But like you say, the fact is not enough people cared.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-per...
This means a decentralized system can't beat a centralized one at marketing. Even with large resources, beating an established competitor is hard, but when the competitor has, and will always have, a huge edge in funds they can throw at user attraction, the problem seems insurmountable.
With a federated platform, that's possible because no single company is shouldering the entire cost. And users would migrate to the cheapest provider since they wouldn't be tied to any particular provider.
This is a straw man. Even people championing user controlled systems know that 99% of users would sell their soul to the devil for ease of use, or a UI with nicer colors.
Forcing people to consider any aspects of federation will be an instant barrier to adoption that reduces the appeal by an order of magnitude, at least, and prevent any such service reaching critical mass.
Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people.
No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit.
And blogger is easy enough to use. Heck, my computer illiterate grandma was using it before she passed.
The problem is that blogging takes time and effort, and the vast majority of people have no interest in it. The only thing they want to do is share their fleeting thoughts and/or tidbits they have found elsewhere. Which they can do easily on their smartphones. Blogging though, not so much.
No, it was a group messaging app which used SMS as the transmission method. Hence the character limit.
Check me if I'm wrong, but isn't that ahistorical? Maybe it had that effect. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that that was the intent, though.
But isn't this fixable? What about a service with a twitter-like UX, but where following people just subscribes to their announced rss-feeds. User profiles would be, at least under the hood, a list of user's own blogs (and the service would also provide twitter-like publishing) and followed rss feeds. You'd have the advantage of supporting most pre-existing blogs, but could also provide a great user friendly experience.
Why is this?
(TBH a centralized service actually feels better, too, because you know it's the service and not some random collection of pieces held together by agreement and duct tape. Partitioning problems are pain enough with centralized services at scale, but they're worse with decentralized ones.)
However, I think there must be something between true user-to-user P2P and completely centralised systems. Why not something like Twitter or Facebook but where lots of different people can set up servers, and accept users? The servers could exchange information and act like a "single" service with a standard protocol, and users would not need to set up a thing, only choose which server to use, but otherwise the experience would be more or less identical, with access to the same information and profiles, all cached and mirrored. (I call this myself a "federated P2P system", not sure if that's a good term.) Of course such a system would need some crypto support to ensure that data is not easily spoofed and man-in-the-middle modified, but different servers could offer different ways of curating news feeds, etc., and some competition on the front-end where all competitors have access to the same decentralised back-end data would be just fantastic.
I think one example of this was OpenID, which seems to have failed unfortunately. I always thought it was a cool idea. But it seems that people need more than just a common protocol, they really need a common entity to adhere to, they need to be able to say "I'm on X" and for everyone to know what that means and how to find them. And a single company with a single domain seems to provide that.
Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.
> Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.
Indeed. And you can't fund a good marketing department if you don't resort to m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶e̶x̶t̶o̶r̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶a̶c̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ vendor lock-in and similar strategies. It's something that, by the way, I see as a direct cause of why so much products are utter shit nowadays - because marketing has much, much better ROI than actually making something useful.
And they were both developed by governments/universities with no profit motive. That should tell us everything we need to know regarding how to go about creating the next ubiquitous federated/distributed system.
They have one thing in common: nobody is polishing the brand, nobody is A/B-optimizing addictive properties, there is no startup success story in which users can feel included, rooting for their network of choice.
Oh, and changing a federated system not only requires unanimous decision, it requires unanimous investment. Did the protocols i mentioned feel a bit dated? Might be because of that.
As for the rest of your comment, I agree.
Splits are a possibility in any federated system and in systems with nonhierarchical, unique naming, any merge requires some amount of namespace violence proportional to the duration of the split.
2. RSS is great, we've just launched this little open source project https://github.com/getstream/winds But by no means does RSS replace Twitter. RSS will never become mainstream like Twitter has (to some extent)
3. The author has a point about the various issues with Twitter's usability.