> I really do want people to be able to communicate directly with one-another, without multi-billion dollar companies.
It's just really hard to imagine what this could look like in practice while remaining a compelling experience.
Downsides aside that we both agree with, it's just hard to compete with centralization. You register @ve55 on Discord and you click "Join" on any server and anyone can find you and it's not confusing.
Meanwhile, literally every discussion of a federated system like Mastodon on HN is full of confusion, even among us the tech savvy crowd.
Example, just yesterday this was posted to HN: "You may be using Mastodon wrong" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819387 and the comments are full of confusion. And it's just a Twitter clone, the simplest social app possible, that isn't even trying to solve real-time chat and voice.
And the traditional siloed bulletin board model (vBulletin, phpbb) had massive downsides too like fragmentation and having to "host it" just to start a community (not something everyone can do), which is why they struggled to compete with, say, Reddit.
It's hard to pin what a Discord would look that maximized the ideals that took us away from a centralized corporation controlling it. Seems we're still in the very early stage of experimentation, or maybe centralization will always have this sort of advantage that lets it dominate social spaces?
I often have similar thoughts to this - there's very few areas where decentralized software has had a better UX than centralized alternatives, and that is why they haven't had as much success.
I think compromises can be made, and in practice, perhaps have to be, in order to attain a large user base (large enough for common network effects, too). I don't want the minimum requirements of all software to be perfect decentralization, censorship-resistance, 10 different client implementations in Rust, and so on. Just, better than what we have. Nonprofit companies could do a good job of it imo, similar to how we see Wikipedia and the Internet Archive as such forces of good that will not become corrupted by ads, selling data, and the likes.
It's just really hard to imagine what this could look like in practice while remaining a compelling experience.
Downsides aside that we both agree with, it's just hard to compete with centralization. You register @ve55 on Discord and you click "Join" on any server and anyone can find you and it's not confusing.
Meanwhile, literally every discussion of a federated system like Mastodon on HN is full of confusion, even among us the tech savvy crowd.
Example, just yesterday this was posted to HN: "You may be using Mastodon wrong" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819387 and the comments are full of confusion. And it's just a Twitter clone, the simplest social app possible, that isn't even trying to solve real-time chat and voice.
And the traditional siloed bulletin board model (vBulletin, phpbb) had massive downsides too like fragmentation and having to "host it" just to start a community (not something everyone can do), which is why they struggled to compete with, say, Reddit.
It's hard to pin what a Discord would look that maximized the ideals that took us away from a centralized corporation controlling it. Seems we're still in the very early stage of experimentation, or maybe centralization will always have this sort of advantage that lets it dominate social spaces?