rglullis

There is a non-negligible amount of companies making money out of services based on email, even though they don't own email as a standard.

Also, remember when VCs were giving money to every "Uber for X" pitch deck some years ago? If ActivityPub ever manages to cement itself as ubiquitous standard, you can bet that we'll see investors going after anyone saying "LinkedIn, but on ActivityPub", "Tinder, but on ActivityPub", "Etsy, but on ActivityPub", "Patreon, but on ActivityPub", "Yelp, but on ActivityPub", "Github, but on ActivityPub"...

No. It's quite easy to paint venture capitalists as these cartoonish evil entities that are plotting together against anything that might come to disrupt the status quo, but the reality is that the is no single entity out there coordinating their work. "Venture capitalists" are just a disparate number of people, all of them acting in their own self-interest, and if any of them sees the opportunity for themselves to make money on something, they will do it.

Venture Capital already knows about the Fediverse. The problem is that VCs are actually terrible at taking risks and they will only invest on things once "the market" started paying attention to it.

It’s much lower friction to say: “Hey, add me on XYZ social media app”.

only because of network effects. People are used to ask you to add them on FB or IG because literally a third of the world have an account there. Now go around asking them to add you on friendica or movim, they will probably just give you a blank stare.

The problem is less about the chart and the fact that you are taking a jump from a very short interval and trying to pass it off as something completely unprecedented.

Getting called a liar and having people try to minimize a significant trend

"Lies, damn lies and statistics" is not about calling you a liar, but how people can selectively use different data points to present information that supports their thesis or confirms their biases. I wasn't calling you a liar, I am just disagreeing with you about this being "significant".

If this growth rate holds for the next two weeks, then I'll gladly change my tune and start talking about a trend. But so emphatically making projections out of one or two data points is a fool's errand.

Sorry, I think we were talking past each other.

When you were talking about "Matrix is not a good" , I was understanding that you meant that the protocol was not suitable for it. Now I see that your issue is not with matrix itself, but with its most popular clients, because none of them (unlike Futo circles) provide any sort of unified view of the different rooms.

I understand how it could be interesting to have this type of unified view if you really care about emulating "the Facebook experience", and perhaps it wouldn't be that difficult to implement that. In practice though, I think that you'd come up with the following conclusions:

• even if Futo Circles was still around, you'd still have a major challenge in convincing the people to create an account on a Matrix server.
• even if Futo Circles was still around, most people are not interested in getting all their social connections sorted in all these different buckets.
• even if Futo Circles was still around, you'd quickly realize that most people prefer the UX of separate group chats. There simply aren't that many "circles" for most users. You'd have a circle for your close friends, another for work/school colleagues, another for some common activity like gym/chess/book club, maybe a bigger circle for your neighborhood, etc... so it doesn't really provide a lot of helping when filtering things out in a timeline. The whole thing with "Circles" is interesting (and one of the most interesting features of Google+) but one of the reasons that Google+ failed was because and the UX of "browsing through the list of groups with new messages" is good enough for most people.

Reach out to @mczachurski@mastodon.social, the developer.

Ok, I don't know how else to explain. What you are asking ("A public timeline that anyone can follow, except end-to-end encrypted") is physically impossible.

Like, really impossible. See if you spot the issue:

they won’t see each other’s stuff, just mine and whoever else they add

The wide audience I’m talking about is all the people I add

How would keep a single timeline where the messages you sent are only visible to your friends, but not visible to your friends' friends?

The answer is: you don't. You can not do that. You need to have a separate room for the contacts that you want to make your pictures available. Your contacts need each to have their own room for the contacts that they need to have available.

I’m essentially proposing a mass e2ee encryption messaging service, with a UI that amalgamates it into a single feed

To view the feed, yes you can consolidate all posts into one single view. But when you post something, you will need to define which rooms will see the content, and the message will be duplicated across the different rooms. You can bet that Futo does not gets rid of this abstraction.

it’s “public” only to people you’ve added

Which means that you have a protected room!

You mentioned you are not a programmer, so maybe you are missing one key information: it only makes sense to talk about "end-to-end encryption" when the sender knows the recipient a priori. You can not simply broadcast a message to any unspecified "wide-audience" and have it "end-to-end encrypted".

It’s not a group abstraction, at least for the user, since you’re not asking everyone to join the same group,

Yes, you are. If you want the messages to be e2ee encrypted and which can not be spied by the server owner, you are in effect asking people "come join me on this room where we will have a shared secret to exchange messages privately".

I understand that you are thinking in terms of an unified view, but this is an UX matter. If you want only a selection of people to be able to decrypt your message, you will have to add them to a group that you will have to manage it, and Matrix/XMPP already provide these mechanisms.

And I'm saying that your "end-to-end encryption" and "public timeline" requirements are conflicting. If you want e2ee, you will have to manage the rooms yourself. You can bet that even if you tried the Futo Circles client, you would still have to manage "who-can-access-what", which implies that the room/group abstraction is still there.

This is where going a group is not what I’m after, as that’s what Matrix would be good for.

A XMPP room and a Matrix group are equivalent. You can, e.g, create a room, set it to "private" and only add the people you want to see your content.

As a matter of fact, I think you could have what you want even with a basic matrix client. This is actually what I do with my family: I didn't want to share pictures of my kids on Facebook, so I created a "Family" group and we use to talk and share pictures.

It's built on XMPP. XMPP provides direct and group (room) communications. If you set up OMEMO, any message you send will be encrypted and only visible to the recipient(s).

What you are calling "timeline" is equivalent to what they are calling "blog", the concept is the same: sorted feed of events which are published to network.