[bluefishinit]

> Goodreads proved it could work. But I don’t understand the market problem this one is solving.

Goodreads and Shelfari both got bought by Amazon. They killed Shelfari and froze Goodreads development. As users, federation protects us from this. We even have the choice of running our own instance.

[sanderjd]

> As users, federation protects us from [the service being killed or development frozen].

Honest question: Does it?

Personally, I worry significantly more about bit rot on projects that make no money. Does federation solve that somehow? What I'm usually looking for is: What is the incentive for people to keep working on this? Is it a passion project made by one or more young people? What happens to it when life happens to them, when they want to start families, etc.? Is it a prestige project from a wealthy person? I think this is less risky, but wealthy people get bored... Or is there reason to think they can get a decent amount of donation money like Wikipedia? This is probably best case scenario, but does it work for niches? I dunno.

Does federation overcome these challenges in a novel way?

[the_third_wave]

Federation can help if you run the software yourself since your identity and your "content" are tied to your instance just like they are with email. As long as you keep it running and make sure the software is up to date with current federation standards you're more or less safe from all those hazards. If the developers of Bookwyrm grow out of their anti-capitalist phase and sell it to Amazon, get that family and realise there is more to life than chasing characters on a screen, get hit by the proverbial Bus or otherwise lose interest in maintaining the project you still have your "content" and identity which you can keep alive by either federating with other ActivityPub-enabled platforms - which will probably lead to a loss of functionality - or maintaining/getting someone to maintain the project for as long as there are interested users. All this stands and falls with the viability of ActivityPub, it will be interesting to see whether the concept pans out in the coming years.

[sanderjd]

This makes some sense, but couldn't this also be achieved with a centralized but open source product?

[the_third_wave]

No, that would make it possible to create alternative instances to use if and when the main instance goes belly-up. Those alternative instances would start afresh, without the user base and lacking any content created by them. If there were more than one alternative instance the two would not communicate unless they employed some sort of federation - ActivityPub or something similar - or some mirroring scheme.

[sanderjd]

Got it! This is an important distinction - open data not just open source. (But throwing back to another recent thread - I think this is at odds with privacy - data can't be both private and persistent beyond the existence of a single server.)

[briandear]

I get it. But how big of a demand is there for that? Does the average Wednesday night neighborhood book club care? I am not denying that there is value there for someone, but most people don’t care. People that read books at a level of enthusiasm to join a network about reading don’t think about that stuff. Federation is a feature but it really isn’t an above the fold concern for the vast majority of the potential audience.

My point is that the value prop of this site isn’t federation, it “a social network for books.”

This could be marketed as a tool for virtual book clubs and communities. “Your book club, anywhere” kind of thing. This could be marketed as a tool for real world book clubs to use. There are thousands of book clubs who would probably love an easy to use tool for managing those clubs. Focusing on that aspect would be huge in my opinion. If the more tech astute want to “run their own instance,” that feature exists. Sort of like Wordpress for books — you have the Wordpress.com for those that just want to use the platform and the .org version for those that want to self-host as an example.

The ideological aspects are secondary assuming the goal is to grow and have a lot of people caring about this. A huge independent book community would be amazing. But this won’t get huge if normal people don’t have a reason to care.

[chiefalchemist]

> Federation is a feature but it really isn’t an above the fold concern for the vast majority of the potential audience.

Federation is a feature, not a benefit. I read your other comments and generally agree. To be fair, the feature vs benefits (that people care about) is an ongoing problem will nearly all new products (I've clicked into) that are shared on HN.

You'd think by now more would get it, but they don't. Instead, it's more, "Ooh! Ooh! Look at our features..." but as you said...no one cares. I would say it also falls under the product classic "don't make me think." Yeah, if I had the time I might be able to convert features to benefits but that takes effort. Sorry. I'm out. Next!!!

Benefits! It's all about me. F*k your features. What are you going to do for me (i.e., benefits)?

[sanderjd]

I'm with you here. I'll be bullish on federation when I understand what non-ideological problems it solves. I totally share the ideology! (And I get the sense that you do too.) But that's not enough. It needs to be useful to be durable.

[goodpoint]

Claiming that federation is ideological is itself a very ideological statement.

Being able to have an independent platform instead of a corporate-controlled one is very useful in practice.

[sanderjd]

> Claiming that federation is ideological is itself a very ideological statement.

No, it isn't.

Federation is ideological because it is not (yet?) in and of itself a useful feature. It is a feature desired by people (like myself) who have an ideology that attracts them to the idea.

Ask yourself: What is the selling point of federation / decentralization to someone who does have any ideology whatsoever with respect to technology? I want there to be a good answer to this question, but I've yet to see a compelling one.

[mavhc]

When the site you use goes bad/offline/whatever, you can easily move to another. If you're moving from a site that went bad/offline/whatever, do you want to lose all your data again next time?

[the_third_wave]

Federation is what keeps SMTP in place as the default electronic communications channel. Alternatives come and go but SMTP abides, there to cover your posterior when that fancy instant shout channel app flips over and goes the way of the dodo.

While many of the current proponents of federation are wont to explain the concept in line with their own ideologies - usually in the form of references to anti-Capitalism, Anarchism or some form of Marxism, often mixed in with a heavy dose of MDS when it comes to proposing alternatives to Twitter - this does not make the concept of federation ideological. It just makes it a widely applicable concept which has shown its usefulness for a very long time.

[sanderjd]

I don't think people fall back to SMTP when a chat product goes away, I think they find a new centralized proprietary chat product.

SMTP survives in its federated form because of path dependency. And people didn't start using email because it was federated, they started using it because it was an entirely new capability to most people. The federation was how its creators managed to implement such a thing at that period of time, but nobody in the 90s was saying "email is great because it is decentralized!", they were saying "email is great because I don't have to wait days for a piece of paper to travel across the continent and it's cheaper and faster to type than to make a phone call!".

Another commenter put this well: decentralization / federation of social networks thus far seems to be a feature but not a benefit. What is the benefit to users, what can they do with a decentralized network that they couldn't otherwise do? So far, the answers to this are ideological, the benefit is "I don't want to use an application centrally run by XYZ corporation, and this lets me achieve that goal". I think that's incredibly reasonable, but it is downstream of ideology rather than utility.

[the_third_wave]

> I don't think people fall back to SMTP when a chat product goes away, I think they find a new centralized proprietary chat product.

...after they told their "friends" (i.e. other users of the failed app) via email about that hot new app that is totally going to be the place to be. That is what I mean with "SMTP abides", it is there and will be there while the centralised proprietary churn comes and goes. SMTP is easy to set up, compatibility is close to guaranteed - Google's attempts to turn Ee-mail into Gee-mail have failed, Microsoft never managed to extend/extinguish it - and it runs on just about every piece of hardware known to mankind. Upkeep is simple as well, the spam problem has been solved a long time ago, email generally "just works".

It can even work as a chat server by using something like Delta Chat [1] if you're turned off by the "old school" user agents.

[1] https://delta.chat/en/

[sanderjd]

> ...after they told their "friends" (i.e. other users of the failed app) via email about that hot new app that is totally going to be the place to be.

There may have been a time when people spread the "hot new app" via email, but it ended decades ago at the latest, when Facebook came out. But I dunno, even before that, I heard about this kind of thing on AIM or one of the many other ones that already existed at that time.

But you don't have to convince me that email is great! Or that federation in general is architecturally satisfying. I'm right there with you and most other tech enthusiast.

But that's all beside the point being made here. The point is that federation is not why email was successful, or why it persists. It was just an implementation detail of a capability that was fundamentally novel to most people when they first came across it.

But that novelty is not the case for "Twitter - but decentralized!" or "Goodreads - but decentralized!".

[bluefishinit]

> But how big of a demand is there for that?

I think every Goodreads or Shelfari user would benefit from the service not being dead.

[sanderjd]

Definitely. I hate that Shelfari is dead and that Goodreads sucks. That's why I clicked on this comment thread. But what should convince me that this product will not be dead? Sure, I believe that it won't be killed by Amazon in particular, but why should I be convinced that it will survive on its own terms?

[bluefishinit]

It will need a community to survive, so I think people being excited about it is a great first step. I feel comfortable investing into building a community knowing it won't be purchased and killed. That doesn't mean success is guaranteed, but it is a prerequisite for me to invest in a social network at this point.

I'll add that a vertical like books probably has a better chance of succeeding than a more general purpose social network, because there's always going to be value in providing metadata around books, it's timeless information more like wikipedia than twitter. I see a lot of value in creating a community driven and community owned corpus of book information and reviews.

[sanderjd]

But if it will need a community to survive, then the selling point can't be "it won't go away after you use it for awhile". Or if it is, it needs some compelling narrative for why it will definitely attract a durable community.

FWIW: I think this product looks really great and already does a bunch of stuff I want, and looks waaaay better and runs waaaay faster than Goodreads, and those are all absolutely big selling points that I think could break through with the general book-loving community, and I think that's awesome! But I just don't think "it is decentralized" or "it will definitely not die" are clear selling points for it.

[bluefishinit]

If it needs a community to survive, you first need to bootstrap that community. People who care about federation and are willing try federated projects seem like a great community to help things get started. Especially because like I said earlier, this is in a vertical where value isn't locked into social silos. Reviews that these users make won't only be read by early users who they know, but will provide value to all future users.

It's normal and actually required to start with early adopters and innovators before reaching more mainstream audiences.

[sleepybrett]

i suppose you could start by not coming into threads and shitting on it sight unseen but instead look at ways you can make it better, so that you can have an alternative to shlfari and goodreads.

[sanderjd]

I haven't once shat on it, and it isn't sight unseen, I've been playing with it since I saw this link. I think they've done an excellent job with it, and I really hope it succeeds, because I really want something like this.

But I also think briandear is fundamentally right that for this to be successful and thus useful to me for more than a short period of time, it needs to have a selling point that doesn't only appeal to computer nerds like me who know what "decentralization" even is, and care about it.