His opinion is that federated systems are too stable, to the point of paralysis by [lack of] consensus. If you want to be able to advance the state of technology he feels that centralized systems are the way to go.
Moxie is the megalomaniac behind Signal, of course you would expect him to back it up, but cherry picking facts doesn’t make a good nor convincing argument. Here’s a rebuttal by an XMPP developer. The current state of XMPP practically proves Moxies’ post to be FUD: XMPP has multiple compatible, secure and maintained clients and server implementations, and by its decentralized nature, is more preserving of its users’ metadata, and more resilient than today’s Signal.
I know that diversification has its advantages. I’m a firm believer in it, and I think it’s one of the main reasons to which Linux for example owes its resilience and flexibility. But decentralization also means it takes a long time, sometimes a very long time, for the that particular product’s benefits to become known and widespread. Linux is a general purpose product which was able to find multiple niches in which to thrive. But other products have a much more narrow scope, and sometimes if they miss their window of opportunity they’re relegated to the subnotes of history forever.
I believe that’s what happened to XMPP, IRC and so on. At some point there was an opportunity to move with the times and add popular features and become user-friendly but they didn’t, and commercial products that could offer those thrived instead. We as geeks would often like to think it’s all because of the marketing power of wealthy companies, but we scoff at the notion of “user friendly”. Let’s look at Telegram and how well it’s doing in spite of having neither the marketing power of Meta or Apple, nor the technical advantages of XMPP or Signal.
This is a danger that applies to Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin too, and which Mozilla is currently trying to address. If the Lemmy community doesn’t put some effort soon into addressing its outstanding issues that prevent easy adoption by new users, it will eventually fade into obscurity and become just as obscure as XMPP.
I will let Moxie answer that: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
His opinion is that federated systems are too stable, to the point of paralysis by [lack of] consensus. If you want to be able to advance the state of technology he feels that centralized systems are the way to go.
Moxie is the megalomaniac behind Signal, of course you would expect him to back it up, but cherry picking facts doesn’t make a good nor convincing argument. Here’s a rebuttal by an XMPP developer. The current state of XMPP practically proves Moxies’ post to be FUD: XMPP has multiple compatible, secure and maintained clients and server implementations, and by its decentralized nature, is more preserving of its users’ metadata, and more resilient than today’s Signal.
I know that diversification has its advantages. I’m a firm believer in it, and I think it’s one of the main reasons to which Linux for example owes its resilience and flexibility. But decentralization also means it takes a long time, sometimes a very long time, for the that particular product’s benefits to become known and widespread. Linux is a general purpose product which was able to find multiple niches in which to thrive. But other products have a much more narrow scope, and sometimes if they miss their window of opportunity they’re relegated to the subnotes of history forever.
I believe that’s what happened to XMPP, IRC and so on. At some point there was an opportunity to move with the times and add popular features and become user-friendly but they didn’t, and commercial products that could offer those thrived instead. We as geeks would often like to think it’s all because of the marketing power of wealthy companies, but we scoff at the notion of “user friendly”. Let’s look at Telegram and how well it’s doing in spite of having neither the marketing power of Meta or Apple, nor the technical advantages of XMPP or Signal.
This is a danger that applies to Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin too, and which Mozilla is currently trying to address. If the Lemmy community doesn’t put some effort soon into addressing its outstanding issues that prevent easy adoption by new users, it will eventually fade into obscurity and become just as obscure as XMPP.