@Adam Dalliance In my environment, I don't really see much people moving as of now. There's a crowd of enthusiasts leaving behind Twitter, Facebook, ... but these mostly are the folks that have been in many places already before, people that aren't hesitant to doing so. Most of especially my Twitter bubble is extremely robust, doesn't care much about Musk and is staying there without any second thought. That's where my motivations to get some of them "over here" just result in a "why", and I don't really have good answers satifying to them, at least in terms of advantages outweighing disadvantages / effort required for that. If "owning your data" just would actually be "owning your data" for everyone without being required to run a server, things would be quite a bit easier to communicate - at the moment, for most of these "owning your data" in practise means "trust some random person to host your data well" (either by running a Mastodon / Fediverse instance for you or by providing infrastructure for you to self-host your Mastodon/Fediverse instance). This really feels flawed in terms of "decentralization".

@Chris Trottier @">jan

@eshep The problem gets worse however in what isn't visible at first sight: Talking e-mail as the "classic" decentralized system, yes, there used to be a lot of different providers and clients and user interfaces but in the end you could be reasonably sure that, at the very end, sending, receiving and displaying mails would work well for all of these and between all of these. In 2020s Fediverse, things are slightly more ... complicated, knowing that how federation, commenting, notifications, ... works will more or less massively depend on which platform you are on and which platforms your contacts use. Like, I repeatedly am experiencing interesting issues (as in lost comments, lost messages, lost notifications when communicating between pixelfed and friendica). This is something you only notice once you've been into things for a while, and at this point reverting a change and moving elsewhere will become more difficult. (We're not talking about different instances blocking each other more or less intransparently now.) Even at this very "high-level" point of view, there's loads of room for usability improvements. 🙂️

@Chris Trottier @christopher :verified_gay: @Arindam Basu @nhan

@joel b There never was a shortage in clueless users over here too. Maybe our load wasn't that heavy though, just had around 7..9k of messages per day, most of them (document / drawing management for civil engineering) with larger documents, xls sheets, ... attached. Even this way, real serious issues (as in mails lost without being able to figure out where they ended up) have been rare, even knowing a lot of the external participants were somewhat low-tech back then, utilized mail systems such as provided by their dialup ISPs, or GMX / Yahoo in worst cases. Content blocking always was an issue, but it rarely managed to have messages lost. And except for a very small couple of contacts sending the dreaded winmail.dat stuff, we never saw messages we weren't unable to read or handle correctly.
On the Fediverse (okay, taken I don't run my own instance) I've seen all too often situations where a comment on a post, or a comment on a comment on a post, would not show up on the target system, in some cases however be visible to others on other system (unless posted privately) and often spent hours in communicating with various actors (including instance admins and partially developers) to learn what went wrong. Same, until just a while ago, Friendica wasn't able to render Mastodon polls so these posts in Friendica would just show up as text posts and unless the textual part of it suggested there might be more you wouldn't even notice you're missing something. Or, in example, handling pictures: I can use pixelfed and Friendica to post messages with up to ten (pixelfed) or unlimited (? Friendica) amount of images attached but Mastodon generally will only display four of them, again without leaving a hint that there's more. Or pixelfed stories (which are absolutely unusable outside the pixelfed world). E-mail had a lot of mess in terms of formats and structures too but I never experienced this kind of chaos with e-mail throughout all these years, the worst to happen in this really was TNEF / winmail.dat or a message claiming to please install an HTML compliant mail client to read the content. I've never seen, in example, a message just partially rendered on some system. This is what is hard to impossible to explain to new users without driving them away (and it sheds a difficult light on all these images claiming the Fediverse is great because everything connects to everything...).


@Chris Trottier @christopher :verified_gay: @eshep @Arindam Basu @nhan

fair points, all of them. I suggest much of this has to do with Mastodon being a flagship product but not always meeting the bar when it comes to interoperability. I will not speculate on reasons for that. It should be noted that I run pleroma, not mastodon.

For what it is worth I don’t do a lot of media heavy posting aside from Simpsons screenshots as snarky replies. They always seem to get thru. I just don’t have many followers so the videos I do post are not widely viewed. I can hotlink them to my mother in an SMS message and she can always see them so that’s my biggest use case covered.

Dropping 12 images into a post that may exceed 50mb is going to be a lot to process for any system. I am not familiar with Pixelfed as a user but I would assume they must offer a crazy amount of server side processing to serve low resolution previews and follow up with high resolution on request. I find without an algorithm to keep everyone’s funnel topped off the content on Activity Pub is very bursty.

The federated nature does exponentially expand bandwidth with scale because each activity must be published among each instance. Yes this means things can be undefined while the system reaches equilibrium and centralization can solve that. I just don’t think that benefit is worth the drawbacks of a centralized ecosystem over all. Lack of speed can always be overcome, in the worst case, by patience.

@joel b Ah no, I'm not really suggesting a centralized system here, and I'm on the Fediverse after all because most likely it's the best we have at the moment. But then again, there has been plenty of well-worded criticism on the shortcomings of ActivityPub (like this one https://medium.com/@denschub/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later-194fe591e900 ). What bothers me a bit is: There's a lot of open aspects - in terms of standards quality / strictness (extensibility is evil and might be opposite to standardization?), handling technical issues (storage, bandwidth, ...) and so forth. And, which is worse: I think in order to address such issues (https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-stampede/), the current decentralization is not really able to handle that well because decentralization means responsibility for handling these aspects is spread out all across a plethora of smaller and smallest actors who have neither incentives nor (at least in some cases) motivations to share such issues in a joint effort. This is a bit concerning (even though at this point we're way deeper than "just" user interface glitches or inconveniences in system communication. But I still feel the Fediverse has quite some way to go here, and maybe ... also in a way of getting organized better, of trying to figure out how to handle bandwidth, storage, ... in a sane way globally, not just limited to particular instances.

@Chris Trottier @christopher :verified_gay: @eshep @Arindam Basu @nhan