Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

berk.es

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 219 posts

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#171

Post by hinkley »

denton-scratch wrote: post #69
zasdffaa wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "doubled in price for every 20 miles" bit is extremely interesting, do you have anything I can follow this up on, thanks.

https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa... Brett says that moving grain by road would double the cost for every 100 miles. He has quite a few articles on premodern farming, and may have given a different figure in other articles.

> by road

Roman roads were high tech for the era and those were still pretty bumpy. A modern road is much more efficient. Bouncing over uneven terrain not only damages the products and veg it also causes wear and tear on the cart, the animals, and the driver.

Also doubling isn’t a bad thing for the first couple of multiples. Each doubling increases the supply by a factor of four on open terrain. It’s no accident that big cities are at the confluence of trade routes. Up in the mountains creates a funnel that raises the average cost and lowers the reliability of everything too much. It’s like you’ve blockaded yourself.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#172

Post by phpisthebest »

tomrod wrote: post #163
phpisthebest wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could also be Mastodon / ActivityPub's version of Eternal September

Of course it is. While early adopters cringe, Eternal September means your platform is growing.

Well this is the problem, USENET, like Activity pub was a PROTOCOL not a platform.

Eternal September lead the the collapse of USENET largely because no company could control it, thus it got harder and harder to manage / control in a way the normies wanted, and governments wanted.

USENET today is primary binary transfers, i.e the high seas of the internet.

It is not largely a communications system anymore.

We are already seeing that as people leaving Twitter, the nice left censored authoritarian bubble and find out that the wider internet is not left censored authoritarian so they are demanding every growing block lists of servers attempting to make a little walled garden for Activity Pub, which undermines the entire purpose of federated/ distributed protocols

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#173

Post by cmrdporcupine »

dotnet00 wrote: post #148
molly0 wrote: post #26

I like Mastodon because it reminds me of an earlier and more interesting web. The same people I follow on Twitter I follow on Mastodon and I feel they are being more honest on Mastodon. This might not be true.

I agree, the fediverse seems to be one of the places the "old internet" moved to. But personally I haven't found the waves of Twitter users running from Musk to be part of that. For the most part they seem to be running into the fediverse and expecting the same culture that Twitter had. As these sorts of waves tend to always go, I expect it to either fizzle out or to ruin the culture that everyone prior to them got t…

Like most things it'll end up being a mix. Some of the people running to Mastodon/AP will leave. Some will stay.

It's a net-win for fediverse. But as I've said elsewhere, will not replace Twitter.

But the world also doesn't need a Twitter.

That kind of single "town square" doesn't work. Can't work. And just attracts blowhards and narcissists. And the world will be better without it.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#174

Post by thrown_22 »

Someone wrote: post #169
thrown_22 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Navigable for a barge and navigable for a canoe are two very different things. The Danube and the Rhine were the two major rivers that could be navigated by Romans and they were the borders of the empire for that reason: they were the only way to supply border garrisons efficiently. They also had the Nile which isn't _in_ Egypt, but _is_ Egypt. China by comparison is three major rivers which change course frequently…

> The Danube and the Rhine were the two major rivers that could be navigated by Romans and they were the borders of the empire for that reason: they were the only way to supply border garrisons efficiently I don’t see why the southern shore of the river would be easier to keep supplied from those rivers than the northern one. So, if the empire ended there because of supply issues, wouldn’t it end a short distance nor…

>I don’t see why the southern shore of the river would be easier to keep supplied from those rivers than the northern one. So, if the empire ended there because of supply issues, wouldn’t it end a short distance north of the river?

Retreat is easier when not drowning.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#175

Post by bobthepanda »

SoftTalker wrote: post #165
Kiro wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.

Yep. If Twitter really founders, Meta or Google will roll out something to replace it. Most Twitter users already have accounts with one or both, so it would be a very low-friction switch, and they certainly have the resources to do it. Mastodon will never catch on with the general public, for the same reasons that Linux has not.

I think it’s more likely that a new competitor arises. FB is dying and uncool; Google has no social media chops to speak of. See: Vine getting extinguished EDIT: and only being succeeded by TikTok years later

If having users already there was enough, Google+ would be king of the hill.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#176

Post by Kiro »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #151
Kiro wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.

But a lot of people are switching over to Mastodon. In the last 3 weeks or so it went from "welp, there aren't a lot of people to follow over here" to "wow, lots of interesting people I used to follow on twitter are here now!" It's really starting to hit a tipping point as more people make the jump.

What is a lot? The forum for a niche hobby that I'm a member of has more active users.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#177

Post by yakubin »

bobthepanda wrote: post #175
SoftTalker wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. If Twitter really founders, Meta or Google will roll out something to replace it. Most Twitter users already have accounts with one or both, so it would be a very low-friction switch, and they certainly have the resources to do it. Mastodon will never catch on with the general public, for the same reasons that Linux has not.

I think it’s more likely that a new competitor arises. FB is dying and uncool; Google has no social media chops to speak of. See: Vine getting extinguished EDIT: and only being succeeded by TikTok years later If having users already there was enough, Google+ would be king of the hill.

Vine wasn’t Google’s. It was Twitter’s.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#178

Post by bobthepanda »

yakubin wrote: post #177
bobthepanda wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s more likely that a new competitor arises. FB is dying and uncool; Google has no social media chops to speak of. See: Vine getting extinguished EDIT: and only being succeeded by TikTok years later If having users already there was enough, Google+ would be king of the hill.

Vine wasn’t Google’s. It was Twitter’s.

Ugh, having a late morning.

I mean to say, that having existing users is not a panacea, since Twitter literally bought Vine with all its users, and then proceeded to squander it. And no one else made the short video format work (<10 minute) for a long while until TikTok gave people a kick in the pants again.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#179

Post by gfaster »

supermatt wrote: post #87

Why does every instance need a copy of posted assets? Is that really the case?

I believe the problem is server load. You want each server to listen and send updates to the federated feed, and forward the federated feed to the users of that instance.

What you want to avoid is a celebrity on instance A posting and then users all over the fediverse pinging instance A to get that post. Instead, instance A sends the post to the fediverse and then for any given user to view the post, they ping their own instance. That allows server requirements to be more closely tied with the number of accounts on it and how heavily they use it rather than the popularity of any given account. Additionally, it makes it so servers only have to interact with their own users and other federated servers.

Of course the downside to this is that as the fediverse as a whole grows, the volume of the federated firehose increases, which still increases the minimum requirements (processing power, bandwidth, and storage alike).

There may be middle grounds here. For example, the instance I'm on (I have no idea how common this is) stores text posts from other servers but images from are not saved, it's the originating server that serves those. Additionally, there may be the possibility of deleting old posts from the fediverse that don't have any local replies, or something like that. There are issues with the latter, especially with old friends-only posts becoming impossible to access by looking at the public profile on the original server, but I could see that being solved by something like generating a readonly token for the other server or something like that.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#180

Post by yborg »

phpisthebest wrote: post #172
tomrod wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is. While early adopters cringe, Eternal September means your platform is growing.

Well this is the problem, USENET, like Activity pub was a PROTOCOL not a platform. Eternal September lead the the collapse of USENET largely because no company could control it, thus it got harder and harder to manage / control in a way the normies wanted, and governments wanted. USENET today is primary binary transfers, i.e the high seas of the internet. It is not largely a communications system anymore. We are alre…

"Eternal September" did not lead to the 'collapse' of USENET. It was largely replaced by web-based solutions in more user-friendly domains like AOL. And USENET eventually largely ended up controlled by a few large entities (ISPs) that had the resources to support the huge message volumes. Since there was largely no monetization mechanisms people would support for the needed resources, freely available NNTP servers quickly were dropped by ISPs. Also, it has to be said that the text-only nature of USENET was generally seen as old-fashioned and it was replaced by technologies that could support a better multimedia experience.

Fediverse has all of the same problems inherent in a distributed store and forward system and may suffer the same fate, but lack of centralized control is not the defining problem here.

Post reply on HN