The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
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Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
#2[flagged]
Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
#3The same was said about open-access journals, still plenty of scientists ignore to publish in those.
Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
#4The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is. And I would suspect that most readers of Hacker News only know about Mastodon. The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement such a big deal.
Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
#5Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to avoid a walled garden but this always ignore the practical implementation issues and the lack of a value proposition to users.
Take Twiter as an example. It's rapidly deteriorated under Musk's stewardship [1]. Bias aside, quality is down to support a subscription models with what many now call the "blue check reply guys": low-quality replies from "verified" users being boosted when thos esame people couldn't otherwise get organic engagement.
What would be the benefit to a user of federation? Federation at what level? Is it just other companies? How do you create a feed with federated content? Are you copying it between nodes? Can I, as a user, set up my own server like I theoretically can with email? How then do we police content in such a world? What about bad actors spamming as we get with POTS and email? Who enforces things like law enforcement requests and content moderation?
All of those things are real problems/ Yet the value proposition for users is at best hypothetical. A service can still degrade. It can get swept away by whatever the new social network is. Will that be federated too? Most likely not because it's easier to scale that way.
Twitter may well die. Who cares? It'll get replaced by something else. Federation just isn't going to happen with these philosophical arguments given all the practical problems.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-...
Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
#6[flagged]
Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
#7The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is. And I would suspect that most readers of Hacker News only know about Mastodon. The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement such a big deal.
Free software became successful because it rendered things mostly obsolete ie commercial Unix and proprietary compilers.
Fediverse doesn’t really have anything on FAANG. It needs people to run it, who’s gonna pay them?
Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
#8Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to avoid a walled garden but this always ignore the practical implementation issues and the lack of a value proposition to users. Take Twiter as an example. It's rapidly deteriorated under Musk's stewardship [1]. Bias aside, quality is down to support a subscriptio…
The biggest problem with federation is easily visible in e-mail: the server “owns” your address and therefore moving in very hard. It’s not much better than any other silo in that way. Mastodon is a bunch of small social sites in a trenchcoat.
There are ways to make identity floating and separate from the server, at least in theory, but ActivityPub (the protocol under Mastodon and many other things) does not implement anything like this.
Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
#9[flagged]
What does "blue haired people" mean?
Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore
#10The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is. And I would suspect that most readers of Hacker News only know about Mastodon. The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement such a big deal.
Free software became successful because it rendered things mostly obsolete ie commercial Unix and proprietary compilers. Fediverse doesn’t really have anything on FAANG. It needs people to run it, who’s gonna pay them?
> Free software became successful because it rendered things mostly obsolete ie commercial Unix and proprietary compilers.
Free software became successful in as much as it reduced the cost for companies selling other things to consumers. Would Google or Facebook be viable if they had to pay Microsoft (or Sun) a license per server. Linux enabled them to have a free operating system to run all their data tracking for ads. Free software reduced the cost for Apple to develop the he software that powers iPhones and Macs.
For the most part, the end user actually doesn’t use the free software, rather it is a part of something else they pay for.