Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org

I only just learned that posts that mention a tag only in the “CW” content warning label don’t actually show up in results for that tag. So my extended post on #mastodon which featured #nerdery ended up not showing up as I expected it to.

https://qoto.org/@pwinn/109343270833122665

#TIL Today I Learned

An absolutely staggering change in Apple’s profits over the years, note that iPhone debuts at the top of the revenue stack in 2010, just three years after its introduction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJMEvKjDGmI

#nerdery #apple #video

#introduction.

I’m pwinn, rhymes with Quinn.

I’m into #nerdery. I’m a professional nerd, currently paid to write #golang, an upgrade from #java. I’m also an avocational nerd, mostly writing #python on my own time.

I’ve written a #book. It’s cheap! Tillie Madison vs Reality is a #scifi #fantasy novel. I love #books, and read more than two per week on average. I include #audiobooks and #graphicnovels in that, but not individual issues of #comics or #manga.

I collect things, mostly but not exclusively electronically. To that end, I have a coouple of NAS units. The newest one is a 95-terabyte #Synology, while the older one is a 28-terabyte #WesternDigital with a 32-terabyte Drobo attached. One of them runs #Plex, but not for public consumption. I’m not a #datahoarder. I’m not! I can quit anytime!

I enjoy #boardgames, including tabletop RPGs (#ttrpgs) like #mothership. I like jigsaw #puzzles too. I’m going to reward myself for posting this by starting one of my new 2000-piece Ravensburgers.

I realized recently that I watch more #anime and #Kdrama than I do American #television, but that comes and goes.

Other things about me: I live in #texas, I’m #married, I’m a #christian, I’m a #feminist, I lean far #left politically on most things, I like #photography, I really like #sudoku, and I’ve been playing with both #AIart and #GenshinImpact lately.

I’m sure I’ve left out something important, but I don’t see any rule that I can’t have more than one #introduction, so I’m not bothered.

About “federation.” That’s the key difference to mastodon, the federation. It’s confusing! It’s exciting! It avoids the issue of having a centralized point of failure, like Twitter or Facebook, while introducing issues of obscurity and complexity, but really, aren’t people mostly obscure on those centralized sites anyway? And federation itself isn’t confusing, just look at email! We’ve all been using email forever, and nobody is confused!

Except, email is terrible!

There’s no discoverability at all. I can’t communicate with anybody whose address I don’t already know or can find a link to, and these days not many people post their email addresses publicly, because spam is the ruin of all.

Many people have multiple email addresses, and I might never know that, or I might be communicating with the wrong one and my messages going unseen. Both sender and recipient might not realize they’re using the wrong address until one day when the recipient decides to close down an old account they aren’t using, and suddenly I have no way to reach them anymore!

Because that’s right, if an email address stops working, it just stops working. Emails bounce back (if I’m lucky!) with no clue about where my intended contact might have gone.

But federation does mean that I can, from my Fastmail account, reach anyone at any valid email address, right? Well, yes in the case of Fastmail, an account I pay for. Not so much in the case of self-hosting mail. It has come up on HackerNews a few times this year: it is a lot of work to self-host email in the modern era. The overwhelming volume of spam has prompted many larger mail service providers to implement stricter requirements for receiving email, any one of which is reasonable, and all of which combine to make for a heavy burden of maintenance. So most people don’t run their own mail servers any more, instead relying on one of the bigger providers, like Fastmail, or Gmail, or Hotmail, or Yahoo.

But let’s be honest: when someone tells you their email address is @hotmail.com, does that provoke a reaction? Or maybe you’re a Hotmail user and you instead look down on @aol.com addresses. Most people have opinions about your choice of mail service provider, so while your email will be delivered equally, it won’t necessarily be respected equally. This is not an issue with centralized services like Twitter and Facebook, of course. I disrespect all accounts at those sites equally!

So mastodon is federated, which a lot of mastodon proponents want to compare to email, figuring that will be easy and understandable. But that just suggests that mastodon has many of the same issues that email does, which… it does! Discoverability is a challenge, people can have identities on multiple servers, and your choice of server might say something about you that you don’t realize. None of these issues are insurmountable, but it would be nice to see proponents of mastodon acknowledge them.

Perhaps a better comparison for mastodon is Discord, or IRC. From a usability perspective, more people are familiar with Discord. Although it is actually centralized, the user experience is that of separate “servers,” so many people are used to using a single client to connect to one or more (usually more) servers for different reasons. This one has the AI image bot I prefer, this other one is about my favorite tabletop role-playing game, and this one has more variant sudoku than I can do in a month of Sundays. Still, if I want to communicate with a person, that’s where the centralized nature of Discord seeps through. I’m pwinn#9251 on every Discord server.

IRC is federated. It’s also not well-known, and is considered confusing and esoteric by many people. You can use any client, some of which are definitely better than others. Some of the federation is hidden from you as computers join a network. Still, you can have one identity on one network and a completely different identity on another network, and never shall they meet. In that sense it’s even less practical than mastodon!

Perhaps that’s why IRC has faded in popularity, largely supplanted by more centralized services like Slack and Discord.

Proponents of mastodon talk about federation as if it is an unalloyed positive thing, but it’s not. One-third of all email accounts are @gmail.com, and I suspect that number would be much, much, much higher if not for work email addresses. Given a choice, people tend to choose a centralized service. This is why the big service providers grow, while IRC use is declining while Slack and Discord grow.

The federation of mastodon is a strength, in that it provides resilience. I believe that leading with that is unhelpful, and that in fact, it’s only true inasmuch as it is hidden from users. Not kept a secret, just not forced onto every new user from the jump.

New users will have to pick a server to get started, a process that, as I write this, sucks. The biggest and most well-known servers have understandably closed to new accounts, and yet people keep recommending them anyway, leading to confusion. The alternatives are said by some to not matter–largely true–and by others to be of key importance. The onboarding process could be clarified dramatically, if anyone had the authority and will and understanding to do so.

The UI, again, as I write this, doesn’t always have clear parallels to UIs people know, but it’s sufficient. I might suggest some wording changes, like omitting any reference to “federated” anywhere it appears. That’s the “Global timeline” in contrast with the “Local timeline.”

I understand why people use “email” for comparison. And the comparison is more apt than not! But it doesn’t solve every problem. Imagine trying to tell someone they should try email, and to start just go to gmail.com and sign up. But it turns out that gmail.com isn’t accepting any new accounts right now, and nobody’s sure when they will again. That’s fine, you say, go to yahoo.com instead. Only maybe they’re closed to new accounts too. Okay, you say, it really doesn’t matter which service you pick, they’re all the same. Which isn’t true! They all have the same ability to send email to others, but the web UIs certainly aren’t the same, and they have different features and archive sizes and some use folders and others tags, and already you’re off to a bit of a bad start.

Even once you get through all of that, you’ve given someone the equivalent of email, not the equivalent of Twitter! For that you need to give them a list of people they can follow, even though that unfortunately takes a few more clicks than it does on a centralized service. How do you give them that list right now?

Well, it’s only been six years. They’ll get around to it eventually.

#mastodon #nerdery #email #discord #irc #federation #twitter