We all know about how Reddit closed-sourced back in 2017 and will be killing off third-party apps this July, what will Lemmy.ml do to avoid facing the same fate? Reddit started off like this (open, aiming for freedom) and it all went downhill from there.
Email and websites are great federated success stories. Distributing the stakeholdership across companies in an interoperation keeps the peace, even in the face of crony capitalism. Just like each company has their own email server and website, they could and should operate their own federated instance of social media, be it Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Matrix… Or whatever becomes entrenched.
People forget that before SMTP email, there existed proprietary email! Yes, it’s true. In fact it took more than 10 years for a federated email format to replace entrenched proprietary IBM and Xerox mail products.
In the end, even corporate clients prefer solutions they can have a controlling interest in, because they want some control of their kingdom, and they usually have the means to get it. You don’t need extreme ancap or communistic views to get there, but you need a lot of patience. Decades of patience. It takes a long time for expensive lessons to settle in.
Except that the email game is now very centralized. Companies run their emails through MS or Google. Both of which have created barriers for independent email servers by marking them as spam more often than not. Email is NOT an example of a successful decentralized service.
I am very aware of the kind of centralization you describe. It is inevitable. And will happen to Lemmy, and Mastodon, and Matrix if/when they become large enough. It’d go so far as to say we are already there with the World Wide Web. What you describe is simply the Pareto Principle in action and it’s a law of natural order.
For me the measure of success of a decentralised service is a bit more modest: I need not that the market shares be evenly distributed among parties (that is a discussion of economics I frankly am not all that interested in debating).
But everything else still applies today: I can spin up a mail server today for pennies and start handing out my email to Average Joe, and (most of the time) they won’t roll their eyes and say “uh how do I use this?”. This is the ultimate, practical test of success of a decentralised communication service. For me it need not be fancy, it need simply to be used.
I am aware that in some developing countries this is not entirely true. I also think that these communities haven’t had the time it takes to learn the very expensive lessons of centralization, as I made in my original point.
I also think some backsliding is possible, and probably happening with the marketshare of email providers today. Then there will be come some outtage, companies will lose profits and we’ll all collectively relearn that maybe putting all our eggs in one basket isn’t such a great thing.
If there is two things you can count on in people, it’s greed and forgetting history.
Right, I am specifically saying that you cannot “spin up a mail server today for pennies and start handing out my email to Average Joe”. It will fall in their spam folder and you will have to jump through many hoops to make sure that it actually gets delivered as expected.
The Pareto distribution of users across servers is a different thing than the big players creating ways to ensure that the small players aren’t playing on equal terms. The former will happen for sure, the latter can hopefully be prevented in the Fediverse.
I experienced this specific issue you desribe myself. Turns out my server configuration was out of date and not following best security practices.
This has really not been my experience. Again, in my experience the only “barriers” I have encountered relate to de facto upgraded security protocols. Which is totally reasonable and within reach of any competent server admin (hey, if I could figure it out, anyone with a bit of knowledge can).
uucp existed before SMTP and is still working for email…