[HN Gopher] Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
___________________________________________________________________
Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
Author : lorean_victor
Score : 73 points
Date : 2024-02-29 12:09 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gist.github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gist.github.com)
| logicprog wrote:
| Pull not being a good model of two way communications is going to
| be the major blocker here in my opinion. It's going to mean that
| people are only going to see comments and reactions on their
| posts or comments from people they already subscribe to, because
| their RSS reader would have no possible way of knowing if anyone
| outside of that list commented, since you can't get _notified_ of
| content sources you don 't already know about, only poll ones you
| already know. That's already bad enough (one of the big negative
| things people with large followings on the fediverse talk about
| is how they can't see what people are saying in the replies to
| their posts a lot of the time if the servers those people are on
| are blocked by their server, which means hate and harassment and
| one sided conversations can fester, and often many commenters
| can't even see each _others '_ comments, leading to people saying
| the same things over and over exhaustingly). This also means that
| people who don't have any followers will literally be essentially
| muted by default: no one will see their comments or interactions,
| because no one polls their feed yet, which means that it's
| basically pointless for them to interact at all, which sounds
| dispiriting and would probably lead to no one wanting to use this
| type of social media -- moreover, it also creates a catch-22
| problem, because a major way to _get_ followers in the first
| place is to directly interact with other people and bigger blog
| posts, to make people aware of you and maybe get some of them
| interested in hearing more of what you have to say, yet in this
| model, you can 't really interact until you have a following
| already, so your main means of getting a following is gated
| behind needing a following to work!
| lorean_victor wrote:
| Yes it is a big hurdle. However, I think content discovery is
| generally a big part of any content platform, way broader than
| discovering "who have reacted to my content". Now if you want
| to solve the problem of content discovery in a broader sense,
| then you have already fixed this particular shortcoming of
| pull-model as well. If a service that can inform you about new
| posts with a particular hashtag, it most probably can also tell
| you about reactions to a particular post.
|
| And yes, I do realise that such services will tend to not be
| really decentralised (similar to the relationship of websites
| and search engines). But that means the downside is not that
| you don't get such discovery, but that you'll be reliant on
| more centralised services for such discovery, whereas in the
| fediverse you would be less reliant on such services for
| finding out who has commented on your post (though it will, as
| you've mentioned still not be enough).
| logicprog wrote:
| > Yes it is a big hurdle. However, I think content discovery
| is generally a big part of any content platform, way broader
| than discovering "who have reacted to my content". Now if you
| want to solve the problem of content discovery in a broader
| sense, then you have already fixed this particular
| shortcoming of pull-model as well.
|
| Right but I don't think as a general case finding all RSS
| feeds on the internet that satisfy a certain criteria, like
| publishing a hashtag or responding to a particular post, is a
| problem that can actually be solved in a principled way,
| because a fundamental limitation of the pull methodology is
| that you have to know the list of places you are checking
| beforehand, you can't get content from somewhere you didn't
| know about prior. The only way to solve this would be to have
| some kind of crawling and indexing system that regularly
| crawls the entire internet looking for these expanded RSS
| feeds and then categorized them according to various criteria
| in order to poll them. And that is both a very high technical
| investment and has a lot of limitations itself. So in the end
| it seems like you haven't really actually distributed the
| work of a social media system more equally after all, you've
| just inverted who is doing the work, going from a Federated
| set of servers that do all the work pushing content
| everywhere to a Federated set of servers that do all the work
| pulling content from places.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| I do recognise the fact that such "aggregators" would be
| hugely centralised (if not outright monopolised, like the
| search engine space). however, maybe I'm wrong but I don't
| see the federated model succeeding without such services
| either, so I think of "need for centralised content
| discovery" as an independent problem, honestly.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Pro tip: Split your gigantic (and certainly thoughtful!)
| comment[s] into paragraphs.
|
| Makes it a ton easier to parse. Cheers!
| logicprog wrote:
| Thanks for the advice and compliment! :D I usually write them
| out and then read them and use the edit function to insert
| paragraph breaks after the fact, but I forgot to do that this
| time lol
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Note RSS is an ill-defined polling protocol. The server emits
| an RSS file which has the top N pieces of content.
|
| All you can do is poll it at a greater or less frequency and
| hope you don't underpoll or overpoll. (I can easily fetch the
| RSS feed for an independent blog 1000 times for every time I
| fetch an HTML page, but should I? What if I wanted to follow
| 1000 independent blogs?)
|
| With ActivityPub on the other hand you can ask for all updates
| since the last time you checked so there is a well-defined
| strategy to keep synced.
| lxgr wrote:
| Oh wow, RSS really doesn't support pagination? I didn't know
| that.
|
| WebSub can help with solving the poll rate issue, but that
| presumably wouldn't solve the problem for consumers that are
| offline for a while.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| ActivityStreams could be seen as a viable extension of RSS
| (aside from ActivityPub being based off it already) and it
| does support some simple pagination via its "Collection"
| vocabulary. Since ActivityStreams is ultimately based on
| JSON+LD, one could also add seamless querying support to an
| ActivityStreams endpoint based on SPARQL, for more advanced
| uses.
| egypturnash wrote:
| In the olden days when bloggers walked the earth, emitting
| lengthy posts over RSS, they solved this problem in two ways:
|
| Firstly, by appending forms to the end of the post where
| someone could type out a reply that was more likely to be a few
| sentences or paragraph, rather than a full-blown essay.
|
| Secondly, by inventing "TrackBack", a standardized way for
| someone else's blog software to say "hey I wrote some stuff on
| my blog in response to this post of yours".
|
| Both of these would get appended to the end of the blog post's
| page as "comments".
|
| This very quickly enabled the new problem of "trackback/comment
| spam"; the enduring solution in the world of blogs to _that_
| has been "Wordpress' Askimet plugin", which is a _very_
| centralized piece of the otherwise mostly-distributed
| infrastructure of RSS-based blogs. I think it 's like $15 a
| year on top of the $60 or so I pay for my Wordpress site on
| cheap hosting.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I agree that pull is the best model for posts. For comments I
| still think the best model is to push them to the post author,
| and let the post author moderate. This way people who can behave
| civilly can get an initial audience by writing comments, and
| having a link to their blog in the profile, with no
| intermediaries involved. If someone doesn't like the moderation,
| they're always free to write a comment-as-post, where they can
| write anything they want but have to take care of distribution
| themselves.
| goda90 wrote:
| What if someone posts a dangerous lie? The post author is going
| to delete any comments that expose the lie. How would comments-
| as-posts be sufficiently linked to the original post so the lie
| can properly be exposed to as much of the audience as possible?
| bdw5204 wrote:
| What if somebody posts a dangerous lie on a centralized
| platform and blocks everybody who criticizes it? Even if it
| doesn't allow deleting comments, you can effectively the same
| result with just block.
|
| A mute-only social media platform would be doable technically
| but it would likely involve tons of spammers replying to
| large accounts. Think about how unusable the replies to an
| American politician's tweets are on Twitter because the US
| courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional for politicians
| to block people on social media.
|
| The best solution to this problem I've seen so far is
| Community Notes on Twitter where a crowdsourced fact check is
| directly pinned to the tweet allowing users to challenge
| liars without directly calling them out and getting blocked.
| More centralized approaches to fact checking don't work
| particularly well because you end up with biased fact
| checkers who clearly have an agenda and thus aren't trusted
| at all by the liar's audience.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| the thing is, with no intermediaries involved, more
| specifically, without any proper "search engines" (or
| "aggregators") involved, the network will suffer greatly from a
| content discovery problem regardless (as the fediverse
| currently is, IMO).
|
| with presence of such services, the problem of comments (and
| reactions in general) can be solved too. if a poster is ok with
| engaging with potentially hostile content, then they can get
| reactions to their posts from aggregators that aren't heavy
| handed on moderation. if they don't want to bother with such
| interactions, then they can choose safer aggregators. if they
| want, they can only pull reactions from feeds they are already
| subscribed to, similar to private posts on twitter.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I'm more thinking about the social side of things. When
| comments follow the pull model, you get the pingback problem
| of old: most "comments" will be links to blog posts,
| themselves stuffed with more promotional links and so on. The
| only way to avoid it and have comments look like a somewhat
| nice garden is to allow post authors to say: please write
| text comments and don't stuff them with links, or you won't
| pass moderation on my blog. In other words, the push model.
| In my experience that's the best solution to this particular
| problem.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| I think that's an issue of tools at your disposal to create
| content (including comments) rather than their distribution
| model (e.g. pull vs push). If your main method of saying
| stuff is through a blogpost, ofc you'll end up in the
| situation you've described. If the tools at everyone's
| disposal are textboxes that just work, people will use
| that.
| logicprog wrote:
| Yeah, this is precisely what I said as well, being able to
| comment on anything and have that seen even without a follower
| count is important for making initial connections on a social
| network.
| Zm44 wrote:
| Yes, the answer is Nostr
| hugs wrote:
| I'm a recent convert to Nostr.
|
| Four things I love about it:
|
| - It's "just" JSON and WebSockets. From a developer's
| perspective, it's incredibly easy to get started and build
| interesting things with it. (Like the early days of Twitter.)
| Which leads to...
|
| - Nostr culture is tolerant of bots and other automated
| workflows. (Unlike current management of Twitter)
|
| - Nostr culture is tolerant of search engines. (Unlike
| fediverse, or at least the Mastodon part, though I appreciate
| the reasons for that distinction.)
|
| - Built-in micropayment infrastructure with "zaps" and
| Lightning Network integration enables a ton of interesting new
| startup idea possibilities.
|
| One thing I don't like about Nostr, the social network. (Not
| Nostr, the protocol. Those two things are very easily conflated
| right now):
|
| - Too many Bitcoin bros. (Although personally I don't mind
| Bitcoin, a thriving platform should have more than one thing to
| talk about.)
| lorean_victor wrote:
| looks quite interesting, I wasn't aware of that. it seems like
| a nice hybrid solution to pull/push problem (relays can push if
| they choose to, clients just publish and pull).
|
| I should say though, that upon first look, I wish it was built
| on top of some already existing standard (like rss), as it
| could get a great headstart in terms of content already
| circulating in the network that way.
| hugs wrote:
| Nostr can get complex, but at its core, it's deceptively
| simple. It's built on JSON, WebSockets, digital signatures,
| and sending a simple Event data structure over the wire. It
| can get complex, but its core is very small. Feels similar to
| how HTTP itself started.
|
| Also, it wouldn't be too hard too build bridges or bots that
| bring in other stuff (like RSS feeds or ActivityPub content)
| to Nostr. One already exists: https://mostr.pub
| Sporktacular wrote:
| " Distributed, i.e. no centers (e.g. personal blogging)"
|
| Is it though? There are dependencies on DNS and CDNs along the
| way. Can anything ever be distributed without a fully distributed
| protocol stack?
| lorean_victor wrote:
| you don't need a CDN or even a DNS to host your blog (though
| most probably you'd use them). you will still be at the mercy
| of registries to have an IP address other people can find, but
| I think practically speaking it is not far fetched to consider
| this a "distributed system" (for most use-cases anyways).
| simonpure wrote:
| PubSubHubbub aka WebSub [0] is an extension of RSS feeds to solve
| the push/pull issue by introducing hubs.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
| ericyd wrote:
| This article, and many others that promote a highly decentralized
| internet, consistently fail to address the vast majority of the
| population who are not developers or extremely tech savvy.
|
| > This is in contrast to personal blogging, where every Bob can
| easily host their own (and they often do).
|
| A key word in this sentence is "often". I would argue that
| hosting your own blog is exceptionally rare at the population
| level. Most people do not have the interest or skill to
| accomplish it, so they use services.
|
| Similarly, this author proposes a system where every social
| interaction could be self-hosted. I fail to see who this
| benefits, beyond a vocal minority of smart technologists.
|
| I've seen arguments that suggest the bar should be lowered to
| allow everyone to do more technical things if so desired (self-
| hosting, domain registration, etc). I just think this misses the
| point that for most people, these topics are utterly
| uninteresting and unimportant. Unless the suggestion is to build
| a decentralized network for a very select few who wish to
| participate, I don't feel like these types of ideas will ever be
| relevant.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| thanks for taking the time to read through it regardless. I
| wrote this as a brain dump, and shared it mostly with the
| intent of learning more about the topic (which thanks to this
| thread, I already have), so I feel it is ok if it doesn't
| change the life of billions of people.
|
| the last part of the post, however, is dedicated to assessing
| whether such an idea would have any real bearing on, as you've
| put it, "the population", or not. I've tried to list potential
| benefits to the average user, if such a decentralised platform
| was ever built. since you are interested more in such
| evaluations rather than technical contemplations, I'd like to
| hear your feedback specifically on that part.
|
| https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935...
| ericyd wrote:
| I'm not sure I have strong feelings about it, but here are a
| few thoughts:
|
| 1. I think a more universal content aggregation / discovery
| tool would be beneficial for many people. Google might be the
| analog that comes to mind. This makes me wonder how such an
| aggregator/search tool would operate in a decentralized way.
| Would each user/node be responsible for maintaining its own
| index? My question to you is how does this differ from
| current centralized aggregators and search tools?
|
| 2. Regarding distribution vs. publication: its an interesting
| point that you could separate the two, but I personally
| believe this benefit would be moot for most people since they
| would be unlikely to self-publish content. My view is that
| most individuals will continue to use centralized services,
| regardless of the underlying protocol, due to a combination
| of convenience, ease, and cost. Like you identified, unless
| there is some critical mass of people self-publing and self-
| distributing, I'm not sure I see a tangible benefit here.
|
| Also, mea culpa, I sometimes forget that the author might
| read my response and perhaps my language in my initial post
| was too strong, I hope I did not offend.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| thanks for the thoughts.
|
| 1. I suspect something like Google, indexing feeds instead
| of websites, and also mapping what is a reaction to what,
| perhaps. something that makes a bit suspicious about the
| potential of this though, is the fact that we've had nice
| rss readers for so many years and none have embarked on
| something like this, although I think there was a huge
| potential if they could properly index youtube channels /
| podcasts for example (all already on rss). would love to
| find someone in feedly or inoreader teams to ask more.
|
| 2. its not only about self-publication / self-distribution
| though. this is already affecting normal users, to the
| extent that it resulted in a few break-aways from twitter
| (none successful of course), and even the whole twitter
| management changing and attempting to capitalise on the
| desire. none of this is enough (or is ever going to be
| enough) to really force big social media to meaningfully
| change on its own, but situations where we have a stable
| market dynamic that constantly produces disgruntled
| costumers who are still locked in the system without much
| choice, the change typically ends up happening through
| regulatory intervention (I mean that's their job), so yeah
| this point might be more relevant from a regulatory
| perspective rather than a direct market force.
|
| and no worries. if I wanted only nice comments I would've
| only shared the post with friends or on linkedin / threads.
| the value, for me, is in these discussions, even if the
| language sometimes gets a bit spicy.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Agreed. I've never understood this cry for "decentralization
| for everything" coming from this tiny bubble of nerds.
|
| Nobody in the real world cares about it even one bit.
|
| The only thing people out there actually want is _CONVENIENCE_
| and _USABILITY_.
|
| When will the nerds understand?
| lorean_victor wrote:
| You are right I'm sorry. I wasn't notified that anything
| discussed on these forums should be exclusively about
| whatever "the real world" cares about at least one bit
| (preferably 8 bits or more I guess?).
|
| Ah the nerds, when will we understand, indeed.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Yo don't take my comment in bad faith, I was being tongue-
| in-cheek sarcastic.
|
| Obviously "we" here on HN care about the idea itself/tech
| ...
|
| Was just saying things will likely never even begin to
| rival the Twitters and Instagrams out there contrary to
| what some utopists among us tend to think...
| lorean_victor wrote:
| no worries, I have worked as a product manager for a few
| products that "the real world" seems to care about, and I
| fully understand your sentiment. that's even why I've
| dedicated the last segment of the post to basically "who
| cares?" (I suspect some "real people" might since they
| can get everything in one place instead of having to
| follow people in 6 different places, but not sure how
| strong of an incentive that is).
|
| also having had the privilege of observing a few products
| that have found "real world" usage, I actually believe
| that "nerdy passion" is key, though of course without
| considering USABILITY and CONVENIENCE (as you've put it),
| it wouldn't get far.
| alexisread wrote:
| I'd suggest it's more of a journey, with convenience and
| usability at the start. Witness many youtube creatives trying
| to jump ship wrt to cut of the monetization, changes in
| monetization eg. longform videos, shadowbanning, and so on.
|
| These are secondary, perhaps more subtle, considerations that
| come to the fore after a while, and illustrate the dichotomy
| between platform reach and endorsing that platform.
|
| Fundamentally I think we are still dealing with hard
| decentralised problems - Small world networks are better
| understood from a tech perspective. AT-protocol, zksnarks,
| DIDs, lattice types and the like are fertile ground for
| exploration that MAY yield new advantages in this problem
| space. UX can follow the function.
| eitland wrote:
| > consistently fail to address the vast majority of the
| population who are not developers or extremely tech savvy.
|
| My feeling after a number of years in the field us we massively
| underestimate users.
|
| We have read all these blog posts about what Amazon and Google
| does to make people click and we think the same applies to us.
|
| But we aren't trying to get the last few percents of the worlds
| population fall into our dark patterns.
|
| We should be optimizing for the ones who actually use it.
| Enthusiast. Early adopters. The already then 50 year old
| electrical engineer who showed me Ubuntu 15 years or so ago.
|
| Firefox, Ubuntu, even Google used to have a massive unpaid
| sales force. I know. I was part of it.
|
| They all decided to take existing users for granted and focus
| on new users. Firefox "polishing" ux and forgetting that the
| best UX is the one that we chose ourselves.
|
| Ubuntu going all in on copying Mac: trashing the existing alt-
| tab solution, moving the window controls for no good reason.
|
| Google prioritizing "intelligent results" and the number of
| results at the expense of relevancy at every point until not
| even the double quote and verbatim operator together can
| prevent them from second guessing what I really meant to search
| for.
|
| I am tired. And I am voting with my wallet. It is Orion and
| LibreWolf for browsing, KDE for Linux distro and Kagi for
| search.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social
| networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and
| some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the
| combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings
| out the worst in people.
| kornhole wrote:
| Social media is the most important counter measure to
| propaganda. Before social media, we had a one way stream of
| information from the media outlets without much opportunity to
| question, discuss, and debunk. The fediverse resolves the
| problem of centrally controlled algorithms and censorship that
| manipulate people's speech depending on the moderation rules of
| individual instances.
| logicprog wrote:
| This is a good point actually, despite my reservations about
| social media, if you want to get a big message out quickly
| there really is nothing better than something like twitter.
| speff wrote:
| Your first sentence is the exact reason why propaganda
| thrives in social media. There's an understanding that fellow
| people are somehow more trustworthy than Big Media. The part
| that's not considered is that people on a whole are not able
| to understand every intricacy of problems out in the world -
| but they sure do love sharing opinions about every problem as
| if they do understand.
|
| Given this, easy-to-digest messages are easily amplified
| through social media and every complex detail is withered to
| nothing. This is why I stopped using Lemmy. The larger
| communities (read: the only ones that get any posts) ended up
| being a worse echo-chamber than every other platform due to
| people repeating the same simple concepts ad nauseam.
| andoando wrote:
| 100% agree. I think Reddit is a huge propaganda machine in
| itself. The most ironic thread I've seen was a headline
| about how Republicans were more susceptible to propaganda,
| with every comment of course being 3-10 words amounting to
| "oh yeah so true, they're terrible". Anyone that actually
| read past the headline though could see the article was
| total nonsense.
|
| I suppose it may be harder to control since a central
| authority can't publish anything they want.
| iteratethis wrote:
| Not really.
|
| First, nobody cares what anybody on the Fediverse says. It's
| tiny. It's pinnacle "app", Mastodon, is losing lots of MAU
| every single day and is now below 1M MAU. Besides being tiny,
| it's scattered and discovery and search do not work. How can
| this mess possibly counter propaganda?
|
| Second, whilst the Fediverse may not have sophisticated
| algorithms, it very much has censorship and typically way
| more than traditional social networks. It's basically a
| collection of far-left misfits that engage in constant
| defederation wars. You can't even post a photo of a meal
| because somebody will be "triggered".
| bee_rider wrote:
| Has anybody written this up? I think it could be
| interesting to see how things are going.
| logicprog wrote:
| I tend to agree with this sort of. In my opinion, stuff that's
| more real time, ephemeral, one to one, and focused on closed
| groups below a certain size, like IRC or Discord, or stuff that
| is one to many like modern social media but much less highly
| visible and networked, like the classic blogosphere, tends to
| be much more healthy and in the long run rewarding then
| microblogging social media like Twitter or Facebook or
| Instagram or whatever.
|
| I don't think it's necessarily the anonymity though. Or even
| the algorithms -- the fediverse has no algorithms and yet in my
| experience (having been a minor player in some big drama there
| before I left) it's getting just as toxic and judgy as Twitter,
| maybe even _more_. I think it 's more that in micro blogging
| social media, because interactions and posts are automatically
| broadcast to this huge audience that doesnt necessarily share
| any values or social norms, and are immediately highly
| discoverable and visible to everyone even outside the people
| who initially saw it, and these interactions can sort of stay
| around in the zeitgeist a bit more permanently than an instant
| message, instead of being ephemeral, in the moment, and
| directed at one or two or a few people within a closed form
| community, every post you make and every interaction with
| people takes on a sort of grandstanding, performing for the
| crowd, dare I say it virtue signaling (I say this as a leftist
| lol so you know I'm serious) tenor. It becomes automatically a
| lot more adversarial and fake and just weird and distorted. And
| then if you add on top of that the fact that posts and
| responses are highly asynchronous, so it's actually difficult
| to feel like you're really having a dialogue with a person,
| instead of just combatting disembodied words on a screen, and
| difficult to engage in compassion and quickly correct
| misunderstandings and respond to feelings in the moment, it
| means that all of the grandstanding and performing for the
| crowd and virtue signaling will be that much more dysfunctional
| and detached from actual human social interaction.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Chronological feed + boosting _is an algorithm_ and it 's
| about as toxic of an algorithm as you could get without
| making a data set of toxic vs toxic posts.
| api wrote:
| It's difficult to impossible to implement bulk level social
| media algorithms on decentralized networks because no single
| node has all the data and views/interactions are largely
| private.
|
| This is a feature and is perhaps an even more compelling reason
| to go federated or decentralized than the other autonomy and
| privacy related reasons. Social media algorithms are cultural
| lobotomy machines.
|
| A great example of technological limitations improving content
| is podcasts. Podcasts are one-way, still fairly simple in their
| distribution methods (RSS and a few major apps but no clear
| monopoly), and mostly non-interactive. This limits the ability
| of platforms and advertisers to ruin them, which is why
| podcasting is still a bastion of quality media online.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| it was quite easy for a small team to crawl and index a good
| portion of the internet, enough to become the de facto
| gateway (talking about Google).
|
| it was similarly possible for a relatively small team to
| crawl a good chunk of the available internet and train some
| of the most sophisticated "algorithms" we've seen on them
| (talking about Open AI).
|
| if there is an incentive, this problem can be solved. if this
| was actually a hard problem, most current social media
| companies wouldn't put so much effort in restricting crawling
| to force everyone through restricted API access (look at
| Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or Facebook, as examples).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I make algorithms that filter RSS feeds and other social
| media content. You don't need a global view of the system at
| all to do this, you just need _a point of view._ That is, if
| you have a few thousand posts and a thumbs up /thumbs down
| judgement you can train an ML model that will predict those
| judgements.
|
| With about two days looking at toots I could make a model
| that shows you nothing but angry toots about politics or one
| that removes angry toots (could take down that keyword filter
| that means I never hear if somebody is having trouble with
| the transmission in their truck or that Transnistria got
| invaded.)
|
| The main reason I haven't developed a social media (as
| opposed to product/service) sentiment model like this is that
| it would involve looking at a few thousand angry toots. (1)
| The reason I want it is that I don't want to read those
| toots, (2) it would cause me great suffering to look at those
| toots. Social media moderators at companies like Facebook
| have been traumatized, it's no joke.
|
| If it was my social network, I'd use that filter to put a
| brake on selfish angry memes spreading so that the pain of
| one person reading angry toots gives relief to so many more.
|
| I have a model that predicts the probability of a headline
| getting a lot of comments relative to votes on hacker news:
| some high scoring headlines in my RSS reader right now are:
|
| Why do women commit far less crime than men?
|
| Study suggests anti-Black racism may account for
| conservatives' negative reactions to jobs requiring DEI
| statements
|
| Checking a bag will cost you more on United Airlines, which
| is copying a similar move by American
|
| Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity
| happened (2022)
|
| Three of those are clickbait, the last one is a good HN
| submission. A social media sentiment model can give a larger
| algorithm a "superego". There are other ways to pursue
| engagement other than selfish angry memes.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| I've got to disagree on this point. I am a firm believer in
| "democratisation" of anything, including "publishing content
| that many other people will see".
|
| this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they
| have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social"
| part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to
| quote or comment on something someone else has already said
| compared to posting something out of the blue, and features
| like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of
| a button. they have also used other techniques that has no
| social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and
| video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc).
|
| of course, that means posting and spreading "worst in people"
| is also easier (as is spreading spam, etc). this aspect I feel
| has nothing to do with the "social" part of these platforms,
| any form of lowering the entry barrier would have caused more
| terrible things to be published and spread (maybe with
| different extents, but not essentially different).
|
| p.s. you might find this interesting if you haven't seen it
| already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion.
| they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the
| "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is
| easier to quote or comment on something someone else has
| already said compared to posting something out of the blue,
| and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create
| content with push of a button. they have also used other
| techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character
| limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's
| stories, etc).
|
| It was very easy to publish things on the internet before
| modern social media.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| how, though? I doubt we had an easier method than opening
| your phone and just typing a few sentences in a text box,
| or just "liking" or "reposting" something.
| pembrook wrote:
| Somehow amusing you're posting this on a pseudo-anonymous
| social network with an upvote based algorithm.
|
| Although I'd probably agree. Even tightly moderated communities
| who fancy themselves as "intellectual" and "rational" like this
| one are prone to bizarre group-think and emotional
| manipulation.
|
| But that's also just humans in general. What you might call
| bringing out "the worst" in people, might actually be the best
| we can do given our biology.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Good. The "worst" in people is a part of people. To pretend it
| doesn't exist and suppress it forever is an insane social
| engineering experiment.
|
| And the Dionysian night of the Internet is a way better and
| safer place for it than the Appolonian day of real life.
|
| If you're willing to surrender that outlet and the game
| theoretic ground of pseudo/anonymity because your feelings are
| too hurt, I sorely hope whatever totalitarian government is in
| your future punishes you for your weakness.
| lxgr wrote:
| > In the pull-based system, more work in the end is required
| (when should Alice query Bob? Also Bob needs to respond to the
| query, though thats super easy as it is static responses), but
| the work is better distributed, lowering the maximum amount of
| work someone has to do (in this case, Bob).
|
| I don't see how that follows. Yes, work is better distributed
| temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a
| randomized way independent of new posts appearing), but the
| baseline load of these polls will in the end be larger than that
| of having to do the push fanout per post - at least for people
| posting less frequently than the average poll rate.
|
| Generally, the push-vs-pull discussion seems like a red herring:
| For every pull system, we'll want some push mechanism for
| efficiency reasons in the end anyway; for every push system,
| we'll need a pull way to catch up with posts potentially missed
| initially.
|
| To me, the practically relevant differences between Mastodon
| (push) and e.g. Bluesky (pull-ish, with aggregators) seem to
| revolve around the actual ease of self-hosting: As the author
| notes, setting up a Mastodon server seems roughly as complicated
| as self-hosting email (i.e. possible but practically almost
| nobody will do it), but I don't see this as a limitation of the
| protocol (Activitypub), but rather its implementation.
|
| Decoupling identity resolution from hosting an entire server
| would also be a smart move: Webfinger is way too complicated for
| this; DNS TXT records would be ideal.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| yes it is a federated system by design. doesn't mean it is not
| a limitation though.
|
| to give you an example: in case of email, though it is not that
| difficult to host your own server (and even if you are a small
| startup you'll most probably do so without much effort), in the
| end basically Google decides on "who is an accepted participant
| in the network". If Google deems you spam, you are spam. If
| Google deems your authentication emails "promotion", for most
| intents and purposes, you are "promotion" and your users will
| miss your emails.
|
| that, I feel, is an inherent limitation of any federated
| system, specifically one whose design is really inspired by
| email.
|
| > I don't see how that follows.
|
| as you've mentioned right after.
|
| > work is better distributed temporally (since consumers
| hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new
| posts appearing).
| lxgr wrote:
| Still, what's the benefit of that? If peak load is a concern,
| a push-based system can stagger out individual post
| deliveries just as well, and push gives the producer much
| more control over load management. If that's not enough,
| several posts can be combined too.
|
| In a pull system, you are at the mercy of your consumers'
| refresh rate setting, and for infrequent producers, you'll
| have lots of wasted cycles fetching nothing new on top of
| that.
|
| I do agree that pull is simpler to implement (since
| subscription management is handled entirely on the consumer
| side, requiring no network protocol and server-side state for
| it), but in terms of network calls, it's strictly worse.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| the system doesn't need to be completely pull-based though.
| I don't even think most modern RSS readers are fully pull-
| based, don't they support WebSub?
|
| the main point is to separate publishing and distribution,
| making publishing far more accessible and decentralised.
| for that to happen, I guess, from a publisher's point of
| view, the system should be pull based. of course we can
| have hubs and relays to add pull-based mechanisms to ease
| the load of the system.
|
| p.s. even in that case, strictly speaking, yes a pull-based
| system, or even a hybrid one, will always require more work
| than a fully push-based system.
| lxgr wrote:
| > the main point is to separate publishing and
| distribution, making publishing far more accessible and
| decentralised. for that to happen, I guess, from a
| publisher's point of view, the system should be pull
| based.
|
| Oh, I completely agree with that assertion: Static
| content hosting is much easier than stateful subscription
| management, knowing which aggregators to post to etc.
|
| I just think that this does inherently put more work on
| the subscribers, and there's no real way to do it
| efficiently in a relatively flat architecture (with
| subscribers directly polling publishers). WebSub helps
| with pure distribution, but not with aggregation (e.g. to
| allow keyword/hashtag search), for example.
|
| That doesn't mean it's not worth still designing a system
| like that (in my view, the benefits are significant!),
| but I wouldn't call it a performance win.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| agreed. it won't be a performance gain at all.
|
| but I suspect aggregating / indexing / etc. still is
| going to be the most resource consuming part of a push-
| based system if you want your content discovery to not be
| limited to two-way interactions, which means the gains of
| a push-based system, in terms of performance, shouldn't
| be that much (I suspect the main gains will be in
| realtimeyness instead).
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Sure. Instead of servers, you have friends, and you subscribe to
| your friends content, and discovery occurs through friend-of-a-
| friend network and "discovery hubs" like the old Yahoo, but for
| niches (i.e. Follow TechDude96 for hardware review aggregation,
| etc).
| iteratethis wrote:
| I think world scale social networks as in an open "town square"
| are borderline impossible. Which is not that surprising as it's
| quite unnatural to talk and be seen by the entire world.
|
| However, if you do try it, I still believe a central network is
| superior. I would opt for baseline moderation (content should be
| legal) after which any further moderation should be in the hands
| of the user, not the network. Bluesky has interesting ideas in
| this area. For example, you can say to always block sexual
| content, show a warning, or just show it. To each their own.
|
| With that in place, a centralized network is superior as it tends
| to have excellent discovery, search, no weird syncing issues,
| it's centrally monetized, doesn't depend on lots of volunteer
| effort and the track record in keeping content online is far
| better compared to alternatives. That's a lot of benefits to
| consider.
|
| The only real downside is the algorithms that dictate reach and
| how they are gamed.
|
| Federated social media is a really bad idea. Having separate
| instances is fine if you want to carve out a community, it's the
| federation part that sucks.
|
| It's very resource hungry and still can't manage to properly sync
| up content, likes and replies.
|
| Discovery and search is very hard which beats the entire point of
| a social network, which is to find people and content.
|
| Reliability is low as any volunteer may quit on a whim, taking
| down your content.
|
| Instance moderation is very heavy-handed in that it not only
| dictates instance rules (which is fine) it also dictates
| federation. Which means you have no say in which outside content
| or people you can see. The solution is the dreaded "switch
| instance". Social media users don't know what an instance is,
| you're not getting it.
|
| The culture on the Fediverse is: connect nobody. Extreme
| safetyism.
|
| The lack of some type of ranked algorithm is a problem, not a
| solution.
|
| Reach is a problem. Bigger accounts, institutions, companies,
| news, sports...get no reach on the Fediverse.
|
| Bottom line: fully centralized social media or fully isolated
| ones. Federated is the worst of both worlds.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| I think there is a huge issue with centralized social media.
| Why are unelected tycoons in the US dictating what the rest of
| the world should be allowed to see? What happens when they
| neglect languages and regions? It can go horribly wrong:
| https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-
| faceb....
|
| Decentralized social media gives us a chance to take back
| control.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Decentralized social media sounds better in theory, but in
| practice is less effective.
|
| People are voting with their feet. Or phones, I suppose.
|
| It's like all the FOSS types who yelled about how IRC is
| superior as millions migrated to Slack and Discord. Your
| bullet point list is nothing in the face of usability.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think
| reddit is truly usable?
|
| as a content consumer I would love to be somewhere where
| there is engaging content and content discovery. I go to
| mastodon, my feed is empty and the search doesn't work. I
| bounce.
|
| as a content publisher, I would go wherever the audience
| is. I go to mastodon, users have a hard time finding me, no
| one gets my stuff. I bounce.
|
| now I (personally), as a consumer, hate the fact that I
| need to follow people at least on 3 platforms to get their
| content proper. as a publisher, I (again, personally) hate
| the fact that I am forced to at least partition the
| discussion on my content. but I'd tolerate these pain
| points for content / audience, because the main role of a
| social media is to give me content / audience. being nice
| and not having all these pain points is secondary.
| bsder wrote:
| > its not about "usability", in general, though. do you
| think reddit is truly usable?
|
| Um, apparently, yes?
|
| Google searches were doing "+reddit" before reddit melted
| down. The content was super discoverable and searchable.
| Everything (including discord, slack, and the fediverse)
| is _laughably bad_ on that front.
|
| People switched from twitter and reddit to ... discord
| and slack. Mostly beause they handle identity and phone
| apps--apparently searchability and discoverability isn't
| that important. I'm one of the olds, so don't get why the
| fuck people want phone apps to pester them all the time,
| but apparently the youngs want this very, very badly.
|
| So, yeah, apparently twitter and reddit were really quite
| usable for the vast majority of users.
|
| I'm a big fan of the fact that reddit's meltdown caused a
| bunch of people to set up forums again. However, that's a
| lot of duplicated work for every single forum
| administrator.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| I see your points (though I don't fully agree). Most of these
| relate to a "central search and discovery service". this
| doesn't need to be coupled with the rest of the network
| functionalities (posting content or interacting with content),
| which I personally believe is better fully distributed (for
| similar reasons to what you mentioned). We've done this for the
| internet as a whole (anyone can bring up a website on their
| own, search engines will discover and index it, but the search
| engine space is as centralised as it gets), so I believe we can
| do it for more "social" content as well.
| samatman wrote:
| Yes, we can easily get more decentralized that the Fediverse, and
| we have. Both Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit are peer-to-peer
| social networking, with rather different takes on what that
| means. There might be more, those are the ones I'm aware of.
| theK wrote:
| Urbit choosing to artificially limit their "address space" with
| an NFT sale was a bit of a gut punch tbh and I don't see how
| this will work out positively for the project in the long run.
| samatman wrote:
| Urbit's address space is 128 bits wide, so scarcity is
| physically impossible, unless there were a need for every
| atom in the observable universe to have many addresses.
|
| The decision to make the bottom 32 bits valuable was a clever
| one, but it's lead to some misunderstanding of how things
| actually work. Specifically, planets (a 32 bit address) only
| own an additional 2^32 addresses, called moons. That leaves
| 2^64 of the address space "wild", these are called comets.
| There are plenty.
|
| If you want a four-syllable address, they're loss leaders
| from hosting providers, currently. Two syllables you have to
| pay for, and one syllable is not usually on the market. A
| sixteen-syllable address is and will always be free.
|
| How this is handled socially, in a hypothetical future where
| there are more than 4 billion active Urbit users, is a
| problem for that future to address.
| echelon wrote:
| We need better-than-bittorrent p2p social swarms that are fast,
| efficient, and massive.
|
| I want for when someones posts an article, to have my local
| custom filters flag it for interest, schedule it for reading,
| grab the photos and videos, pull in relevant comments (again
| filtered, perhaps to my interest graph peers and highly-ranked
| dissenting opinions), and never have to step foot on the
| corrupted, ad-ridden, algorithmically boosted web again.
|
| News websites are trash. Reddit and socials are trash. I want
| complete unfettered control over the inbound stream. Everything
| first class from engineering principles. The protocol, the data
| structures, the ranking, the visualization, etc.
|
| I want data I can easily copy into my notebook, easily
| bookmark, easily remix and respond to.
|
| The web doesn't cut it, and it never has.
|
| P2P social should be article and media centric. Sharing news,
| blogs, videos, etc. with first class threaded comments built
| atop it.
|
| Everything is ephemeral and immutable unless you want to save
| it or publish a correction.
| dingdingdang wrote:
| I echo your sentiment about bittorrent and p2p swarm
| protocols. Seeing the current fediverse emerge has felt
| almost anachronistic to me - the tech put to use is, at
| baseline, older and less resilient than the p2p protocols
| from the late 1990s and early 2000s. There may or may not be
| milage in the Matrix protocol...
| alkonaut wrote:
| Sure. But even slightly less decentralization has mostly proven
| clunky and unattractive when it comes to two-way communication
| social networking. I mean we all have accounts
| bluesky/mastodon/whatever the network du jour is, but it's on
| Twitter the posts are, despite its massive quality nosedive in
| recent time. The centralization of Twitter has massive benefits
| has almost zero downsides.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| it has downsides though. I am constantly jumping between
| twitter, reddit, spotify (for podcasts) and youtube to see the
| content and latest updates from the same people. when I want to
| share something, I should think where should I post it, is it
| more technical? then reddit and HN maybe, though on twitter I
| do have some technical people following me too. is it social /
| political? then its twitter, so on. then I find myself reading
| and discussing political posts on reddit which are screenshots
| of posts on twitter or vice versa. I don't know how much pain
| this is truly, but the unnecessary walls between these
| communities is indeed a pain point, both as a consumer (I need
| to check people on multiple places) or as a publisher (I have
| to partition the discussion to say the least, if not the
| audience in total).
|
| as for mastodon / bluesky / whatever, the main issue to me
| seems to be lack of content and content discovery. which is
| weird, since every youtuber, podcaster, subreddit, all of HN
| and medium, etc. is technically on RSS, and even more can be
| easily put on RSS with cheap bridges. but instead of unifying
| and enhancing all this existing shared content streams, we've
| broken off with new protocols and created separated and
| isolated communities.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| What happened to Content-Centric-Networking? That seems to be an
| ideal model for a fully decentralized network, p2p or otherwise.
|
| Are there specific technical hurdles preventing adoption? Or is
| the allure of large companies hoarding all the data too good to
| pass up?
| lorean_victor wrote:
| what do you mean by "content-centric-networking"? perhaps I
| have some reading to do.
|
| the "allure of large companies hoarding all the data" might be
| a factor independently though. I personally believe a proper
| content discovery service is key to any form of
| decentralisation, and that is, as far as I can imagine, highly
| dependent on centralised entities amassing and then processing
| large amounts of data. I mean we sold our data to Google and in
| return got the current decentralised web where anyone can make
| a website and get traffic if the content is good enough (or
| SEO-hacky enough).
| digdugdirk wrote:
| The wikipedia article is a decent high level overview: [1]
|
| "Content-Centric Networking (CCN) diverges from the IP-based,
| host-oriented Internet architecture by prioritizing content,
| making it directly addressable and routable. In CCN,
| endpoints communicate based on named data rather than IP
| addresses. This approach is a part of information-centric
| networking (ICN) architecture and involves the exchange of
| content request messages (termed "Interests") and content
| return messages (termed "Content Objects")."
|
| It seems well suited for a distributed p2p style network in
| my mind, but its definitely not anywhere near my area of
| expertise.
|
| [1] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking
| lorean_victor wrote:
| thanks for the pointer!
| wmf wrote:
| ISPs won't deploy IPv6 and CCNx is much more complex than IP.
| Getting ISPs to cache content for free also sounds like a
| fantasy.
| davexunit wrote:
| Yes, we can. Christine Lemmer-Webber, coauthor of ActivityPub,
| cofounded the Spritely Institute to work on the next generation
| of decentralized online communities. https://spritely.institute
| ianopolous wrote:
| Absolutely. We've pioneered portable identity (and links and
| data) in a decentralised social web in Peergos:
| https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media This is also
| pull based interestingly, but also has visibility controls being
| E2EE.
|
| I don't think society needs public, or at least public by
| default, social media. This is even more true now in the age of
| LLMs and mass data harvesting.
| x3haloed wrote:
| > I don't think society needs public, or at least public by
| default, social media. This is even more true now in the age of
| LLMs and mass data harvesting. Depends on your definition of
| "social media." Is a message board / forum considered social
| media? Because while they can be problematic, they're still
| extremely useful. It would be interesting to think about
| decentralized Reddit and why lemmy is going nowhere.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Personal instances will be pretty rare
|
| Personal instances of the US Post Office are also pretty rare, my
| dude. You gonna go deliver your mail yourself? If so, why write a
| letter?
|
| You want total distributed decentralization? Use Gnutella. It's
| equivalent to giving your letter to your neighbor and asking them
| to deliver it, and they ask their neighbor, etc, until it reaches
| a back alley in Algeria, and then that Algerian calls you on the
| phone, and if you're home, you read the letter out loud live on
| the phone. Turns out that's a pretty crap way to deliver letters.
| But it's decentralized!!
|
| People: Stop being so fucking obsessed with decentralization.
| It's not that great. I'm sure you're all having lots of fun
| inventing crap technology to solve an already solved problem, but
| you're just codesturbating.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| I wouldn't. I also wouldn't think about a decentralised email
| solution, or a decentralised messaging service. doesn't make
| sense.
|
| as for publishing my own blog though? nah I'd really rather a
| decentralised system where I can host my own blog wherever.
|
| and yes I do realise most people don't care about that, and yes
| I'm not sure if they'd care about other benefits of
| decentralisation as well or not, but its not like there is
| nothing there that would affect them.
| Dwedit wrote:
| For immutable content, there's still BitTorrent magnet links or
| IPFS.
| x3haloed wrote:
| I've also been thinking about this problem for a while. The push
| model and account portability are definitely the most important
| dimensions of this issue.
|
| Can't we just solve this problem with IPFS? And something like
| DHT tables for protocol-level awareness of state changes?
|
| Your client app would just be responsible for pushing and pinning
| content to IPFS, scanning state tables for interesting updates,
| and then sending you push notifications.
|
| Really simple to take your IPFS key with you can switch to a new
| app.
| kkfx wrote:
| IMVHO:
|
| - all distributed solutions show too much overhead to perform
| well for casual users, some (now abandoned) like ZeroNet was
| performant enough for some personal blog hosting, but barely and
| still no "indexing" solution stable enough;
|
| - classic decentralized social like Usenet seems to be abandoned
| by most people (except for commercial piracy) so well, most
| people do not really care enough to take this root if they do not
| feel something at hand immediately...
|
| Long story short: we "just" need IPv6 with a global per host AND
| a "family" domain name (with all relevant subdomains) per home, a
| homeserver (like common domestic "routers", just a bit more
| open/powerful in hw terms) and that's do the base to rebuild "the
| internet" with a connected desktop model where we no not need
| third parties or a VPS to traverse NAT, where we do not have to
| deal with strange long IDs instead of something like
| phone.bill.myfriendfamily.tld to make an IP2IP audio/video call
| and so on.
|
| All other approaches ESPECIALLY those who try to mimic big
| platforms will fails.
| lorean_victor wrote:
| I admire this vision, and also appreciate the fact that you
| quoted "just" to underline a recognition of how much of a
| fundamental shift this is :D
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