Why ActivityPub is the future • Hacker News Board

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#181

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Fri, Jun 29, 2018, 4:20 AM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #162

adventured wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And nobody used it, relatively speaking vs the extraordinary scale that those email products made possible later. Hotmail had more users after 18 months than the total history of all email services on earth combined for the first two decades of email. If email was still as annoying to use as it was pre AOL & Hotmail, the general public still wouldn't be using it today.

Great point. Webmail is a product that was massively adopted compared to regular clients.

Perhaps, but no particular web implementation of email really stands out. (You might say Gmail, Gmail is really comparatively recent.) So a web interface on email push adoption further.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#182

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 1:40 AM UTC

antpls wrote: post #176

remir wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, Facebook, Whatsapp are companies with strong products . Mozilla have a strong products. Same thing with the Linux Foundation. The article is talking about how ActivityPub is the future, but without strong products, how can that future be possible? Idealism alone won't convince people to switch to Mastodon instead of using Twiiter or Peertube intead of Youtube.

> Idealism alone won't convince people to switch to Mastodon instead of using Twiiter or Peertube intead of Youtube. Just curious, according to you, is democracy an idealism that happened alone or with a product?

[deleted]

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#183

Post by remir » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 1:45 AM UTC

antpls wrote: post #176

remir wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, Facebook, Whatsapp are companies with strong products . Mozilla have a strong products. Same thing with the Linux Foundation. The article is talking about how ActivityPub is the future, but without strong products, how can that future be possible? Idealism alone won't convince people to switch to Mastodon instead of using Twiiter or Peertube intead of Youtube.

> Idealism alone won't convince people to switch to Mastodon instead of using Twiiter or Peertube intead of Youtube. Just curious, according to you, is democracy an idealism that happened alone or with a product?

What I think about democracy is irrelevant. The question is: will idealism be enough to convince people to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and my answer is no.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#184

Post by antpls » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 10:35 AM UTC

remir wrote: post #183

antpls wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Idealism alone won't convince people to switch to Mastodon instead of using Twiiter or Peertube intead of Youtube. Just curious, according to you, is democracy an idealism that happened alone or with a product?

What I think about democracy is irrelevant. The question is: will idealism be enough to convince people to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and my answer is no.

Twitter, Mastodon can be tools for political system such as democracy. Twitter don't sell anything to the end user : it is free, it is not really a "product" for an end user. Why did people use it? Because it's a new way of expressing your ideas. If some governments force Twitter to censor itself for X reasons, and users disagree with it, people will start to look for alternative to express themselves. Also I think the Mastodon/federation system is harder to block nation-wide than just Twitter. Democracy is totally revelant to the topic imho.

Edit : so, maybe Mastodon will never be as big as Twitter, but the goal isn't to migrate everyone from Twitter to another platform. The goal is to propose alternatives. The title of the submission is a bit click-bait

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#185

Post by cbsmith » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 10:48 AM UTC

throwawaymath wrote: post #153

cbsmith wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla was founded out of Netscape's product failure, and survived largely on the coattails of the search revolution. Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective, but there were more than a few products built around it... they just failed. It turns out, that was the wrong vision.

Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective, It's really not. https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

That's because the place to make inroads was elsewhere... in mobile, embedded, etc., which we don't count as "desktop" (though at one point, desktop was basically anything with a GUI). You throw in Android phones, Chromebooks, browsers in embedded devices, etc., the picture looks quite different.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#186

Post by cbsmith » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 10:52 AM UTC

some_account wrote: post #163

cbsmith wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla was founded out of Netscape's product failure, and survived largely on the coattails of the search revolution. Desktop Linux's failure is a matter of perspective, but there were more than a few products built around it... they just failed. It turns out, that was the wrong vision.

Desktop Linux never became significantly better than Mac OS or Windows, that's why it failed to grow. It's worse in a lot of aspects except ideology. Firefox is arguably better than Chrome and has a much nicer ideology as well, but it's not so much better than Chrome that the majority of users is switching by default. Non technical people need a reason other than ideology to switch. The product needs to provide a new…

> Non technical people need a reason other than ideology to switch. The product needs to provide a new value that doesn't exist or be so much better that it's obvious to everybody who tries it.

It's not even that.. often it's just distribution. Often consumers don't really want to make a conscious choice, so taking it away from them in the distribution channel is the way to go. I remember doing studies on search engine switching rates. No matter how awful we made the default search engine, the vast majority of users would not even try using Google. It was AMAZING.

I would argue that the browser wars have, to a much larger degree than we're prepared to acknowledge, been driven by distribution. Users don't want to make a choice.

So that means you just need a strategy for winning the distribution channel game. Product design be damned.

Re: Why ActivityPub is the future

#187

Post by cbsmith » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 11:06 AM UTC

dingo_bat wrote: post #166

AsyncAwait wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It failed to grow because it was never preinstalled on a sufficiently large number of machines at BestBuy, there's nothing else to it. If people were buying PCs with Linux on them, they'll use Linux and nobody would find anything weird about it.

Firefox was also not pre-installed but still beat out IE.

Firefox was pre-installed (just not by OS makers) and it didn't so much beat IE as Chrome beat IE and didn't harm Firefox nearly as much (likely because Google prioritized converting systems where neither Firefox nor Chrome were the default browser).