content. There's IPFS, but it's 90% Make Money Fast with crypto and 10% actually storing stuff. Whatever happened to the DOI concept? There's distributed caching, like PeerTube, which works better. Every file has a home location, but if lots of people want something, it gets replicated. So if your cat video goes viral, your tiny server won't be overloaded. That solves the problem of popular content, but not the long tail.

ranguna 3y ago
Re:discoverability And because the option to not index posts is enabled by default and a good chunk of the fediverse is opposed to indexing due to their irrational fear of bots: https://fedsearch.io/ https://fedsearch.io/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546937 https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_s https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_s...
- badtension 3y ago
  > https://fedsearch.io/ https://fedsearch.io/ > Due to extreme backlash from the Mastodon community we decided to end the project, it is obviously not wanted by server admins.

nologic01 3y ago

This discussion could be a movie scene: Prison door malfunctions and lets prisoners free. Prisoners step out in the sun and get confused by their freedom to move in all directions. They gloomily walk back to their well understood confines. The door locks again, this time for good. Ok, fair enough, we don't want them prisoners to go back to the "comfort" of their cell. What is needed? Not much. A few damn signposts would do. This way to inanity. This way to bliss. This way to scratch your itch. Etc. To frame freedom as a problem because nobody put up some signs (because honestly who expected serious traffic?) shows how far we have fallen.

ranguna 3y ago
Funny analogy, here's another one: Prison door malfunctions and lets prisoners free. Prisoners step out in the sun to find themselves confused in a never ending maze full of branches in all directions. They have difficulties finding shelter and food. They walk back to their well understood confines, in relief. The door doesn't lock, but they choose to stay either way.
- nologic01 3y ago
  > The door doesn't lock Assuming you are not a prison operator this smacks of complacency. In the digital age where rules are there to be broken fast, any and all complacency will be used against you (us). The era of web 2.0 social media, damaging as it was, is drawing towards a close. The next phase will be an ever tighter "embrace", with airtight control of digital identity, access to financial transactions and unprecedented AI manipulation. Of-course the inmates will enjoy Cloud Atlas type amenities. Freedom was never easy and is not an exportable good either. It is either in your real constitution or not. I just hope that there is a critical mass of countries that actually mean it.
Kiro 3y ago
I definitely prefer prison to all this nonsense.

Kiro 3y ago

Mastodon (and Lemmy) had the opportunity of its lifetime and failed to capture it. It honestly feels like crypto with lots of smart people wasting time on a doomed concept.

maeln 3y ago
I feel like we are comparing apple and oranges here. Mastodon and Lemmy are free project, run by a community and, in the case of Mastodon, backed by a non-profit. Depending on who you ask, they don't really give a damn about capturing the opportunity. It is not a for profit venture where capturing new user is essential and critical. It is about creating something they think are cool, neat and want to use.

bawolff 3y ago

Honestly these all seem like solvable albeit hard problems. Learning curve is a ux problem. Yes federated is a bit harder, but i think this is more the general problem that open source is terrible at ux, especially when it doesn't have sonething to copy, not a fundamental federated issue. (Cross-instance) Authentication - definitely hard, but seems solvable as well. Whether with fancy crypto or maybe some federated oauth thing. SEO - meh, who cares. Do people really use these sites for googling. Also seems like could be solved by getting everyone to shove some rel=canonical all over the place. Personally i think the fundamental issue (as opposed to just engineering challenge issues) is that its hard to modify/adapt federated protocols. I very much agree with moxie's critique of federation at https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ . Everything else is a simple matter of programming - an inability to rapidly iterate is on the other hand is an unsolvable problem.

valdiorn 3y ago
> SEO - meh, who cares. Do people really use these sites for googling. Given that I, and probably half of hacker news, preface most of my searches with "site:reddit.com", I'd say Yes. Definitely Yes.
- bawolff 3y ago
  I guess it depends a bit on the site. I can't imagine prefacing my search with site:twitter.com

INTPenis 3y ago

I thought this would address the scaling of federating activitypub messages, but it's really just problems from an end user perspective. Those problems we can easily solve. Mastodon auth is already a thing, allowing the same app to authenticate against multiple types of backend software, and oauth can also be enabled to use a central identity. When I hosted a fedi node I disabled search engine crawling with robots.txt, but it can easily be enabled. Learning curve is all about giving it time and earning experience in accessibility. But regarding the scaling out of messages; I am writing a small activitypub app in Python, because it's just so fast to prototype in, but I want the option to rewrite heavily used components in another language. So instead of passing pickled or serialized Python/Ruby code around background job processing, I aim to only pass ActivityStream objects, simple JSON that is language agnostic. Just put it in different queues depending on its destination. Then any background job processing program can process the queues and put the data into DB, or whatever needs to happen.

stereolambda 3y ago

If the goal is to talk about your interests with strangers (and not pull in your whole family and political and journalistic class), some minimal federation friction could be beneficial actually, as a soft filter. Maybe it's worth it to have some common pre-Eternal September spaces on the Internet, even it means not building unicorn empires. The latter seems to be a mindset people aren't able to shake off for some reason, applicable to the given case or not. If a person can write and read two sorta coherent paragraphs of text for a internet forum, they are already on the level of being willing to learn and a little curious, above what the tech giants expect from their model user. There are enough of such people to have interesting and diverse discussions. Don't tell me Discord is easy to figure out. I'm not saying the devs should be working to make the experience easier, but it starts to be one of those topics where the discussion is meme-based. You can tell search engine robots not to index your copies of different forums. I don't think they are viewable by default anyway? Avoiding small instances to avoid outages sounds like 4D strats to most users, who might prefer cosiness, personal connections and camaraderie, like on Minecraft servers, say.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
I wonder if the rise in smartphones as people’s default device has indeed reduced the likelihood of gathering such knowledgeable and worthwhile strangers together. Even many people with intellectual acumen and adventurousness, who might have tried an alternative community, are using devices that discourage longform text and logging into obscure websites. Case in point, I am a member of some hobby and travel communities where, a decade ago, many people had blogs where they described their experiences with rich, detailed text. Now those same people hardly even touch a keyboard and are content to maybe just post a few pictures. They also are more likely these days to engage in political battle, since political polarization is so much greater than it used to be.
badtension 3y ago
The problem is discoverability. You don't know where to look for stuff or people. I wanted to check out this whole Lemmy thing and found almost completely dead (no comments) communities linked from their project page. Where do I go? How do I search for something worthwhile? There's no central space to find it, compare communities etc. I was curious but now I am kind of put off.

Ylpertnodi 3y ago

Registered at Lemmy.world - jumped accross to kbin.sh have to register but my details are 'already in use'. Can not log in, can not register. Can not be bothered (for today, at least). I will try again, maybe with different credentials, but it shouldn't be this difficult. Quick edit: happened on other fed sites, too. Worked on others, too.

ccppurcell 3y ago

I don't get these posts. I've yet to hear someone developing federated social media whose goal is mass uptake. Mastodon is designed to avoid viral posts for instance. I use latex and vim to produce pdf documents. I wouldn't write a long post saying "I don't see this replacing ms office any time soon".

andybak 3y ago
> I don't get these posts. I've yet to hear someone developing federated social media whose goal is mass uptake. In which case it's being mis-sold. It will never replace the thing that people are claiming it will replace. > Mastodon is designed to avoid viral posts "viral posts" aren't inherently a bad thing. It's part and parcel of some of the good aspects of social media - the sense of having a collective conversation among a large group. Fragementation is fine up to a point (We're already fragmented between half a dozen large social networks) but I want people to find me easily if they are interested in what I'm posting.
- ccppurcell 3y ago
  Who's claiming that? And why do you want to be found easily, really? In case you get your 15 minutes? I think the goal is to build community. Large numbers and reach are actually not so important.
  - andybak 3y ago
    > In case you get your 15 minutes? Cheap.

hosh 3y ago

That’s interesting. I don’t hear some of the other issues, such as updating and propagating changes to servers and clients. (Although, I wonder to what extent AI can help with that).

vaylian 3y ago

> Here’s the biggest kicker for me. Search engine indexing for these federated services SUCKS. That's a rather odd argument as "the biggest kicker". I'm fairly sure the teams at Google and other search providers are very aware of the fediverse and its rising relevance. It might be hard to find something today, but eventually the search engines will be improved so that they understand federated content.

ktosobcy 3y ago

Has the author complained the same way about email? it's hard to decide and if my <email server> goes down I <can't send email>...

madeofpalk 3y ago

> I mean that’s the whole point of federation right?? To distribute the server load This is the first I've ever heard of "server load" as being any factor of federation, let alone the primary point.

clnq 3y ago

It also costs money to host instances. And I wonder how will we be able to monetize them. Will we have ad-supported and premium instances? Is that possible with Lemmy? As much as people don’t like websites making their behavioural profiles and selling that data or advertising with it, most people are also not willing to pay for access to social media. There are many who would be willing, but will there be “critical-mass” many? So it will be very interesting to see how the instances can be made self-sustainable. Right now (but correct me if I’m wrong), I think it doesn’t make financial sense to run one. People can do this for a while to support “the movement”, but I wonder what happens when “the movement” is over.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

The "federation is unintuitive" is not an absolute problem. URLs are unintuitive. ".com"? What on earth is that? All new systems require you to learn. If the content is there people will use it. People cluster around one or a handful of servers... that doesn't make federation pointless. People keep thinking of federation as an absolute, everything must be evenly distributed, but it isn't. Email is the perfect example. Most people use gmail or outlook. Imagine if outlook stopped sending or receiving from anyone else. The point of federation isn't to ensure even distribution of content, it is that it can and must be accessible from outside. It cannot be siloed without becoming useless. Even if 90% of users use one or two servers, the minute that server blocks outside access that server becomes a pariah. Authentication... Why would one server let you login to an account on another server? I see the problem from a user perspective, but this is simply a misunderstanding of the architecture. In any case, hubzilla (zot protocol) has an interesting solution to this, and Nostr, which is not a federation, doesnt have this problem at all. I think both of those protocols are fantastic. SEO, with only one engine mentioned... That sounds like a google problem. This technology is cool, if the content is there and google doesnt deliver it, it will affect them in the long run worse than the federated system. I personally don't like the way activitypub works, or even like federation. I don't think community creation, maintenance and engagement are very good use cases for federation. I don't see why a server in a federation needs more than one community, as is the case with Lemmy, and I don't think communities, let's say HN for example, benefit from federation, because it encourages drive by engagement from people with no real commitment to the community. Reddit has this problem, spillover engagement, and the subreddit where it is not a problem aren't really communities, theyre just tags. "Memes" isn't a community, "chicagobears" is. The former could just be a tag in a federated system, the latter doesn't benefit from being in one. At best, two autonomous communities that have overlap could benefit from it, so having software that supports it is good, but on by default federation is not a good paradigm for forum like community software.