Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this misses the point.

People dislike Facebook and other centralized platforms not because they're centralized per-se, but because the user experience is terrible (due to mismatched incentives - these platforms make money off ads, so their only objective is to make you engage with the ads as much as possible).

The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran by donations, etc) but that otherwise has the user experience of the mainsteam platforms.

This reads like a tech demo where the tech and decentralization is the selling point, but the truth is, the masses don't know/care about that and rightfully so. The same applies to Mastodon and similar projects.

View on HN

I don't think the point is to replace Facebook&Co though. It is specifically a tool developped for political activists. Everybody can use it of course, it is free software. Given that context the decentralization feature is most definitively a crucial feature.

https://joinmobilizon.org/en/faq/#facebook

And even more broadly, the whole point of Framasoft is to offer tools to use the internet in a decentralized way. This is not limited to this particular tool, they have many other project. All offering an inferior user experience than the existing solutions by the usual FAANG giants of course but again the point is decentralization and freedom.

Exactly this. From one viewpoint, https://pad.riseup.net/ is just a worse version of Google Docs, and most people will never use it. From another, it's a vital service for preserving the anonymity and security of activists, and comparisons to Google Docs are moot.

In other words, these tools quite effectively solve the pain of a small but clearly-defined group of people - turns out this approach is useful beyond the startup world!

> I feel like this misses the point.

> The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran by donations, etc) but that otherwise has the user experience of the mainsteam platforms.

The argument by people in favor of this stuff is that federated technologies best avoid and resist those mismatched incentives, because any centralized gatekeeper, not matter how benevolently founded, always has the temptation to ignore it's charter and become a rentier.

Think about the recent .org debacle, or even the Mondragon Corporation employing non-member labor.

>Think about the recent .org debacle

I missed that one. Can anyone offer a few keywords? "org debacle" isn't search friendly.

This should get you started: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/eff-other-nonprofits-a...

> The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran by donations, etc) but that otherwise has the user experience of the mainsteam platforms.

Isn't it kind of inevitable that those incentives manifest themselves? A company can run a centralized platform, do a good job of it, then get bought out for millions(if not billions) by a large corporation and redesigned to maximize ad revenue and the egos of those looking for greater job titles. This isn't exactly unheard of. Decentralization would supposedly section this kind of thing off if it even happens at all.

You're right that the average person doesn't care about decentralization, let alone understand it. That's fine. Before Facebook, people used forums supported by vBulletin, and those were effectively "decentralized" in the sense that they weren't all owned by the same entity. The only difference was that there wasn't sharing of data between 2 or more web forums, like there could be with something that supports ActivityPub or the like.

It seems Mobilizon invested a great deal in the usability of this tool.

(Not specifically the visual design, but the ease of use and the matching of user needs).

I've seen projects advertising decentralization as the main selling point. Mobilizon seems to also push strong on the user experience, and I'm glad they do.

One of the main things keeping me on Facebook is fear of missing out on events. This gives people who are not on Facebook a chance to stay in the loop.

> People dislike Facebook and other centralized platforms not because they're centralized per-se, but because the user experience is terrible

I'm not sure I agree here. My anecdote is that the experience of Facebook events is superb. People are prompted to fill in pretty good basic information, can discuss arrangements on the "wall", and I'm reminded about my attendance before the event multiple times. The invites also come into a place where I already spend a fair bit of time. I don't know anyone who makes events outside of Facebook within my circle of friends.

> This reads like a tech demo where the tech and decentralization is the selling point, but the truth is, the masses don't know/care about that and rightfully so. The same applies to Mastodon and similar projects.

I agree with this. Until the mainstream narrative realises that giving away all of our personal info is a faux pas, engaging with platforms like this is limited to activists and those who have an incentive for privacy.

Step one is dev buy-in, then people start federating it and THEY help realize the UX needs. /imo

From the FAQ:

> We do not want to reproduce the toxicity of Facebook. Surveillance capitalism uses the mechanisms of the attention economy to lock up our time, capture our behaviour and impose advertising on us.

> Mobilizon does not depend on such a business model: this is an opportunity to try to do better, by doing things differently.

=> https://joinmobilizon.org/en/faq#facebook

Reply on news.ycombinator.com