I tried using Email but the onboarding was very confusing. I have to choose a server? And I'm at the whims of server admins having petty disputes for if my posts are delivered to my friends?
@cadey Ah, yes, the time-honored technique of mocking potential Mastodon users for not being geeky enough. The same approach that made Linux on the desktop so successful, now brought to anti-social media.
I will never understand this mindset of wanting Mastodon to absolutely fail to make a dent in the world and to see corporate platforms continue to dominate because… non-techs users are cringe? Because it’s so much fun to say “It works for me” and smirk? I guess I’m not cool enough to get it.
@pooserville@cadey Users unwilling to learn or help themselves are cringe.
Being a noob isn't inherently bad. Everyone starts there. Some choose to stay there against their own well-being and that is what's deplorable.
(Also the fact they generally already faced the exact same challenge with email, so they're not really failing to understand, they're intentionally refusing to do it.)
@lispi314 You know, email is a great example! Let's compare email to Mastodon:
There is one default consumer email provider, and it's Google. Microsoft is a distant second. So let's pick one instance, say Mastodon.social, and make it the default for new signups.
Which provider doesn't matter, because nobody except hobbyist neckbeards will ever defederate from Gmail or Microsoft or other large providers. So let's make it impossible to defederate from major instances.
Yeah, I think this can work…
@lispi314@pooserville That's interesting. I have never looked into the details, but I suspect the issue with P2P would be delayed/unreliable delivery at the peripheries of the network (smaller instances, post-colonial countries affected by the digital divide, etc).
What do you think? I suspect you've already looked into these.
@david_megginson@pooserville There are already no delivery guarantees for ActivityPub either (whether in timing or at all) and unlike SMTP, the retry behavior is actually much less tightly specified.
So essentially, the problem is already present in non-ideal circumstances.
Support for store-and-forward and/or gossip nodes does help mitigate that in p2p networks. Avoiding bloat by caching forever or enabling automatic re-emission without providing DoS opportunities gets a bit complicated.
@lispi314@pooserville Thanks for the extra info! How well will P2P perform in areas where connectivity is sparse (compared to direct connections among instances)?
@david_megginson@pooserville Assuming caching is either at a reasonable delay for the expected latency, it can work better with the tradeoff of a storage buffer.
If you go the gossip way, if you store everything then it's similar to the first, with maximal storage costs for maximal delivery reliability. If you're more selective, such as only storing messages from friends infinitely and others just for a given time, then it depends.
Most systems implementing/supporting it are de-facto P2P, but that isn't a hard requirement (it is technically an orthogonal property, it has similar but not exactly identical implications to "delay-tolerant").
🤔 with current fedi undergoing corporate capture in increasing speed would it make sense for Free Software / Free Culture minded folks to seek 'greener pastures' and spend time on protocol innovations in such direction?
Not jumping through hoops to stay masto-compatible and focus on protocol level qualities and flexibility. Support heterogenous (p2p + federated) interop in time. And create an ecosystem more firmly in control of the people, for the next time corporate interest comes.
@cadey most people are on the two or three biggest servers, if you go on a smaller one there's no guarantee your posts will reach all your friends there
@Eris@cadey I definitely don't mean to dismiss the concerns with e-mail or Mastodon DM security, but I do think it's definitely an example of motivated reasoning... especially since you never hear the same concerns brought up about trusting Musk et al with everyone's DMs.
I like to use the web interface, but a few of my friends use an app called "Outlook". Looks a bit weird with additional features like a calendar and stuff.
For EMail to become a success, we need more features like... IDK, an RSS feed?
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