#social 2018-07-21

2018-07-21 UTC
Guest84_, Guest84, ben_thatmustbeme, saranix, xmpp-social, kaniini, kaniini_, fr33domlover, fr33domlover1, fr33domlover2, fr33domlover3, fr33domlover4 and tantek joined the channel
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tantek great discussion of federation vs decentralization yesterday starting here: https://chat.indieweb.org/social/2018-07-20#t1532120008422400
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Loqi [widowclip] I was reading the Hacker News comments for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17577372 (Article on PeerTube's successful crowdfunding campaign, congrats by the way!) and something that struck me is that people talk a lot about centralization vs. de...
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tantek widowclip++
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tantek puckipedia++
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Loqi slow down!
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tantek oops
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tantek To add to that, I think both decentralization *and* federation are important.
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tantek And frankly, there's a danger of focusing on federation primarily (or too much), as in you end up with a few large silos that federate amongst each other and actively block new participants
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nightpool[m] i guess
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tantek examples: cell phone service providers, big email providers (who keep raising the bar for what random/made-up protocols / whitelists you have to be on in order to "peer" with any of them)
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nightpool[m] email hasn't really ended up that way, despite everyone's claims to the contrary
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nightpool[m] i know multiple people who have stood up independent bulk email servers in the past year
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tantek both examples are federated (your identity works across servers / services / devices), however both are oligopolies and have centralized more than decentralized
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tantek nightpool[m]: it's not impossible (yet) to stand up your own email server. just saying the big email providers keep raising the bar for doing so, and thus fewer are able to
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tantek I would be fewer people stood up independent bulk email servers in the past year, than the year before, or the year before that
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tantek would bet* fewer
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tantek I've also heard examples of people who have a current email server of their own, try to move to a new domain, and everything blocks them
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tantek IMO federation by itself leads to centralization amongst a few big services
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tantek I'm hoping Mastodon disproves that
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nightpool[m] the main problem mastodon has had so far is attrition
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nightpool[m] there was a big land rush, and now there aren't a ton of new servers getting a large audience
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nightpool[m] because there isn't a large natural audience looking for a server
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tantek has it plateaued?
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tantek it there a rough equilibrium between new servers coming online, and old servers shutting down?
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tantek or are people leaving small servers and moving to larger servers? consolidation of users among fewer servers as it were
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nightpool[m] mm
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nightpool[m] so far we've only had a few servers actually shut down
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tantek that's good at least. I suppose that makes sense that the growth of new servers would slow down, since there is a natural incentive for new users to sign-up on an existing server
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nightpool[m] right
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nightpool[m] and there are less new users, mainly
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nightpool[m] when there are a lot of new users, they're opening for signing up for whatever server exists
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nightpool[m] but users move at a much lower rate then they sign up
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tantek hmm, we should be seeing the opposite, we should see an increasing growth in the number of total users as people get their friends to join etc.
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tantek *accelerating growth in total number of users
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nightpool[m] hmm?
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nightpool[m] Well, yes, that does happen
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nightpool[m] our base growth rate is much higher then it was, say, last year
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nightpool[m] but most of our user growth comes in bursts from more traditional channels. getting mentioned in press outlets, etc.
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nightpool[m] or at least, that's when the really noticeable growth happens
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