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Comment by zelly | Hacker News Reader

The entire model is flawed. You don't want federation (small tribes). That's not why people use FB, IG, Twitter. They use it because that's where the people are--network effects. The only reason I'm posting here is because this is where your message can reach people. Federation means you will never ever get network effects. Dead on arrival.

It's possible to have decentralization with network effects. Just have one canonical network. Tor and Bitcoin are good examples.

Downside (or upside?) is that you can't have moderation or else whoever does the moderation becomes the new jack and it's not decentralized anymore.

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> The only reason I'm posting here is because this is where your message can reach people

Actually you're posting it here because this is where it can reach the niche group interested in the subject, and that you're also interested in belonging to. That's a lot different than "go where the people are" because nowadays there's just too many people online, and unless you're doing mass marketing you probably don't want to talk to all of them.

To me the most attractive part of fediverse is exactly that, small niche tribes, so very low levels of noise, off-topics and nonsense. It's not ideal as a general-purpose marketing channel, but for users on a receiving side of it (and that's most of us) it makes it even nicer.

People want both. Big world and small tribes. People are constantly building new community everywhere for non-technical reasons, even if similar communitys already exist. Why do you think they do that?

Small tribes have better control and more trust. Big crowds are lacking this for the individuals.

Federation does NOT mean small tribes. This is the meme that needs to die.

You can make the argument that discovery of new people is harder on a federated system, but this a problem analogous to trying to find content on the early web and this is a solved problem already.

> this a problem analogous to trying to find content on the early web and this is a solved problem already

The early web died. The problem was solved by killing it and replacing it with big institutions. It got replaced by the superior network effects of Facebook feeds, Reddit feeds, Instagram, Twitter, or the very site you're scrolling through now.

Twitter is the bar or the town square. Mastodon etc. is people's living rooms.

Early web did not died, it evolved. It gained neccessary tools and platforms. The web from the early days still exists, it's just not the only face the web has now.

More like they stopped including it in search engine results and starved most of it to death.

BS. Your argument has two problems: you are confusing ActivityPub with Mastodon, and you are confusing the aggregation part with the content itself.

The early web might have been eclipsed by the big companies, but don't be fooled by availability bias. How much of the internet is powered by Wordpress.org? Quite a lot to be considered "dead".

How many people still use some kind of RSS Reader? Google killed its offering more for a lack of way to monetization than for a lack of users. (Also, I don't remember people saying "RSS is dead, there is no way to discover who to subscribe to.")

Look at messaging protocols, Matrix also is still small compared to WhatsApp/Messenger/iMessage/Slack/Discord/whatever but their are numbers are growing. Far from dead.

Mastodon is people's living rooms only because the current users are mostly refugees from the centralized platforms, and yes, they are making this mistake of conflating instances with tribes. But this temporary and specific to Mastodon. As more systems start adopting ActivityPub and the more pulverized the user's become, the less this will be an issue.

I don't think I understand what you mean by Mastodon being people's living rooms.

I mean, a user's identity is @username@domain, and I can follow local or remote users equally easy, and most of the time I don't even notice where they are posting from.

If that's my living room, it sure looks like a living room that's wide open and the size of the planet.

I just went with OP's metaphor. It makes sense when you take in consideration how a lot of Mastodon instances are being created and being kept closed from the federation by the admins or being too trigger-happy to block other instances on the grounds of "people over there say mean and offensive things". For some of them, it is indeed just a bunch of kids hanging out in their rooms

Ok, I see what you mean. I've been on the Fediverse for a bit over a year (I think, I could be more?) and I've seen some drama around this.

That said, the number of instances that engage in excessive blocking seems to be rather limited. I'm not sure it's such a large problem in practice.

> and you are confusing the aggregation part with the content itself

If they aren't the same, that's a bug. The lesson of Facebook et al should be that aggregation and content should be in the same place. People use these sites after a long day of work and don't have the time or energy to plug in other fragmented software to make it work--even technical people. They just want to consume and share content. They would see this fragmented ecosystem vs. the shiny all-in-one network with social proof of all their friends and celebrities.

> But this temporary and specific to Mastodon

It's endemic to all of these alternative platforms because they select for (other than curious technophiles) people who were too extreme for the mainstream platform.

Here's how to solve it and to get what you actually want:

One decentralized global network with self-directed moderation (following/friends). The problem with Facebook et al is not the UX or the quality of implementation. It's that the protocol is owned by one corporation. Why can't you just clone Facebook in every single aspect except the computers it runs on (everyone's rather than Facebook's).

Now I don't know if you are just trolling or technically clueless. You are criticizing the implementation of a application protocol and one the same breath you affirm that "the way to solve it" is by using a completely decentralized system?

ActivityPub itself is not tied to Mastodon or any federated protocol, all it is concerned about is format of messages and some authentication mechanisms.

Have you really thought this through?

The early web died. The problem was solved by killing it and replacing it with big institutions. It got replaced by the superior network effects of MySpace accounts, Slashdot threads, Flickr, delicious and Geocities. All of which will continue to exist forever more.

> The early web died. The problem was solved by killing it and replacing it with big institutions.

During the 80's and early 90's, there were tens of thousands of BBS systems. Those disappeared with the advent of the Web:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-l...

Most of the dominant platforms today have only existed for less then 20 years. That's... only yesteryear. There's absolutely zero guarantee that they will be around for another 10, 20 or 30 years.

Why? Because it's par for the course for empires to come and go. Ma Bell had an absolute monopoly on a telephone network in the U.S. until they got broken up in 1982. That happened. Few large corporations are over 100 years old, and even so, they aren't the same they were back in the day.

The Internet still consists of the same basic building blocks and technology as it did 10, 20 or 30 years ago. TCP/IP, UDP,... Beyond your wireless access point, it's all just fiber and UTP spanning the globe. Oh, and data centers with racks of computers to linked one another. Beyond computing power and other trappings, it's all conceptually not that different from what it has always been.

I've always found it a strange how we have been myopically staring at FAANG companies in the Valley over the past 20-30 years. You know how that has come to be? Damn excellent marketing on their part. That's all it ever was.We all know it, but we don't really admit to it. And so we laud them as these powers of nature that you can't get around. Even though they are anything but, really.

For all intents and purposes, large swathes of the Internet and the Web are dark, but they are very much there. For instance, there is more then just English in the world. The Web in Asia looks radically different, beyond what Baidu or Alibaba offer.

Sure, the early web has died. But neither do you find 19th century newspapers or obscure popular literature in modern bookstores. You'd got to a library or an archive for those. We have the Internet Archive for good reason.

What hasn't died is the technology and the basic ideas of that era. Those are very much alive in small communities all over the Internet. And that's totally valid and in no way inferior to what large platforms offer.

Yelling that "x has died" and "the problem was solved", well, no, that's a very simplistic take on reality. If something works perfectly for someone, well, why do you forcefully imply that what they want is without value and thus a waste of time? Por que no los dos, right?

As too FAANG, ask yourself this: When they publish reports about their numbers of users, how much of those represent actual use of those platforms? How many accounts are truly dead and unused? How many people are really using Twitter on a daily basis for hours on end and aren't just hopping all over the place? Why would we accept those reports at face value? Because they are valued billions of $?

Remember, it's all about keeping the music playing and the party going. And today's "big instutions" aren't the first DJ's at the decks, nor will they be the last. History always catches up in the end.

And meanwhile, others will always do their own thing, write code, build cool things and invent new ways of communicating.

You completely missed the GPs point and I suspect you even agree with him. Look at the list of entities.

I disagree with the words "died", "problem" and "solved".

The early Web didn't die. It evolved into what we have today. And that's the normal way of how things go.

Much like the Roman Empire has kept and still keeps on deeply influencing modern Western culture.

Hence why I disagree with the words "problem" and "solved". That assumes that history has come to an end and the Web will be and forever be like it is now. Stasis. End of story. Which can't be further removed from the truth.

Nobody can predict the future exactly, but what we can be sure of is that nothing is permanent and everything changes, because change is literally what has shaped human history.

MySpace will live forever in our hearts.

Why do people use email then?

Network effects can be achieved with or without federation. They aren't mutually exclusive.

Email is federated at a lower layer. At the UX layer, it is not federated. Fully qualified email addresses are like usernames. If you ask a random email user, they would think it works like this. If you ask a random Mastodon user, they know that they have to join a relatively isolated silo. Also most uses of email are peer-to-peer. In the case of two people emailing each other, the number of peers is 2. This is not directly comparable to public social networks.

Email was once the main way social networking was done via mailing lists. This was kind of federated, because you had to ask the listserv to add you to the list. The federated aspects of email are what caused it to die and get replaced by forums which in turn got replaced by Reddit and Twitter.

(Notice the trend? Mailing lists -> forums -> Reddit. From federated to centralized. Network effects.)

The Fediverse is federated on exactly the same layer as email. You have a username of the form user@domain,this is the same in both Mastodon and email.

You can send messages to anyone regardless of the instance they're on. This is also exactly the same on both Mastodon and email.

Precisely how are these different in any relevant way?

The fediverse has conversation streams that are mostly in public indexes, which other people can observe and interact with. In addition to these conversations comprised of statuses representing activities, it is also possible to follow the authors providing said content so that their latest posts show up in your stream, regardless of whether those posts pertained to that conversation or not.

Email, conversely, often is a limited-scope conversation that can only be observed or interacted with between the people participating in said message. Of course, this changes slightly with the use-case of mailing lists, which often provide a public archive of prior messages. But email content is generally not accessible from the web in the same manner that a status is.

Sure, but when I said "in a relevant way" I was talking about differences that are relevant in the context of the conversation.

There was nothing wrong in your description of the differences between the Fediverse and email, but none of those differences explain the previous poster's assertion that the protocols work at fundamentally different levels.

They don't, though[1]. It's often the lowest-common-denominator because everyone has it. But if a more streamlined alternative, like Slack, is available then it will be preferred over email.

A quick look at websites talking about email trends finds that the only people who are bullish on email are marketers. And that's why everyone else hates it: it's predominantly spam. So if you want to compare ActivityPub to email you'd better have a strong argument for why it won't just become another vehicle for spam if it ever becomes widespread.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/16/personal-email-is-dead--but-...

It is fine for both to exist. FB|ig|Twitter is like getting to NY's times square - a lot of new people/ads, and then coming back home to your federated tribe (perhaps with new friends you found at the times square).

I don't disagree, but it's not 100% true that the only people who use centralized social networks do so for the network effects. YouTube in particular is used by a lot of people because of content discovery, not just the network effects.

Content discovery is about having a good search engine. Why couldn't that be federated?

No real reason except no one has tried yet. It's extremely difficult to get search right, although Moore's law and tensorflow has probably made it easier to attempt today. Latency would be significantly worse than major search engines though. I think for the people who care about the open web, having a libre alternative search engine should be the highest priority. It's one of the few classes of software/services that no one has tried replicating open source.

Hmm, doesn't eMule have something like that in place (and nearly 2 decades now) ? (It's more janky than a centralized search engine of course...)

Because the company with the de facto monopoly on web search is the same company that bought the company with the de facto monopoly on user generated video content.

Yes, but we are specifically discussing boycotting those.

No, you don't need a search engine for that. Blogs and YouTube channels commonly link to similar channels and content. A search engine is a form of content discovery, but it's not the only one, and technically we already have a form of federated content discovery.

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