Hacker News Reader

Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

None of that was enough to stop email. Free is a very good price.

Once it was obvious that emailing was a thing many people wanted to do, and a free server became available, servers started springing up all over the place, many more implementations of the underlying protocols were developed, businesses figured out various ways to monetize, the standards evolved (somewhat).

Now let's do an inventory on ActivityPub...

1) It became obvious that tweeting was a thing many people wanted to do? Check

2) A free server became available? Check

3) Servers started springing up all over the place? Check https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/m...

4) More implementations were developed? That's where we are now

5, 6) Stay tuned

View on HN

- With email, it was very easy to join and use. Get an email account, get an email address, send the email. Done. You can email anyone who has email.

- With Mastodon, it's immediately more complicated than that.

- Free isn't a factor in Mastodon's favour because Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are also free. And it's simple to understand and join.

- Everyone is on Twitter, so if you want to see their tweets, you have to join too.

> - With Mastodon, it's immediately more complicated than that.

Is there something inherit in Mastodon that makes it more complicated, or is this an obstacle that can be overcome (like email did)

I suspect that it's something that could be "skinned" with a simpler UX.

I'm writing a very basic social media app, myself, right now, and have developed an appreciation for the complexity behind the façade.

Yes, having to find an instance to join. That hurdle alone stops a large percent of casual users.

How did email solve this?

Centralization of the biggest email providers.

This is why we don't see normal users (non techies) themselves self-hosting their own email servers to send a email, even though the option is there.

Even if they did, the biggest email providers deal with the spam problem better than self-hosted individuals, hence why it isn't a problem for users signing up to Gmail.

Mastodon will naturally gear towards centralization once the larger instances open up their instances and add defaults, ruining the whole point of federation with the biggest instances being at risk of buyouts and takeovers offers.

>Everyone is on Twitter

Not anymore and less each day. Twitter is no longer a valid choice for a lot of people.

No no I'm not referring to free for the consumer. Actually an email address was also a pain in the butt to obtain in the beginning, a small number of organizations ran email servers and you had to be attending the correct university or know the right guy or something.

What I'm referring to is free on the supply side. There is now free and widely available server software which not only will let you host a social network, but will also connect you to an existing social graph via ActivityPub. Prior to this, how were you going to compete with Twitter? You needed to build your own client and your own social graph and that was a huge barrier to entry. The tools which exist for a new competitor today (e.g. Mastodon and still a fairly small fediverse) are far from perfect, but they are improving and you can extend them however you like. That looks a lot like an environment where someone disruptive could appear, add value is missing, figure out a way to monetize and so on.

7) Google and Microsoft become dominant in the space and make deliverability harder for everyone who doesn't want to jump hoops to make their server deliverable, and even for those who do, sometimes it is literally impossible. For those who want to play the game, they do, but most people move to Gmail and move on.

>None of that was enough to stop email. Free is a very good price.

You missed some steps in your inventory listing though:

0)Able to communicate with anyone else with an account, regardless of which server they have signed up with? [ Nope. ]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com