I tried using Email but the onboarding was very confusing. I have to choose a server? And I'm at the whims of server admins having petty disputes for if my posts are delivered to my friends?

@cadey Did you know your mail administrator can read everything you send and that people send to you? Isn't that wild?

@cadey also, rude, the behavior of other users of your server influences your ability to email others?

@cadey most people are on the two or three biggest servers, if you go on a smaller one there's no guarantee your posts will reach all your friends there

@Yuki @cadey also you can sometimes be prevented from communicating if someone else does something bad

@cadey So I signed up for email but I don't seem to be getting the same email as everyone else, how can this possibly work

@charlotte @cadey just different issues, with email everybody are on three huge servers that block messages from almost all the smaller ones because they want all the control, with fedi most people are on smaller servers that often block messages from a lot of the other smaller servers because they didn't take the same side in one of the 4892 blood feuds happened over the last five years

@cadey - you possibly can't imagine how sad and funny your comment is for someone who used to do email before the internet arrived. If you are interested - try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

@cadey Has anyone thought about how this is going to scale? If someone sends a message, it has to make a copy on both the sender’s server *and* the recipient’s server?? Including media which can be ten or more megabytes per message? I’m not made of hard drives!

Follow my SoundCloud: https://youtu.be/M1fioflxEH0

@cadey ah yes and sometimes your gtld is so used by spammers (we see you .xyz) that they add a default rule in antispams to decrease the score of all the mails that use this gtld. With as a consequence that they're flagged as spams most of the time and your only solution is to find a new domain

@johan This is why I use a .net instead of a .website for my main email address. It's such a huge pain.

@cadey Ah, yes, the time-honored technique of mocking potential Mastodon users for not being geeky enough. The same approach that made Linux on the desktop so successful, now brought to anti-social media.
I will never understand this mindset of wanting Mastodon to absolutely fail to make a dent in the world and to see corporate platforms continue to dominate because… non-techs users are cringe? Because it’s so much fun to say “It works for me” and smirk? I guess I’m not cool enough to get it.

@pooserville @cadey Users unwilling to learn or help themselves are cringe.

Being a noob isn't inherently bad. Everyone starts there. Some choose to stay there against their own well-being and *that* is what's deplorable.

(Also the fact they generally already faced the exact same challenge with email, so they're not really failing to understand, they're intentionally refusing to do it.)

@lispi314 You know, email is a great example! Let's compare email to Mastodon:
There is one default consumer email provider, and it's Google. Microsoft is a distant second. So let's pick one instance, say Mastodon.social, and make it the default for new signups.
Which provider doesn't matter, because nobody except hobbyist neckbeards will ever defederate from Gmail or Microsoft or other large providers. So let's make it impossible to defederate from major instances.
Yeah, I think this can work…

@pooserville Good luck have fun with moderating that. We've already seen the megacorps can't (and won't) effectively do it.

We've also seen exactly how easy it is to completely takeover and ruin such an instance too.

And at the moment, Google exists because antitrust is being ignored (and Microsoft because it was already halfways dead by last time).

Unlike email however, very few people *need* maximum reach social media (or at all), so telling megacorps to get fucked is absolutely an option.

@pooserville For the record, I still think not making #ActivityPub primarily #P2P or at least message-oriented with gossiping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol) similar to #Usenet / #NNTP was a mistake.

@pooserville @cadey

Yes, thank you. I’ve been trying to decide if I want to try and be more active here and if this is the place for me. But seeing all these posts lately make me feel like I shouldn’t be here.

@lispi314 @pooserville Nostr seems to work this way, how is moderation going there?

@schizanon @pooserville Not sure, I haven't really kept up-to-date on it.

@lispi314 @pooserville That's interesting. I have never looked into the details, but I suspect the issue with P2P would be delayed/unreliable delivery at the peripheries of the network (smaller instances, post-colonial countries affected by the digital divide, etc).

What do you think? I suspect you've already looked into these.

@david_megginson @pooserville There are already no delivery guarantees for ActivityPub either (whether in timing or at all) and unlike SMTP, the retry behavior is actually much less tightly specified.

So essentially, the problem is already present in non-ideal circumstances.

Support for store-and-forward and/or gossip nodes does help mitigate that in p2p networks. Avoiding bloat by caching forever or enabling automatic re-emission without providing DoS opportunities gets a bit complicated.

@lispi314 @pooserville Thanks for the extra info! How well will P2P perform in areas where connectivity is sparse (compared to direct connections among instances)?

@david_megginson @pooserville Assuming caching is either at a reasonable delay for the expected latency, it can work better with the tradeoff of a storage buffer.

If you go the gossip way, if you store everything then it's similar to the first, with maximal storage costs for maximal delivery reliability. If you're more selective, such as only storing messages from friends infinitely and others just for a given time, then it depends.

@david_megginson @pooserville A general keyword pertaining to this would be #AsynchronousCommunication.

Most systems implementing/supporting it are de-facto P2P, but that isn't a hard requirement (it is technically an orthogonal property, it has similar but not exactly identical implications to "delay-tolerant").

@lispi314

🤔 with current fedi undergoing corporate capture in increasing speed would it make sense for Free Software / Free Culture minded folks to seek 'greener pastures' and spend time on protocol innovations in such direction?

Not jumping through hoops to stay masto-compatible and focus on protocol level qualities and flexibility. Support heterogenous (p2p + federated) interop in time. And create an ecosystem more firmly in control of the people, for the next time corporate interest comes.