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by oneplane 2602 days ago
Federation has been tried a lot and in the end it always fails, even if it's the best solution. XMMP is pretty much dead regarding free use, IRC for a lot of FOSS project is slowing dying, there were a lot of federated social media projects that simply failed because they couldn't attract anyone.

Being technically the best (or the best in 'freedom') doesn't seem relevant to anyone.
1 comments
wahern 2602 days ago
Centralization has never succeeded. Let's see how popular Slack is in 5 years. 10 years. There's no reason to believe it won't go the way of ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc.

IP, TCP, SMTP, HTTP, these are fundamentally technologies of federation. They succeeded and continue to succeed spectacularly. However, with the commercialization of the Internet there are much stronger countercurrents. I still expect federated solutions to succeed, but adoption will be slower and punctuated, and in the interim there'll be countless proprietary also rans.

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oneplane 2602 days ago
I suppose you are right from a technology standpoint. I was aiming at the user-facing side of things. There is SMTP and email that is federated and usable by most people, so I suppose there are examples of user-success.
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