[infinity0]

I've never seen an actual well-thought out technical argument on why decentralised social networks can't work. That's because there isn't one. People who are familiar with the technical issues surrounding this are humble and don't make bogus over-generalised statements like "X can't work [ever, everywhere, in all contexts]".

This article is not a well-thought out argument either. It's a bunch of random irrelevant anecdotes with some hand-waving tacked onto the end that the writers though was good to write down here because the same words impressed their friends.

The main barriers here actually are:

- over-advertising and self-promotion of non-advanced stuff like Diaspora etc that doesn't actually solve any inherently hard problems in this area, wasting people's time especially that of interested people that want to enter the field

- lack of funding on solving the hard problems in this field

- lack of structured educational material to get good new engineers onto these topics

When people say this stuff "can't work", they really have no realistic concept of the amount of actual resources it takes to bring a great idea into reality, and how little resources are being (and have been) fed into this topic that they so over-confidently dismiss "can't work".

[inanutshellus]

What "advanced stuff" was/is Diaspora lacking for you?

The problems I had with it I can't imagine being able to solve technically. It was merely not top-of-mind for the group I set it up for. They came for a little while but weren't inherently invested (e.g. you're "inherently invested" in your football team's communication mechanism. don't log in, and you don't find out about a schedule change). Instead it was just a group of friends I wanted to "facebook-verb-without-facebook-noun with".

Point is, Diaspora worked for me technically, just not socially. What was it missing in your eyes?

[infinity0]

Global search. Diaspora might have worked for you technically in the limited use-cases that you were using it for, but there are things Facebook can do that Diaspora couldn't have done (with non-shitty performance).

> It was merely not top-of-mind for the group I set it up for.

Some people make a big deal out of the "network effect" but they totally ignore how networks get going in the first place. It's the digital world, networks come and go all the time, overcoming the network effect is not a magical process. You offer more features than competitors and target people that have greater influence in the network.

It's for sure an uphill battle and this is one of the motivations of creating decentralised networks in the first place - to reduce network effects, to avoid these barriers to entry and these influences that make society's inequalities worse. But obviously if one has a depressing attitude about the whole process of overcoming network effects, and talk shit about "it can't work", then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[gwenzek]

> lack of funding on solving the hard problems in this field

Also some of the hard problems like spam detections are only ads related. If you build a decentralized social network you don't face those

[AndrewDucker]

People will still send spam messages, "friend" you with spam profiles, etc.