[tschellenbach]

1. Nobody except your echo chamber cares about using a distributed or user controlled system. In fact, the vast majority of users will actively avoid such a system.

2. RSS is great, we've just launched this little open source project https://github.com/getstream/winds But by no means does RSS replace Twitter. RSS will never become mainstream like Twitter has (to some extent)

3. The author has a point about the various issues with Twitter's usability.

[Nition]

What this guy is wanting for Twitter is basically what Disapora tried to do for Facebook. I even backed that Kickstarter[1] back in the day (2010!).

But like you say, the fact is not enough people cared.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-per...

[rebuilder]

A big issue with federated or, going even further, P2P alternatives to centralized platforms seems to be monetization. It's not so long ago that everyone seemed to be wondering if FB could turn a profit on their platform. What can an open, decentralized system do for revenue? Donations? Commercial tech support for node operators? It must pale in comparison with FB's advertising revenue.

This means a decentralized system can't beat a centralized one at marketing. Even with large resources, beating an established competitor is hard, but when the competitor has, and will always have, a huge edge in funds they can throw at user attraction, the problem seems insurmountable.

[rgbrenner]

I agree, but I think a federated platform would look more like email. Very little advertising, mostly given away for free.

With a federated platform, that's possible because no single company is shouldering the entire cost. And users would migrate to the cheapest provider since they wouldn't be tied to any particular provider.

[eropple]

And once one provider that's good-enough hits "free", why wouldn't everyone just go there?

[rhizome]

What does Facebook offer for all that money that is necessary, though? That is, why is monetization such a big deal for a communications platform? A marketing competition? There's no inherent need to participate in that.

[SpaceManiac]

A communications platform is useless if its user base is small; who will you communicate with? People have some limit on the amount of different communication platforms they can participate in simultaneously. The number one way to get more people on your communications platform is to have lots of people on it already; the number two way is convincing people to use it (that is, marketing).

[manigandham]

Monetization is a big deal because communications service for 1.7B people is expensive, and Facebook is actually a very efficient system compared to regular telecom.

[rhizome]

A centralized communications service for 1.7B people is expensive. Not that decentralized or federated services would be cheap, but the costs would be dispersed.

[bigiain]

That was then. I wonder if the idea's time has come?

[Tharkun]

Not to be snarky, but who uses diaspora? And why?

[im3w1l]

> Nobody except your echo chamber cares about using a distributed or user controlled system.

This is a straw man. Even people championing user controlled systems know that 99% of users would sell their soul to the devil for ease of use, or a UI with nicer colors.

[weego]

He is correct in that distributed and user controlled are not highlight features of a successful product. This is something a lot of developers never seem to learn. It is the product that will succeed or fail despite what technology underpins it.

[inopinatus]

Aye. Like television before them, people can consume twitter- and instagram- and facebook-borne content without engaging executive functions of the brain. Sadly this characteristic seems essential for truly mass appeal.

Forcing people to consider any aspects of federation will be an instant barrier to adoption that reduces the appeal by an order of magnitude, at least, and prevent any such service reaching critical mass.

[ivcha]

I am getting tired of people seemingly ignorantly repeating "echo chamber" and using it every time someone mentions Twitter. Systems like Twitter provide great ways for disseminating information -- there is nothing inherent about these systems that makes them "echo chambers" and they're definitely not worse in that aspect than mass media or other social networks like Facebook. So stfu and approach the discussion constructively.

[monk_e_boy]

I wonder how many HN posts have been made about replacing twitter?

Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people.

[enraged_camel]

>>Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss

No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit.

And blogger is easy enough to use. Heck, my computer illiterate grandma was using it before she passed.

The problem is that blogging takes time and effort, and the vast majority of people have no interest in it. The only thing they want to do is share their fleeting thoughts and/or tidbits they have found elsewhere. Which they can do easily on their smartphones. Blogging though, not so much.

[Fuzzwah]

>> No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit.

No, it was a group messaging app which used SMS as the transmission method. Hence the character limit.

[__derek__]

> Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people.

Check me if I'm wrong, but isn't that ahistorical? Maybe it had that effect. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that that was the intent, though.

[nindwen]

> blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people

But isn't this fixable? What about a service with a twitter-like UX, but where following people just subscribes to their announced rss-feeds. User profiles would be, at least under the hood, a list of user's own blogs (and the service would also provide twitter-like publishing) and followed rss feeds. You'd have the advantage of supporting most pre-existing blogs, but could also provide a great user friendly experience.

[zimpenfish]

You'd also get twitter-like outages as 10k people all try to fetch the RSS from $semifamous at the same time. Or you get people burning their mobile data trying to fetch 2k RSS feeds multiple times per day. Or [any one of umpteen other problems people don't consider when proposing this solution].

[eruditely]

What's the benefit of winds over other projects? Let me know, i'm looking for a native RSS experience to be honest. Although I love feedly, I'm tired of the fact that it doesn't have a mute feature.

[welly]

Your project looks awesome. If you can package it into a standalone app, I'm sold. There's certain things I want in my browser and certain things I want to manage in a separate app.

[grawlinson]

I'd like to try Winds, but your demo requires a login. Is this intended?

[ryukafalz]

>In fact, the vast majority of users will actively avoid such a system.

Why is this?

[TeMPOraL]

Harder to set up. With centralized systems, all you need is the URL and you can get the magic social-stuffy box on any device you have.

(TBH a centralized service actually feels better, too, because you know it's the service and not some random collection of pieces held together by agreement and duct tape. Partitioning problems are pain enough with centralized services at scale, but they're worse with decentralized ones.)

[radarsat1]

I've never understood why P2P always goes for the end users.. in most cases it doesn't work for exactly the reasons you mention -- harder to set up, etc. (For some reason bittorrent became the exception that proves the rule.)

However, I think there must be something between true user-to-user P2P and completely centralised systems. Why not something like Twitter or Facebook but where lots of different people can set up servers, and accept users? The servers could exchange information and act like a "single" service with a standard protocol, and users would not need to set up a thing, only choose which server to use, but otherwise the experience would be more or less identical, with access to the same information and profiles, all cached and mirrored. (I call this myself a "federated P2P system", not sure if that's a good term.) Of course such a system would need some crypto support to ensure that data is not easily spoofed and man-in-the-middle modified, but different servers could offer different ways of curating news feeds, etc., and some competition on the front-end where all competitors have access to the same decentralised back-end data would be just fantastic.

I think one example of this was OpenID, which seems to have failed unfortunately. I always thought it was a cool idea. But it seems that people need more than just a common protocol, they really need a common entity to adhere to, they need to be able to say "I'm on X" and for everyone to know what that means and how to find them. And a single company with a single domain seems to provide that.

Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.

[TeMPOraL]

About the only two successful federated communication systems I know of are phone network and e-mail. It doesn't matter who you pay your phone bill to, nor where your e-mail address is hosted, you are globally reachable. There might be something insightful in how those two systems started and what keeps them being relevant.

> Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.

Indeed. And you can't fund a good marketing department if you don't resort to m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶e̶x̶t̶o̶r̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶a̶c̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ vendor lock-in and similar strategies. It's something that, by the way, I see as a direct cause of why so much products are utter shit nowadays - because marketing has much, much better ROI than actually making something useful.

[enraged_camel]

>>About the only two successful federated communication systems I know of are phone network and e-mail.

And they were both developed by governments/universities with no profit motive. That should tell us everything we need to know regarding how to go about creating the next ubiquitous federated/distributed system.

[usrusr]

IRC, usenet? Even email is usually implemented that way: few end users run their own SMTP servers in the basement.

They have one thing in common: nobody is polishing the brand, nobody is A/B-optimizing addictive properties, there is no startup success story in which users can feel included, rooting for their network of choice.

Oh, and changing a federated system not only requires unanimous decision, it requires unanimous investment. Did the protocols i mentioned feel a bit dated? Might be because of that.

[TeMPOraL]

I purposefully didn't mention IRC in a parallel comment because I don't see how it is federated. You always connect to a particular server and stay within its bounds; you don't get the shared space handled by multiple servers that are abstracted away. Or simpler, you say "I'm hanging out on channel #x on freenode", or "on QuakeNet", not "on IRC".

As for the rest of your comment, I agree.

[usrusr]

The isolation level you speak of is between networks, not between servers. This distinction might seem a little arbitrary since no centralized system of relevance is running on a single server either, but the key difference is still there: in the larger irc networks, the different nodes that form it are run by different organizations.

Splits are a possibility in any federated system and in systems with nonhierarchical, unique naming, any merge requires some amount of namespace violence proportional to the duration of the split.

[spc476]

I seem to recall that when IRC first started, there was only one "network" and that it was a Big Thing when a second IRC network started up.

[posterboy]

Also, the promise that it's safe because you can check the source is really lost when, you know, you can't actually check the source for lack of time, skill or trust in the chain of trust.