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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
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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.
Ah, I see. A youngling who never heard of the usenet.
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.
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.
Nice to see someone else was around when the lore was written :D
In NZ instead of AOL it was xtra and Paradise.
@yahoo.com is still somewhat popular among us old farts.
I would be one of you if they didn’t purge my accounts years ago. The trust will never return.
just imagine if we could only communicate with people using the same mail service like the newer internet.
Federation really isn’t hard to understand especially when you dive in and start using it. I don’t understand anyone who says otherwise.
Somehow this sentiment exists in the selfhosted subreddit and is why the community didn’t move to Lemmy. One of the last places I’d expect to let something kinda technical scare them tbh.
It’s an excuse, people don’t want to just say they don’t want to do it, so they make an excuse not to, saying it’s ““complicated””. They don’t feel like it or hate it for some irrational reason, possibly a misconception or just hate change.
If you see someone making excuses like this, or even casually making fun of the idea of decentralization and the fediverse, challenge them on it, point out how they are making excuses simply because they don’t want to do it, or say no. Ask them how it is “complicated” and make them give an explanation. 90% of the people I’ve done this with couldn’t come up with one and just acted embarrassed after, because they couldn’t come up with one. It’s a mindless excuse.
This used to be true. However in the internet of today, if your email doesn’t come from a Microsoft or a google it will get rejected if the recipient is a Microsoft or google email address. They have taken over.
I use proton and simplelogin aliases. Both doing fine
Sure there are a few others. What I’m mainly getting at is that you can’t run an email server in your house the same way you can run a lemmy instance and expect those emails to get delivered. You are forced to use someone else’s email service as a backend or google will flag your emails as spam.
If other federated services gain dominance, they will go the same route. And due to the same pressures. (Spam, bad actors, misbehaving servers, etc)
We already see defederation drama.
This really underscores that “The Company Town” is very much alive. Also move over East India Trading Co.
We’ve let the Internet too few big players. It used to be more diverse, more federated. Now it’s just the New TV for Advertisers to shit down your neck.
I’m not even sure if we can go back without inventing new technologies not captured by bureaucratic establishments.
Spammers ruined this not email companies.
This is by design. The primary email relays have been captured for snooping. The spam lists are just a tool to solidify “winners” who comply with giving up your data.
I noticed they seem to be intentionally locking out smaller domains and I hope that backfires. Not holding my breath though.
IRC has entered the chat
Nobody point how much Email sucks!
I really wish email had a built-in aliases feature. Like, so you can create unlimited new addresses that just point to your normal inbox. That would help so much with spam, since you could just block individual aliases. I know some email providers have this feature, but usually it’s paid. Plus Addressing is also nice, but it does nothing to hide your “real” address. Also I’m disappointed that end-to-end encrypted email is basically never used by normal people.
Usenet?
IRC, bulletin boards that had links to each other…. The old net was decentralised by default.
Usenet/IRC/BBS sitting in the background like: Am I a joke to you?
… but lemmy and masto do completely different things
masto’s a microblogging platform like twitter and lemmy is a link aggregator like reddit
honestly i kinda wish there were a rebuild of email that is compatible with the old system but was redesigned from the ground up to do the job better
I’m not technical enough to think it through carefully but I’ve always thought there was an opportunity for an organization like USPS to develop email 2.0 - something that gives people some kind of verifiable and secure email address so that users can easily find each other whilst filtering out spam (or to have spam taken into consideration in the design at the outset). You would design it based on strict standards that would be difficult to get around so that big tech could not easily co-opt it, and adopt for some kind of critical function (taxes, voting maybe?) so that it would encourage adoption en masse. Make it distributed so that users can selfhost it easily, safely, and securely.
Yeah man if I were in charge of the post office I’d definitely push for that AND the return of postal banking. Every post office in the United States would be your one stop service for this email so if there are authentication issues or anything you can actually go there and talk to a PERSON, IN-PERSON.
You would use this system specifically for official government correspondence, and also it’d be better for job seeking too - any situation where you need to be communicating as YOURSELF, fully verified.
I’d even throw in social media features. Forums, microblogging, live chat groups… however, everyone’s identity is clear and certain. No anonymity here. There is privacy insofar as what’s between you and the government stays between you and the government, but if you want anonymity and to express opinions without someone knowing who you are, that’s to be done elsewhere.
Instead of a social media website that lies to you and pretends dishonestly to give you privacy, this would have to be up front about the fact that it’s public property. A town square where you’re wearing a name tag. If you don’t want your neighbors knowing your rhetorical positions, post them elsewhere. Those other places, private services, and important and need to exist as counterbalance.
I’m sure many criminals would be stupid enough to use it for human trafficking and contraband smuggling shit though so that’ll help uncover and discipline rogue elements.
Usenet or Fidonet would be a more apt comparison
Now if government officials start accepting a fediverse based communication, I will create a separate instance for that and it will be totally safe for work, only used for communications with the government.
This smells like ego projection. These are tools for jobs, they don’t have to compete.
What on earth are you talking about?? Of course they don’t have to compete. It’s a meme. It’s meant to be funny, not accurate. What does my ego have to do with anything?
It’s alright, it’s art. You can’t expect it to reach everyone the same way.
Mastadon and Lemmy use the same protocol.
You can even see accounts and posts from Mastodon on Lemmy, and the other way around too.
But yes, email is great.
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
Welcome to the Nerdiverse, where normies are kept out of.
