> It's been said a thousand times before, but poeple use to make fun of proprietary "emails", yet don't hesitate to use twitter, hangout etc...
The problem is that back in those days you basically had the choice between old school unixy internet power, and dumbed-down crippleware designed for joe sixpack who had never seen a computer before (ie. AOL). It was definitely worth the pain of learning to configure client apps for email, news, irc because that's where all the interesting online activity was happening anyway.
But since then two things happened: the majority of people in developed countries got online and became familiar with it, and the new generation of walled gardens was created on top of the internet rather than as a bizarro parallel universe.
The result is that things like Twitter succeed because A) that's where all the people are and B) they can leverage that to create a UX that is unattainable to distributed protocols.
This is not in the spirit of the creators of the internet, but their creation is no longer governed by the counter-cultural geek ideals of the late 60s either. The sad truth is the internet is market-driven now, and no amount of principled reasoning will put the cat back in the bag. The pendulum may swing back in the future due to political and cultural events, but mark my words, no federated Twitter replacement is going to gain any traction any time soon.
My prediction is that a few years from now, the big email providers' spam systems will have made sending email from smaller independent servers sufficiently unreliable that few people will want to do it anymore. At that point federated email will be a minority concern and everybody will get migrated to email 2.0, a new and improved system with no smelly sub-billion dollar participants allowed. Nobody will care or notice except a few out of touch nerds from the past.
The problem is that back in those days you basically had the choice between old school unixy internet power, and dumbed-down crippleware designed for joe sixpack who had never seen a computer before (ie. AOL). It was definitely worth the pain of learning to configure client apps for email, news, irc because that's where all the interesting online activity was happening anyway.
But since then two things happened: the majority of people in developed countries got online and became familiar with it, and the new generation of walled gardens was created on top of the internet rather than as a bizarro parallel universe.
The result is that things like Twitter succeed because A) that's where all the people are and B) they can leverage that to create a UX that is unattainable to distributed protocols.
This is not in the spirit of the creators of the internet, but their creation is no longer governed by the counter-cultural geek ideals of the late 60s either. The sad truth is the internet is market-driven now, and no amount of principled reasoning will put the cat back in the bag. The pendulum may swing back in the future due to political and cultural events, but mark my words, no federated Twitter replacement is going to gain any traction any time soon.