this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Do you want a mainstream corporate app to be federated?
To some extent I feel like the inverse of this would be "do you wish Gmail wasn't federated?"
Can you explain?
A lot of Lemmy users don't want twitter or anything meant to take twitters place run by corps to be federated because the whole point of any platform of that kind is to make money off ad revenue. That's why people on Lemmy seem to be trying to FOSS all the things.
Something like 80% of email goes through Google and Apple. But, email is just about the most successful federated protocol we have. Also, I believe that these services would have become huge regardless, and I'm glad that they are dominant while using an open protocol instead of something they can exert much more control over.
In an ideal world, I believe the goal for federated social media is that you don't care what platform other users you interact with are on, and they can freely move to other platforms without compromise. It's scary if a big corpo controls too much marketshare and can break compatibility with other apps. But, if the protocol is truly open, there can't be any barrier to corpos launching services on the protocol either.
I tend to agree when everyone is worried about an already existing major player joining federation (e.g. FB with threads). But bluesky is a new entrant to the space; they will have to fight the existing giants for market anyway. And if they're starting small, then them being federated means that as soon as they start to get credible traction, any other company would be able to launch their own app in the same space. If the scare of big players is that they'll choose to one day stop playing nicely with federation, then it will definitely be easier for them to say "you can no longer chat with a few random FOSS weirdos" than to say "you can no longer chat with this other major app".
tl;dr, for me the goal isn't to have a protocol that can only talk to other people who care about FOSS; it's to have a way to talk to everyone. Eventually, that means that I hope we do hit a critical mass of "big players" buying in, even if they're motivated by profit.
Okay, but the fact the email is that way makes it very vulnerable to a lot of other problems especially with security, and a lot of it is driven either by sales or by an attempt to keep workflows moving and people productive which only adds to the number of tasks to be completed.
I know that's getting a little far afield, but I wouldn't say that email is a good example specifically because it isn't what I would consider successful because it kind of does the opposite of what it was meant to do. Nobody really likes email. I wouldn't say that most of us want to use it. And the things it should be useful for? Sending and receiving information for really important and time sensitive things like test results from a doctor, or financial documents? None of that is actually emailable. We're still relying on fax for those things.
So it being federated does what to benefit the average user? Because that's what I mean. People want federation to benefit the people who use it. I have a work email I barely check. It mostly exists to tell me I have online training to complete and to receive authentication codes, which I would argue isn't the best use case. My personal email is mostly for receipts. I don't send many emails at all, and honestly a lot of the ones I receive are to sell me something. I'm not using email to interact with people so much as I am with systems.
I agree in general, but 20 years ago, people were using email to actually talk to each other. There are problems with the protocol, but those aren't related to the way it is federated imo. The reason people stopped using email to talk to each other was because the features of newer options were better -- things like IMs and Skype, which have continued to evolve into stuff like WhatsApp or whatever people use now. But, unlike email that was devised in an era when things were still being driven largely by the education sector etc, all these other solutions were made by post-dotcom era profit-driven companies.
So I agree that email has lots of problems, and some of those are certainly related to its federation (e.g., the protocol has not really been able to advance in significant ways since making changes to it is nearly impossible). But I still think it's the best example of a federated messaging protocol we have today.
Anyway that's all a bit afield, as you said. I think the bottom line for me is that whichever protocol it is, if one of these current attempts at federation is going to meet my goals, then eventually there should be a large number of commercial entities participating. I know that's not everyone's goal though, but there's a reason I don't use IRC for example.
Yes, they have the most users and the most cultural significance.
Having the most users is great until you realize that's how Twitter became... Well. Twitter. Before Musk it was still a shit show, with a whole lot of alt right BS going on. It's gotten worse since he bought it but this is the late stage for platforms like this.
What
As in, part of the enshittification process that brought a lot of us to places like mastodon and Lemmy had to do with social media relying on being wide spread and giving a lot of people (who probably shouldn't have a platform that reaches the masses) a platform that then proliferates things like conspiracy theories and hate. Additionally though, they survive off ad revenue and have investors which generally makes them sooner or later hostile towards the users so that the investors can benefit from a profitable platform.
I see your point. However I think enshitification is more due to the latter issue than the former. People in general are good at shutting down hate speech if given the tools.