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 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.
@msh @JordiGH federation is weakness
bow to your #p2p gods