News

Phew .... then we can trust the open software that is locked to one company and one instance essentially leaving control to a handful of people.

What could go wrong?

Open AI changed to a for profit company in a heartbeat and these folks can too.

More worrying is who owns them and their funding sources.

This time he bailed early though. He's got no control of the site

Yeah that generally seems to be an issue with a lot of foss projects.

It seems like Bluesky kind of did all of this with ATProto but they’re just met with constant criticisms

It’s like everyone agrees mastodon isn’t the “right” special concoction but any attempt ever made to do something different or better and people shoot it down because it’s “not open like mastodon”

That's what bluesky's DID based account identity does. Unless you make that key the sole authority (no key rotation, like nostr) then you need a registry as authority (like bluesky's PLC registry)

Bluesky specifically lets the account hosting server handle your auth, the directory points to where your account server is as in when you enter your handle, every 3rd party service and federated peer can do OAuth seamlessly to your account host. Then you can log into every compatible site with your handle, instead of having to get redirected "home" before you can interact. Your account server's repository keeps records of all your posts and your social network, and you can even migrate seamlessly across hosts.

It's wild that no one ever had a problem with this with email

Do you work in IT? I couldn't imagine sitting there trying to guide people through IMAP and SMTP settings. Like email has been made a lot easier on that end because most people use an app on their phone that allows them to select from one of the three major providers, they click it, poof all done.

But imagine someone calls you up and is like "hey how do I setup mutt for gmail?" "How do I set up Canary for Microsoft?"

Then imagine someone who has 1/10 of your knowledge trying to set it up. We have to remember that a lot of people are unaware of the file/folder metaphor in computers because a lot of people just "put it in a cloud" and call it done. The tablet/phone era has really eroded a lot of knowledge about systems. I know that seems hard to believe on the Fediverse when we're all surrounded by incredibly knowledgeable people.

This analogy gets used a lot here, but it ignores the fact you literally see users struggling, asking for help, then giving up.

Also, email had a lot of things helping it out. Many ISPs would (and still) give people an email address and set it up for them. Moreover, mail web clients like Hotmail and Gmail didn’t pester people with domain selection. Average users didn’t pick a Hotmail or Gmail domain because they were thinking about the domain, they got it because they were thinking about the features that the web client and host offered.

You don't have to deal with being sent links to other people's mail servers' public mail lists, and then figuring out how to get your own mail server to figure out how to join that conversation. Mailto links open in your mail client which already knows what your server is.

Mastodon don't have a mailto: equivalent, pages can't identify themselves in a way your browser recognize as a Mastodon host, your browser won't remember your Mastodon account(s) specifically. And federation sync issues aren't even dealt with here...

Email is not the same, if it was, then mastodon would just be another email client.

One of the biggest issues with federated social media is discovery, a specific problem that email doesn't deal with, sense communication with email is primarily done between individuals with known addresses.

It's also easy for people to comprehend email because it has an easy analog to regular addresses and traditional communication (I'm writing a letter on my computer and it's getting sent to someone else's computer)

Finally, it took email decades to get to the place it is today, and 99.99999 percent of people using it don't understand how it works in the slightest, like at all.