The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform.
Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, and more popular.
People don't use email as social network or instant form of social communication.
>Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)
Email's just so damned old everyone uses the standard and it kind of dodges the issue.
Email's also structurally a bit different - it's a set of one-way sends to select recipients, with chats you moreso go to a place and read the place's signboard.
You could in principle just use mailing lists under the hood instead if the UI wasn't garbage.
https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=bl...
People cannot find their friends on Mastodon because:
+ They can't search all instances across Mastodon.
+ There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk to.
So they just go back to a centralised service like Twitter and they definitely not use email as a social network.
I have found that this is an accurate description of the first impression one gets; this is not true, but we're all so used to recommendation algorithms easing discovery that the impression is equivalent.
Twitter is just fine and everyone knows it.
email isn't a social network and lots people outside of HN don't self host them as such.
Business email is very dependent on the fact that it’s an open protocol.
And so the word comes down, we have to move to Gmail. It’s believable decision making, but that’s how it works.
People don't self host email because 1) the protocol doesn't make it easy to deal with incoming spam on a small scale, and 2) giants like gmail tend to automatically flag unique email domains as suspicious. Which is a valid criticism of the federated model, or rather the people using it.
If more people found value in decentralization, in theory they would also be more critical of their node management, opting to reject anti-competitive behavior in a democratic way. Unfortunately, for democracy to work, citizens have to be educated and fight for it. If they don't, it's easy to have centralized, ostensibly totalitarian walled gardens.
We just need to make sure fediverse accounts are easily transferable between nodes in a standardized way, something I don't think mastodon does well, and email doesn't do at all.
Seriously: Transforming spam filtering into a black box service has decommoditized email and everyone knows it.
Bob registers his new Twitter handle so I, Alice, can find it on the central service of Twitter.
A mapping of users to users can be across any service, including centralized to centralized (ie Twitter to Facebook) or decentalized to decentralized (IE Diaspora to Mastadon). It is just saying this string registered somewhere else as that string.
This, I feel is especially notable for Western nodes since they don't really seem to bother with relays (which I think largely defeats the point of federation by creating incentives to stick to large nodes). A lot of the relay lists are either super sanitized/focused on uninteresting topics or are dead.
In comparison, in the Japanese community there are several fairly active open relays (with some moderation to prevent abuse) and thus it's pretty easy to setup a custom node and have it populated with some basic content to build off of. As a result of which, ~75% of the traffic to my node comes from Japan, ~20% from the US and ~5% from Europe.
It seems to me that finding someone on a federation is as easy as on centralized systems. Do you have a use case in mind where centralization makes it easier to find someone?
It will search a subset of instances.
How do we know this to be true?
a) there is no central listing of all mastodon instances, or even all public ones.
b) it would take FREAKING AGES TO COME BACK because there are so damn many, you can only make so many parallel requests at a time, and you have to process the results from all of them.
Nope, It will only show accounts followed by local accounts.
Mastodon doesn't do any kind of per server search, And your "federated feed" is basically accounts on other instances followed by local accounts.
This makes hosting a private Mastodon server, for personal or family use, incredibly hard as discovery is basically impossible.
This can be fixed by using Activity pub relays, but guess what? Mastodon's official servers don't use them, which are the servers that really matter.
Its a big part of why I'm hesitant to use Activitypub, as I believe discovery is a big part of modern social media, and Mastodon absolutely sucks at it.
This is coming from someone hosting his own Matrix server.
Not at all. These types of centralized platforms won because they raised capital to grow fast and meet market needs before anything else. Email is still king, but if it were to be designed today, it would have been designed as some proprietary centralized system.
Distributed systems are hard.
In any case, I don't think federation goes far enough to save us from the problems we're seeing. I want a peer-to-peer social feed / social news app that doesn't depend on federation or servers at all.
Takedowns (DeCSS), takeovers (Twitter, FreeNode), shutdowns (Google+, Orkut, Digg, mastodon.technology), censorship (everywhere; should be an individual choice), maintainer-imposed spying (Apple CSAM), and maintainer-imposed changes or limits (Digg, modern Reddit, Twitter API) seem an order of magnitude harder to pull off if we have full control at the protocol and node level.
Federation would be nice for anonymity and aggregation of interest graph metadata, but at the core we should just have a swarm of content to sample and consume. It's fine if the content is naturally ephemeral as a consequence. We can use a constellation of opt-in 3rd party distributed (federated) services to provide durability, ranking, recommendation, filtering, etc. where desired.
Bittorrent, but for Twitter/Reddit/HN.
Imagine you could find me as @numpad0 anywhere, and you can validate shadydomain.shadywebsite.tld/uuid.htm with my pubkey to hold me accountable for weird things I'd say, and that /uuid.htm URL may be ephemeral, or could be more permanent for more respectable posts at non-shady venues, and either ways I wouldn't have to be perfect wrt handling of privkey, yet somehow usernames matches someone anywhere would be verifyably that someone. That would be ideal.
But I believe social media operators recognize the exploitable value in conflating both; this has to be why no one use cross-OAuth between social medias and web apps anymore, and rather focuses on own ID systems and federated signups. Consistent set of identities is a value, media is a means to monopolize on it.
Who am I kidding, these people are looking for an audience, not their friends.
Of course it's a whole other can of worms, reminds me of Linkedin/Fb that would spam me because they had access to my friend's rolodex..
It's not so important to force any dichotomous perspectives on the whole here, as the situation has a lot of nuance to it in the details.
The big issue with Mastodon is that your "twitter handle" depends on the server you join, which makes it hard to find you. If it was just your e-mail address, however, then everyone would be able to find you, and keep finding you even if you decided to change servers.
I can use g-suite, fastmail, outlook for business and a range of other things, and the people sending me mails won't notice. I can't swap my Mastodon server.
SoMe should be email based, and servers should just be relays. That way you could also create private SoMes for things that you'd do in Facebook group by simply setting up a relay on something cheap.
you could argue that there's benefit to centralized friend-finder tools, but there's no reason that has to be tied to a centralized platform. a decentralized and open-access platform allows for choice and competition amongst friend-finder tools
I'm thinking if I'm a Nazi I mostly care about other Nazis and would not go to the normie mastodon friend finder tool but the one which finds all my friends on our Nazi mastodon instances and vice versa.
Something I'm keeping an eye on is the @ protocol that is being designed specifically for the creation of federated social media applications -- it allows for portable identity and your social graph is portable, these things are not tethered to an instance of something. Hopefully that will be an upgrade so there will be less "jury-rigging" like this required to make federated applications usable