[HN Gopher] Fediverse
___________________________________________________________________
Fediverse
Author : the-mitr
Score : 177 points
Date : 2022-05-03 11:47 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fediverse.party)
(TXT) w3m dump (fediverse.party)
| echelon wrote:
| A Twitter replacement shouldn't be federated. It should be fully
| P2P.
|
| Federated platforms can still be censored and walled off. Not all
| Mastodon instances are peers, and your data isn't portable. It
| still has most of the same pitfalls as the platforms we complain
| about today.
|
| P2P is naturally efficient. The best ideas will gain traction
| within their memetic networks, and you can branch out and explore
| anything and respond to it.
|
| Sign and publish with a pubkey so you have pseudonymous identity
| and can keep track of peers. Publish and consume through a
| gateway proxy or VPN if you want to keep your IP private.
|
| Supernodes can help with scaling, especially for mobile clients.
|
| You can block whomever you dislike or share only with your direct
| network. You can write your own prioritization algorithm to cut
| down on noise and create high signal channels. You can archive
| whatever you like easily.
|
| It should have been P2P all along.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| Try [Scuttlebutt](https://scuttlebutt.nz/), which is fully peer
| to peer. You'll experience the limitations soon enough.
| elitepleb wrote:
| there's a project brewing hoping to do just that by july
| https://liberapay.com/Revolver
| vidarh wrote:
| ActivityPub is mixed. It's peer-to-peer for follow/follower
| relationships, with you yourself deciding whether you want to
| sign up to an instance operated by someone else, or your own.
| It only need the federation for the "firehose" of public
| messages. But you don't _need_ that to be 100% distributed, as
| long as there are _enough_ publicly accessible endpoints.
| Nothing also stops you from gatewaying between the current
| federation mechanism for it and a fully peer-to-peer model if
| you invent a more distributed model.
| grishka wrote:
| No, P2P is impractical and it inevitably leaks into the UX,
| making it significantly more cumbersome. With a P2P system, you
| can't just send someone a link to something you found -- you
| either expect them to have a client for the service, or use a
| web proxy.
|
| > Sign and publish with a pubkey
|
| No, absolutely not. Public keys make terrible identifiers. You
| leak it and anyone can impresonate you, with you having no
| recourse. You lose it and you have to start a new life
| basically.
|
| Account recovery and the ability to revoke access are not "nice
| to have" things -- they're hard requirements for any identity
| system that is to be used in the real world by real, including
| non-tech, people. Trust me, I worked at the largest Russian
| social media company, they have a dedicated account recovery
| department for a reason.
| Ambolia wrote:
| Couldn't this be solved by chains of trust and "blacklisting"
| accounts? This is pretty much how it already works in the
| most annonymous corners of the internet, and those are the
| best corners.
| grishka wrote:
| Chains of trust would not solve the problem I mentioned but
| simply kick it further down the road.
| echelon wrote:
| > No, absolutely not. Public keys make terrible identifiers.
| You leak it and anyone can impresonate you, with you having
| no recourse. You lose it and you have to start a new life
| basically.
|
| Most average people can't even get the platforms to deal with
| ATOs.
|
| I'm not into crypto, but it's also accepted in that community
| that you must safeguard your keys.
|
| But beyond the status quo, I can easily imagine dozens of
| mitigations and protections and additional proofs: revokable
| cert authorities and peers, multiple signatures, portable /
| updatable keys, etc. etc.
| grishka wrote:
| > I'm not into crypto, but it's also accepted in that
| community that you must safeguard your keys.
|
| Of course it is _accepted_ , but so it is with passwords.
| And people are terrible enough with passwords, yet here you
| are suggesting that they use _something_ that can 't even
| be (easily) memorized, can't be invalidated, and has to be
| stored reliably yet secretly, as "the" identifier. You're
| putting too much trust into your average user.
|
| None of these cryptography-based identity schemes can
| possibly work in the real world, period.
| Ambolia wrote:
| You could still have server-owned accounts with that
| setup. It just wouldn't be the only option.
| grishka wrote:
| You could still have public-key-identified accounts with
| ActivityPub, too. ActivityPub does, in fact, use public-
| key cryptography for authentication, and each actor must
| have a key pair. It's just that it's not its _identity_
| -- the identifier is a URL where the actor JSON object
| can be found.
| easrng wrote:
| In practice the keys are managed by the servers though.
| lumost wrote:
| The only time these systems will work is when the
| perceived risk of snooping is greater than the value of
| account recovery. There is certainly a niche for this,
| but it probably isn't very broad. The majority of
| internet users seem uncomfortable with surveillance, but
| accepting of it.
|
| I suspect the pendulum will swing if users no longer feel
| they have anyway to opt-out of surveillance. e.g. private
| browsing and other systems are recognized as ineffective,
| or sensitive data such as chat messages become broadly
| leaked and accessible to the typical user.
| rglullis wrote:
| No, we don't need to do P2P, we just need to separate the
| identity from the application server, like HTTP and DNS.
|
| If I own my identity, I can use any service provider and I can
| attest data ownership at any time.
| anderspitman wrote:
| P2P is just a special case of federation, where n=1. IMO PKI is
| simply not a realistic identity platform for the average
| person. You have to back your private key up with some reliable
| third party and their recovery system is going to be based on
| email so you may as well just use email for identity.
| pavlov wrote:
| I feel the branding here is just not very appealing. "Federated"
| brings up associations of something boring and complicated and
| bureaucratic. And now because of the metaverse hype, "Fediverse"
| sounds like a VR training program for FBI agents.
|
| Take a leaf from the crypto pumpers and call it web4?
|
| "It's like web3 but advanced beyond money. You know, like in Star
| Trek. Hoarding tokens is just so 20th century."
| efsavage wrote:
| Also, the fact that all of these partners are depicted on the
| edge/fringe, with a big gap in the center, might be a little
| too accurate.
| [deleted]
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Every time I see "fediverse", I think it's some kind of US
| federal government cloud, until I remember that it's something
| else... I'm still not sure what.
| cowtools wrote:
| >"Fediverse" sounds like a VR training program for FBI agents.
|
| This made me spit out my coffee laughing
| tonguez wrote:
| yours is the most important post here. so i need the fediverse
| to escape the feds? sounds confusing. here's an example of a
| conversation that will never happen in the real world: "Why
| should I use the Fediverse?" "It's federated"
|
| The types of names that become popular are things like Beats or
| Goop. Is there anything remarkable about Beats headphones? No
| there's literally nothing except the name because it makes the
| average braindead person think it must be bass-boosted or
| something, and this was enough to make what dumb rapper came up
| with that name, a billionaire. But apparently this is just too
| intelligent for any nerds to figure out, so the Fediverse will
| remain unused.
| jug wrote:
| I agree -- I find this more exciting and approachable than the
| name implies!
|
| It's striking how much sense this makes to me: you interact in
| social networks like mail servers interact with each other. How
| did this concept take this long! (I know it's not NEW new but
| still... fairly new)
|
| Suddenly, due to the distributed nature, it doesn't need to be
| expensive to have your own server to be part of it, like how
| running a mail server can be cheap. But if you don't want to
| care about that, just sign up on an existing server like most
| do! In either case, it's cheaper because it's not centralized
| and because it's cheaper it doesn't need ads for funding and
| because it doesn't need ads it doesn't need to keep distracting
| you with an ever changing feed and pulling in "suggestions"
| (read: AI noise)
|
| So, there is really not that much to it!
|
| Like mail servers or chat servers (remember XMPP?), but now
| social network servers.
|
| And now Mastodon has an official app too, besides an
| approachable web interface. And thanks to the ActivityPub
| standard, anyone can write a server, or client app. I think
| it's pretty revolutionizing with the voice now put in our hands
| rather than in a corporation's.
|
| Definitely deserving of something more fun than "Fediverse"
| which sounds geeky and alienating.
| moron4hire wrote:
| General purpose social media will be considered the greatest
| mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented
| discussion boards.
|
| When you have no common topic around which to organize, then
| people have to search each other's personalities for commonality.
| And in doing so, they stratify along political lines. This isn't
| enough, so then they micro-stratify into various, rabid subgroups
| within those political wings.
|
| But when you have the only message board dedicated to an obscure
| brand of motorcycle from the 1940s (or whatever, IDK), then
| you're stuck with those people. You're stuck with either having
| to learn to get along or lose out on your favorite thing.
|
| Go back to topic-oriented message boards. You don't need identity
| continuity between all the message boards you are membered in.
| That serves the corporate surveillance state more than it serves
| you. You don't need people on Board A to see what you're doing on
| Board B. If it's important and relevant, you can tell them. You
| dn't need to be friended with all your aunts and cousins and ex
| boyfriends. That shit is weird, family is for seeing at
| Thanksgiving to remember why you hate them and then go back to
| being happy for the rest of the year.
|
| Go back to topic-oriented message boards.
| fsflover wrote:
| > Go back to topic-oriented message boards.
|
| This is essentially what Mastodon instances are. As a bonus,
| they can interact _if they want it_.
| rglullis wrote:
| No, this is how a subset of its users treat it, and there is
| a significant amount of people (myself included) who think
| topic-based instances are a poorly conceived idea for
| federated systems [0].
|
| [0] https://raphael.lullis.net/federations-and-identity/
| [deleted]
| parksy wrote:
| This is not going against what you said in principle, I feel
| what you are saying, but I feel the need to add that I was
| admin of a few topic oriented message boards in the 90's and
| early 2000's, and yeah as you said it was pretty good simply to
| be able to be part of some group that cared about the same
| random stuff as me, and I think a big part of it is because
| humanity literally had not ever been able to connect so quickly
| on shared interests from such geographically diverse regions
| before, but it wasn't all roses there either.
|
| Personality cults were a regular theme. Honestly just one
| individual with no other goals in life could wreak havoc by
| constantly weaving between the rules, launching sock puppets to
| do some virtual Munchausen-by-proxy performance, painting admin
| as the bad guys, staging crises that didn't really exist to get
| more followers (in the social sense, there was not really a
| "follow" option in the platforms at the time). These topic-
| based forums were often in direct competition, and on more than
| one occasion it was revealed (usually by infiltrating via long-
| term social engineering so you could get to see the IP
| addresses of the members) that these users were from
| competitors trying to stir trouble and siphon off members.
|
| Diversity and cliquishness was an issue. Generally a community
| would kick off around some exciting new theme, or just a
| general shared interest and grow organically from there. This
| was great but the longer the same group hangs together, the
| more insular the atmosphere and inside references became. It's
| just what groups of people do in physical groups when they hang
| together a lot - they grow bonds with each other, their shared
| experiences strengthen these bonds, and newcomers see this and
| can see that it will take a lot of effort and patience to reach
| the same level of acceptance, and the older and more insular a
| community becomes, the less people are attracted to it. Then
| eventually the older members see there's nothing new to learn
| here and drift off. So the lifecycle of topic-based message
| boards followed a standard inception/growth/stagnation/diaspora
| pattern.
|
| Generalised social media puts everyone on an even platform -
| albeit a pretty shitty one - everyone sucks equally by default.
| You're correct in that the centralisation has a ton of other
| side effects and I don't disagree that many of these aren't
| what people want (if they're aware of it). Just that as I said
| it wasn't all roses and we can't just "go back". There were
| tons of reasons why the topic-oriented message boards faded
| away and it wasn't just laziness or convenience. It is human
| nature to desire connection and a sense of place, balanced with
| a need for novelty and invigoration of ideas. Generalised
| social media provides that routinely and formulaically, they
| basically hacked our brains.
|
| Also on practicality of your suggestion, we can't force people
| to go back. You can't put a gun to people's heads and force
| them to only use single issue forums. I get the nostalgia
| because I was a part of it and it was great for a time, but it
| did also have a ton of downsides.
|
| I think we need to move forward not go back. Federated social
| networks are one attempt at this. It's a lot to take on board
| as we have to learn new things like managing our identity /
| signatures and learning differences between providers, but
| efforts are underway to try and shift us away from the big old
| attention silos people have been trained to use these days.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I never ran an popular board. I had ran some small ones,
| mostly folks I knew in real life. I've also ran several in-
| person clubs over the years, which obviously don't scale to
| the same degree. But I do have some inkling of the issues
| you're talking about.
|
| The newess of the whole thing is a great point. I keep hoping
| that Internet culture as a whole will invent a new sense of
| manners. (At the risk of being accused of being an Eternal
| Septemberist, which was actually before my time) 'Member when
| people talked about being a "good 'netizen"? We had trolls,
| but they knew what they were doing was against good manners
| (indeed, that's why they did it).
|
| Somewhere along the line, people stopped getting on-ramped
| onto the Internet. They got dumped on instead and the only
| role models they had were other folks who couldn't see the
| humanity behind the handle.
|
| A lot of the issues you talked about still exist in general-
| purpose social media. Indeed, the platform _reinforces_ it,
| as it gets to know your political proclivities better and
| pushes you into their engagement bubbles.
|
| I think the decentralization is a bulkheading against those
| issues. When they happen--and they will happen--the limited
| scope of the topic board limits the damage to that
| subculture. It doesn't impact the Whole Damn Nation. Can you
| imagine someone like Donald Trump winning the presidency
| without a one-stop-shop of advertising and propaganda
| dissemination that Facebook provides? You don't even have to
| spend that much money, you can get the people to organically
| self-sustain it with the right meme seeding.
|
| We had competing boards, too. I was active on two different
| game development boards. There were more that I just didn't
| bother with. If one started to feel like shit, I could dump
| over to another one. There was some continuity, but it wasn't
| absolute.
|
| IDK. I know I'm probably rose-colored-glasses on the issue.
| And you're right, there's no putting the cat back in the bag.
| Maybe the bigger problem is that most people really are shit
| and smartphones gave them access to the internet. "Garbage
| in, garbage out". But it seems like they'd all be fighting it
| out on the ESPN boards, away from my eyes, if it weren't for
| general-purpose social media.
| moron4hire wrote:
| One more note on the family bit:
|
| I love my mother. I wish I talked to her more often. But I wish
| it were about whatever she's doing and not whatever stupid shit
| she's seen on Facebook. Some post from 8 years ago about killer
| mosquitos that are going to wipe us out so don't let the kids
| play outside. "This really happened to this person I've never
| met or even talked to on Facebook". Mom, I think we would have
| heard about towns getting wiped out by mosquitos. Though I
| guess she does have cataracts, so maybe she can't see the date
| field.
|
| But you used to only get that kind of shit from Reader's
| Digest. So you only had to hear about it once per month, not
| every day, with old topics you thought were long dead suddenly
| coming back with a vengeance.
|
| Society used to have bulkheads.
| layer8 wrote:
| This gives me the thought that the focus should be on
| federating communities
| (boards/subreddits/forums/newsgroups/whatever you want to call
| it), and user identities only as a secondary aspect. The
| instances would choose which boards they want to host, and the
| contents of the boards would be synchronized between instances.
| The contents of the boards would be controlled by the community
| (board owners/moderators). Instances would decide which
| instances they want to synchronize with. Communities can also
| decide to fork. That's actually similar to how Usenet works,
| except that we want built-in moderation, and cryptography for
| content integrity and cross-instance authentication.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I think we really need to get over the idea of trying to get
| our content perpetually propagated out to the population, or
| trying to not miss out on consuming every single bit of
| content in a category.
|
| It's okay to live in a small community. Hell, it's okay to
| live in an enclave of a small community. There were whole
| sections of various topic boards I never visited, with active
| members there that I would not have recognized because they
| didn't visit the sections I frequented.
|
| It's okay to miss out on things. It's okay to not know about
| the latest JavaScript framework because it was developed in a
| community of stamp enthusiasts instead of your community of
| train enthusiasts. It's okay that fashion in Milan takes time
| to propagate to NYC and then to the country. It's okay to not
| hear about every single humanitarian crisis in the world when
| we can't reasonably do anything about it and we have our own
| to handle here at home.
|
| So much energy is put into pushing content, pushing pushing
| pushing. Boredom is okay! All this hyper optimization of
| content dissemination has started to feel like a system of
| control. Keep people preoccupied, overwhelmed with the
| enormity of the world. Then they won't question the coal
| plant in their back yard.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm not sure how that relates to my parent comment. What I
| outlined can apply both to private boards and public
| boards.
|
| Nevertheless, for the purpose of discoverability, I'm a fan
| of public forums. However that's still more a pull model
| than a push model, and very different from "microblogging"
| platforms (e.g. Twitter).
| phicoh wrote:
| In my opinion, social media like Facebook and Twitter were
| (mostly) fine before commercial interests killed them.
|
| There are plenty of reasons to connect with a group of people
| and have asynchronous communication. In many ways, current
| messaging groups are a poor replacement of early facebook and
| twitter.
|
| Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of
| control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook
| and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort
| updates.
|
| Over time, the initial concept of people who have something to
| say, watered down to liking or forwarding other people's
| updates.
|
| Topic-oriented discussion is great. But there is also a need to
| connect to a small group of people that just want to talk about
| random subjects that come up in everyday life.
| moron4hire wrote:
| > Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack
| of control over the visibility of updates, and for both
| facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter
| and sort updates.
|
| I think where it went wrong was moneyed advertising interests
| forcing controversial content on people because they had a
| one-stop-shop to do it instead of the unmanageably costly
| operation it would have been to carpet bomb the PHPBBs of
| yor.
|
| Advertising was still a thing back then, but advertisers were
| not in a position of power. Popular boards like Penny-Arcade
| could demand a premium and had full editorial control.
| Smaller boards had less of a bargaining position, but only
| insofar as they were willing to annoy users. There was much
| wailing and gnashing of teeth the day Gamedev.net introduced
| a one-time, full-page ad, that could be dismissed
| immediately, that only showed up when you first visited the
| site for the day. It lasted less than a week. Now you can't
| go 10 minutes on YouTube without getting essentially the same
| thing with a strict timer making sure you have suffered to a
| satisfactory degree before being allowed to continue on. If
| advertisers could track your eyes and make sure you were
| actually looking at the screen before engaging the timer,
| they would.
|
| It has nothing to do with user facing features on these
| platforms. It's the centralization and control that
| centralization gives to the owners of the platform that is
| the problem.
|
| Recall the 90/9/1 rule of the Internet. It's always been the
| case that 90% of people are nothing more than lurkers and the
| content is only created by 1% of people, with the missing
| middle commenting on it. Like buttons shifted the scale on
| how many people "engaged" with content, drawing from that 90%
| of lurkers, but didn't change the 9/1 part. That alone
| doesn't stratify people. It takes maliciously weaponizing
| that content against people.
| Kye wrote:
| The page for Mastodon reminded me of the alternate web
| interfaces, Pinafore and Halcyon:
| https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/
| wellpast wrote:
| Wither is #nostr [1]?
|
| [1] https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr
| monkin wrote:
| Ratio of active vs created accounts is very low, it feels like
| most of them ware abandon by users after the initial boom. That
| one that's stands out is Mastodon which isn't a surprise.
|
| For whole fediverse to succeed it will have to jump out from
| niche groups and fight for ordinary users that are used to
| Facebook or Twitter. Which will not happen until some big
| brands/interesting people start to use them as PR/commentary
| tools. And, yes, that's the single point of all social networks,
| and not connecting with friends.
| kvetching wrote:
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Niche groups? Have you seen how huge and heterogeneous
| mastodon.social and the likes are? They're even bigger than
| that ;-)
|
| Even the "niche" instances have sufficient numbers that there
| are enough niches for many people to see something of interest
| there, and most of them freely allow off-topic chatter, nay
| welcome it.
|
| One of the benefits of the Fediverse is that even if you're on
| an instance that's for talking about movies, you can a) almost
| always talk about anything and b) talk to your followers about
| whatever you please.
|
| The Fediverse isn't about brands or influencers using them for
| PR or commentary, although there's nothing to stop that. It's
| kinda against the fundamental ethos: that it's about people not
| brands. And in that, it enjoys the fact that it's already
| succeeded, but it inherently doesn't want to "succeed" in the
| commercial or capitalistic sense. All it needs to do is
| continue to exist.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| If anyone wonders why LBRY (Odyssee) is not part of Fediverse,
| despite dwarving PeerTube or whatever it is called:
|
| https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/issues/3982
| Ambolia wrote:
| Which are the platforms that let you own your data
| cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly
| for yourself and your followers? Basically the network should be
| in the data and the servers should be replaceable. I think those
| are very obvious bottlenecks that affect most of these
| alternative networks.
|
| On the other side, censorship is also very important, nobody
| wants to have to dwell into spam and filth to read a small amount
| of valuable content. Maybe be able to choose your own censors
| somehow? Or build chains of trusts with your friends and
| "friends-of-friends" that can be revoked at any point?
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Which are the platforms that let you own your data
| cryptographically and let you move your account around
| seamlessly for yourself and your followers?
|
| If you know of a homomorphic encryption scheme that would work
| for this and remain economically viable for other people to
| host, let me know. I simply don't think it's reasonable to
| expect that degree of privacy, much less on a Twitter clone. If
| you want privacy, use Matrix or OMEMO.
| Ambolia wrote:
| I mean "own" not in the sense of privacy in this case. But in
| the sense that the account (public key) belongs to the person
| who has a certain private key. So you can move your content
| to a different server or domain and keep all your audience,
| maybe with a small transition period while the new server
| becomes well known, but not like now getting kicked out of
| twitter or youtube just results on a bunch or broken links
| and contextless comments.
| smoldesu wrote:
| AFAIK Mastodon implements a migration feature that lets you
| move your followers to/from different accounts if you want
| to use a new homeserver. Not sure how it works on the
| backend, but it's got this base mostly covered.
| dharma1 wrote:
| Try https://lens.dev if you're interested in portable
| data/social graph that is onchain (disclaimer - I work on this)
| emptysongglass wrote:
| What does this solve that Urbit doesn't?
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| What you describe is essentially Tim Berners-Lee's vision for
| Solid: https://solidproject.org/
|
| The idea is that every individual person has a container for
| their own data, and then platforms interact with that data
| using methods built on the Semantic Web.
|
| I frankly don't think it has a hope in hell of succeeding, but
| I love the concept!
| bduerst wrote:
| I haven't dived into the specs, but how does solid solve bad
| actors getting access to your pod?
|
| Usually today your data is fragmented across platforms (so
| damage is reduced) which have centralized authorities who can
| step in and fix bad actor issues.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Honestly, I'm gonna be super lazy and just quote the front
| page of the site:
|
| > Anyone or anything that accesses data in a Solid Pod uses
| a unique ID, authenticated by a decentralized extension of
| OpenID Connect. Solid's access control system uses these
| IDs to determine whether a person or application has access
| to a resource in a Pod.
|
| Of course, as a data owner, you could accidentally grant a
| bad actor access to your data, but presumably you can also
| revoke that access as well.
| bduerst wrote:
| But that's just it though - if bad actors gain control,
| you lose the ability to reject OAuth creds (which is what
| OpenID is). Things like social engineering or phishing of
| credentials, which happens at scale today.
|
| They need a way to handle situations _when_ bad actors
| take over, because other solutions handle this with
| centralized authorities who step in and rectify the
| issue.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I'm now confused by what you mean when you say "gain
| control".
|
| Are you talking about literally exploiting a bug and
| hacking the underlying service that is providing access
| to the pod?
|
| In that case, it's a question of who owns and operates
| the pod. Solid is conceived as a set of standards that
| can be implemented by either individuals, or by companies
| on behalf of individuals. Think "data ownership as a
| service".
|
| So you can still have centralized entities that implement
| the spec and provide support and other services for
| users, including dealing with security incidents.
| slkdk32 wrote:
| ianopolous wrote:
| You might be interested in Peergos - https://peergos.org (co-
| founder here)
|
| Properties: * fully self-authenticating protocol independent of
| DNS and the TLS certificate authorities * self sovereign
| identity * you can migrate to a different host and keep all
| your data, and social graph, and old links continue to work. *
| You can authorize and run live mirrors of your data which help
| provide bandwidth * you only see things from or via people you
| follow
| k__ wrote:
| Permissionless decentralized platforms.
|
| This includes Radicle, IPFS, Skynet, SSB, Arweave, Ethererum,
| and many more.
| grenran wrote:
| I think this was the premise of the original World Wide Web
| (minus the cryptographic part) before everything was
| centralised. Essentially people would have their own personal
| web pages and readers subscribe via RSS.
| leephillips wrote:
| That's, to a large extent, what the WWW is today. I have my
| own personal site, and a collection of RSS/Atom feeds that I
| check to see what's happening on other people's personal
| sites. It's surely an exaggeration to say that "everything"
| is centralized, despite the rise of the huge monoliths such
| as Twitter.
| mescaline wrote:
| I was thinking about "physical reality" as a means to establish
| a chain of trust. If you and I sit next to each other, we have
| vocal and image chat available. Other than someone coming and
| physically injecting themselves into our "sphere", our
| communications can be trustworthy and reliable.
|
| If a "chunk" of data could be "sovereignized" by association
| with other "nearby" chunks of data (through some common signing
| event), one could "move" seamlessly from one chunk to the
| other, regardless of where it was being "served" from.
|
| When I talk about "chunks" here, I'm talking about document
| boundaries and ownership/control of the data.
|
| If we were in some sort of simulation, moving from my sphere of
| data to yours would look something like a probability
| distribution. By having signed contracts between the spheres,
| one could increase the probability that movement in a general
| direction resulted in access and loading of trusted data.
|
| Because the chains start out empty, nobody "owns" these
| fictitious plots until they are established through preexisting
| trusted channels. Various channels as well. None of this
| bullshit NFT land grab crap that nobody can trust. Use NFTs, or
| even better, Lightning payments to establish the "authenticity"
| of the nearby data spheres.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Urbit does this: https://urbit.org/blog/an-urbit-overview
| riffic wrote:
| no one's adopting urbit, let's be real.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| You didn't come with any numbers so I will and they
| contradict your claims: https://hatryx-
| lastud.tlon.network/newsletter/urbit-takeoff-...
| rglullis wrote:
| I _believe_ this is possible with ActivityPub already, and the
| servers just need to start making a distinction between the
| identities from its users and the "federation":
| https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/106825107786781891
| pat2man wrote:
| Its interesting that DNS doesn't come up more often as the
| solution here. Owning a domain (or subdomain) seems a whole
| lot easier than most of the other "decentralized" solutions
| that get discussed. And if DNS is too centralized for you
| then something like ENS can replace it without needing very
| many changes to the rest of the stack.
| rglullis wrote:
| Exactly. That's the approach defended and promoted by the
| indieweb thinking heads: start with identity and structure
| things bottom-up. Machines are quite good at translating
| between the different protocols. If I want to publish my
| content using RSS and you want to consume it using
| ActivityPub, it is easy to write software that makes the
| bridge, _provided your identity doesn 't change_.
| kovalevski wrote:
| the most federated thing - indie web - is not mention there,
| unfortunately. it'd be great to have a link to some list of
| indieweb websites.
| easrng wrote:
| Mastodon uses microformats so you can follow Mastodon accounts
| with an IndieWeb h-feed reader. I don't think it handles
| WebMentions though.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these
| services seem fun and, different, and I would love to
| participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them
| up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community:
|
| I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit
| (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse:
| A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance
| or configure the clients B. Understands the value of
| decentralized platforms and holds those values themselves
| C. Knows more than 1-2 people who ALSO meet the qualifications of
| A and B (aside from me)
|
| I think this leaves two possibilities: 1. There
| can be a small number of large instances, which removes the
| issues caused by A and B but has the effect of reducing most of
| the benefits found in B (focus, privacy, catered speech, etc).
| 2. There will need to be a million tiny silo'd instances (<5
| people). This solves B, but we run into the issues of A and C. I
| realize this is closer to the goal.
|
| I'd love to see Fediverse "platforms" succeed, but I'm not sure
| how they can since the network effect is what is needed.
| andreyk wrote:
| For 2, I wonder if there could be a 'wrapper' service (website)
| around Fediverse that makes it as easy to set up an instance as
| Slack or Discord. It would still be decentralized, except the
| service could abstract away the technical bits entirely.
| myself248 wrote:
| Bingo. Send payment here, choose a name, your instance spins
| up, and stays up as long as you've paid for hosting.
|
| When payment runs out, it emails you a download link to
| export your data which you can take to another provider, or
| just start paying again and it starts working again.
|
| I'd send a few bucks to such a site, sure.
| msoucy wrote:
| There is such a thing in masto.host, though I haven't used
| it personally.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I completely agree, there's such a barrier for entry that's
| incredibly difficult for not-tech people to emphasize with.
|
| I think there's an interesting case to be looked at with
| Discord. Not that discord itself is decentralized, but the
| surprising amount of vibrant and active communities in the form
| of Discord servers. If the client-side barrier can be
| sufficiently lowered, I'm sure many communities like that have
| at least one or two people knowledgeable enough to set up an
| instance or two
| anderspitman wrote:
| > Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance
| or configure the clients
|
| Yep. Self-hosting something like Plex (please consider Jellyfin
| instead) or a social Fediverse server shouldn't be any more
| difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone.
| I think projects like Sandstorm, yunohost, Cloudron, etc have
| the right idea, but they're still way too complicated for the
| average person to get up and running. I've been chewing on this
| problem for about a year, and I believe it's solvable with
| technologies that are currently available. This is the focus of
| my current main side project.
| [deleted]
| kixiQu wrote:
| https://runyourown.social/#keep-it-small <-- Something like 50,
| where only 1 or 2 have to have the technical skills, seems
| reasonable to amortize the admin time. I don't totally know why
| we're saying that kind of middle number is infeasible.
| glenstein wrote:
| I agree with your points on B and C, but the vast majority of
| people don't have to know or care about A.
| riffic wrote:
| > technical ability to set up their own instance or configure
| the clients
|
| This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted
| services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail
| services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved
| on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or
| Google Workspace.
|
| Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack -
| hosted services will be the dominant players once the ecosystem
| evolves.
|
| also, I'll repeat my _new business model_ Twitter should adopt
| -- take the underlying protocol (ActivityPub), white-label
| their services and sell them to orgs who want Twitter on their
| own domain (also allowing for control over the username
| namespace like email / @anyusername@domain.tld). I've been
| pitching this idea for years and no one's ever given a serious
| critique of the idea. A global unified namespace like the one
| Twitter uses is problematic (squatting/trademark disputes, etc)
| and awful.
| Kye wrote:
| Interesting thing: one of the major ActivityPub platforms
| (Write.as) offers a white label version of their blogging
| platform if you don't want to run it yourself.
|
| https://writefreely.host/
| rglullis wrote:
| I've been waiting for you to join communick, as this has been
| my plan from the start. ;)
|
| I started with the simple "managed" hosting, now I am hearing
| things up to do custom hosting and the whitelabel.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Don't hosted services defeat the point of federation in the
| first place? That's how we've ended up with email being as
| difficult as it is to self-host.
|
| Same issue with Discord, it's a centralized service where you
| and your content are at the mercy of the owner of the
| service, which I think is one of the big things that
| federated alternatives (like Matrix) are meant to solve, so
| any single entity can't unilaterally revoke your
| participation in the entire network.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I don't think so.
|
| Being able to switch what provider hosts your social media
| without losing your network is valuable (and has pro-social
| effects) without needing to self-host.
|
| > That's how we've ended up with email being as difficult
| as it is to self-host.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean, what's the "that", what do you
| think led to the situation where email is hard to self-
| host?
|
| Even if hard to self-host, email succeeds in avoiding
| vendor lock-in _if_ you have your own domain. Which most
| people don 't, because of cost and because _that_ can be
| hard to manage for a normal person. But if fediverse
| succeeds at giving a typical person the lack of vendor
| lock-in that email-with-your-own-custom-domain does, I'd
| consider that a success on the criteria of what federation
| is meant to achieve.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| >I'm not sure what you mean, what's the "that", what do
| you think led to the situation where email is hard to
| self-host?
|
| I was referring to spam filtering, where all the big
| hosts know to allow each other through, but make it very
| difficult for smaller hosts to participate by being tight
| lipped about their filtering criteria and making others
| have to jump through lots of hoops to not be treated as
| spam. Which, when considering the high cost of being spam
| filtered (eg. if you're a business) ends up making it
| very hard to practically self-host.
|
| Similarly, I wouldn't think fediverse would have
| succeeded in the goals of federation with large
| centralized hosting providers. Since upon reaching
| critical mass, they could easily enact similar policies
| in the name of preventing spam or for 'safety'. The
| content would be going through their network and would be
| stored on their hardware, so they would use the same
| logic current social media uses to justify their right to
| moderate without oversight.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| > I've been pitching this idea for years and no one's ever
| given a serious critique of the idea.
|
| It would dilute the Twitter brand and divide internal
| resources. That's the main critique I can think of. Would
| never happen while Twitter was a publicly traded corporation.
| Under private ownership, it very well might happen.
|
| I think the Fediverse idea is great, but people are dumb.
| @somebody is about as far as most people can handle.
| @somebody@domain.with.dots is confusing, and nobody will
| understand. Imagine having to explain bang paths to Fred in
| accounting so he can send an electronic mail.
|
| Never underestimate how obtuse the average computer user is.
| They can be taught, but it takes many, many years before it
| becomes common enough that people grok it without trouble.
|
| (I like your idea, btw.)
| riffic wrote:
| fair critique and absolutely reasonable considering why
| they've never done it. It just seems like a more ethical
| business model than selling ads and data licensing
| (https://octodon.social/@jalefkowit/108216691483123862).
| dash2 wrote:
| It's strange to argue that people are stupid because they
| don't want to deal with irrelevant technicalities. Are they
| also stupid because they prefer domain names to IP
| addresses?
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Fair enough, swap out "ignorant" if you want. The
| learning curve for Internety-thing is pretty steep, which
| is why people like "Find us on Facebook!" so much.
|
| But what I was doing was comparing Fedi
| @somebody@some.thing.com to old-school bang paths. It's
| unlikely to take off among the masses until significant
| time passes. Heck, even email addresses baffle enough
| people to make me doubt whether all of this Internet
| stuff was worth the trouble.
| riffic wrote:
| > "Find us on Facebook!"
|
| ah, the modern take on "AOL Keyword:" from the late 90s.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Maybe this was the underlying goal in their efforts with
| Bluesky?[1]
|
| 1. https://blueskyweb.org
| riffic wrote:
| probably. Fortunately Bluesky is vaporware so the Fediverse
| and ActivityPub actually have the advantage here of being a
| standard that has an established community of implementors,
| and momentum.
|
| EDIT: I've said before, the PBLLC should be working with
| the W3C, IETF, or other open bodies, and they've always had
| a seat at the table (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/join).
| pfraze wrote:
| We're absolutely not vaporware. We're also completely
| happy to live in a world where both ActivityPub and
| Bluesky exist, and prioritize different problems with
| different approaches.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| It depends on who "your community" is - if they're people who
| can set up their own instance, and care about decentralisation
| - congrats, there are already loads of them on the Fediverse,
| in terms of users and instances. C) solved.
|
| If your community is "people I'm interested in talking to" then
| they don't need A) or B, and there are so many of those on the
| Fediverse that congrats, C) is solved.
|
| The fact of the matter is the Fediverse (and even just
| Mastodon) is that 1) is not the current reality (plenty of
| medium and small-ish instances), and 2) does not have to be,
| and indeed is not the reality, and even if it were, A and C
| still need not apply.
|
| I sometimes fear people jump into the Fedi but, understandably,
| aren't versed on how discoverability works, thinks there's no-
| one interesting there, and leaves. Whether setting up your own
| instance or using a tiny existing one, you can browse the user
| directories and posts from other, larger instances, and find
| interesting souls to connect with, without having to make an
| account there.
|
| Most importantly one can search tags used in posts and profiles
| which relate to your interests. Any good / mature client (or
| the web UI) lets you search for tags and pin them as their own
| timelines - so a rolling conversation about your fav topics,
| across all instances that you federate with.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Platforms should not own content and subscribers graph. Users
| should own content and subscribers graph, preferably by
| reliance on public key cryptography. Then you will be notified
| of your peers' contents on any platform.
|
| Imagine a popular but controversial blogger deplatforming
| attempt, followed by his 300k subscribers getting an 'Your
| contact has just uploaded their first video on NextTube'
| notification in five minutes. You don't need many platforms
| when platform understands they only have power to de-content
| themselves.
|
| You also no longer need those rows of social icons since you
| only need to subscribe to a creator once.
|
| Content should reside in P2P/DHT mesh and platforms would only
| present, curate, decorate and discover it. But it should also
| be discoverable via PKI+DHT.
| krinchan wrote:
| As someone whose primary social media is in the Fediverse, the
| discussion in this thread is ... confusing? It's so disconnected
| from my experienced reality of the Fediverse I don't even know
| where to _begin_.
|
| Functionally, my experience within the Fediverse is it's
| literally just Twitter but with moderation fully broken up
| between instances and not agreed on. An instance's
| administrator(s) can decide what instances users are allowed to
| interact with. This is done either via whitelisting or
| blacklisting, though almost all instances work via blacklisting.
| Furthermore, administrators have total control over moderation.
|
| Users pick the instances that closely align with their own
| ideals. If they don't like the moderation, they can move
| instances.
|
| The software that backs the Fediverse and the software that
| consumes it is quite varied. Users are unusually adept at
| navigating all this.
|
| We had the same sort of frontend diversity in Twitter for many
| years. This isn't much more than that, honestly. Now you just can
| match any client with any set of moderation rules you like best.
| It's very much a free market approach to the question of
| moderation of user generated content by Big Tech.
|
| When it's so easy to move between instances and you have a large
| selection of moderation rules to select from for your account's
| "residence", you no longer really have a legal leg to stand on
| for "censorship" because you can just move next door where
| explicit adult gifs are totes cool and your followers will be
| updated with your new home. There's literally a network of
| instances that can be as moderated as your most loathsome ban
| happy video game board to as unmoderated as your favorite
| anonymous image board. And _you_ get to pick. Not Musk. Not wall
| street. And certainly not Congress.
| hello_marmalade wrote:
| This is a nice idea in theory, but the issue then becomes
| inconsistent moderation that affects what is visible to
| everyone. If you get banned or have posts deleted on one
| platform, presumably those posts disappear from that instance,
| and thus the Fediverse as a whole.
|
| This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at
| least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves
| off from other instances or instances at large, which seems
| pretty unhealthy.
|
| Not to mention, people don't typically want to pay for these
| services, or pay to host them, they want to access them for
| free. On top of that, with something like Twitter, the desire
| is to be visible to all, rather than just a few. Most people
| use Twitter to interact with 'the world', not just a local part
| of it.
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| Is having both a normal social media account & a federated
| version _okay_? I 've seen a lot of people delete their Twitter
| and then hop on Mastodon because they're worried about Musk.
| Whether their concern about Musk is valid is another question.
| How do people see his acquisition of Twitter as a bad thing? If
| anything he will try to improve it no?
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Yes, as a several-year fedi user I don't see anything wrong per
| se with having and using both. (I never got into twitter so I
| personally don't.) The most important thing to remember is that
| it is specifically not Twitter, and you'll be disappointed if
| you try to bring the exact same kind of interactions you might
| have had on Twitter. Every instance has its own themes and
| inside jokes that you can get to know and become part of. It's
| designed to be more about forming relationships and community
| than getting lots of likes and followers.
|
| It's possible to use a bot to crosspost your tweets onto a fedi
| account. Hardcore fedi fans tend to frown on it because it's a
| very arms-length way to interact with people on the platform,
| but a lot of people do it and I've even followed a few. If
| you're considering using a crosspost bot make sure your
| instance's rules allow them; different instances have different
| policies about that kind of thing.
|
| As far as Musk goes, I have no doubt he will try to improve
| Twitter according to his vision of improvement, which not every
| user will agree with. We've already seen similar situations
| with Tumblr's policy changes a few years back leading to a wave
| of new users across the fediverse. Eventually some people go
| back/elsewhere and some stick around and become a part of these
| communities. Welcome to the fediverse!
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| >Is having both a normal social media account & a federated
| version _okay_?
|
| Of course it is. There will always be a small number of [insert
| thing here] purists, it's best to (mostly) ignore them when
| they moralise about _only_ using [thing] (but don 't
| _completely_ ignore them, they 're usually on to something,
| despite the hardline position).
| hbn wrote:
| If these people are fleeing Twitter because they're terrified
| about a platform where everyone they don't like isn't banned,
| just wait until they realize there's no way to ban someone from
| the fediverse
| kevingadd wrote:
| Is that a typo? This post doesn't make sense to me. The
| latter isn't true, because individual instances can ban you
| and instances that allow bad behavior will be defederated.
| Elon has indicated a desire to unban users, not ban them.
| hbn wrote:
| Yup, it was a typo (edited now). I meant that if they want
| everyone they don't like to be banned, the fediverse
| doesn't seem like the place for that.
|
| Getting banned from a fediverse instance isn't as impactful
| as being banned from twitter, and I think those people
| would want it to work like twitter. Not too sure about
| instances being defederated though, that's the first I've
| heard of that.
| kevingadd wrote:
| The biggest defederation example I know of (with the
| caveat that I haven't actually used Mastodon in years) is
| that when Pixiv launched their own instance it quickly
| grew to be something like the 1st or 2nd biggest instance
| in the network and was eventually defederated by many
| other instances because people were REALLY antsy about
| the fact that a lot of Japanese art on Pixiv is illegal
| in other countries.
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| "Japanese art" is kind of underselling pornographic
| images of fictional children. Most forms of Japanese art,
| I presume, aren't of this nature.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Yeah, I meant specifically a lot of the content on Pixiv.
| It kind of is a self-selection problem because content
| that won't cut it on services like Twitter is allowed
| there since it operates out of Japan, so naturally their
| Mastodon instance will also be used by artists to post
| stuff they can't post on Twitter.
|
| fwiw while the underaged illustrations are the most
| objectionable part, there's also other stuff that could
| get you in trouble - for example, illustrations of ww2
| nazi soldiers with accurate garb would run up against
| regulations in germany and put the operators of german
| fediverse instances at risk. There are a few high-profile
| japanese games that feature accurate ww2 uniforms,
| weapons, vehicles etc so if you end up with fan-art for
| those games on your service you will quickly need an
| answer for "what happens if content on the fediverse is
| illegal in germany"
| rapnie wrote:
| You can watch "Decentralized networks vs. the Trolls" to
| get a sense of how it works. Good video.
|
| https://conf.tube/w/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01f38f966
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think it's fine, comes down to your reasons for trying the
| Fediverse. I'm not fully opposed to Twitter etc, a lot of
| people I'm interested in are there and I've managed to filter
| out the bad stuff to a reasonable extent.
|
| Similarly I find the Fediverse interesting technically and
| there's at least some content I enjoy, so I have that too.
|
| It's the same with Discord and Matrix. It's probably even
| better to have both accounts because then it isn't as much of a
| hurdle to move platforms if one thing doesn't go in the
| direction you'd like.
|
| As for people leaving Twitter over Musk, I expect most of the
| big ones to quietly come back once they find an excuse, after
| all, most of them are mainly addicted to the attention, which
| isn't as easy to earn in the Fediverse due to a lack of a
| recommender system with perverse incentives to manipulate.
| simonw wrote:
| This is the best commentary I've seen about the Twitter
| situation, from someone who worked there for four years at a
| senior level (but isn't there now so is free to share their
| thoughts):
| https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2022/04/anchors-away
|
| The short version: Twitter's challenges are not hard technology
| problems, they're hard social and community problems. These are
| not areas Elon has shown any interest in understanding or
| respecting.
| gpm wrote:
| Twitter was a space with a set of rules, Elon has publicly
| indicated his intention to change those rules, and many of the
| people who came to it with the understanding that those rules
| existed don't really want to be there without those rules in
| place.
|
| Improve is subjective. Some people want to go to a coffee shop,
| others a Bar. Elon is buying the space and turning it from one
| into the other, of course there's going to be turnover in the
| patrons of the space.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| You can certainly have a normal and a federated social media. I
| do. You likely already have email, which is also kind of
| federated and kind of social media.
| Ambolia wrote:
| Intra-elite competition between old media types and silicon
| valley types has being on for a while in different ways. Musk
| has been openly exposing some outsider narratives, so he is
| seen as an enemy to the old media types.
|
| I think this is most of it. The "billionaire" narrative doesn't
| make any sense. It's not like Twitter, or any other media
| companies, were owned by poor people until now.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >It's not like Twitter, or any other media companies, were
| owned by poor people until now
|
| To an extent they were because they're a public company. A
| public company is accountable to its shareholders which in
| principle is open to everyone (generally represented by
| institutional investors in practice), whereas a private
| company is, in this case, only answering to one person, and
| only really serving one person.
|
| That basic democratic aspect of American capitalism where
| everyone can take a stake in the economy is undermined when
| people withdraw from public markets altogether. It looks more
| like another gilded age.
| taurusnoises wrote:
| I have tried to wrap my head around how this works as a total
| outsider noob, and I just can not get it! But, I want to.
|
| I get the email comparison (different platforms can all speak, so
| why not have social media be the same?). But, then the white
| sheets are just all php and python and all this stuff that
| doesn't make any sense (I know _what_ they are, just not what to
| do with that info), and for better or worse doesn 't make sense
| to anyone I know. I'm, like, doing the Odin Project, actively
| trying to learn, and I still can't really get it. How is this
| supposed to translate to anyone else?
|
| But, again, I want it to.
| jwarden wrote:
| This might help. If Twitter for some reason decided to migrate
| to the Fediverse, then you could login to their mastodon.social
| account, follow @elonmusk@twitter.com, and reply to Elon's
| tweets, all without having a Twitter account. And Elon and
| other people on Twitter would see your reply (coming from, say,
| @taurusnoises@mastodon.social) and could reply to you.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| The W3 spec has a high level overview of how ActivityPub works.
|
| https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview
| nileshtrivedi wrote:
| ActivityPub is a generalization of Email. Email gives you a
| cloud-hosted inbox that others can put stuff in. ActivityPub
| gives you both an online inbox AND a "outbox" that YOU can put
| stuff in that others can check out. Check out this diagram:
| https://activitypub.rocks/static/images/ActivityPub-tutorial...
|
| The stuff here is called an "Activity" around "Objects". Follow
| request is a "Follow" activity with the "Actor" as the object.
| A tweet is a "Create" activity with the "Note" being the
| object. There's an entire vocabulary defined in the spec:
| https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#object-typ...
|
| This way, all kinds of social platforms - from YouTube to
| GitHub - can be modeled in this general distributed pub/sub
| system.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >ActivityPub gives you both an online inbox AND a "outbox"
| that YOU can put stuff in that others can check out.
|
| It's djb's Internet Mail 2000!
| giantrobot wrote:
| That's a term I haven't heard in forever. For those that
| don't know the reference: https://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| Basically you have e-mail, which is a protocol (actually a set
| of protocols, but ignore for now). Thus you can e-mail a
| protonmail user from your gmail/corporate account without any
| issues. However Twitter and Facebook are proprietary black box
| services and beyond using a Facebook-provided identity to
| create a Twitter account, there is no way to 'friend' a Twitter
| user on your FB account or interact with content in any way.
|
| Then there comes a protocol called ActivityPub[1], which
| "e-mailifies" social networking. So far Mastodon and their
| goodreads clone are harvesting modest success.
|
| I am a great fan of the goal, but not of the top-down approach
| W3C have taken with ActivityPub. For example LBRY solves this
| problem in a different way and is way more successful than all
| of Fediverse in total.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
| ancientsofmumu wrote:
| > _So far Mastodon and their goodreads clone_
|
| Had to look this up, I think you mean BookWyrm(?).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420580
|
| https://bookwyrm.social/
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| Yes, exactly this, thank you. It is actually quite good,
| shame that their main node seems to be out of capacity.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| I don't think you need to understand anything about php or
| Python to understand this. I think the email comparison is the
| best metaphor.
|
| Gmail and Yahoo and whatnot all speak the same language,
| "email". They've friended one another ("federated") and have
| unfriended spam mail servers. They've also settled on roughly
| the same design for their mail clients, but they didn't need
| to.
|
| Unlike Gmail, there are a zillion Mastodon servers, because
| anyone can make it. And unlike email, the "ActivityPub"
| protocol can be used for a bunch of different uses. Mastodon
| cuts it up to look like Twitter, Pixelfed cuts it up to look
| like Instagram, PeerTube cuts it up to look like YouTube, etc.
|
| Basically, Gmail is just one email server, and it speaks SMTP .
|
| Similarly, Mastodon.social is just _one_ Mastodon server, and
| it speaks ActivityPub.
|
| In practice, I don't think you really need to understand it any
| further than the email analogy. I just tell those interested to
| sing up for Mastodon.social and see if they like it.
| fsflover wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009468.
| k101 wrote:
| It seems to me that the main reason for unpopularity, in addition
| to the lack of advertising, is monetization. How can I recoup my
| production of content that can be expensive? It seems to me that
| a competent symbiosis of fediverse and cryptocurrency is the real
| web3.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| The Fediverse is not for your target market. We hate Internet
| advertising: it serves to use and abuse us, and is a security
| risk to our devices. It exists in opposition of monetising
| people and what they do and say, because we're sick of being
| retreated like we're worth a ton of beans. We don't live to be
| a part of profit.
| k101 wrote:
| And how can fediverse survive, and how can it pay for
| servers? Who among the professionals will do this? If you
| leave this system only for enthusiasts, then you can leave
| everything as it is and improve only the code. And if you
| want to overthrow the monopoly without violence, then the
| authors will need monetization tools and not necessarily
| advertising . Linux would not have become so popular without
| redhat and other commercial companies. P. S I myself really
| like everything free and use only open source software, give
| donates periodically to the authors.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| How does it / will it pay for servers? This is a great
| question and I can guarantee if you set up an account
| somewhere, and start asking instance admins this question,
| you'll find out exactly how. I'd answer your question but
| you'll get much more organic answers and they'll answer you
| in a way you'll believe and understand far better than just
| from me.
|
| The system is not, and was never, just for technology
| enthusiasts. The majority of people I chat with probably
| wouldn't know their RAM from their GPU and I wouldn't
| expect them to. Sure there are a lot of Linux/FOSS
| enthusiasts there, but they're the minority.
|
| I don't know anyone trying to overthrow monopolies by
| running an instance because again, I say that not
| everyone's motivation for everything they do is for the
| acquisition of wealth.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I joined a fediverse group but it's all just random short posts.
| Kind of like knock-off Twitter to put it bluntly. Also the "home"
| tab is empty which is a bit confusing.
|
| I want this to succeed, but as a social media site in order to
| succeed they need people (interesting people who like to post
| interesting things), and a good feed algorithm. This is where
| Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc. are worth a lot: many social media
| sites could easily replace Twitter except they don't have these.
| easrng wrote:
| It's like twitter but decentralized and with no algorithm. You
| follow people and you see their posts in chronological order.
| It works great once you've started, but yeah if you don't know
| anyone on fedi to begin with you're going to have a rough time
| finding people to follow. If you already know people who have
| fedi, follow them and when they boost posts see if the person
| who wrote the post they boosted is interesting. If they are,
| follow. Don't follow too many people though or you will have an
| unmanageably large timeline. I've been on fedi for about a year
| and a quarter. I started out following one person
| (@maia@crimew.gay) and now I follow 108 people and have made
| ~3.2k posts. It works for me and my friends at least and I
| don't really care about adoption beyond that.
| zaarn wrote:
| For the home tab to populate, you need to follow people.
| Mastodon doesn't push content you didn't ask for. I would
| recommend checking out the local and federated timelines and
| see what people are up to.
| slkdk32 wrote:
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think that the ActivityPub protocol is better than Twitter,
| Facebook, etc, but is still too many problematic and is more
| complicated than it should be. I can see many problems, one of
| which is that it seems to default to HTML and some services seem
| to require it, and that it probably requires Unicode too, and
| that auth services may also need a web browser to work, which is
| also no good.
|
| There is NNTP, email, IRC, etc, that you can use, which I think
| can work better. (I invented "Unusenet" to avoid namespace
| collision, if needed; there are a few different ways to define
| names in Unusenet, one of which is reverse domain names)
|
| An implementation should not need a web browser or something as
| complicated as it, and should be independent of the programming
| language to be used (you could use C, JavaScript, etc), with
| optional TLS.
|
| Of course you will need to be able to block messages, or to not
| block them if that is what you wish, but that will be possible
| easily enough. ActivityPub does this too, but so does NNTP,
| email, IRC, etc; you can define your own filter criteria, and
| NNTP can have moderated or unmoderated newsgroups. Many clients
| can have scoring files, and a few support global scoring files
| (which the user can install or not at their choice, but
| unfortunately these do not seem to be portable across different
| implementations, as far as I can tell).
|
| Mailing lists are still sometimes used, but NNTP would be better,
| I think.
| easrng wrote:
| The subset of HTML supported by Mastodon is quite small and
| would likely be easy to parse and render without a browser.
| Misskey and glitch-soc support more IIRC, but still not
| everything.
|
| RE: Unicode, of course it uses Unicode. What else would it
| use??
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