People are always comparing the fediverse with email. Remember webmail in the 90s? We had Hotmail, Mailcity, Rocketmail, and a bunch of others. Now we have Gmail by default.
I wonder if Masto or any other part of the fediverse goes mainstream, would one instance would eat up all the others? People seem to always congegrate back into centralisation. Internet herd behaviour..
@JordiGH well the fediverse came into being at a different time, in a different environment. Persistent connections and server space were extremely expensive when email started. Google saw the opportunity to ruin email for their own gain but until then email was highly distributed and mostly ISP provided.
Mastodon actually presented an opportunity to centralize but Eugen consciously rejected it because the state of the net made federation the best strategy...
@JordiGH Today we have reverted back to the days of timesharing systems and isolated proprietary services that make decentralisation appealing, and we finally have technology to make barriers to participation low:
* cheap processing and storage
* affordable persistent broadband
* commodity virtualisation technology and services
and since no single service could ever take down the silos (even as broken as they are) highly federated successors seem to be the most likely outcome.
@clacke @JordiGH @msh i don't think a step-wise approach is necessary. maybe in terms of developing the technology, but for adoption it just has to be interesting/fun and easy to install/use. i don't think there is really a difference between:
> get snapshat
and
> get tootdon
and
> get mmmmm
the underlying tech is important (to some people), but mass adoption has nothing to do with tech and everything to do with features.
@xj9 @JordiGH @clacke unfortunately privacy and freedom are the LAST thing "the masses" consider...they are dreadfully undervalued qualities people willingly give away for shiny trinkets. Freedom and Privacy will only be highly valued when they are forcibly taken from people.
All things being equal any distrubuted/p2p alternative that provides even the same features and user experience as the silos without surveillance and lack of control could succeed...but yeah features are king.
I got on identi.ca because it was easy to join (because Web), and Twitter had shut down their XMPP interface (so also because Not Web!).
I got on SSB because I was physically present with people who used it, and because git-ssb.
I got on WhatsApp because non-geek friends used it, and I have no idea, not a single clue, how WhatsApp got there without a web frontend. And no desktop client either!
So maybe MMMMM should have been developed before Patchwork, and *magic happens here*.
I know I wasn't interested in i.e. Twister because no web. You can't link to to things, you can't preview the community, there is no serendipity.
But I don't have a point, because WhatsApp blew my point apart. Was that a billion dollars in advertising or what was it?
I think what needs to happen to stop centralization from coming back in waves is for P2P to be the real layer and the web interface to be a convenience layer on top of that. The true p2p layer needs to have tangible benefits that pull people away from the convenient layer, to offer a centrifugal force opposite to the centripetal force of centralization[0].
I also talked about this today in https://social.heldscal.la/notice/5598836 .
[0] And if you think a centrifugal force isn't a thing I refer you to #xkcd123. And if you think "but in reality it's just inertia", I say that if inertia is was keeps people on p2p as opposed to going to a web instance, inertia is as good a friend as any.
@msh @JordiGH federation is weakness
bow to your #p2p gods