Ask HN: Is federated / de-centralised ever going to make sense? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is federated / de-centralised ever going to make sense?

26 pointsdmje10 comments

With the obvious backdrop of The Reddit Thing going on, I've been poking properly into lemmy, kbin, mastodon, pixelfed, etc. I then had a quick look at nostr too.

What strikes me quite forcibly is that although federation is obviously A Good Thing for content / control, and also A Good Thing for nerds who like the elegance of the protocols - it really, really isn't A Good Thing from a user point of view.

Straw poll amongst my (non-nerd) friends reveals absolutely zero understanding of what federated might mean - but more importantly a total confusion when faced with a paradigm which is completely at odds with anything that has come before. Searching Site1 for content that happens to be on SiteN makes no sense to people who spend their time on Insta / Reddit / Twitter.

It ultimately won't matter if a user doesn't actually know that their content is federated to/from a number of other platforms - but the UI, the words, the descriptions of what "federated" is are terribly, terribly confusing. Per the words of someone on Reddit: "If you need me to read a 10 page document explaining how to use this new type of Reddit, I'm out".

I think there's a blindspot here, and until someone figures out a nicer interface and way of talking about all this stuff, it's going to scupper any possibility of serious migration of users onto these platforms.

Thoughts?

Aside from the technical problems, like discoverability and others, the problem from my POV is that most federated instances are run by infantile people who would de-federate one another because of (mostly stupid) political disagreements. Which makes your life difficult as an user, on top of the many technical problems everyone in HN is able to bring to light.

The big problem, IMO, is human, and no amount of tech is going to solve that.

At least Reddit is big, what does the alternative social media bring to the table, that is not a dream of becoming something they themselves sabotage every time they have the opportunity.

I'm not going to invest my time into comunities run by crybabies. Centralized social media has it's problems in this regard too but at least they put huge content in front of me.

I've been researching alternatives to reddit lately, and I already found drama between Kbin and some Lemmy instance because some kulturwars I don't give a flying shit about.

I live in a world surrounded by people that has, most likely, different political opinions than me. My friends, my GF, my family, they all have very conflicting opinions about many items, yet we get along together. Why can't you do the same with a fucking forum, you dimwit.

My view is that discoverability is the bigger problem. The larger social media and content platforms are able to surface hundreds of hours of content users want to engage with (often from authors you haven't heard of before). If the federated networks want to gain broader adoption, discoverability of content must be greatly improved somehow to give readers a reason to keep using the platform and to give authors a reason to publish. Currently, it feels like this a lower priority than being federated itself.

Federation is a technology. As we have been reminded a billion times, users don't care about technology. So it really matters what people will do with the technology.

The second thing to realize is that federation is a superset of centralization (it includes it as an edge case). People are used to centralization thats why the main mastodon instance is much larger than everything else. But with in a federated architecture there is not intrinsic obstance to developing more diverse patterns.

So just conceptually thinking federation will "win". But how exactly is not clear. Efforts in this space are still grossly underfunded, in some cases overly ideological, distracted by web3 and always too influenced by the walled gardens.

My feeling is that the most interesting cases will develop around federated wordpress and reddit-alternatives. These will be driven by creators and publishers in specific domains that want something less oppressive and value-destroying of their work.

The average user/consumer is indeed hopeless. They are just shoved around and abused like sheep and they take it because there is no obvious / easy alternative or any warning from trusted entities.

Interesting. Tell me about "federated WordPress"? I haven't heard of it before as a concept...

My view is that due to the insecurity of our computers, we (and the public) always be very afraid of going to anything other than the popular sites for things.

It doesn't matter how hard you push, nobody wants to risk getting hacked, and will stick to the "safe" sites.

It doesn't have to be this way, if you're old enough, you remember the days of shareware floppy disks in the 1980s, when it was reasonable and safe to try anything you wanted. (Why.... we had a very strong and reliable de-facto version of capability based security with our write protectable floppy disks and lack of hard drives) Genode, and GNU/Hurd could get us back to that level of safety, but it's going to be a long, long time before that happens.

You may be interested in this article by mitsuhiko on the subject: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/11/14/scaling-mastodon/

V interesting piece, thanks for that!

If all these people use email, then they're already on federated services.

My grandma has email but no chance she figures out kbin or Lemmy. Think of your average (or less) user. Download app to phone. Sign up. Go. Much more than that and they drop off pretty quick. Picking an “instance” to jojn? Nope. That instance can vanish, then sub average user X is baffled. Deletes app. Logs back in. Frustration. Goes off to fap or find another app that is perceptibly easier. Especially if their friends and family use it.

Quantity vs Quality.

These kind of people are most often lurker, won't bring much quality content beside meme and one line comment.

if the quality is better on Lemmy or another website, I will go there. if it's better on reddit, I go to reddit.

That's basically the reason I'm currently on HN, yet there isn't much people on HN compared to reddit.

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