141–150 of 158 posts
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Email is the paradigmatic example. You can export your mailbox and use `pine` if that's your jam. But in the real world, most users of Gmail will depend on at least one feature of Gmail that isn't easily replicable elsewhere.
I wonder what gmail's churn rate even is? It is surely staggeringly close to zero.
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Not if the switching cost is high and/or slow. The problems of a monarchy will not be solved by setting up a competing neighboring kingdom. To bring the topic back to networking, it has been said that decentralization is the worst form of networking except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. (With apologies to Winston Churchill.)
> Not if the switching cost is high and/or slow. The problems of a monarchy will not be solved by setting up a competing neighboring kingdom. That was how the US grew between 1700 and 1914. Everyone in Europe sick of monarchies just moved out to the new world. When there isn't a finite amount of land to squat it becomes a viable long term solution.
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What's an example of an open protocol (what this thread is about) where MSFT successfully followed this strategy?
HTML before IE6. At one point Microsoft owned the web browser market to the same degree that Google owns it today.
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I think what's happening here is selection bias. The people who proudly have no Meta accounts are replying to each other saying "me too". The hundreds of others who were reading did not reply.
Sample bias is a thing, sure. I'm alluding to something a bit more interesting, I hope. We don't have a way to test those hundreds of voices comprising the supposed silent majority. I'm saying that when/(BIG if) one does - via some hitherto undevised ingenious experiment which always yields truth - we find that no... in fact everyone is at best ambivalent, but mostly going along with what they think the majority view…
in philosophy it is known as heterophenomenolgy hetero = same, phenomenology = experience
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HTML before IE6. At one point Microsoft owned the web browser market to the same degree that Google owns it today.
Anything from this century?
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Sample bias is a thing, sure. I'm alluding to something a bit more interesting, I hope. We don't have a way to test those hundreds of voices comprising the supposed silent majority. I'm saying that when/(BIG if) one does - via some hitherto undevised ingenious experiment which always yields truth - we find that no... in fact everyone is at best ambivalent, but mostly going along with what they think the majority view…
"Consensus mythology" in philosophy it is known as heterophenomenolgy hetero = same, phenomenology = experience
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Yea, not really. The wild west was wild. People used to make up their own banknotes, there were fraud and schemes everywhere. We take for granted that our bank won't steal our deposits, that's a new concept. Most of that is derived from some degree of 'centralization' - that said - it's definitely not this 1-to-many scheme that the language implies. The Fed has immense power, but is not really in your business. You c…
What your describing is just a different, more local form of centralisation. If your bank manager gets to refuse to give you your money, he has all the power. That's very very centralised, even if it's centralised in him, not in a CEO or a president. I have 4 accounts at 4 different banks. If one of them refused to hand the cash over, even without any redress, I have 3 other accounts to fall back on. So my life is mu…
This is unlike true decentralization i.e. 'trustless', which, paradoxically has to be based entirely on trust.
https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
One reason the blockchain has persisted longer than other decentralized systems is that it introduced economic incentives for maintaining its system. I think this is the best strategy for making decentralized systems that resist the tendency toward centralization while remaining competitive with centralized ones.
I'm beginning to suspect that we will not see a federated protocol as successful as e-mail in my lifetime. I would, in fact, be only mildly surprised to see e-mail become much less federated than it is today (which is much less federated than it was 20 years ago). Spam (and other bad actors) is one huge, and obvious, reason why; it's led to a significant consolidation in e-mail as well; SMTP delivery is hit-or-miss t…
This is one of the smartest things I've read in a long, long time. It seems deceptively simple or shallow, but it's not.
At least once or twice a year, for the past ~15 years or so, I reflect on how the email protocol has survived and thrived despite numerous attempts at "reinventing email" and such.
I'm beginning to suspect that we will not see a federated protocol as successful as e-mail in my lifetime. I would, in fact, be only mildly surprised to see e-mail become much less federated than it is today (which is much less federated than it was 20 years ago). Spam (and other bad actors) is one huge, and obvious, reason why; it's led to a significant consolidation in e-mail as well; SMTP delivery is hit-or-miss t…
> I'm beginning to suspect that we will not see a federated protocol as successful as e-mail in my lifetime. This is one of the smartest things I've read in a long, long time. It seems deceptively simple or shallow, but it's not. At least once or twice a year, for the past ~15 years or so, I reflect on how the email protocol has survived and thrived despite numerous attempts at "reinventing email" and such.
In a way it's like saying "we won't have a baseball team as good as the 1939 Yankees in my lifetime" in the sense that e-mail is the '39 Yankees of federated protocols.
On the other hand a lot of boosters for various new federated protocols want to compare their pet project to the '39 Yankees when they it's more like the 2021 Orioles.