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Comment by schmichael | Hacker News Reader

This is a risk with federated protocols regardless of who operates them. OP’s suggestion of personally knowing all of the operators you interact with doesn’t scale. As I’ve said in other discussions: scaling isn’t required. You can intentionally choose to keep your community small, but you have to admit that’s exclusionary. You’re looking for a solution for your in group (since everyone is assumed to know their operator), and that’s never going to scale to a large international audience.

What Google has done with chat and a hundred other products is atrocious, but when it involves federation it’s something any negligent, malicious, or just opinionated operator could do at any time. Mastodon is pretty full of instance blocking drama already.

I hope a federated protocol can survive in a world of asymmetric operators. Email has done … ok. Jabber less so. Here’s hoping mastodon becomes a gold standard.

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> You can intentionally choose to keep your community small, but you have to admit that’s exclusionary.

I think there's another option here. Namely, that the intended "vibe" or usual experience for individual users is such that their experiences have that level of person-to-person familiarity.

Also I feel like, in this passage you moved ambiguously from talking about protocols as a whole to a sense of "community" within the protocol, and its not clear to me whether its the protocol itself or a particular community that is confronting the issue of scaling or not scaling.

The aspiration for an "old internet" vibe, that you might find in usenet, email, bulletin boards, or various forms of chat, or webrings, makes sense as an aspired-to "vibe" without committing oneself to a side on scaling or not scaling.

Old internet was exclusionary. It was small because no one was on the net in those days, and those that were, were wealthy enough to have a computer and internet access.

...and it was good

In that sense door locks are exclusionary.

> I hope a federated protocol can survive in a world of asymmetric operators. Email has done … ok.

Email as a decentralized protocol is basically dead at this point. Not to mention extreme decline in usage from younger generations and to a lesser extent the whole population.

Google can maybe take some of the blame for that, but they also likely extended the lifetime of email too through Gmail's relative ease of use (in the early days).

> Email as a decentralized protocol is basically dead at this point.

While I wouldn't consider it healthy, it is far from dead. Billions of emails are sent every day from untold numbers of operators, few of whom have a direct relationship with one another. Few systems can claim that level of use and distribution.

Email users can choose from a number of free or paid providers. None of those providers had to request access to participate in the email network, such as requesting API keys from Twitter or Meta to participate on their platforms. This is not to say email is easy or without gatekeepers! This is only to say it's possible for a determined and technically capable operator, whether an individual or an organization, to participate in the global email system without having to ask any one entity for permission.

Again: I'm not trying to assert it's a particularly healthy federated ecosystem, but I would argue it's still a successful one.

The killer of email, like with every method of communication that has gone mainstream and then declined, is spam.

Not just spam as in fraudulent scams, though those are pretty bad.

Not just spam from companies you've done business with and neglected to opt out of legal spam from, though it's exhausting.

Once a communication protocol gets a reputation as a consistent way to reach someone, with some level of urgency, a certain subset of the population lowers their threshold for what constitutes urgency until the signal gets lost in the noise.

Not sure how to fix it.

Spam is a problem, chats are another one, IMHO a bigger one.

Every message in a chat, whatever chat, is one less mail sent. That was true in the 80s / 90s with IRC and it's true with WhatsApp, Slack, etc now.

I feel like “email is dead as a decentralized protocol” is paradoxically a meme among Gmail users. Counter-anecdote: I haven’t touched Gmail in years and I still send and receive email fine

Yup, I too receive spam just fine. Greylisting and SPF alone doesn't stop it now. If I want to send e-mail to someone on gmail or office365 it usually ends up in spam.

I think that the internet has pretty clearly shown one thing: doing things that involves a very large crowd is extremely problematic, and in order for it to continue to function, it has to aim at the most common denominator (meaning be the most vanilla possible), has to remove most autonomy of the participants, and in the end, the assholes will ruin it all.

I don't know if there's a solution to this problem. Perhaps having a large number of small "villages" is a more sustainable way.

It is a cautious tale we can hopefully relate to people before they jump on Threads and get locked in. Unfortunately those of us off the platforms have difficulty getting through to people on the platforms.

It is very easy to run an individual or small Mastodon or other activity pub instance, but this is also not widely known. The problem with almost every free solution is that zero money is spent on marketing.

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