ray ozzieDec 28, 2022

There's a good chance that the ecosystems evolving around ActivityPub, WebFinger, may parallel mail (smtp, pop).

An era of innovation & cooperation.

Then API battles as some scramble for control (vim, mapi).

Then the community digs in to find ways to deal with the problems that come with scale (spam, security).

Settling into the duopoly of A (gmail) vs B (o365), and "other" (fastmail, ...).

The scale phase will be much more difficult in this case, though, but it wouldn't be a bad outcome.

Show threadJon Udell

@rozzie You took me from joy (innovation and cooperation again) to despair (duopoly again) in a couple of sentences :-)

But you lost me at the end.

What wouldn't be a bad outcome?

Jan 2, 2023 at 9:35amWeb
Show threadray ozzieJan 2, 2023

@judell I may be in a minority, but I think the three-legged stool of where we ended up in email isn't a horrible end-state: two players who've built viable sustainable businesses competing for customers, plus a range of smaller players (fastmail, hey, ..) serving those with varying preferences.

When things get difficult (identity, moderation, monetization), rather than to see the decentralization experiment fail I'd be comfortable with its tipping into a more sustainable, polycentric form.

Show threadJon UdellJan 2, 2023

@rozzie Gotcha. I'm with Fastmail actually.

FWIW I've long imagined a friends-and-family service that:

- does what people use Facebook for

- lives within the Dunbar group-size limit

- is dead simple to deploy and manage

- runs on the coop business model

Pipe dream?

Show threadLarry YudelsonJan 2, 2023
@judell @rozzie The problem is that there are people in my Dunbar group who are not in my father’s or my son’s. We all want to live in a village, but not the same one.
Show threadJon UdellJan 2, 2023
@yudel @rozzie Hence federation. I'm not handwaving away the complexity, but very curious to know if the fediverse can evolve to support core friends-and-family groups with the option to connect more widely.