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Comment by ixxie | Hacker News Reader

While I see your point about product mentality, and agree to a large extent, I am not sure it applies to ActivityPub. Its like saying email needed to be productized; it didn't, we just needed productized implementations of email servers and clients to get the network going.

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Exactly- email would be nothing without outlook and gmail, http might have fallen without netscape.

We need products on ActivityPub that beat real products

Email was there before outlook and Gmail and will still be long after Gmail sunsets it and Microsoft rebrands outlook to something like "Microsoft xbox delayed chat system".

And it was productized before then. AOL being a huge one ("You've got mail"), and Hotmail also coming to mind.

And email was around long before AOL or Hotmail.

And nobody used it, relatively speaking vs the extraordinary scale that those email products made possible later.

Hotmail had more users after 18 months than the total history of all email services on earth combined for the first two decades of email. If email was still as annoying to use as it was pre AOL & Hotmail, the general public still wouldn't be using it today.

How many people used any internet technology before there was even in Internet? But some people did use email.

Great point. Webmail is a product that was massively adopted compared to regular clients.

Perhaps, but no particular web implementation of email really stands out. (You might say Gmail, Gmail is really comparatively recent.) So a web interface on email push adoption further.

It might be more accurate to say that a social standard would need to support productized client evolutions that outlook and others provided along the way of email’s evolutionary path.

The web was already doing fine with Mosaic, although that was also proprietary. Netscape was just the better-funded and flashier version.

You're missing the point. Like you said, Mosaic was ALREADY a great product, compared to the nerdy terminal browsers without embedded media, etc.

OP's point is not whether netscape or mosaic is better, but that the graphical web browser was what brought the web mainstream. Doesn't matter if it's mosaic or netscape (or several other graphical ui browser competitors that existed during that time)

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