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0 pointsdasyatidprime7y ago0 comments

> Meh, don't need another box, just keep the family desktop on.

Doesn't exist anymore (often enough).

> Just user-oriented effort instead of the constant barrage of difficult-to-setup tech demos.

Things like identity management and data storage make these barriers pretty deep. “I can delete my post and it basically won't be accessible anymore” (there can be physical exceptions so long as they're legibly exceptions to the social reality), “I don't have to think about how big my images are and can just post as much as I want”, “I can lose any of my own hardware and everything will still be there because it's in the cloud”, and “I can tell who my friends are based on common knowledge within my circles of their unique name which is easy to remember and meaningful” are all things that heavily constrain what you can do “on the inside”.

Mastodon has meanwhile managed to either do something right or get lucky wrt the path dependency of building structures where prosocial hosting behavior is convenient: a whole bunch of mostly-volunteer instances have sprung up, adopters have managed to make instance choice part of identity so that the domain-part isn't just a “meaningless extra thing to remember”, and federation remains reasonably strong; meanwhile, financial support for server costs has mostly leant toward the Patreon model, allowing a fraction of generous users to help support a bunch of free riders while not having to directly participate in administration. At the same time, despite Mastodon having almost exactly copied Twitter's model in terms of available user interactions, the zeitgeist has repeatedly suggested that users getting on board for the first time often had no idea what instances even could be, and had to have the very concept explained several different ways before it got real traction. Random instance death is also a problem that's tempering the mood nowadays, because keeping the server up requires enough motivation which sometimes runs out, and some instances have started having problems with media storage requirements, which, see above (though I'm told the internal architecture could use some optimization too).

There's something deeper in here surrounding the thorough conflation of type with instance in the popular side of the digital world; I feel as though something critical to the more literate concept of this didn't make it into the default folk model, such that only centralized services are legible. I have some hope that Mastodon and related ActivityPub-based federated services absorbing waves of people fleeing the abusive behavior of major social media (such as the recent Tumblr exodus) will make a dent in this and cause the appropriate concepts to reach critical cultural density.

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apatters7y ago

> Mastodon has meanwhile managed to either do something right or get lucky wrt the path dependency of building structures where prosocial hosting behavior is convenient

It seems to me that Mastodon gained traction in a way that wasn't much different from email. In both cases there was a communication network which anyone could add a node to pretty easily. Your node could have local moderation policies and you wouldn't have too many issues with getting blocked as long as you acted nice. For both email and Mastodon this enabled a few motivated administrators with some influence to onboard thousands of users quickly, and benefit from a network effect bigger than just their node.

The similarities to email end when you consider _why_ people migrated to the network in question. With Mastodon the waves have been culturally/politically motivated people running away from something (ex-Twitter users fleeing abuse, Japanese loli enthusiasts trying to avoid embarrassment, sex workers seeking an alternative to SESTA/FOSTA regulatory deplatforming). Whereas with email people were running _to_ something - the first free, global communications network of its kind.

It's also interesting to note that email nowadays has lost these advantages (running a server is much tougher now and you can't really pull it off without blessings from Google and others). Sure enough email is now on the decline.

dasyatidprimeOP7y ago

I think email evolved when people had more digital-identity ties to their ISPs though. I remember having an email address tied to your university or your dial-up provider or whatever being pretty common in the 1990s, and pre-eternal-September the same protocols already existed among a more closed crowd (which is kind of like Facebook, now that I think of it).

Then “free email” providers on the early consumer Internet were able to compete on things like storage, because that was something it was still acceptable to expect people to pay attention to. One of GMail's original big draws was “lots and lots of storage”.

Email being in decline for social purposes feels partly related to changing feedback expectations and UI inertia, but I'd guess also some relation to a “mental association with uncool things” including both spam and stressful/boring transactional email; it's become more of a business thing. The spam side of that is related to the gradual federation lockdown, and something similar could happen to Mastodon, but at least there's some discussion about it happening in advance now.

I'm not sure what this all adds up to.

zozbot1237y ago

> running a server is much tougher now and you can't really pull it off without blessings from Google and others

Only true if you care about Gmail (a centralized service) getting your e-mail and delivering it to its users. You could just not care about Gmail and still interoperate with lots of mail servers - even lots of servers that do have Google's blessing.

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