[HN Gopher] Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks
___________________________________________________________________
Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks
Author : revorad
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-07-12 10:41 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.varunsrinivasan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.varunsrinivasan.com)
| motohagiography wrote:
| Not this one in particular, but the general idea of
| decentralizing social networks often seems to miss the necessary
| ingredient that drove people to social networks in the first
| place and overlooks what social networks originally were - social
| proof.
|
| Start with the use case, not the tech. I joked that facebook was
| invented as a way to let people know you went to harvard without
| having to _say_ you went to harvard. It started by solving the
| h-bomb problem whereby having a thefacebook account they created
| an online way to say you went to school "in Boston," which they
| then extended to "in Newhaven," "New Jersey" and then to any
| college affiliation at all (.edu domain requirement). That
| signalling was the use case. It expanded to include people
| without that status but wanted access to it, and the only way to
| "win" at facebook was either an Ivy school education or becoming
| a celebrity. Once it opened up to everyone else, it finally
| became the cruel spectacle it is today, and the source of our
| cultural discord.
|
| A decentralized social network isn't a protocol problem. The
| hardest thing to face is that nobody wants to join decentralized
| social networks because they confer no signalling benefits or
| meaningful status to users the way central ones did. It wasn't an
| artifact of the technology that made the handful of social
| networks successful, it was their use case.
|
| Clubhouse almost replicated it, but like any elite organization,
| 80% of the game became not-being the person who recommends
| someone off brand or un-cool, and so it became contrived and over
| gatekept, and its growth atrophied from the anxiety.
|
| Git is probably the closest thing to a decentralized social
| network that confers tenuously analogous status to what FB
| originally did, where instead of your school tribe and pictures
| of your butt, it's a competence graph with localized hierarchies.
|
| It's like we can solve every problem except how to become
| attractive to users, probably because we're indexed not on being
| attractive, but on emmulating what we percieve as smart and
| powerful and solving a problem, which is the very thing repelling
| users from decentralized social networks: The products are self-
| defined as inferior to the problems they oppose, and not as
| sharing access to a desirable resource - like powerful tribes and
| butt pictures. Nobody wants to _become_ like decentralized social
| users.
|
| Twitter's blue checks are similar, where you can affilliate with
| people close to the source of official power narrative by
| "following" them. If they follow you back, it's an endorsement of
| your identity and status. If I join a decentralized social
| network, what do I get? A bunch of anonymous fugitives pushing
| newsletters explaining why it's someone else's fault they're
| unhappy.
|
| This is a message of mercy to decentralized social projects.
| Focus on the use cases and build things for specific people you
| sincerely like _and who sincerely like you back_ , and not anti-
| solutions to anti-problems for aspirational audiences using
| obfuscated proxies to simple experiences.
| rambambram wrote:
| You have a very clear message and it's beautifully written,
| thanks!
|
| > A decentralized social network isn't a protocol problem.
|
| When the author talked about "the ability to claim a unique
| username" I was waiting in joy for him to start talking about
| domain names. But he didn't...
|
| Then the author talked about "scaling networks" and I was
| hoping he would mention the internet... and he sort of did.
| purry wrote:
| Thought I'd share this here (not feeling ready for a Show HN
| yet): we're working on something in this spirit, right now it's a
| Twitter-like app running on the Avalanche Fuji Testnet:
|
| https://purry.io/
|
| You need to be connected to the Avalanche Fuji Testnet in
| Metamask (there are some instructions on the site for how to set
| that up). Feel free to leave us some comments, feedback and
| suggestions here or on the app :)
| VonGuard wrote:
| Funny, I am working on a non-profit for just this type of thing:
| https://spritely.institute/
|
| We are building standards for open distributed social media
| systems, with identity and security built in, and absolutely no
| centralized management. Everyone can run their own communities,
| while still having managed identity, and without a single click
| sending content to everyone in the world.
| rapnie wrote:
| Really anticipating these technologies. Also encouraging people
| to hop to https://spritelyproject.org/ to get an exciting
| overview.
| varunsrin wrote:
| author here - happy to answer questions folks have.
|
| we've also been building a sufficiently decentralized protocol
| called Farcaster, and you can check it out here:
| https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol
|
| we've also built the first clients for this protocol, which are
| still in beta. if you have an ENS name and are interested in
| trying them out, DM me on twitter https://twitter.com/varunsrin
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| if anything, mastodon and pleroma and pixelfed have shown, even
| if on a small level compared to the likes of facebook and twitter
| and instagram that decentralization does not need to be on
| crypto/blockchain.
|
| >ActivityPub doesn't provide a way to use a managed host without
| compromising decentralization.
|
| what does this mean?
|
| i don't get this. if i am hosted on mastodon.social and i want to
| talk to cawfee.club or a pleroma instance, don't i just message
| them and the services resolve themselves using activitypub?
|
| what does managed hosts mean? you mean mastodon.social as an
| example?
|
| what is this
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Yeah, a managed host means what the fediverse would call a
| public instance.
|
| The compromise of decentralization is that if you have an
| account on mastodon.social, they can censor you (for good or
| bad reasons), or the people you'd like to follow. You can move
| to another instance, but your identity has to change (though at
| least now you have a decent likelihood of being able to
| transfer your social graph along with you). And because
| discovery of instances is not perfectly frictionless, people
| tend to just sign up for the big instances (like
| mastodon.social).
|
| All that said, any solution is also going to introduce new
| problems. And there's absolutely no reason to think that adding
| blockchains to the mix is going to do anything but harm.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| so how is blockchain supposed to mitigate identity remaining
| the same?
|
| i am assuming if i want to block a bad actor on the chain, i
| note that and later whenever someone queries their address,
| my note is shown so what is it solving?
|
| >And because discovery of instances is not perfectly
| frictionless, people tend to just sign up for the big
| instances
|
| the solution exists, sure it might not be frictionless as of
| now but its not like it is a fundamental problem?
|
| yeah, blockchain is not the solution.
|
| >The compromise of decentralization is that if you have an
| account on mastodon.social, they can censor you
|
| admins of mastodon.social can but so can any other instance
| so how is that a bad thing? how do we equally fight
| spammers/bad actors and at the same time prevent good people
| who have been banned to say their words?
|
| isnt good/bad inherently a subjective issue that is to be
| decided by a person? activitypub gives users and admins the
| power to decide so what is the problem there?
|
| i am not questioning you specifically, just asking
| jerojero wrote:
| There are so many different problems that come from
| decentralisation and I really don't think people are all that
| willing to put up with them. Specially not the kind of people
| that use social media.
|
| It seems to me sometimes that a lot of these posts come from
| people that don't really interact with the average social media
| user very much. People are willingly giving all their data to
| Facebook, Tiktok, etc. They do that because in reality... they
| don't care all that much!
|
| How do you expect these kind of people to care about
| decentralisation? I think the closest we are to a good middle
| point is stuff like mastodon, but federation is not perfect. Will
| it not be reasonable for people in the future (if mastodon
| becomes really popular) to simply default to the biggest server
| out there?
|
| I think the best we can do is come up with standards for data-
| transfer between sites as well as basic communication tools...
| pretty much what activitypub has tried to do. This would go a
| long way to ensure people are actually capable of moving, not
| being locked in is I think the key to ensuring decentralisation.
|
| In a few words: people don't care as much as we'd like them to
| and that's not really a technical problem. Because of this, it is
| not possible to solve this problem by adding any extra inch of
| complexity that doesn't come with substantial benefits to users.
| And I don't think adding blockchain-based market mechanics to it
| is really going to solve the problem as blockchains add a huge
| amount of overhead to the problem.
| varunsrin wrote:
| author here - you're right that the average user doesn't care
| about decentralization as a first order benefit. people
| typically use social networks to be entertained / informed or
| to increase their status. we've been building a new,
| decentralized social network and we've learned this first hand.
|
| but if you've figured out a new social network, building it in
| a decentralized manner today might give you very strong second
| order benefits. and its now possible to do this in a way that
| doesn't compromise the user experience.
| fredguth wrote:
| I also was reading your post with the mindset "how to
| regulate social networks". I strongly believe that all big
| organizations need regulation. It is not easy to regulate
| social networks, but _heck_ maybe it wasn 't easy to regulate
| telephony or energy.
| geekbird wrote:
| Decentralized social networks of the past: UseNet and IRC.
|
| No one owned all the servers for either of these. The problem
| came with moderation versus spammers and trolls.
|
| The problem still exists with the centralized social networks,
| although theoretically it should be easier for them to deal with
| due to centralized identity management. It isn't.
| cm42 wrote:
| Re: Novel Social Primitives - I've been reading up on econ
| because of crypto, and came across E Ostrom's writing about
| Polycentricity, which seems extremely valuable to the Centralized
| vs. Decentralized conversation (hint: it's never 0.0 or 1.0 on
| that scale).
|
| Before DevOps was fully a thing, a coworker and I sketched out a
| (too-complicated) service-discovery/bootstrapping program using
| DNS + PGP, and what we thought was a super-clever signing scheme
| for trusting automatically-spawned processes from our central
| platform tool. (Turns out, there are better ways)
|
| The ability to build trust a la PGP Key Signing Parties, but at
| scale - and use them in a polycentric way could change a lot of
| things for the better.
|
| For example, instead of ever giving out my IlluminatiFreedomCoin
| address that's tied to my SSN, I could produce a Venn diagram of
| users who have signed my keys for FB, Twitter, HN, etc. to
| suggest that I am who I say I am. Not foolproof, but probably
| sufficient to add a user account or keep a Craigslist deal moving
| forward, until I can authenticate IRL.
| varunsrin wrote:
| what is the best reading you've found that explains
| polycentricity well?
| jnordwick wrote:
| lookup zero knowledge proofs, I believe that is what he is
| referring to as the better way
| [deleted]
| blippage wrote:
| I think, ultimately, there's no easy way to do it.
|
| How do you stop spammers and bad actors in general.
|
| > the ability to claim a unique username
|
| Which would require a centralisation, presumably. We have things
| like OpenID, but that hasn't really caught on.
|
| What we want is internally inconsistent. We want both unique
| identifiers (this is the "real" "blippage" making this post), the
| possibility of multiple identities, and the possibility of
| anonymity.
|
| We also want openness, but are likely to desire censorship for
| legitimate reasons, too.
|
| Just how are we going to square the circle?
|
| Li'l update: I see NFTs being mentioned, which sounds a bit band-
| wagony to me. In the Gemini protocol one creates TLS
| certificates. The Lagrange browser can generate a cert quite
| simply. So in at least some sense, isn't the identity issue
| "solved".
|
| Another update: there's also the issue of discoverability.
| Centralised networks make discoverability easy. It's not
| insurmountable with decentralised ones (people are willing to
| host aggregators), but it is harder.
| carlosdp wrote:
| > > the ability to claim a unique username
|
| > Which would require a centralisation, presumably. We have
| things like OpenID, but that hasn't really caught on.
|
| The article addresses this. We already have a decentralized,
| credibly neutral identity layer with unique names in production
| (and pretty wide use, at least in the web3 space): Ethereum
| Name Service.
| fsiefken wrote:
| About squaring the circle; I remember the Slashdot karma
| moderation system with community based optional filtering and
| tresholds.
|
| https://slashdot.org/faq/karma.shtml
| https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
|
| The same goes for democracy and politics, how to prevent bad
| actors from gaming the system and acquire illegitimate power.
|
| When moderating a 5000 person topic focused community I used a
| ruleset which was easy to understand. Along the way I tweaked
| the ruleset to defend against bad actors using the rules
| against me.
| blippage wrote:
| Yeah, I think a karma-based system is about the right way to
| go. One system I thought of was that the karma propagated
| outwards, as it were. So I award A with +1 karma because I
| like their content and trust them. If A awards B with +1
| karma then the karma trickles up to me and I'm more likely to
| read B. Not sure how my system could be turned into reality,
| though.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| This is really just a Web of Trust, right?
| derac wrote:
| Per-user karma maybe? You could have global and per-user
| karma. Perhaps you could generate views server side based
| on global karma, then sort client-side based on user-
| assigned karma?
| matt_s wrote:
| A social network where you pay to join with the ability of only
| one account per payment method might stop a lot of nonsense.
| Make the signup fee high (ex. $100 USD) and monthly fee low
| ($2) to steer people towards 1 account.
|
| That idea won't get traction because people don't want to pay
| for a social network. But damn do people love "reality
| internet" - outrageous content, reaction videos and otherwise
| fabricated "content" I equate to Reality TV like "The Real
| Housewives of ..."
|
| In my opinion, it should also be closed in the sense of no
| viral/global messaging. With zero need for advertising money,
| you don't need eyeball time or to be promoting controversial
| content above people posting pics of their dinner. Let people
| be social about stuff they are interested in and connect with
| people they know. That's the other bit - you can't randomly
| connect/view content by people not in X degrees of separation
| from you.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I generally disagree about the "pay to join" issue, but the
| thing you're right about is no viral/global messaging. That's
| the thing that really turns social networks into garbage. The
| problem being, though, that under late capitalism, that's
| what a large number of people really want out of them -- to
| build a personal brand and social capital that can be
| converted into financial capital.
| matt_s wrote:
| I understand the disagreement about pay to join. A social
| network needs to pay its bills somehow and there are 2
| methods - users pay or advertisers pay. Or I suppose with
| sites like youtube its both (users buying stuff with
| affiliate links, etc.) Pay to join eliminates the need for
| viral/global messaging which is the draw to get
| advertisers. Influencers and the like is just bullshit and
| it promotes look-at-me behavior which is pretty anti-
| social. I'd argue those types of people are really noisy
| and fewer in number than casual social network users.
|
| Maybe there is some middle ground where its free for users
| and advertisers can pay to advertise but there won't be the
| viral content that advertisers want. One approach could be
| the local groups that naturally form - book clubs, mom's
| groups, gamers, etc. could be tagged as such so an
| advertising model can happen.
| bee_rider wrote:
| We could imagine a paid social network designed to not engage
| in this toxic attention-grabbing behavior. I guess such a
| network would get less attention... I mean, that's almost a
| condition of success, right? But then, has it "gotten
| traction?"
|
| Perhaps social interaction could be thought of as sort of
| like food, and social media could be thought of as sort of
| like junk food -- maybe this paid social media site could be
| thought of as a less-damaging form of junk food. The metric
| for success could be something like <user satiation>/<wasted
| time>.
| ankrgyl wrote:
| Many of the comments seem to miss the point entirely -- this post
| is about how to achieve _sufficient_ decentralization:
|
| > two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest
| of the network wants to prevent it
|
| and use centralized methods where it does not compromise on this
| constraint (e.g. efficiently storing/retrieving data about
| posts).
| a3w wrote:
| Why do we need smart contracts and a blockchain in there, do
| distributed databases not offer this at either better security or
| performance?
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| Yes. A blockchain is one form of a distributed database. A
| blockchain allows writes from multiple parties without
| permission. AFAIK, that's the key
| cowtools wrote:
| Blockchains are only useful for low-bandwidth tasks that
| require complete consensus.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| "The key" to whom? Most people wouldn't know nor care about a
| blockchain backed social network - most just want it to work
| and be without all the current baggage. This being "the key"
| is only to those forcing blockchain into things where it
| doesn't belong to justify it's existence.
| k__ wrote:
| Well, people who get their content removed probably care
| about the network being decentralized.
| douglaswlance wrote:
| It's not hard to understand the difference between
| something accruing wealth to the owner or not, being able
| to be taken down or not, or being able run your own node or
| not.
|
| People might not care about the technical implementation
| details. But they do care about what the implication of
| those details would be.
| varunsrin wrote:
| author here.
|
| what distributed database would let you own your identity
| without any third party party being able to take it away from
| you?
|
| that's a necessary condition for sufficient decentralization,
| and the only distributed databases capable of achieving such
| guarantees are L1 blockchains.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > Some believe that decentralization requires the entire social
| network to be on a blockchain. This is unnecessary and even
| undesirable. Social networks generate petabytes of data every
| year, which can be very expensive to store on-chain.
| Blockchains also make it difficult to delete data forever,
| which is a desirable feature for users. A network design that
| leverages on-chain systems to decentralize ownership while
| using off-chain systems for a better user experience is a
| better path to building social networks.
|
| The article does indicate a blockchain is undesirable
|
| For another decentralized social network (that runs entirely
| without a blockchain) check out Scuttlebutt (not affiliated)
| douglaswlance wrote:
| Which distributed database systems would serve this function?
| deweller wrote:
| There needs to be an incentive for users to host other people's
| data. Centralized servers and advertising is the current model.
| Blockchains with tokenized value is another model.
| blamestross wrote:
| The whole bad assumption of Bitcoin is that you need to bribe
| people with a scam to host things.
|
| BitTorrent's DHT never had this problem. BitTorrent existing
| and working IS the value.
|
| "We have a working social network" is likely sufficient value
| to motivate users to host things.
| cowtools wrote:
| I don't think you need to incentivise people to host each
| other's data. People will host their own data, and they may
| host others' data for free like in BitTorrent.
|
| I am skeptical of the need for filecoin-like systems in the
| first place. If all you have is a hammer, then every problem
| looks like a nail.
| grumbel wrote:
| > I don't think you need to incentivise people to host each
| other's data.
|
| Bitcoin is worth a trillion dollar. Meanwhile 20+ years of
| effort into creating P2P networks has resulted in pretty
| much nothing. No Linux distributions are hosted on P2P. No
| source control is on P2P. No messaging. Nothing of
| significance. Just a few tech demos here and there.
|
| Proper incentives can make all the difference and given the
| utter failure of getting any non-incentivised P2P off the
| ground in the last two decades, I think it's safe to say,
| it will be necessary. I don't see much point in repeating
| what hasn't worked in the past.
|
| > and they may host others' data for free like in
| BitTorrent
|
| BitTorrent isn't free. All the fancy piracy sites have
| share ratios. The public stuff more often than not has 0
| seeders, lots of leechers and is just a lot of dead
| torrents in general. You are better off just using a
| centralized share hoster. Even your average Linux
| distribution agrees. BitTorrent might still be offered for
| ISO downloads, but it's hardly ever the default anymore,
| it's all back to plain old HTTPS.
| cowtools wrote:
| >Bitcoin is worth a trillion dollar.
|
| Bitcoin is """"worth"""" a trillion dollars. It's not a
| free money machine, It's is a shitty payment system, not
| a P2P network unless you are sharing your blog over
| OP_RETURN.
|
| >Meanwhile 20+ years of effort into creating P2P networks
| has resulted in pretty much nothing
|
| IDK bittorrrent and IPFS just work without inventing a
| free money machine.
|
| You can download linux install disks over BitTorrent.
|
| >No source control is on P2P
|
| With a system like Git there is no need for such a
| centralized system. Each user has their own copy of the
| tree.
|
| >BitTorrent isn't free
|
| Bullshit. It is free. Go on TPB, it's still up. I use it
| every day and it is leagues faster than any alternative.
| k__ wrote:
| The "hammer" were centralized systems, and now we have an
| alternative with Filecoin, Arweave, and the likes.
| cowtools wrote:
| The hammer here is both. Cryptocurrrency is solving an
| incentive problem here that doesn't really exist. If
| anything, File hosters should not be the ones that pay
| for the hosting, it should be whoever is retriving the
| file, and those funds should go towards relay nodes and
| hosting nodes. filecoin's incentive structure essentially
| replicates that of the existing internet, where file
| hosters will have to find some other form of income like
| advertisements or tracking to cover their costs.
|
| Here is a comment I made yesterday on the matter:
|
| >Instead of "liking" or "upvoting" a post on a
| centralized forum, why not "rehost" or "forward" a post
| on a decentralized forum: essentially seeding it like in
| BitTorrent or "pinning" it in IPFS. "Followers" of a user
| donate their storage and bandwidth to them, combating
| bureaucratic attacks like delisting and DDoS against
| popular users.
| k__ wrote:
| I think, this is the main problem. Nobody really wants to
| host other peoples stuff, especially not on their desktop
| or smartphone.
|
| That's where Filecoin comes in.
|
| But yes, I think the Filecoin model is to heavy weight
| right now.
| cowtools wrote:
| people have extra storage and bandwidth that they don't
| need. Anything that the public decides not to rehost is
| not worth being published.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| People do not have extra upload bandwidth to stream
| video. Plus the whole CGNAT issue of getting to a home
| device.
| cowtools wrote:
| Yes they do. See: bittorrent and webtorrent-based
| streaming services.
|
| My friend uses private trackers and his download speeds
| are unbelievable. But even on public trackers the
| download speeds are quite good. It does not take that
| many seeders to serve even a giant video file like an HD
| film, because even if upload speeds are a fraction of
| download speeds, the total upload bandwidth will be
| multiplied by the number of seeders. In fact, even an
| adequately-seeded torrent is orders of magnitudes faster
| to download than a youtube video or HTTP file for
| example.
|
| People like to keep backups of their favorite creator's
| works. On youtube, when a popular youtube video is taken
| down, it will usually be reuploaded by fans. From this,
| we can probably surmise that maybe 1/100000 viewers will
| archive a given video. That's basically enough to keep a
| video alive forever on bittorrent, even throughout times
| of peak viewership as downloaders will also seed the
| chunks that they have.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Yes they do. See: bittorrent and webtorrent-based
| streaming services.
|
| No, _people_ do not have crazy upload bandwidth. A
| private BitTorrent tracker group is immaterial. They 're
| maintaining ad hoc infrastructure just by leaving a
| machine on 24/7 and maintaining favorable U/D ratios.
| Many groups also maintain seed boxes.
|
| This doesn't apply to the population at large. Most
| people are on phones or laptops on WiFi. They're not
| running 24/7 and in the case of phones a background
| service isn't even viable. Many people are on CGNAT and
| can't "serve" data without some intermediary
| infrastructure.
|
| As for retention, that's a pipe dream. A torrent more
| than a few years old may as well not exist unless it is
| extremely popular and maintains its popularity. There's
| innumerable dead torrents with no seeders.
| cowtools wrote:
| >This doesn't apply to the population at large. Most
| people are on phones or laptops on WiFi. They're not
| running 24/7 and in the case of phones a background
| service isn't even viable.
|
| They don't need to serve 24/7, they just need to be
| available 24/7. Do people not have their phones on and
| connected to the internet 24/7 in case they receive a
| message? For social media, most people just share text
| posts, pictures or a few small videos. BitTorrent is a
| worst-case scenario where it would be only used for large
| files like movies.
|
| >Many people are on CGNAT and can't "serve" data without
| some intermediary infrastructure.
|
| There are ways to get around CGNAT without STUN/TURN.
|
| >As for retention, that's a pipe dream. A torrent more
| than a few years old may as well not exist unless it is
| extremely popular and maintains its popularity. There's
| innumerable dead torrents with no seeders.
|
| This is desirable behavior in social media. Popular
| content will have longer retention, unpopular content
| will have shorter retention. Web forums like this one
| emulate a "fake" version of this with the weighted
| voting/time system that favors upvoted posts and
| disfavors old posts.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Do people not have their phones on and connected to the
| internet 24/7 in case they receive a message?
|
| A device able to receive a notification is not the same
| as listening on a socket 24/7. Push notifications on
| mobile go through the platform's push notification system
| lest they kill the device's battery. A push notification
| doesn't wake up a device and power up all the radios to
| stream masses of data.
|
| Apps on mobile devices can be killed at any time, they're
| extremely unreliable as servers of content. Laptops are
| little better as servers of content.
|
| I don't understand why you'd _want_ social media content
| to only favor popular and recent content. Why would you
| want a built-in memory hole in the system?
| nanomonkey wrote:
| The incentive for me is that the information becomes off-line
| first. I've been on Scuttlebutt for 5 years now, and all of
| my discussions are available to me to go back to and expand
| upon whenever I want, no matter if I'm connected to the
| internet or not.
|
| Necro-posting (bringing up old discussions) becomes a viable
| option, as does scouring through old information.
|
| What is more interesting to me, is utilizing this
| functionality for something beyond a _social network_ ,
| something more productive like an ERP system, yet allowing
| the social aspect of collaboration improve such a platform.
| groffee wrote:
| > There needs to be an incentive for users to host other
| people's data.
|
| And then you inadvertently host 'terrorist' materials and get
| 25 years in jail.
|
| People are trying to redesign 'social networks' with no
| fundamental understanding of what they are, how to run them
| or the very real risks involved.
| Jonovono wrote:
| Sounds similar to what Jack Dorsey has in mind with "web5" (lol).
|
| ''' Successful social networks are usually built around a new
| communication primitive. Facebook had the wall, Twitter had the
| 140-character tweet and Snapchat had the ephemeral message. The
| idea maze of things you can do with decentralized identities,
| blockchains and zk-proofs is large, weird and interesting enough
| that there are probably many primitives waiting to be discovered.
| Decentralized social networks should explore this as a way to
| attract users. Offering a product experience that doesn't yet
| exist is far more compelling than a clone of an existing network.
| '''
|
| This is the quote.
|
| For the decentralized social network, it needs to be 10x better
| than existing social networks. I have a few ideas, currently
| playing around in this space.
|
| I think a decentralized social network can at minimum bring 10x
| the value to users/creators that existing social networks do.
|
| As a quick example, look up how much Tiktok/youtube make per
| view. Tiktok is something like 2 cents per thousand views. Per
| thousand views.
|
| I also think a decentralized social network can be much more
| profitable than a centralized network.
| seydor wrote:
| it doesnt need to be 10x linear extrapolation, it just has to
| have 1 extra dimension. The decentralized dimension will never
| work however, because it is always illegal. Otherwise,
| gnutella, bittorrent, bitcoin, ipfs all could have become a
| decentralized "social network", aka "the n-th iteration of
| gopher/boards/forums"
|
| > can be much more profitable than a centralized network.
|
| The money comes from advertisers, not from users or views.
| Advertisers perennially spend the same amount (~1% of GDP,
| barring periods of war) to advertising companies. The pie is
| not expandable and is eaten by google and FB.
| jsemrau wrote:
| In my opinion decentralization is a non-feature. I.e., I don't
| believe in people waking up in the morning and thinking "gee,
| that app would be 10x better if decentralized". What people
| care about is (1) getting better connections with friends and
| colleagues. Here lunchclub is doing an amazing job. (2) getting
| better news then have a look at finclout.io. If you are a
| regular posted for whatever motivation, I don't think that the
| current state of social media works well. Decentralized Social
| as an implementation of a Decentralized Social Network is
| really terrible because it doesn't add anything to the user
| experience besides a pay-layer which in reality brings out the
| worst in people "Please buy my coin'
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think the #1 problem that needs to be addressed is how to
| completely remove content from a blockchain social network.
| Otherwise it's going to be a permanent record of every mistake
| someone makes online.
| omeze wrote:
| In Farcaster, deletes are possible. They use a hash chain
| (new messages refer to previous message's content hash). If a
| user deletes a cast, they delete the content of the message
| and the hash is no longer correct. This makes deletion both
| possible and detectable, since users can self-host their
| messages. Note that in Farcaster only username mappings are
| on-chain, the rest of the messaging protocol is off-chain.
| EGreg wrote:
| Tim Berners-Lee has been working on it for a long time, I met
| him and his team back in 2014 when it was called SOLID. He was
| just very into making everything work with SPARQL.
|
| His lead developer Dmitri Zagidulin agreed to work with us for
| a while but ultimately went on to help create the DID standard
| at the W3C. And Daniel Buchner at Microsoft pushed for years to
| make ION (sidetree protocol) which Jack Dorsey's Web5 is based
| on.
|
| If you want to see truly decentralized _and working_ social
| networking, here are some examples:
|
| https://yang2020.app
|
| https://ftl.fm
|
| https://gba.community
|
| All built on our framework: https://qbix.com/platform
|
| The eventual decentralized Web2 ecosystem can look like this,
| and there is no blockchain: https://qbix.com/ecosystem
|
| Why we need it: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-
| communities/
|
| Questions, comments and threats welcome :)
| bckr wrote:
| <bad-idea>
|
| Maybe what will evolve the space is automatic translation from
| any possible format to any other format using AI.
|
| You don't need to manage a server or store anything in any
| particular way in any particular place.
|
| Instead, you expose whatever you want in any way you want,
| whether that's uploading a video to some big tech host, or
| exposing a bunch of XML over FTP, or a RESTful endpoint that
| serves binary encoding pictures of cats.
|
| My user agent scoops up everything and presents it to me in a
| way that I like.
|
| There would need to be some creative ideas involved for, say,
| "replying" (hashes? webmentions?)
|
| In other words, maybe innovation on the demand side is where
| the fun is.
|
| </bad-idea>
| grumbel wrote:
| > Maybe what will evolve the space is automatic translation
| from any possible format to any other format using AI.
|
| Easier said than done. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Co. like
| to gatekeep their data and don't allow third party clients
| access. So you don't just need an AI smart enough to capture
| the data and reshape it, but also one smart enough to pass
| whatever CAPTCHA they throw at you, which will likely get
| progressively more difficult the more popular your tool gets.
| And of course they'll lock your account when you try, so this
| is at best a read-only participation in the social network.
|
| The problem has shifted over the last decade, it's no longer
| about fixing a broken Web, but about a large part of the
| content no longer even being a part of the Web. Everything is
| either moving to Apps or getting gated behind login screens
| and ToS.
| bckr wrote:
| CAPTCHA is a big problem but not impossible to overcome.
| It's an arms race.
|
| That said, CAPTCHA can be defeated by changing the
| landscape of incentives in favor of giving the consumers
| what they want.
|
| The consumers will use these user agents when they get so
| good that they're better than the alternative and/or it's
| easy enough to "dual boot".
|
| Once one of the above happens, then there is a greater
| incentive for everyone to make their content available e.g.
| by uploading to public Google Drive folders.
|
| What I'm trying to get at is that the dream of
| decentralization can happen perhaps sooner if we focus on
| building the client side of it as a layer over the existing
| structure, instead of trying to supplant the current server
| side structure.
| Jonovono wrote:
| Lets just say, I don't think it's a bad idea ;p
|
| '''My user agent scoops up everything and presents it to me
| in a way that I like.'''
|
| I think this is close to what the future looks like.
|
| For example, it rattles me that no matter what app I am
| watching 'videos' on I have different options. Some I can
| watch 2x speed. Some I can tap the sides to go quicker
| through. Some if I tap it mutes. Some if I tap it stops the
| video.
|
| All of this for the same type of content.
|
| Insanity.
|
| Not to mention even within certain apps like Instagram is
| just brutal. For the same content type - videos - they have
| like 3 (?) different ways to view it.
| godshatter wrote:
| I wish the trend wasn't for social network companies to
| rewrite web apps from scratch in javascript when they could
| simply in this case just hand me the video and my preferred
| local application would play it.
|
| I get that they can display suggestions for what you should
| watch next and keep data on how much you watch or how often
| you pause it or whatever. But if we're going to create a
| decentralized social network, then maybe we could junk all
| the metrics that a centralized social network keeps on
| their users. Let it evolve organically, rather than in a
| way that best suits one particular small group of people,
| and give people back their privacy as well as their
| autonomy.
|
| Edit: rewrote an awkward sentence.
| Jonovono wrote:
| Exactly,
|
| one way I am thinking about it right now is do away with
| the idea of "apps" entirely. Think about it more in the
| sense of "intents".
|
| If anyone is interested in building in this space, my
| email is in my profile! Looking for cofounders :)
| lulzyk wrote:
| Check out Lens Protocol, it's a decentralized social graph on
| Polygon (brought to you by the Aave Companies), where you can
| mint your profile as an NFT, therefore own it, as well as own
| your content and audience. Lens provides the API and smart
| contracts for decentralized social apps to be built on top, and
| there are already quite a few apps built already, including
| Lenster (https://lenster.xyz), Lenstube (https://lenstube.xyz),
| Iris (https://irisapp.xyz/) and more. Check it out here if you
| want to experiment with it and build some web3 social :
| https://lens.xyz
|
| Full disclosure, I work on the team building it.
| naravara wrote:
| > where you can mint your profile as an NFT, therefore own it
|
| I mean, I don't really care about "ownership" of my social
| graph. What I would care about is interoperability of it. If I
| can move my graph and associated links from service to service
| that would be great. But that's basically just a defined format
| for an "address book" with a unique identifier for each person
| on it. I'm not sure what value blockchain is adding there.
| lulzyk wrote:
| Well, ownership implies and enables interoperability. When
| your profile and content exists in your wallet, everytime you
| connect it to a given social app, you carry it with you. From
| a user perspective, its a single handle for every social app
| that integrates with it, and from the builder perspective,
| it's a batteries-included content and user registry.
|
| In this paradigm, the blockchain becomes the single public
| source of truth/database for everyone's content. And what you
| mean by 'service' is just any frontend app that consumes and
| presents this content in a nuanced format for its target
| audience. So as a builder, you can focus on creating an
| engaging and valuable experience for your users, providing
| them interesting ways to engage with each other, monetize
| content, fund common goods, promote or filter content etc
| without worrying about scaling your infrastructure.
|
| At the same time, you don't need to rely on the blockchain
| for anything besides user authorization - nobody stops you
| from just using Lens as just another sign in flow to your
| existing web2 social media app and keeping your business
| model intact, while simply increasing your userbase.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > In this paradigm, the blockchain becomes the single
| public source of truth/database for everyone's content.
|
| Which blockchain? There's scores of public blockchains.
|
| As for infrastructure, are you high? Blockchains are shared
| among miners, they're not going to carry massive amounts of
| data. If you try to decentralized storage like IPFS then
| you have to maintain infrastructure to have data actually
| available.
|
| If you try monetizing every social media transaction you'll
| have no users. No one is going to pay money to post a
| picture of their breakfast or to change their profile
| picture.
| Keeeeeeeks wrote:
| I think Lens is using Polygon (storing interactions,
| social graph) and IPFS (storing media/content)
|
| So in the context of Lens they're probably pointing to
| cat photos on IPFS in whatever program they have on
| Polygon. People seem to be maintaining content on IPFS
| (I'm no expert but I think via pinning services?)
|
| > If you try monetizing every social media transaction
| you'll have no users. No one is going to pay money to
| post a picture of their breakfast or to change their
| profile picture.
|
| I don't think these frontends are trying to monetize
| everything, as their users would come to the same
| conclusion you did. Polygon seems to be a lot cheaper
| than ETH (coinbase says it's like 50 cents vs $1000 for
| ETH), you can do a lot more on it for less.
|
| I wonder if people will redeploy Lens on cheaper chains
| if the price goes up 100x or more?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Polygon seems to be a lot cheaper than ETH (coinbase
| says it's like 50 cents vs $1000 for ETH), you can do a
| lot more on it for less.
|
| Is this simply because it's not as popular as ETH, or
| because it's designed to stay cheap forever?
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| This sounds superior to social networks providing 3rd party
| access to your graph
| civilized wrote:
| Dumb question. We already have a social network called the
| internet. What exactly are we trying to add on top here and why
| does it need a blockchain?
|
| If it's the ability to publish and subscribe to content, why not
| just do some fancy version of RSS?
| k__ wrote:
| I think, blockchains are a reasonably well understood
| mechanism, albeit not the one with the best performance
| characteristics.
|
| If you look into the specs for decentralized identifiers
| (DIDs), they don't define how a "method" needs to implement its
| interface.
|
| There are solutions that use blockchains (Ethereum), others use
| DAGs (IPFS, IOTA) and some are even static without any server
| required.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Obviously not a dumb question at all. My favorite "social
| network" currently is the Gemini and Gopher blogging community.
| No bad incentives, people are posting things that genuinely
| interest them, and it's easy to follow anyone who's posting
| stuff that interests me. It's also usually easy to directly
| communicate with people about things they've written, via
| email.
|
| The bad side is the barrier to entry (a hobbyist-level
| knowledge of internet protocols, and the ability to either
| self-host or seek out a managed server). It would be nice for
| people to be able to just install a program and be able to both
| write and read things. This is something that will require some
| protocol and application design to keep decentralized, but
| there's no reason to believe that a blockchain is needed, or
| even helpful.
| varunsrin wrote:
| not a dumb question.
|
| if you squint, the protocol i've described is really a fancy
| version of RSS. In fact, the original brainstorm doc for this
| idea was titled RSS+ :)
| civilized wrote:
| I could note that RSS has worked fine for decades without a
| blockchain, but for a web3 visionary, I imagine that's beside
| the point.
| rambambram wrote:
| Nice! Did your original brainstorm doc contain more ideas
| about RSS than in this final article?
|
| I just subscribed - by RSS - to your blog. I'm looking
| forward to read more about RSS.
| bsedlm wrote:
| I think that's the wrong question
|
| IMO, a better question (two questions) is where is RSS now and
| how did RSS get there?
| civilized wrote:
| Those seem like follow up questions to my questions rather
| than suggestion that my questions are the wrong questions.
| grishka wrote:
| ActivityPub is "sufficiently decentralized" in my book. I don't
| consider decentralizing name registry a requirement -- DNS is a
| sufficiently decentralized name registry we already have and know
| how to manage. I don't consider cryptographic keys a viable form
| of identity because they absolutely inevitably leak into the UX
| and hopelessly ruin all of it. To add to that, as someone who has
| worked in a real-world popular social media company, I can assure
| you that account recovery is not something "nice to have", but
| rather a hard requirement -- and it's impossible, by design, in a
| public-key-crypto-based system.
| riffic wrote:
| DNS also has the advantage of having won "the test of time" so
| we know it's not going away anytime soon.
|
| A phenomenon sometimes referred to as the Lindy effect:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
|
| I'd be picking this time-tested tech as a foundation over
| anything else being pitched these days (who knows what their
| longevity will be).
| varunsrin wrote:
| account recovery is very possible with smart contracts and
| public-key crypto
| grishka wrote:
| So how do you do it? Who would override the authentication
| mechanism and reset your key? How would _that_ person
| authenticate? How would you keep your identity when _your
| public key is your identity_? How would you stop someone
| using your leaked private key to impersonate you?
| varunsrin wrote:
| a simple mechanism is using a smart contract to map your
| key (0x123) to an identity (@alice). the contract can allow
| you to transfer that identity to a different key (important
| for key rotation) and also to set up a recovery key that is
| also authorized to transfer the key if the primary key is
| lost.
|
| our recovery system for Farcaster has a few more bells and
| whistles, and you can read about it here:
| https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol#33-recovery
| grishka wrote:
| So it's just pushing the problem a bit further away by
| hiding your _real_ key. See, you have to be able to
| recover your account even if you 've lost every single of
| your electronic devices. Every one of them. Including
| flash drives. No data. No backups. None. Zero bytes.
|
| The fundamental problem with keys is that they are files.
| You can't exactly memorize one, not without torturing
| yourself. You have to store them somewhere extremely
| reliably but at the same time completely secretly.
| omeze wrote:
| The point here is that self-hosting is _possible_. Most
| users are almost certainly going to just let a third
| party host their keys. But if keys are identity primitive
| at the protocol level, then the protocol prevents full
| centralized platform capture, similar to email interop.
| grishka wrote:
| The key being _the identity_ still has the problem of not
| being changeable, no matter how you spin it.
|
| Self-hosting is possible with ActivityPub as well, but
| without sacrificing the user-friendliness. I can already
| see someone saying "what do you mean I have to start a
| new account after my private key leaked".
| karpierz wrote:
| > Ownership remains decentralized because the recovery
| address cannot make a transfer that the custody address
| does not approve.
|
| This isn't true though?
|
| If I go out camping for a week and the recovery address
| transfers my identity, I won't be asked to approve; it'll
| simply go through after waiting 3 days.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > and it's impossible, by design, in a public-key-crypto-based
| system
|
| You can walk back on the security preventing account recovery
| by giving your keys to a third party. This is essentially the
| same as not having the security guarantees in the first place -
| and it's optional and you can choose who to give the keys to!
| k__ wrote:
| _" account recovery is ... impossible, by design, in a public-
| key-crypto-based system"_
|
| I think, the Torus/web3auth people do it.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > and it's impossible, by design, in a public-key-crypto-based
| system.
|
| I am working on a project where this is a very definite
| possibility: https://stamp-protocol.github.io/#arch-recovery
| danbolt wrote:
| I'd really love to see this sort of thing over Bluetooth
| between cell phones. It feels like an interesting opportunity
| for worker solidarity.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Odd you should mention, this project is being built as sort
| of the cryptographic foundations of another protocol
| adjacent to the idea of worker solidarity.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > account recovery is not something "nice to have", but rather
| a hard requirement -- and it's impossible, by design, in a
| public-key-crypto-based system.
|
| Can you give some examples of acceptable account recovery
| systems?
|
| Do they involve either giving up privacy (with government-
| issued IDs, for example), or delegating the problem to another
| system like email?
|
| If email is an acceptable system to base account recovery on,
| then couldn't users just store their recovery private key in an
| email sent to themselves (or saved as a draft)?
| grishka wrote:
| > Do they involve either giving up privacy (with government-
| issued IDs, for example)
|
| Sometimes, yes. But then presenting a government-issued ID is
| kinda inescapable -- this is also a requirement for
| participation in crypto. You can't buy cryptocurrency without
| KYC. And you sure as hecc need some sort of tokens for these
| "fully decentralized" identity schemes because they
| inevitably are a cryptocurrency with extra functionality duct
| taped to the side.
|
| > or delegating the problem to another system like email?
|
| That's also an option.
|
| > If email is an acceptable system to base account recovery
| on, then couldn't users just store their recovery private key
| in an email sent to themselves (or saved as a draft)?
|
| And if their email account is broken into and the private key
| gets into someone else's hands, how exactly do they prevent
| potential impersonation without starting a whole new online
| life, ideally without their followers even noticing?
| riffic wrote:
| ActivityPub or a successor protocol will eclipse everything else
| on a slow but attainable timeframe.
|
| We won't notice it really until it hits a certain tipping point,
| which will look a lot when interoperable email started to take
| off (mid-1990s or so)
|
| an aside but does anyone else remember when everyone was telling
| you their AOL _Keyword_?
| skeyo wrote:
| I don't think voting and NFTs is going to be enough to drive
| mainstream audiences in.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Meh, you don't need a blockchain for any of this.
|
| Look at nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
|
| There's also Revolver
| https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/revolver-kickoff.h...
| it is in development and very interesting, will be available to
| the public for testing Soon(tm) from what I gather.
| solarkraft wrote:
| You may or may not be a crypto currency shill, but if you're not
| you may want to consider that the term "smart contract" in the
| preview picture will make your article go straight into the trash
| for a lot of people.
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