The Federated App Problem
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The Federated App Problem
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Re: The Federated App Problem
#2If you're thinking of federation in terms of "apps" yes it's doomed.
Like with email, you have to think about it in terms of "service".
The "gravitate to one provider" problem is there (as with gmail), but those who care can still have their own email services or use reasonable third parties.
The tragedy of course is that very few people care.
Re: The Federated App Problem
#3The big one here that is compelling for me is Identity (sort of Auth as touched on in the article). My understanding is that there are multiple working groups trying to tackle this, but I don't know of any federated networks with a sizeable userbase that has implemented any of the decentralized identity mechanisms yet. (Please let me know if you're aware of one).
That said, Matrix is quite large, and growing, and being adopted by multiple national governments. And I know they want to eventually tackle decentralized identity, there are open issues and some brainstorming about it.
I am hoping that a federated alternative to HN will emerge because this is the only non-federated social platform I (will) participate on, post-reddit. And probably the only one that has reasonably stood the test of time in the face of tech capitalism, and it's certainly unique in that regard. I like building software that is aspirational and going to stand the test of time, and I wish I had spent more energy til now working to the same end in terms of "knowledge-bases" ala those that have grown in now-private subreddits and semi-private Discord servers.
Re: The Federated App Problem
#4I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantage of federation I keep hearing is that servers can block other servers if their users become problematic. My question is this: why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?
I do see the potential advantages of federation to prevent the same fate that overcame Twitter and Reddit, but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful. Without solving that piece of the puzzle, I don’t see any practical advantage to federated services.
Re: The Federated App Problem
#5I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantag…
Maybe each subcommunnity can be it's own server? Or will that not work because a user can belong to multiple communities?
Re: The Federated App Problem
#6I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantag…
Yes, all problematic users don’t congregate on the same server. Problematic users can pop up anywhere. However, a server could fail to moderate effectively and become a source of misinformation and trolling. That’s the benefit of federation: it ensures a minimum level of moderation quality. Servers that don’t moderate are blocked, which sets up the proper incentives.
Re: The Federated App Problem
#7The problem with federation is that “HTTP browsers” simply just don’t work that way.
There is nothing you can do to make Firefox or Chrome to understand what a “federated network” even is. For a browser, an “Origin” is an extremely well defined concept. You can’t just decide to amend it because that’s how you feel it ought to be. If you can’t make mastodon.social be relates to social.mastodon in the browser, then you’ll have a rough edge. And that’s just to start. Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues that all could be attributed to what a “browser” interrupts HTTP or the internet to be vs what is actually possible.
Re: The Federated App Problem
#8I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantag…
Maybe each subcommunnity can be it's own server? Or will that not work because a user can belong to multiple communities?
That’s exactly the problem with replacing Reddit with a federated service. The opposite is true with replacing Twitter in which case it’s difficult to explain why a user has to pick any server at all.
Re: The Federated App Problem
#9> I mean that’s the whole point of federation right??
The point of federation is not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that.
>It kinda loses its point.
Even if it comes to this, it doesn't. Another migration can happen at any point, but this time you wouldn't lose your social contacts - and in the future hopefully neither your content.
>But Google and Microsoft got in the game.
That's like your common anti-Linux argument.
>Search engine indexing for these federated services SUCKS.
Decentralized content/link aggregators just became popular so we'll see what'll happen, but personal social media shouldn't be as public for most people as it right now anyway.
Re: The Federated App Problem
#10I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantag…
>but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful
in theory, the instance-specific bit of it is the moderation. the one you sign up with chooses which other instances to federate with, as well as how to moderate the content on their own instance. in theory, you could sign up for an instance that only allowed the sort of politics you agree with, or that had very lax moderation, or that had very strict moderation.
unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know.