The challenge here is that centralized systems will ALWAYS have a usability advantage. The cost of that is that they can be bought, and ruined We gotta put a bit of extra work in if we want to avoid that happening to us again in the future
@simonw
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Demystifying Technology: Encouragement and Accessibility for All
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The message I was aiming for here was "I believe in you! You got this! If you figured out Twitter you can figure this thing out too! It's not nearly as complicated or intimidating as you might have been lead to believe" I'm really sorry how badly I failed to capture that
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Twitter centralization risks revealed by platform dependency irony
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Twitter worked well enough for me that the benefits of federation always felt more ideological and theoretical than practical to me I mean, how much could possibly go wrong with a well established public company?
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Federated networks offer true ownership against billionaire control
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I resisted the federated thing for SO long, but now I'm there it feels really natural, to the point that I have trouble imagining myself being tempted away by something that DIDN'T give me that ownership of my own destiny I don't want my space to be bought by another billionaire
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Mastodon API Hackability Versus Twitter’s Restrictive Approach
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I'm finding the hackability of the Mastodon ecosystem _extremely_ beguiling – Twitter's API increasingly felt like I'd get in trouble if I did anything particularly interesting with it
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Client Innovation: Custom Algorithmic Feeds Beyond Chronological
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Definitely feels like there's room for innovation around the clients – I'm already thinking about weird custom feed things I'd like to do (I miss the Twitter algorithmic feed – I want something that's a bit more likely to highlight interesting stuff than pure chronological)
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Mastodon UX Design: Decentralization Challenges and User Experience
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I think the UX of Mastodon is extraordinarily good considering the difficulty of what it is trying to achieve It's always been 100x easier to design usable products if they are centralized. But centralized platforms can be bought and ruined even after you trust them for 16 years
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Decentralized Networks Worth Their Infrastructure Costs
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Generally though there are definite costs involved in having a network that someone like Elon can't ruin I've decided that I can tolerate them
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Improving decentralized instance performance and federation
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My plan for that is to not do anything on my instance that makes other instances want to block me! I've got used to my messages not showing up elsewhere for a few minutes (up to ~40 minutes in some cases) My current hunch is there's low hanging fruit for improving performance
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Mastodon’s Decentralization Protects Users From Billionaire Control
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After the past couple of weeks it turns out the one feature I care most about is that a billionaire can't buy my online home and ruin it – and that's the single feature Mastodon has that nothing else (at least of the same scale) has been able to offer