I don't mean to be Old Man Yells at Cloud, but the more I see talk about the "instance thing" regarding these decentralized services, it makes me think about how most people today would be
completely lost trying to use the internet of just 20 years ago when a small handful of mega-corporations
didn't hand-hold and control
all the major services. The "instance thing" feels no different to me than picking an email service. How did anyone possibly function back then, having to pick a provider/domain for their email and
remember that domain and
tell people about it before Gmail came along?
Yes, I know the answer is lot more complicated than I'm implying. Some people got their email through their ISP by default instead of deliberately choosing a domain, and running
your own required (and still does) a very high tech skill level, but guess what? It
worked. Thousands of mail servers with different "instance" names working around the globe using the same protocol, and most people don't think twice about it.
I guess it's too much to ask modern users to think about and remember more than just one word to uniquely identify themselves on a global communications system.
grumble grumble
