Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism. In theory, I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn. I haven't had a portfolio in years, because I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it. Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists. (And plenty of precious content that ended up on other services, like Qik, no longer does.)
If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.
The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.
>If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.
Good! Higher barrier to entry is exactly why Neocities, Mastodon and [redacted] are so much higher quality than the NPC internet. We need a couple hurdles to keep out the low effort posters.
Yeah but is it good gatekeeping or bad gatekeeping? Because having to agree to a code of conduct is a gate, but I don't think we want to remove that one. And anyway, when did gatekeeping pick up such a negative, pejorative tone? The gatekeeper is the one who kept people out of the gate. Some people were kept out for good reasons, others were kept out for bad reasons. Depending on the gate and country politics, nobody or everybody was let in through the gate. That doesn't make gatekeeping inherently bad. Doctors gatekeep who can call themselves a doctor, and while there are broader problems with that, fundamentally, some random fraudster shouldn't be able to call themselves a doctor sell rat poison in a pretty box as cure for cancer. There are some kinds of gatekeeping that are bad, but it's not inherently so.
>having to agree to a code of conduct is a gate, but I don't think we want to remove that one
depends on who you ask.
but in general I think that the goal of gatekeeping should be to filter out bad candidates without filtering out good candidates. You could imagine that for a medical degree, if students were graded on exams based on their handwriting and spelling that many otherwise good candidates would be eliminated, which is bad. So we want to avoid arbitrary gates and uphold meaningful gates.
If we are talking about gatekeeping new technology, we might want almost everyone who uses it to grasp it well, so it does not become a system of organized control. It may be reasonable to allow the technology to filter those who struggle with its inherent problems, but it would be good to avoid filtering out people due to the tech's unnecessary complexity (complexity based on its implementation, for example). So it is good to cull this unnecessary complexity of the system.
For example, a good gate for technology is making sure users understand the modular aspects of it (for example on linux this would be commands and unix pipes) and how to repurpose those modules for their own needs. A bad gate in this case might be bash syntax.
> Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists.
by the good grace of Meta Inc. and nothing else. Your account can get purged because:
- they decide to start purging old content
- they comply with a censorship order from the country you live in (or a country you don't live in)
- the CEO decides they don't like you (though that's really only a current issue on Twitter)
> Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism.
Decentralization is the bedrock of all the _most_ pragmatic internet technologies (DNS, HTTP, Email), centralization is a more recent phenomenon driven by a dozen or so very large companies.
This feels like an argument that stuffing cash under your mattress is better than keeping it in a bank. The number one cause of data loss - by far - is technical incompetence. 99.9% of users do not have the expertise to spin up an AWS instance and maintain it.
The difference between Facebook and your bank is that it's illegal for your bank to just say "you don't have an account here anymore and we're never giving back any of your deposits".
I mean why stop there with this analogy? we didn’t solve that problem by building decentralized banks. As a society the solution we came up to this is regulations around what banks can or can’t do, how much notice they must give you. If user data is so valuable (and I would vehemently argue that it is) we must have regulations to protect that.
well, people are trying. Jury's still out on that one.
But yes, we're in a weird spot of "clearly this is altering society" and "it's just an app bro". The latter is shedding away, but the powers that be will try to delay it as much as possible to squeeze out a few billion more dollars.
You are stuck in a centralized mindset where the only way to host content is to pay someone else with a static IP address and a reliable connection to host it for you, and to pay a domain registrar to link to it.
Why shouldn't hosting a webpage or social media content be as easy and reliable as seeding files on bittorrent? Programs like syncthing are proof that this model works in other domains, for example "cloud" storage.
I like and use matrix (I'm indeed one of those ideological types), but even their nice webapp is janky in comparison to discord, with fewer features on paper (E2EE is huge, but the median discord user doesn't care). I use it in spite of the jank.
With bluesky on the other hand, there really isn't much jank, certainly not relative to twitter (except right now when it feels like the servers are struggling to scale fast enough...). The average bluesky user doesn't seem to be ideologically motivated (or if they are, their ideology is "I don't like elon musk"). They mostly use bluesky because it works for them, regardless of implementation details.
On the Matrix side: to be clear, Element Web/Desktop isn't a nice new webapp (yet) - it's an 8 year old codebase which is improving slowly but surely (unless we get lucky and can focus on a step change). Element X however is an entirely new mobile app written in Rust + Swift UI / Jetpack Compose, and it has zero jank, and gives an idea of just how good Matrix can be: https://element.io/blog/deep-dive-into-element-x/ etc.
It's fascinating to see how well Bluesky has done with RN + Expo though, and makes me wonder what an equivalent Matrix client would feel like. Unfortunately rnmatrix.com looks to have been stalled since Annie joined Beeper/a8c.
Element X has been a long time coming and most of the people I brought to the matrix ecosystem have left (calls are basically broken and everything is jank). Telling them there is a new app will not bring them back. Finally I am tapering off my use and moving to other applications.
i’m flattered you made an acct just to wish us luck :) EX is here, and the jank is gone (although Element Call is admittedly still beta). Sorry it comes too late for you.
But just as Bluesky dipped and then returned with critical mass, so can Matrix. The uptake patterns of decentralised platforms seems to be much less linear than the tightly controller centralised apps of the path.
I suspect being spun out of Twitter, developed by Dan Abramov, and not owned by Mark Zuckerberg are all inputs that make Blue Sky feel like the blessed continuation of what used to be Twitter (at least for people in the hacker sphere).
> I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn.
But people still care about it and that minority can become expensive to fight off. We see this as we speak with games. The (IMO, frivilous) minorities got to a point last week where 2 Californians are trying to sue a 10 year old game for shutting down in 2023 (before this law they are suing under was made).
It'll probably take a few thousand to fight it off, so those two plantiffs are having the effect of maybe 100 gamers in terms of cost. For what I see as a frivilous lawsuit. Imagine one with teeth.
Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need decentralization are people who are being censored but that's very few people. So everyone incurs extra complexity to benefit a small minority.
I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it
This is caused by you writing custom software, not by decentralization. If you were running some off-the-shelf software like WordPress it would probably be updated to keep pace with the world so you wouldn't have to do much.
> Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need decentralization are people who are being censored but that's very few people.
There is a larger group of people who are frequently harassed but don't have sufficient control to prevent harassment on Twitter, for instance the recent change in what the block button does.
With decentralization, one can self-host on their terms, or find one with like-minded people and have more stringent controls on both incoming and outgoing messages, via blocks or defederating unmoderated or otherwise disagreeable instances.
If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.
The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.