True, but that was easy. It was a bit less convenient than file-sharing systems because you had to search as a separate step, using a different program, but it wasn't hard.
> often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything
I saw that sort of thing with BBSes, but never with FTP sites. I didn't know that was a thing with them.
> Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster?
Those aren't ftp clients. I was questioning the premise that ftp was hard to use.
Me neither, but it’s worth a shot. I have set up a public Lemmy instance. Registration is open currently. Would be nice to see a handful of people join my instance.
Yes! :D https://zapad.nstr.no/
You couldn't choose your server on the official application, but others allowed you to do you could always meet the same persons. I was on the Orange server.
i mean architecturally it’s nearly as decentralized, but from a user point of view that’s not the part that matters. construct the Napster UI atop a decentralized architecture, and it’s all the same right? heck most large websites today are internally decentralized (sharding, load balancing, …) if you peek inside them: the real difference here is not that a service is distributed across machines, but across machines with different owners. it’s really more of a political distinction, the UX could be identical, it just isn’t (quite) due to preference or limited labor.
Twitter's thing was "giant conversation with everyone" - federation interferes with that.
Reddit was inherently fragmented (subreddits, and heavy redditors tended to describe groupings of related subreddits). Federation seems pretty natural here (community names can just have an @ symbol somewhere in there).
There are UI and discoverability issues, but those seem rather tractable.
I think performance at scale will be a real issue though.
For those old enough to remember Napster, it worked because it was centralized.