The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves: Cohost and the Fate of Centralized Platforms

last week i was in a conversation with a few people about social media. i guess they were finally leaving xitter and wanted to know where to go. cohost came up and they all made accounts immediately. then i mentioned mastodon and was immediately rebuffed because "sometimes those instances shut down"

whoops!

It's super easy to migrate accounts on Mastodon. Even works fine to move an account from Mastodon to Akkoma for example.
- Your content stays behind, though, and some shut down without warning.
  
  Your posts will not be moved, due to technical limitations.
This should hopefully get better over time as some instances stick around for longer. You'll be able to point to instances that have stuck around for a while, which means they'll probably stick around for some time longer. The problem right now is that the fediverse and many instances are still young, and something that started yesterday is not too likely to still exist tomorrow.
- i just have such a hard time wrapling my head around why the fedi is under that level of scrutiny to begin with while everyone assumed cohost would be forever. i had an account there but stopped using it years ago because half the time i tried to log in it was down! come october there will be a plethora of mastodon instances that both predate and have outlived cohost

I agree with the overall spirit, but this is a bit shallow, no? Not much of an attempt to argue its points. It makes some claims, refuses to elaborate, then leaves. Feels written for people who already think the same.

Because of this as well as poor financial management, Cohost will pass out of internet culture with little impact

Would decentralization have helped it make a much greater impact? Would it have helped Cohost survive? Seems to me that financial issues would've killed it regardless.

Would it have helped Cohost survive?

Well in theory if cohost was decentralized, the instance that is now shutting down would just be one of many. As it is, it's one of one, the only one.

Plenty of Lemmy instances have shut down, some less abruptly than others. One cohost instance shutting down is not that remarkable, all things considered. It's only remarkable cause there's just one instance.
- In theory, I doubt development would continue. For a federated cohost to survive long term, it would also need to be open source, with a developer community that could fork the project and carry the torch. That's a very different cohost we're envisioning, even excluding required UX changes to make it possible.
  
  At that point, one might as well imagine a cohost that explored better ways to make money, or attracted more users, or ran a tighter ship. Both scenarios lead to this discussion never happening.

This will all keep happening until we decide we have been tricked one-too-many times by centralized platforms. The only way to escape the hellish state of the current internet is to pursue options that drag the network back towards its decentralized state; a state where corporations are unable to control who we talk to, what we see, where our attention is for five or more hours a day, every day.

This will keep happening until we abandon centralization and choose and free, open source, decentralized future. Or else the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Honestly that's why email has stuck around. Can you imagine if one company controlled email? That would've enshittified and shut down years ago lol

I don't know what Cohost was but I'm pessimistic about Lemmy these days. Note that the link is to an article moaning about the centralization of sites like Reddit and that Cohost (whatever that was) failed because it was run by the same type of people. At first I didn't click on the link because it says "audio" so I expected it to be audio and I didn't feel like listening to one. It's a written article though.

I’m pessimistic about Lemmy these days.

Why? The userbase is quite stable, and new platform are emerging (Piefed, Mbin), and more people are probably going to come the next time Reddit messes up
- The instance system is confusing for new users and they might not even realize that they're missing out on a lot of content by signing up to the wrong instance.
  
  In the end it's just a bunch of centralized websites sharing content if the admins feel like it and sure you can create your own instance but another admin can decide to defederated from yours anytime they feel like it, that's still a lot of power in the hands of a single person...
  
  Both front and back end need to be decentralized and also separated from each other. Make all content available to all and have people develop a UI to access it, let the users curate their feed.
  
  This way people sign up on one page and can use the same credentials no matter what page they go to, the competition for front end devs is to offer the best UI, the development for the hosting part is what's done as a community on GitHub or whatever...