|
|
|
|
|
|
by sanderjd
1066 days ago
|
|
|
> ...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!". |
|
|
Nope, hard disagree there. If the mail-related protocols had not been federated - i.e. had email relied on a single-source centralised server - it would not even have survived into the 90's. It would have come up against a host of commercial competitors and eventually would have succumbed to some "Microsoft Network"-like thing which would have come pre-installed on Windows 95. Only Greybeards would use email, the latte sipping set would use Apple Mail, most of the rest would use whatever Microsoft presented them with. That was the original intent of the Microsoft Network as described in the first (hardcover) edition of Gates' book "The Road Ahead" [1] in which he envisaged a future where the internet gave way to the "Information Superhighway" based around proprietary technologies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%2...