Centralisation and Mastodon | Hacker News Reader

Centralisation and Mastodon

kevq.uk

17 pointskevq10 comments

Fediverse is such a poor design. It's utterly futile.

The ID is tied to a host, so every time you lose your host, there's a lot of work to do, because you don't own your account - your host do. You basically have to start from scratch every time, so what's the point? Better to use Twitter, at least there's some chance they will not dissapear out of the blue.

Identities should be self-generated, and independent of any hosting. Fediverse hosting should just facilitate passing stuff when peers are offline. Then it wouldn't matter if you're on one server or other, because it wouldn't be even visible in the UI.

https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork had some more interesting ideas, but AFAIK execution was rather poor.

That ID design has worked well enough for email for multiple decades. Most of the ways of dealing with Fediverse moves are similar to email ("please update your contact book") though the Fediverse has some smarter tools for automatically updating "address books" than email has.

Here too the "centralization" problem mirrors email in that there have often been large email hosts that have the majority of users, but a long, long tail of smaller hosts.

> That ID design has worked well enough for email for multiple decades.

Did it? Oh really? Well if you consider email decentralization a great success, than I retract. Fediverse can totally replicate that "success".

I guess it already did. There's Twitter and long tail already. Mission accomplished.

Your sarcasm doesn't appear helpful here. I'm not saying it is perfect (it's definitely not), I'm just saying it is "time tested" and "sufficient" ("well enough"). Perfect is the enemy of the good, and all that.

You already pointed out one attempted alternative and its many drawbacks. We don't have a "perfect" solution yet, and that's not a reason to stop trying to build one. I just don't think you should be so quick to criticize the Fediverse for using the well worn trail until someone builds something better instead of blazing a new one on their own.

Mastodon is a difficult one. The decentralisation of users runs contrary to the natural predisposition people have toward following the crowd.

As the writer puts it, people need to use other instances, but (myself included as a guilty mastodon.social user) the comfort of being on the bigger boat draws people in since they think it’ll be the last to sink.

One way to discourage following the crowd would be to level the playing field by making hosting/instances kind of invisible. For example, if each person has their own domain then it wouldn't be obvious where people are hosted (and it solves the identity migration problem).

I really like that idea.

It could be implemented very easily by using DNS SRV records or HTTPS .well-known URIs.

The original OpenID [1] took that path (see "OpenID delegation"), and as an identity tool made sense for an ID intended for bloggers who would be expected a modicum of technical talent including buying their own domains (on which to host their blogs).

The criticism that applies to that original OpenID model would apply here too that buying and controlling a domain is a level of technical expertise two or three steps up the "internet user" ladder (especially without another reason to have a domain such as blogging as a motivating factor) and could gatekeep the platform from a large percentage of potential users.

[1] Not to be confused with anything called OpenID today.

I'm not sure about that. Hosting companies like Dreamhost, GoDaddy, Squarespace, etc. have "consumerized" the process of registering domains so that it's little harder than signing up for Facebook. The bigger barrier is probably that domains are not free.

Those sort of providers existed in the blogging age as well (WordPress, Blogger, etc). Certainly that's a start, but think which of those then have "consumerized" SRV records or .well-known files yet? That's why the analogy used was a ladder, and that this involved multiple steps up. Individually most of the way from one step to the next is "easy" and "consumerized" somewhere, but each additional step along the way is still a barrier to less technical users.

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