The posting from a few days ago that reimagined email as a social network really got me thinking how much our approach to social networks has been led by the webbification of everything.
The spirit-of-the-nineties approach to recreating mastodon would probably look like one or two dominant native apps and something like a newsgroup server. Or maybe something like a really great RSS reader.
Questions about federation vs a walled controlled servive would be silly, because technologists are fighting it out to sell the best app. And of course a walled-in service is stupid because that would be as obsolete as Compuserve.
We’re all fighting it out on the web now. Well, except possibly on iOS and (grudgingly) Android. In some ways I think the web was how we geeks made survival on Linux possible, as we never had the mass to demand desktop apps.
Part of what I liked about the reimagining of email as social media was that it allowed for the return of the app. In the case of Mastodon, the protocols are presumably open and don’t preclude interaction via apps. So here the question of web or heavy client is not technical but one of point of view or preference.
This is all to say I kind of miss when we were chasing “the killer app” as opposed to competing for service share. When the focus was on the user’s desktop, any associated service was more or less seen as boring plumbing—-certainly nothing to have brand affinity for.
EDIT: Case in point, there’s another comment explaining that Mastodon doesn’t let you move instances and retain followers. In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse. Your computer crashes, you lose who you were following. If you want to publish who you’re following that’s you or your client’s job.
Giving up your social network graph to the service provider isn’t an issue in the heavy client model, because the 90s service isn’t going to pay to store that information on your behalf anyway. It wasn’t because the service viewed that personal information as “oily rags”; it was because they simply didn’t want to expend the resources to store it.
> In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse. Your computer crashes, you lose who you were following. If you want to publish who you’re following that’s you or your client’s job.
If all the state related to following is on the client, then the client has to either consume the stream of all messages (on a push model) or regularly poll its sources across its entire follower set (on a pull model), both of which are extremely inefficient. Some pressure in the direction of centralization is intrinsic to the problem.
In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse.
In the 90s, if you moved from your universities' mail server to Lycos, you also lose all the people who you were following, since they still had the previous email address.
Mastodon just happens to work in the reverse (you have a list of people you follow, rather than of people who follow you, as in email), but the issue is the same.
Yes, though it was hypothetically possible to buy a domain and host your own email. Not a solution for most people in those days, certainly!
That’s gotten harder and easier today. It’s never been harder to properly manage a mailserver yourself. On the other hand, registering a vanity domain and hosting with a neutral 3rd party like (my current) Fastmail has never been easier.
Someone should make a startup that suggests and registers a vanity domain on users’ behalf and then configures the email hosting provider of the user’s choice, spelling out the costs and tradeoffs of each. Work out the billing with a handful of providers and take a small monthly cut. It’s probably a beer money startup :-)
Come to think of it, given this problem is so old, I’d be surprised if nobody has made this.
Many webhost deals will include a domain and a webserver. I guess the main thing they lack is marketing: people in the market for a vanity email will not now to look for those deals.
I’ve been saying the same for a long time. Email gives you both a distributed delivery mechanism to unlimited users and a data storage platform. If you want things available in more than one place, leave it on the server and sync with IMAP.
All you really need to turn it into a social network is an app that can read it, parse it and arrange it in a more convenient manner than clicking on individual messages.
The spirit-of-the-nineties approach to recreating mastodon would probably look like one or two dominant native apps and something like a newsgroup server. Or maybe something like a really great RSS reader.
Questions about federation vs a walled controlled servive would be silly, because technologists are fighting it out to sell the best app. And of course a walled-in service is stupid because that would be as obsolete as Compuserve.
We’re all fighting it out on the web now. Well, except possibly on iOS and (grudgingly) Android. In some ways I think the web was how we geeks made survival on Linux possible, as we never had the mass to demand desktop apps.
Part of what I liked about the reimagining of email as social media was that it allowed for the return of the app. In the case of Mastodon, the protocols are presumably open and don’t preclude interaction via apps. So here the question of web or heavy client is not technical but one of point of view or preference.
This is all to say I kind of miss when we were chasing “the killer app” as opposed to competing for service share. When the focus was on the user’s desktop, any associated service was more or less seen as boring plumbing—-certainly nothing to have brand affinity for.
EDIT: Case in point, there’s another comment explaining that Mastodon doesn’t let you move instances and retain followers. In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse. Your computer crashes, you lose who you were following. If you want to publish who you’re following that’s you or your client’s job.
Giving up your social network graph to the service provider isn’t an issue in the heavy client model, because the 90s service isn’t going to pay to store that information on your behalf anyway. It wasn’t because the service viewed that personal information as “oily rags”; it was because they simply didn’t want to expend the resources to store it.