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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

For those who dislike federated services, keep in mind: email is a federated system, and it remains arguably one of the largest social networks in the world.

Email's federated nature has kept it alive for decades, and will ensure that it long outlives more proprietary forms of social networking.

Federated systems already work in practice and at scale.

edit: Some other examples with widespread adoption:

- The phone network (PSTN)

- The internet (via BGP)

- The postal service (federated between countries via the UPU)

- Podcasts (and RSS more generally)

Am I missing any?

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Unfortunately 2 of those I almost entirely get spam and business/commercial interactions through. On my cell phone I've gotten one call in the last 6 months that wasn't spam and it was an automated notification from the Sheriff about a permit I'd applied for. I haven't gotten a single useful call from someone not on the whitelist of my contact page in so long it's tempting to just autosend all unrecognized numbers to voicemail.

Email in particular I don't think really fits the mold of social network. I think principally because there's not really a public post concept it's all essentially point to point communications. There are some abstractions like mailing lists but they're still an express list of people who will get it. I guess that might not be so different from a 100% private profile but the lack of any public functionality excludes it from the social media category.

What about SMS? I don't know where you live, but here in America everyone I know uses it.

The use of SMS is a US oddity. The rest of the world is using almost only messenger apps: Line or WeChat if you’re in Asia, WhatsApp or telegram in Europe or South America.

euro here, used sms heavily until the ott messenger craze set in my cicles (~2015).

nowadays mostly for contacts that either dont use a smartphone or dont have mobile internet connection (yes! those exist).

are u sure u are using sms? asking because apple overlays imessage and iphone penetration is said to be highest in usa.

In Indonesia the only SMS I get is spam. It's so annoying that I just disable notifications for SMS.

I largely only text my partner and that's through Whatsapp. My friend group has a Discord we all use.

> - Podcasts (and RSS more generally)

Podcasts exactly exhibit what I fear for with federated systems. As podcasters move to "Spotify exclusive", Spotify still calling those podcasts, and those podcasts not being available through your general podcast subscription app, could lead to most podcasts being de facto centralised again.

The same could happen to the Fediverse: some player adds some feature that makes large swaths of people migrate there, those features are not interoperable, and then that service turns off federation altogether...

Personally email is a bad comparison in my opinion. The way it is federated makes easy to fossilize the protocol and the "social" nature is at odds with the federation due to the spam problem.

And in general I consider it a terrible method of communication.

> arguably one of the largest social networks in the world

At the same time, I know several people who gave up their email addresses and only use Facebook now. Maybe the next iteration of social media behemoth will be even more effective at that.

How do they reset their Facebook password?

Technically they still have an email account, so I imagine that would be how. But they don't otherwise ever use the account, never even check it.

Though to be honest I expect they just use their phone if they need to reset their password.

> [email] remains arguably one of the largest social networks in the world.

What percentage of email traffic do you think is social in nature (and not just notifications from an actual, separate social network)? I'm guessing <0.1%.

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