It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model
i feel like the newsgroups could also be pegged as an early distributed/mass-audience environment similar to what we see today… multiple nodes sharing sometimes identical loads of content
i miss tagline management… bluewave
e. ALso! the star trek nonsense was strong with alt.wesly.crusher.die.die.die!
We’ve got some strong Star Trek nonsense brewing in !tenforward@lemmy.world
Yeah, Usenet was where it was at back at the turn of the millennium. Then again, I had access through a university. Access wasn’t free outside of places like that.
ISPs were spotty on coverage because even at that time, they needed at least a terabyte of storage to dedicate to it, and still not be able to cover everything that was on there. Of course, they might’ve got away with less if they decided not to carry the binaries newsgroups…
The way it worked was a lot like how Fediverse federation works now, or similarly, filesharing. It was possible to be reading a thread of messages and the older ones wouldn’t be available on your local/ISP news server because their space had been recycled for newer data.
If you were lucky, your attempt to access that message might cause your host to grab it on a future request to upstream hosts or peers, but some Usenet messages are completely lost to time because everyone purged them.
Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.
Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.
Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.
unmoderated
Fun fact: that’s not strictly true.
You could have moderated groups, where a moderator/group of moderators would get sent every post via email, and they’d only be posted into the group if approved.
The vast, vast, vast majority of groups were not moderated, but that’s not to say you couldn’t do so.
Yeah and then google+microsoft rolled in and killed the decentralized nature of email with gmail and outlook.
Only sign left of the good ol days is merged accounts with @ old domain names and the few that self host.
It’s not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.
Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, “eh, why not”. The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the “gold standard” for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.
You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.
Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you’re trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you’re a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don’t.
Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square
Sure, they might’ve cornered the market fair and square, but they’re certainly doing anticompetitive things in keeping it cornered.
Just try setting up a mail server not connected to any of the big corpos (Google, MS, Cloudflare or their clients with more niche marketing) and see who will actually recieve your mails. You most likely won’t land into the Spam folder either.
It is also worth considering that yes, MS and Google have definitely dominated the market through superior products, but the standards they’ve pushed for and established have also made it difficult for other players to enter. If we wanted to say that the federated nature of email is dead, I think that’s a fair argument still.
Hosting your own email server is quite difficult. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in anyone’s mailbox without assistance. If you want to make a mailing list, you basically need to use a mailing service, lest you get blacklisted by major systems owned by MS and Google. Much of this is a byproduct of spam, by which I don’t blame Google and MS for doing their best to protect against, but at the same time they have more or less neutered some core aspects of what made email accessible.
I get the argument, but email is also very different to the kind of open-web network that the fediverse resides in. There are problems the fediverse faces which email doesn’t like discoverability. The emails either come to you or they don’t. With federated social media, you have to find the content you’re looking for first. Maybe you use a search engine, or somebody gives you a business card with their handle and instance, whatever. Then you have to figure out how to view those posts from your home instance if you want to actually interact in any way. There’s browser extensions and stuff which try to make this easier, but that’s another thing that has to be explained and set up, plus not everyone is visiting from a web browser with extension support, or a web browser at all for that matter.
It’s not fundamentally impossible to understand the fediverse, but there’s more of a barrier than email, which can be explained in a single sentence like “Your email provider gives you a unique address that anybody else can send emails to and vice versa.” I don’t think convincing ourselves that the fediverse is actually very simple is going to convince people outside the bubble that that’s true.
convincing ourselves that the fediverse is actually very simple
There’s a difference between ‘technically simple’ and ‘understandable UX’.
Your mom doesn’t need to know how ActivityPub works or the intricacies of federation. She just needs to know to log in and go to c/cutecats.
The early-adopter curse here is causing way too much technobabble to be involved in descriptions that just confuse people, and it’s technical aspects that the nerd cohort here is fascinated by, but uh, nobody else is.
The real leap will be to resist the urge to pull out the PPT and spend 3 hours and 10,000 words explaining how Lemmy works vs the much more concise how-to-use-Lemmy details that people actually want.
There’s a lot of assumptions being made by a lot of people that “normal” people are stupid and couldn’t understand ‘It’s a conversation platform like Reddit, but it’s run by it’s users and that’s why there’s a lot of servers who all talk to each other’ and so there’s a lot of hand wringing about how you have to explain all the details and such, which really, isn’t all that true.
Every non-technical person I’ve explained it to like that immediately understands what it is, how you’d use it, and what it’s used for and I’ll occasionally get a ‘Oh, neat, how does all that work?’ question I can then expand on, but that’s like, maybe 1 out of 20.
TLDR: too many details is not helpful for most people, and nerds loooooove going into more detail than anyone could possibly care about
There is discoveribility, but no one uses it. It’s called Web of Trust (by PGP).
Doesn’t really have the same purpose but…
The point being made is really just the identity of user being tied to User@domain.tld vs @handle it seems like that concept has died with Web 2.0. Only thing I would improve of the fediverse. If communities could be merged with when a group of instances agree to form a network. Like how IRC does it with channels. I mean yeah there would be netsplits from time to time but it would cut down on duplication and increase the traffic of niche communities like the benefits of central platforms get but it’s still distributed.
Well with email if you want emails to come to you you also have to search for it and sign up your email to a list to receive them or give your email to people for them to send you stuff.
In lemmy you need to go to a community finder and find communities you want then you copy their link and paste it in your home instance search bar and hit follow. With email you need to search the web for a sites email list then paste your email in their and say you want to receive their email
It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model
Because you don’t need to understand email to use it.
There have been decades of software and user interface advancements that have made the usage of email extremely simple and straightforward.
People also inherently grasp the idea of it because they understand the real world concept of mail.
Email is also one way. You aren’t sending mail to and receiving mail from everyone at once, or reading mail one person sent to another and interjecting. You’re just sending something to an address, not CC’ing literally everyone all the time.
Email also doesn’t have any confusion around which mailboxes are allowed to speak to each other.
The fediverse is nowhere near that simple or intuitive.
Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It generally doesn’t matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses, baring more niche services. It does actually matter what instance you’re on.
We try to sell people on this comparison, try to explain to them that it’s simple, but it’s really a half-truth at best, or a lie at worst.
When you joined reddit, you know for a fact you’re seeing everything, and the same thing as everyone else. The same posts, the same comments, the same vote counts. A simple, shared, unfiltered experience of everything was the default, and then you shaped it yourself.
That’s not the case with the fediverse. There’s no simple default. You have to build it yourself.
It was broken before then, the whole distributed user and instances is hard for the average non techy. This is the same issue Linux has. People say “just install Linux” but when the person Google’s it, they get destroyed with 30 plus flavors and don’t understand what to do.
Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It generally doesn’t matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses, baring more niche services. It does actually matter what instance you’re on.
You’ve probably never tried using email outside of Google, Outlook, Yahoo or Proton but let me tell you it doesn’t just work. A lot of the servers have been blocked by the big first 3, sometimes soft-blocks being redirected to the Spam folder, but often times hard blocks where they don’t get through at all. So it very much does matter what email service you do use, as many of the smaller ones and domains you might obtain to set up your own have been defederated, much more aggressively might I add. It doesn’t take much for a domain to end up on spamhaus’ or other spam lists, and it’s a big pain to get them off said lists.
Let’s compare with Defederation of activitypub services (because Lemmy devs didn’t invent the idea of deferation, it’s part of ActivityPub standard and is a thing on all activitypub platforms), something that typically happens when a server is spamming, spreading violent or hateful messages, or otherwise engaged in unproductive or harmful behavior (i.e. trolling, rudeness towards others, etc.). We don’t use spamhaus or a similar equivalent service to filter “spam” automatically, much of it is done by server admins themself, there are tools like Fediseer meant to keep track of instances which are trusted as well as identifying known bad actors, but since this is community driven and not monolithic it is different from spamhaus and the like.
In all honesty the Defederation boogeyman is a very stupid argument, especially when comparing it to email which has ironically been hit the hardest by it. It has effectively been reduced to a handful of big players while all the other smaller ones out there find themselves unable to compete. Meanwhile on the activitypub side defederation is still an issue but it is a minor one and is limited to edge cases or bad behavior. One thing that is important to note, and why it isn’t talked about more frequently to other people is this. When people invite others to join the Fediverse, they naturally assume the people who are joining are NOT trolls, alt-right sociopaths, neonazis, pedophiles, spammers, etc. and thus are not likely to have their accounts banned or the servers they start get widely defederated. If you are one of those people chances are you aren’t the target demographic for most fediverse servers out there, and thus you will face friction, bans, and mass defederation because people do not want you in their spaces or to listen to your dogshit propaganda.
The Fediverse was never about freeze peach, it’s about collaboration and cooperation between services, and most services do not want to collaborate with people who are assholes. The people still claiming that it is for free speech are lying or misinformed, because on most servers if you speak your mind and say things that are unacceptable or evil, there will be consequences. That means bans from those servers or defederation if you run your own.
I don’t care if it catches on, I’m enjoying it here where the people are still awesome.
