Hard disagree. It’s inevitable with any company in their position. There should be no company in that position. We need to decentralize and federate. Mastodon is AFAIK the prominent implementation here but regardless, we need to start pushing for and exploring networks and platforms operated under completely different premises.
Wait until you realize that highly centralized businesses are a feature, not a bug.
We've BEEN through federated platforms before. We've even been through PROTOCOLS before. They're all horrible. The successor to any platform that currently exists will have slight improvements to what already exists, and that's IF they're able to do so.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have over 30 years of being around social media platforms on the internet.
Just a general response to some of the skeptics here (I hear your points, I just think we're still early in the game). I do believe this will happen. I believe it's inevitable, it will just take time. The main advantage over current networks+apps is that it breaks the barrier to entry for new competitors. Mastodon etc are still early newcomers who still have to break that barrier. But once there are many of them playing in the same water, they can gradually build a competing network - slowly at first, then they'll win over the entire new generation. Whatever the next "tik-tok" is could be decentralized, and then the flood gates open. Advertising and privacy issues will still exist, but it will be competitive. There will no longer be a monopoly gate keeper who that sets the rules. Lots of details to be worked out for sure. We need user interfaces to improve and get simplified. I agree that right now federated platforms like mastodon are still too cumbersome for users. But I believe all of this will improve and this will work eventually. I think it's coming this decade.
Like I said, I don't know if the likes of Matrix and Mastodon will be our platforms of the future. However, they are blazing the trail. They demonstrate what is possible.
There is a lot of churn in the world of online services. It's only a matter of time before someone else follows in the footsteps of Matrix and Mastodon, but figures out how to take it even further. Or maybe someone else will break through by following in their footsteps. Or maybe Matrix or Mastodon are just dark horses who haven't hit their stride yet.
I don't know, but I do believe the future will be in decentralized services over centralized ones.
I don't think Diaspora* and Mastodon will, just to clarify what other people are saying. But Mastodon <-> Mastodon should (and maybe even ones based off the same protocol).
Also note that email is federated, yet the majority of users have congregated around Gmail.
I predict that the same thing will happen with Mastodon, and that is not the type of future we should have.
Instead, I urge everybody to use P2P/decentralized networking, where even though there might be strong/reliable federated hosts, YOU fundamentally control your identity and it does NOT belong to a federated host.
I said the same about Mastodon v Twitter, but decentralized solves nothing. It just makes it impossible to complain to anyone. We absolutely need centralized and uniform moderation rules and guidelines. And it needs sustainable funding to operate. There are not really any major tech challenges to achieve this. You could build a 140-character microblog in a weekend. The problem is attracting enough users to generate the requisite network effects and building trust amongst those users. Both of which are human problems and very, very hard to do.
Exactly. I am personally all for replacing it with open source decentralized options, I am even working to further that cause, but do you actually think that'll happen anytime soon? Network effects are not so easily replaceable...
(on the crypto note) is something like https://steemit.com/ what you are envisioning?
It does seem like we are stuck in a cycle where we are super into platforms until they become large and too beholden to investors, then we swap. Some kind of truly community driven (open source) federated service does seem like a real answer to this problem. Maybe we will all end up on Mastodon-like services pretty soon.
But the web is already descentralized, isn't it? What I mean is, why don't we go back to the early 2000s phase where there were popular forums for everything, each of them with disctint styles and idiosyncrasies. You could have a separate identity in each of them, and I don't remember ever once thinking "oh, it would be cool to be able to somehow connect this account with this other one in this other forum".
It brings me back a few years ago where everyone just had to use blockchains instead of... a database, when it made no sense. It should be decentralization in the sense of offer, not technical decentralization.
Mastodon and the like feel flat to me. Again, maybe I'm missing a key piece here.
> A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible
I don't think so. I don't think any of this will gather enough momentum to make a dent to the established networks (Twitter, FB, TikTok, Reddit, etc). That ship has sailed, imho
It’s going to have to be a non-industry move or a radically different model sustained by an interested minority. Federated systems are the other way this can work.
Which company? Npm Inc? Github? Microsoft? Google? Mozilla?
Each of those would cause an outroar, and it would be near-universally agreed that having a decentralized ecosystem is better than being beholden to the whims of $company. (it doesn't help that 3/5 of the companies I mentioned are Microsoft, famous for embrace-extend-extuinish)
There needs to be a bigger benefit to the end users before decentralized services catch on. Widespread hard censorship of company run services might be just the kind of thing that decentralization needs to stop being a niche thing for people willing to put up with a diminished experience for the nebulous benefit of controlling your data and experience. Vanishingly few people want to deal with running their own services so the annoyances of not having control over what exactly happens on $socialMediumPlatform is smaller than the hassle of trying to move to mastodon then having no one to follow.
I stand up and point my finger again in the direction of decentralization. Here we have this massive societal infrastructure, a huge education tool and a hub for culture, and the whole thing is under the control of a single entity whose primary motive is exclusively profit.
The core infrastructure of the internet (search, social media, archives, etc.) should not be under the influence of single companies. The internet was supposed to be decentralized but we ended up with individual companies taking huge monopolies over our standard internet experiences.
I don't think there is any tech out there today that can properly replace YouTube. Especially things like the recommendation engine. But I also don't think it's that far out of reach. We should putting greater effort into decentralizing the core parts of the internet.
Money, search, email, data storage, social media, DNS, ISP, and I'm sure dozens of other things. We don't need to be vulnerable like this.
They probably can't, which is why I'm pessimistic about the idea being viable - unless there is some way for the application to be open-source and quasi-federated; for example with people/companies/communities hosting their own nodes - like Mastodon but with some kind of auto-discovery for regular users to make it approachable.
Which is also why Mastadon will never grow outside said bubble. It's unfortunate but it's also waaaaay too technical. The general population will always stick to centralized platforms out of accessibility and usability.
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