You laid out the problem and all its sub-problems quiet well.
I suspect that the only way out is to provide a solution that has all the advantages of e.g. Facebook, without most of the disadvantages.
I’m writing a post about a potential solution like this that I picked up from reading a paper :). It’s a very interesting space, which I feel doesn’t get a lot of focus because a) most people dont want to build/program b) most people are satisfied with things as-is and c) the problem space is huge and searching it is hard. But with the malleability of software, I think that once we hit a new, working set of ideas, they will take over as quickly as social media pushed out traditional forums/mailing lists/link rings back in the 00′s.
Facebook is like GMail + instant messenger + web forums, all in one, and requires minimum setup.
Well put. It’s like Facebook/Twitter/etc. are an extra layer above everything else, a “layer 8” in the OSI model, that allows people to completely not care about all the protocols, filesystems, name-spacing schemes, storage requirements that sit underneath it. Just point your browser to this one page and you get it all (no installer, no plug’n’play, no versions/updates, no fees...).
Now another question is how to pay for the costs. (...) Then we have the problem of policing content… (...)
I feel this is very accurate in how it points out that we’re dealing with issues on both the technical layer and the social one. My gut tells me that purely technical solutions like mastodon will never take over because they don’t address any of the social issues like usability, moderation, accountability, etc.. I don’t have a good example of something that would work well on the social layer, but not on a technical one.
Currently, I place a lot of hope on stuff like the push for decentralization and web3. (I need to read up more about it though as right now these are just utopian ideas in my head). If we were able to get the efficiencies of centralized platform on a decentralized one, then that, I think, would have a good chance of winning in the sense of migrating over hundreds of millions of users. I imagine it would work by allowing users to very precisely price/pay for what they use, eg. the average user would most likely pay most of their fee for photo/video storage, while a power use would dedicate most of their fee toward specific features, or even characteristics like uptime. In both cases, they could still enjoy living on a higher level of abstraction than running their own email servers, but they get as much value as the price they’re willing to pay.
Yeah, speaking about decentralization… I would recommend using one default server (which will be used by all people who do not know what “server” means, that means most of population), but allow the protocol to connect to independent servers. They should be handled kinda like alternative app stores in smartphones. You connect to an alternative server, you get all the warnings, and then you choose your mode of contact-making with the alternative server: whether only you can actively seek for friends there (because your phishing resistance is zero, and you only wanted to connect with one specific person there), or whether other people can send you friend requests. (When you get a friend request, it is clearly shown that is comes from an alternative server.)
You laid out the problem and all its sub-problems quiet well.
I’m writing a post about a potential solution like this that I picked up from reading a paper :). It’s a very interesting space, which I feel doesn’t get a lot of focus because a) most people dont want to build/program b) most people are satisfied with things as-is and c) the problem space is huge and searching it is hard. But with the malleability of software, I think that once we hit a new, working set of ideas, they will take over as quickly as social media pushed out traditional forums/mailing lists/link rings back in the 00′s.
Well put. It’s like Facebook/Twitter/etc. are an extra layer above everything else, a “layer 8” in the OSI model, that allows people to completely not care about all the protocols, filesystems, name-spacing schemes, storage requirements that sit underneath it. Just point your browser to this one page and you get it all (no installer, no plug’n’play, no versions/updates, no fees...).
I feel this is very accurate in how it points out that we’re dealing with issues on both the technical layer and the social one. My gut tells me that purely technical solutions like mastodon will never take over because they don’t address any of the social issues like usability, moderation, accountability, etc.. I don’t have a good example of something that would work well on the social layer, but not on a technical one.
Currently, I place a lot of hope on stuff like the push for decentralization and web3. (I need to read up more about it though as right now these are just utopian ideas in my head). If we were able to get the efficiencies of centralized platform on a decentralized one, then that, I think, would have a good chance of winning in the sense of migrating over hundreds of millions of users. I imagine it would work by allowing users to very precisely price/pay for what they use, eg. the average user would most likely pay most of their fee for photo/video storage, while a power use would dedicate most of their fee toward specific features, or even characteristics like uptime. In both cases, they could still enjoy living on a higher level of abstraction than running their own email servers, but they get as much value as the price they’re willing to pay.
Yeah, speaking about decentralization… I would recommend using one default server (which will be used by all people who do not know what “server” means, that means most of population), but allow the protocol to connect to independent servers. They should be handled kinda like alternative app stores in smartphones. You connect to an alternative server, you get all the warnings, and then you choose your mode of contact-making with the alternative server: whether only you can actively seek for friends there (because your phishing resistance is zero, and you only wanted to connect with one specific person there), or whether other people can send you friend requests. (When you get a friend request, it is clearly shown that is comes from an alternative server.)
OK, now we just need to make this happen. ;)