In the words of Gucci Mane, "A man can get lost in the sauce, but the same man can be lost without the sauce."
It's natural that here on hacker news we spend most of our time discussing protocols and implementation details. No, protocols alone are not a solution but they are important. What's the point of just re-inventing centralized social networks over and over again? That being said, in order for any of these protocols to reach the masses the protocol itself needs to be invisible to casual users. If the marketing for your new social network is "It runs on this cool decentralized protocol!" you will never reach a non-technical audience.
The end product needs to be as good and as easy to use as centralized equivalents even if that means making some compromises.
The point is to iterate, innovate, and compete. Name one major social media site today that was based on a “new protocol”? Answer: None. They all started as slight twists to an existing site. It’s kind of strange to me that the word “central” has such a bad rap when it really just describes an efficient means of organization, which naturally lends to other efficiencies.
> Name one major social media site today that was based on a “new protocol”? Answer: None.
If one already existed then this title of this post would be 'ActivityPub is the Now' instead of 'ActivityPub Could Be the Future'. Efficiency isn't the only metric and comes at the cost of freedom and resiliency.
“Efficient” perhaps, but also typically controlled by a single entity that often ends up using its power in ways that don’t benefit its users. It’s not really about the technology, it’s about the power dynamic that technology leads to.
It's natural that here on hacker news we spend most of our time discussing protocols and implementation details. No, protocols alone are not a solution but they are important. What's the point of just re-inventing centralized social networks over and over again? That being said, in order for any of these protocols to reach the masses the protocol itself needs to be invisible to casual users. If the marketing for your new social network is "It runs on this cool decentralized protocol!" you will never reach a non-technical audience.
The end product needs to be as good and as easy to use as centralized equivalents even if that means making some compromises.