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.
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.