Comment by setrofim_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by setrofim_ | Hacker News Reader

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> but still - is that the consensus now? That federated protocols are dead and "no longer have a place in the modern world"?

Having see what has happened (is happening?) to Mastodon, I can see where Moxie is coming from; as much as I hate to accept it.

Moxie also doesn't seem particularly happy with the situation; notes in the same post:

"Truly though, I wish you well in the endeavor, it's something that I'd love to be proven wrong about."

He notes two issue in particular:

- Degradation of UX

- Loss of development effort

From what I've seen, Mastodon suffered from similar problems (certainly as a user, I can attest to the first one). It seems those are inevitable consequences (along with performance/scalability issues) of the loss of control that comes from federation. Personally, I don't think those are necessarily insurmountable, but they are non-trivial, and will require effort and commitment -- including from the end users -- to resolve.

All other things being equal, a project focusing on federation will be at a disadvantage compared to a centralized one when it comes to delivering good UX. So lamentably, I don't see a federated platform becoming mainstream outside tech culture, and that is what Moxie's vision for Signal is...

[edit: grammar, formatting]

As a counter example, I'm still very happy with e-mail

Moxie is talking specifically about making a secure (particularly, end-to-end secure) federated communication protocol. Making insecure federated communication protocols is pretty much a solved problem, yes.

(And I'm sure some people are very happy GPG users. But the majority of email users are not and will probably never be)

Been working on a mail.ru pet projects in my teens (Moikrug), people were telling that PGP/GPG adoption was at around 8-9% in Russia in 2006.

Among corporate users, there are some rather big companies with 100% adoption. How they achieve it? With a simple policy "anybody sending unencrypted email is fired," and training to make sure that even least technically literate people on the company get it (a person is not let to handle anything until he is examined by a specialist).

Perhaps because your goal isn't blanket, end-to-end privacy?

To work on end to end privacy one really needs to control the experience end to end; trusted clients and a solid protocol, plus trusted discovery.

Email is not that thing. Email is postcards.

At a technical level, email works well from the perspective of "the mail must get through", although practically speaking, spammers ruined things to the point that most people are feudalised because defending spam raised the bar of technical expertise too high for most people.

And the small number left who can run their own infra are often locked out by the feudal overlords (big 4 + every isp ever) because an untrusted ingress is basically a spam loophole.

Ironically the closer you get to spam free the more you have to police, because the value of a spam injection point goes up commensurably when most people are no longer exposed to it.

Overall, the war on spam was won, but at the cost of freedom for the people who would like to run their own infra but aren't technical and patient enough to do it in today's environment.

> Ironically the closer you get to spam free the more you have to police

The root problem of bare-bones email is that user identity and user-agent address (mbox) are conflated. (A social layer would effectively address this fundmental flaw.)

> one really needs ... trusted discovery

Or an 'introduction' protocol.

I'm not. It has outlived its usefulness, safety, and privacy models.

What is the problem with Mastodon? It is the most populus federated network I have seen. (Other than the Internet, if you count it as one) It's striving among several interest groups around the world.

> It is the most populus federated network I have seen.

Yes, same; but that's kind of the point. Mastodon is the best effort I have seen so far; which is why it was disappointing to see it falter shortly after it started to really pick up.

There seem to be a mass exodus from Twitter (at least, among the people I follow), precipitated by Twitter's latest unwelcome UI tweaks. Initially, it seemed really cool -- it was specifically addressing Twitters biggest pain points (longer messages, chronological timeline, saner threading), and was OSS and federated to boot.

However, quickly the veiner started to crumble, with there appearing to be an increasing number of issues, such as undelivered DMs, scrambled threads, dropped mentions. A lot of them seemed specifically related to interactions between federated instances. To make matters worse, the UI seemed to be getting increasingly slower.

Eventually, the combined frustrations, and to some extent perhaps network effects, resulted to gradual return back to Twitter.

This is, admittedly, a skewed view based on the observation of the small slice of Twitter community that I follow, and my own limited experience with the platform (spanning a few weeks).

I am still hoping that Mastodon (or something like it) makes it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Hmm, I've never seen any of those issues. Usage definitely died down after it graduated from fad status, but I stll have a busy feed.

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