@strypey@Gargron Fanciful thinking. But the reality is that he'll try to join #yCombinator, fork his own software for design experiments, and accidentally pivot into being a meme generator.
@strypey It's not the first. Technically #Diaspora is bastardized OStatus. Similar phenomenon - there's growing dissent with a mainstream social network that lots of people use.
By cosmic coincidence, some guy started developing an app with his own sense of design sensibilities and ideas. Maybe this guy just got shower thoughts about a Ruby OStatus client that happened to use Bootstrap. Happens to me.
It's the combination of dissent and disappointment with coincidental coverage.
@strypey The surge is not happening because it is #OStatus. Many of the new people here barely understand the history, and must be taught about the conventions of what runs under the hood.
It's popular because it's just easy enough to use, presented in an exciting light by a circle of reporters who are also trying it out, and also, it has an API and supports mobile clients. Video works, pictures work, push notifications work.
Not overtly so. But people get invested in these projects for very different reasons. Some people develop federated apps because they're interested in it, and have fun working with others on it.
Some people are more political about the act, and hope to either make their system better, or work together with others for a brighter federated future.
But for the most part, many of these apps have contained their own communities after slowdowns in user growth.
@strypey@Gargron Try not to delude yourself with another person's grandeur.
He's just a guy working on an app, scratching an itch. People might be interested within the short term, but hype and disappointment are generally a terrible experience in these situations - and most of that comes from tech journalism.
@strypey As always, the old is made new again. Similar accusations were made about us about five to six years ago. We were hipsters with macbooks, reinventing the wheel.
Mastadon won't get VC funded because it doesn't have a profit model. They may try to find one, but attempting to do this with decentralized services almost always falls apart. Selling data doesn't work, and selling subscriptions only works if you're Wordpress.
@strypey @deadsuperhero Not to put too fine a point on it, I think it's because it's kind of weird and strange when so much is being done by centralized services.
@strypey Eh, not that simple. Diaspora never tried to be Anti-Facebook. That presentation was invented by the media coverage. We tried a lot of different things, and eventually joined yCombinator, but it's just not a good industry match.
@strypey I know Max pretty well, Diaspora was meant to be a summer coding project for about $8k. They really didn't expect any kind of success out of it.
@strypey We can, but we must also admit that anti-centralization is also a wider critique of how web services work, not just one particular web service. Facebook is the icon of walled gardens, but paradoxically so are hundreds of others.
@strypey "Intellectual Property" is essentially a term that means "junk drawer of methods and utilities that we can use to further our own product while undermining others."
Software patent law is a strange and tragic minefield, one that largely tilts in favor of businesses with deep pockets.
@strypey Right, I love the idea of the thing, some good will probably come out from it. But a simple glance at #Twister shows that it's all but wildly impractical for end users.
@strypey@mjd The remarkable thing about this, though, is that the federation has to some level been able to sufficiently self-organize over the years.
The addition of a new app that can federate with a good chunk of it actually is a testament to federation itself, and validates that it not only works, but can work well enough to make the model more appealing.
@strypey Yes, but optimising the software for corporate use means de-optimising for other uses. In Evan's defense, apparently there's something about #US corporate law that makes an IPO practically compulsory at a certain point. Then you're on the road to ruin.
When we talk about "trustFUL" systems, and "trustLESS" systems, what do we mean exactly? In your example, why would a trustless email server work that way?
@strypey yes I read that one too. Mashable seems pretty awful, but then this kind of simple-minded "genius invents widget out of nowhere in flash of inspiration" narrative is common in msm articles about technology. It fits their biases.
@deadsuperhero the downside is Eugen has decided that his ideas are better than the W3W approved OStatus protocols so he tends to break things for the rest of us @mjd @strypey
There are a number of things that #OStatus lacks, trying to build a better version of something yourself isn't necessarily bad. It is no sacred document.
I've seen a lot of great federation developers severely disappointed by the whole design-by-committee approach.
What's important is how this project reacts to the things that are broken.
@deadsuperhero fair but if he's going to build a new standard a RFC is in order. Currently he's just making more wore work for those of us who were here before he decided to start killing our DB's at his whim. There's only so much we can patch before we say fuck it and there seems to be some cool people coming over that are oblivious as to his history. @mjd
Let's be intellectually honest with ourselves, who exactly has been working on improvements to existing OStatus implementations within the GS space within the last six months? What improvements were made, and is it developing anything new towards a specific vision?
Yeah, breakage sucks, it sucks for everybody involved. But if we want to stay connected, we must mobilize and become competitive in implementation.
We're all still waiting on ActivityPub at this point, which may or may not get implemented. Zot exists, but no one will use it, and most of the federation relies on a bespoke reverse-engineered implementation of a bastardized OStatus implementation (thanks, original Diaspora devs)
@fl0wn@mjd Not trying to be a jerk or a downer, your points are valid and I understand where you're coming from. But maybe a lot of good can come from this situation yet.
I also am interested in pA and appreciate the hard work that @maiyannah is doing. I hope that the overall health of GS will improve along with it.
@deadsuperhero also @lambadalambda is working on a back end to go with the Pleroma front end. Then there's always Qvitter by @hannes2peer. There's a lot going on here beyond vanilla GS ;) @mjd
@strypey @neimzr4luzerz I read the Torvalds biography long ago, called Just for Fun, and based upon that it sounds like he sold out pretty early on. It explains a lot about his current "meh" attitude towards blobs and such. That said, I don't think Linus is a bad person, even though the tech media have tried to snag him repeatedly. He's just a human, and many of us in that kind of situation would be tempted to do the same thing.
@strypey @neimzr4luzerz If Linus had more backbone, then yes. He is in a position where he can significantly decide whether the kernel is free or not. He could decide to banish the blobs. There would be a lot of support for that, but it would piss off some companies which probably include the ones paying his salary. Linus' logic is probably quite simple and straightforward: do anything which allows me to continue what I'm doing.
@strypey Yes, sorry. That pseudo-fact predates my transition from IT to academic nerd, so I don't have a source. From memory it was the sort of dilemma where you trade long-term control for short-term viability. Less a law than regulation that adds up to an offer you can't refuse
@strypey No. That's my #BreakfastLecture for tomorrow sorted, then. I always start my day with whatever's in the fridge plus an intellectually improving video. Never a #TED talk, though; you shouldn't bolt your food.
@strypey @deadsuperhero I could never find out how it works... Ostatus is a bit weird but the components are simple. I still don't know how nomadic accounts work...