A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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Incredible to think about that we got it right the first time (with email) and still had to spend the last 20 years complaining about centralized social networks.
For fucks sake, have the 0 at the twelve o clock position and not this horrible mess. This ruins one's day.
This is a terrible distribution and the semi-centralisation and gatekeeping by the established actors is one of the reason email is dying.
I think we can do much better than that ๐
We should have large semi-centralized services. But they should be democratically controlled.
Do you ever think about why cities form? Rural life has a lot of appealing characteristics, plus it's the starting state of the world. Cities form because there is an advantage to size, proximity and specialization. If we had a new planet and completely evenly distributed the population across its land, we'd very quickly form cities regardless.
It's the same with centralized services. It takes a lot of special knowledge and equipment to run an email service. The average Lemmy user may have those resources, but even here, how many of us run our own email servers?
It costs less per person in resources to add more users after the first one. So there's an incentive to aggregate users together. And once you have a certain number of users, maybe you figure out some way to fund your operation, and you can pay more people to add features/capabilities. Soon your entity not only has more users, it's more appealing than a plan vanilla email service, and you get even more users. You're doing it cheaper and better than the DIYers.
I think centralization and size are naturally occurring. We should think about ways to exist and benefit from them, so something like Gmail but run as a worker cooperative.
Email has been "dying" for 20+ years. I'll believe it when I see it.
yeah its hard for an essential service to die. I will spout one of my super downvoted opinions but I think every government should be providing email service the same way they provide physical mail service. With all the rights currently given to physical mail. Im not saying as the only option and im being idealistic in thinking we can do like what we did with physical mail in this modern time. But I don't care. Its essential and there should be a version people have that is a right and cannot go away.
I think every government should be providing email service the same way they provide physical mail service. With all the rights currently given to physical mail.
We've tried that in Germany. The De-Mail was already dead when it was born.
I mean it should not be. It should be run if no one is using it but government communication should always be through it so you know its legit. I'd be fine if it was not popular. I mean if everyone sent everything through ups and fedex I would still want usps to be a thing here.
I'm not sure why the USPS shouldn't be the sole provider of email in the US.
Why in the world should it be?
No profit motive and no private interests.
I'm sure there could still be private carriers, just like there's still private delivery services like UPS and FedEx, but I don't see why the average person should be relying on a private company for essential infrastructure.
You really trust the US government to control your communications? Especially given the last 20 years?
There exist plenty of free email platforms right now. I'm not against the government providing one, but unlike physical packages, sending an email to Bumfuck, Missouri doesn't cost any more than sending it across town.
There's the cost of the ISP, and for that I think there should be a municipal option for sure, to provide service to unprofitable regions just like postal mail and rural electrification.
That is why it's important to also use other software than Lemmy like Mbin or Piefed. Users want choice and the Fediverse is only as decentralized as the software running on it. So please, think about this.
I dont think its the software* but the instance that matters. Everyone being on lw is not good (not that there is anything wrong with lw, just that centralization is bad). Thankfully most lemmy apps nowadays default to lemm.ee which should hopefully counter most of the centralization. Lemmy apps should rotate the default server when it gets too big which will help a lot (also shows the impact defaults have).
*Software would have mattered if the main devs instance was also the biggest. Or a very popular lemmy client defaulted to their own instance. With lemmy thats not the case.
Great point. If defaults didnโt matter Google wouldnโt have spent billions of dollars buying the default search position on other browsers.
I think a surefire way to help with this would be to have a rule that any instance that becomes the largest one on Lemmy should lock itself instantly. That way, we'll only surpass the current max number of users on a single instance until it's completely spread out
Also, have a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active and count the number of non-LW communities in the top 20
Ironically, [email protected] could also be an alternative to this community.
@[email protected] , have you considered crossposting there?
I think piefeds combined view makes this less of an issue. Like people subscribe to/post in the big communities because they are more active so get more comments and stuff. But in piefed you get the combined discussion from all the communities so you get the same experience even if you are subscribed to a less popular community on that topic.
Feeds are awesome ๐
Ex: https://piefed.social/f/fediversevideos
Allows you to sub to many fediverse account/communities/etc...
That pie chart isnt including trust.
If I see a Hotmail/yahoo email, I immediately assume spammer or nontechnical boomer who has already been scammed a few times.
Lemmy instances have similar stigmas
It really just depends on how users have to choose a service and how much it matters. With email the service used doesn't really matter so most either use what is given to them (here that's often from their ISP) or what is recomended to them (e.g. Gmail or Hotmail here in the EU)
It'll probably follow Zipf's law, like most things.
Okay, based on that article Zipf's law seems to mostly apply to languages. Cities, for example, don't follow it.