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Comment by personjerry | Hacker News Reader

It really feels like "federated" is to tech geeks (i.e. HN people) what "blockchain" is to a lot of non-tech people.

What does federated do for me at all in solving this problem?

federated means your bookgroup could set up their own instance & everyone could either post their book reviewws there, or you could aggregate your own reviews into that instance. it's the freedom to start new communities, while still being able to participate worldwide.

it means that there's a protocol there, at the heart, for having multiple parties cooperating. it means anyone is free to build their own server or client. it meams we're not all trapped in one walled garden, one silo, it means the freedom to innovate & evolve.

right now there is not a lot of models for how we the peoe can host things online in an interoperable way. we can still use http & the technology that we have (unlike block chain), but we can use well defined vocabulary (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#activity-t...) & protocols as a base to communicate & interweave social networking systems.

I agree with everything you’ve said, but most users will never want to host their own instance. It might even be an anti feature, since it sounds like a bunch of work! This is not a benefit that most people are going to care about - at least in the way you have explained it.

I think it’s a different view. Technical-savvy people who know how the web was conceived and thought like decentralization because it promises freedom. In my (limited) experience users just want ease of use and nice UX, and just don’t take into account the long term implications of their choices. I’m afraid, like someone said earlier, that decentralization solves a problem mainstream don’t have and don’t want to have.

I think the mainstream does care about decentralisation, but only in so far as it affects the final experience. Censorship on major social networks is a great example. People absolutely do care, but starting their own Reddit (for instance) is far outside of their abilities. Where would you even begin?

They also don’t care about how it is implemented, just so long as it works. Sometime I feel like the HN crowd cares more about what language a product was written in than how well it serves their needs!

What is required is a platform which combines the UX of a centralised service with the ability to easily spin up new instances, is open-source, security audited, etc. etc.

I agree. And also I really believe that any good software is made up of a lot of tedious and boring tasks, like editing the copies, making the QA, fixing bugs, and so on, and that these kinds of tasks are seldom done as voluntary work; what I'm trying to say is that without a company paying developers for doing this, it's difficult to have good software. Let alone to keep a service up and running 24/7.

To my knowledge, very few companies have found a way of monetizing decentralization in a sustainable and efficient way (I really hope someone proves me wrong with some replies to this comment).

I'm still trying to understand how this works at a functional level.

I see you can find reviews via ActivePub services, like Mastodon, but you can only post from BookWyrm instances? i.e., you can't have one federated social identity that can post reviews and post other fediverse content?

No. Unfortunately, the fediverse has kind of given up on the idea of a single identity using a variety of services. Every new ActivityPub services wants to own the user account and the interactions are one way or extremely limited (likes/reposts).

You're correct that each server has separate accounts, and you can't log in to, for example, but mastodon and bookwyrm and pleroma using the same account. You can do more than just like or repost though - a bookwyrm user and a mastodon user can do a variety of things like follow on another, send DMs, and reply to each other's posts.

Shows that the architects took an above average time considering the space, and that users may be turned off by data lock in due to previous community betrayal.

None of this federated stuff will ever gain mainstream acceptance. I would bet my house on it. It adds multiple layers of complexity and a ton of UX trade-off, and doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.

I wouldn't make that bet. Mastodon isn't mainstream yet, but it does have almost a million active users:

https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon

A million active users is at least two orders of magnitude away from "mainstream".

this worship of solving user problems pretends like the one or two companies running the big huge massive winner take all monopoly walled-garden networks are going to keep being good, going to keep doing things in the users best interest, are going to make better and better product.

it's a world view that does not click with how i view software development & progress. i see long term stewartship as hard, see most walled gardems eventually succumb to acceued bad decisions or events that they become saddled with, or poorly steered into, or simply not aligned with their users on. federation isnt an answer to a problem, it is the theory that many problems require more than one ultra-massified uber-answer. federation says that problems and their answers require experimemtation, require adaption. it believes in protocols to agree upon & communicate across people & communities with. federation is freedom to generate new interfaces & extend capabilities.

i think it's dangerous to only ask "what can help the user now". technical environments need to be diverse & potentiated, need to have creative possibilities open. federation gives us both a quick, well known, easy to adopt, easy-to-host users & communities basis, and gives us the liberty to keep exploring further. i would trade these liberties for no products, and i think users over time will see how trapped they are & appreciate living life not under the auspices of ultra-massified software titans, but instead, with smaller, more adaptive, more community based (but interoperating) federations.

Ever heard of email?

That's a stretch, as it has neither identity nor content federation. Would you call IP stack a federation protocol too?

I think so. The definition of federated is not as specific as you're making it out to be.

It's the main difference between the WWW and the centralized information systems that came before it.

I remember seeing the first Web pages at CERN, clicking through them a bit and being unimpressed. You sound like me back then.

I agree in terms of users running their own thing.

What I do imagine will happen is that one instance takes off, gets itself a board or VC to answer to, removes activitypub, runs away with the win

Tech people will be mad but overall nobody will be able to do anything about it as they'll just ground-up rewrite eventually. The users won't care about the drama at all

Money is a bastard

I'd love to be wrong on it and I'm not just sitting here doom'n and gloom'n, I'm trying to ActivityPub-enable all of my projects as it happens! I do believe it's something to watch out for though

> What I do imagine will happen is that one instance takes off, gets itself a board or VC to answer to, removes activitypub, runs away with the win

Any instance which did this would be totally forgoing the network effect of being able to link up w/ other instances. So this is quite unlikely, at least in most cases.

Any instance that did this wouldn't care, they have all the users

See also Google talk, Facebook messages, literally any other thing that was once open access ever by a big company. That racist Twitter gab is an isolated Mastodon install last I heard if you want to see this in action, though I wouldn't recommend going there

> doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.

Mentioning "Federation" as a feature will not be very appealing to the average user, indeed. It is more of a technical concept. But there are features that derive from an app being federated.

Ever heard people complain they were suddenly banned for no apparent reason, and have no means to get it fixed? In a federated service you may just go to another instance (and in future migrating / controlling your own content will be easy).

A big centralized platform has a single ToS, and algorithms throw random people from the entire userbase at you. In a federated system you can choose a server with rules / ToS that appeals to you. An individual server is like a community with own culture and topics of interest.

Wanna escape ads, algorithmic driven UI? Choose any federated server (currently fediverse is ad-free). Server adds ads later on? Migrate to one that does not.

I may be wrong, but all I have seen "federated" resembles one of the worst and most harmful websites ever created (twitter), which is really disappointing and disgusting. Likewise, the "blockchain" scene talks about innovation all day but the bulk of their creation is boring and dated, recreating the banking/finance scene using new tech with minor changes. Back in the day, people thought machine guns would produce peace!

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