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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

It is somewhat ironic that it (for now) has somewhat of an old school free software crunchy hippie feeling feel (which I'm personally always all for), because the value to big companies feels like an absolute no brainer.

"Hey, see the stupid thing that happened to Eli Lilly? You know how you can actually just have your own email instead of gmail in your company if you pay for it? Also your own website? This is that, for what Twitter does."

Seems positively stupid for companies to NOT go in this direction.

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funny enough, the trend for mail has actually been to use google for enterprise ( or equivalent) and stop hosting your email servers.

i believe that could be a middleground : a mastodon server hosting service.

A centralized repository is inherently at odds with the federated nature of mastodon

Just because Google enterprise offers email hosting doesn’t make email itself centralized. Just the fact that the protocol is federated is enough to prevent abuses (since anyone who doesn’t like the abuse can self-host without any loss of feature or friction).

These already exist, though they tend to be community focused. There probably is a place for a corporate focused one.

the problem is being able to pitch the wider ecosystem without sounding like a loon spouting technobabble. I'd love to pull off being able to sell this to normies.

Ain't that the truth. I find that I'm the only one leading with essentially what I just said.

I think they (devs) just need to round out the rough corners with blacklisting, whitelisting, etc - because i think:

> it's just like email, foo@gmail.com becomes @foo@gmail.com, that's it!

Is pretty easy to sell. The issue there is that in any "real" email host (ie not in your closet) you have no problem[1] emailing another host. Yet with Mastodon it's rather dependent on the specific of platforms blocking rules. Which isn't to say that this is an indigestible concept for the average person; just that it's a rough edge, it needs some work, some transparency.

Likewise how federation works is also a bit obtuse. The speed of nodes federating to each other feels inconsistent on a UX, and imo you should basically _never_ miss pieces of a conversation. Or at least if you do, it should be very clear that there is a blocked comment, or a yet-to-be-synced comment, etc. Right not it can just look like someone is replying to themselves or etc.

Really though it's all quite solvable with some UX it seems. There's some tech issues too of course, but all together this feels quite a feasible "twitter but like email" tool. I'm quite happy with it, and i'm even happier to ignore Twitter.

[1]: generally speaking of course. It's expected to just work.

> The issue there is that in any "real" email host (ie not in your closet) you have no problem[1] emailing another host.

Spam filtering and intense host allowlists and denylists are just as bad in email. In many cases it is actually worse because the number of "real" email hosts has shrunken to a staggeringly small number (most of which are major corporations) in some situations and self-hosting can be quite fraught with hidden traps and accidental denylist penalties and an increasingly baroque maze of security standards like SPF and DKIM and… From that perspective Mastodon is currently far more open in federation than today's email.

As much as anything "email is open" and "Fediverse is subject to blocks" is a marketing problem more than anything. Email as an internet foundation tech has decades of accidental propaganda versus reality. Mastodon has a lot of loud critiques from people that either don't want it to survive or have some other political game they are playing.

> Likewise how federation works is also a bit obtuse. The speed of nodes federating to each other feels inconsistent on a UX, and imo you should basically _never_ miss pieces of a conversation. Or at least if you do, it should be very clear that there is a blocked comment, or a yet-to-be-synced comment, etc. Right not it can just look like someone is replying to themselves or etc.

This is rarely a "speed" thing and in email analogy terms much more a "BCC" problem. Your instance was not BCCed on the other content. I remember ages of email when mailing lists were far more plentiful when these sorts of "BCC issues" were quite common. If your mailing list wasn't BCCed on a reply but then the reply of the reply BCCs it, there's an obvious missing piece in the conversation.

Mastodon UX could absolutely improve, but in this case the instance generally has no idea there is a "yet-to-be-synced comment" because there isn't a "yet-to-be-synced comment", the instance never saw that comment because it wasn't BCCed on it in the first place. (Though yes, this analogy breaks down a small bit because some of the "mailing list" posts come from RSS-like feed syndication, but there also there's no easy way to "guess" what might be in a feed the instance hasn't synced.)

Also, some of these BCC issues are intentional, for the same sorts of privacy reasons BCC itself exists in email. Mastodon offers some privacy settings for how far messages travel and some users don't want to "BCC the world" with some of their posts. There's never going to be a "complete view" of many conversations because people want some privacy in their conversations and Mastodon allows that.

> As much as anything "email is open" and "Fediverse is subject to blocks" is a marketing problem more than anything. Email as an internet foundation tech has decades of accidental propaganda versus reality. Mastodon has a lot of loud critiques from people that either don't want it to survive or have some other political game they are playing.

Agree entirely. I've argued (in recent threads) that Mastodon, just like Email, is not meaningfully Federated because ignoring this problem is what caused Email to be not meaningfully Federated. "Meaningfully Federated" as in, Email encourages centralization.

The Fediverse has a much smaller reach than mainstream social networks. Your target audience might not be on it.

For now. That's kind of the point here.

Won't a centralized platform always have a wider audience than a decentralized one? I think that's one of the hurdles that you have to get over by offering other advantages

Yes, that’s why everyone uses AOL for email rather than that faddish SMTP.

More seriously, there’s nothing in particular that requires complete centralisation for success, though a future billion person ActivityPub network probably relies mostly on a few giant hosts (a la gmail) rather than millions of small ones.

I see shades of Google+ haunting the rhetoric surrounding Mastodon.

The lesson we should have learned about alternative platforms is that they will attract power users and enthusiasts. These people will be very vocal about why everyone will switch to the next big whatever. A lot of enthusiasts and power users will switch, and a big flood of people comes over to the alternative platform like the tide coming in.

But normal users don't really give a crap about Twitter politics. The people who don't think about Twitter as a community or wider thing and just want to retweet funny cat pictures or whatever. They'll never move. It is a lot of effort for something they just don't care about.

And the enthusiasts? Well, now they're dealing with a fragmented community, where some of their contacts are on one service and some are on the other but a majority are on both because let's be honest, all the new Mastodon folks aren't burning their Twitter bridges behind them.

They start out posting everything on Mastodon. Then they realize they're leaving lots of people out, and they start posting everything on both platforms. Then slowly, one post at a time, the laziness sets in and before you know it they're posting exclusively on Twitter and wondering whatever happened to that promising Mastodon thing. The tide goes back out.

> But normal users don't really give a crap about Twitter politics.

Your mistake is thinking Twitter users were normal users to begin with.

Twitter users have always been weird. There's a reason the user base never really grew after hitting a certain plateau. It's always catered to chronically online, media savvy, news obsessed types.

They are by definition enthusiasts.

> The people who don't think about Twitter as a community or wider thing and just want to retweet funny cat pictures or whatever.

You're describing Facebook and Instagram, not Twitter.

> They start out posting everything on Mastodon. Then they realize they're leaving lots of people out, and they start posting everything on both platforms. Then slowly, one post at a time, the laziness sets in and before you know it they're posting exclusively on Twitter

People weren't even doing that with Twitter.

The people who actually made Twitter successful--the celebrities, news sources, "influencers, etc--have always had a presence on multiple social media platforms, whether it was Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, etc.

If Mastodon is successful, it's just gonna be another one of those platforms.

And hence, this article.

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