Submitted 4 weeks ago by coffeeadmin@lemmy.coffee to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://isg.beel.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Untitled-2.png
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.
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 👍
Email has been “dying” for 20+ years. I’ll believe it when I see it.
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.
As someone who run a Lemmy server I can tell you that it isn’t as simple as that.
Yes, there is an initial benefit from having more users on an instance, but this initial scaling benefit isn’t linear. It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further. Only after going over that hump it might become cheaper again at the scale of hundred thousand of users or so, but Lemmy the software is currently also unlikely to scale as a single instance to such numbers, so it isn’t just a system operator question.
So no, unless you wsnt to fully commercialize the Fediverse and bring in external investors to fund the getting over that initial bumb, semi-centralisation is not a feasible way forward. And what would even be the point of that? Reddit exists and is basically the same.
Luckily ActivityPub is designed to scale horizontially through lots of smaller (but not tiny) instances, so I think we can manage without the above.
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.
It shows up when choosing things. Most people will choose the largest, some will choose the next largest, etc. I might be wrong, of course.
Zipf’s law is just a specific example of a power law. Other power laws exist for lots of different things, just with different exponents.
the jury seems out about cities. This paper suggests they don’t follow a other distributions: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0264275124002592 , but this one suggests that they do: www.oecd.org/content/dam/…/5k3tt100wf7j-en.pdf - specifically it suggests they DO follow Zipf’s law, within a given country. Inter-country differences are likely due to different developmental trajectories over time.
The thing about email is that the software is proprietary. Each of these providers has their own implementation of the interface, features, and integration with their tools (Google drive, photos, etc).
As long as lemmy servers run lemmy software, this won’t happen, or at least won’t be an issue as you can move to another server and not have to change your usage habits.
However if some server owners decide to fork Lemmy and develop their proprietary server, overhaul the UI, add features and attract users, it will start to become a problem.
Lemmy’s AGPL license doesnt allow forking the code into a proprietary server. All changes need to be open source as well, otherwise the operator can get sued. So a proprietary Lemmy software would have to be developed from scratch which would take a long time.
email is a standard protocol. You can run your own server using FOSS software in 5 minutes if you start now. One of the biggest problems is that you will have a hard time “federating” to gmail and others due to the spam problematic, but that is something that we will see with Lemmy, too. Currently I can spin up my own server and start pushing shit to lemmy.world and other bigger instances, but I feel that this will change with the coming spam waves
Lemmy.world, lemm.ee.
federation and the concept of communities have always been a little awkward together since it’s based on sunreddits where there is only one always.
The only ways this pans out is with having one server where the community is most successful to eat up the others or having like two or three who hate each other
For fucks sake, have the 0 at the twelve o clock position and not this horrible mess. This ruins one’s day.
By how easily you’re offended, your day was probably going to be ruined anyway.
I kinda like it. The off-centered main line allows labels to be written easier.
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)
As long as nothing dominates I am ok with it
Looks like a en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I really do want to point out, Gmail is gonna get a massive lead as time goes on.
Doing parental consent forms for my schools library, most of the parents email were yahoo, Hotmail, etc. but EVERY SINGLE student email was Gmail, with the exception of like 10 out of (at least) 300 pages
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
There really is no competitor to Google Drive right now. Apple and Microsoft have made some weak attempts but until their software works fully in a browser and is 100% free to get started, it won’t catch on. It not just about email.
Irelephant@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
mega is good, in my experience.
shalafi@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Been on Gmail since it was invite only. It really is best in class. Hate on Google all ya like, but they got a lock on email early in the game.
And for those that think getting away from it is a matter of choosing another email provider, I’ll say that Gmail does loads more than deliver email. Authentication is a huge and obvious use. Reading comments around here leads me to believe that many don’t understand Google for Business and how integrated an org can be with those services.
Another note, just because the domain isn’t gmail.com doesn’t mean it isn’t served by Google. For most companies it would be insane to host their own services and cheaper to let Google handle it all.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
The raw SMTP landscape on the internet is such a shitshow. Setting up a SMTP server requires so many goddamn condoms that you might as well just give up and start using some other professional email service. Or you set it up just to forward email to a GMail account, and even then, Gmail bitches about how much spam you’re forwarding it and blocks you for a time.
macaw_dean_settle@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
That’s because these students were brain washed on that garbage.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I wonder how much of that has to do wtih chromebooks.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Android seems far more likely cause.