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Others covered some other points, but one of my major motivators is the issue of centralization: the world has come to depend on this single organization (much

Others covered some other points, but one of my major motivators is the issue of centralization: the world has come to depend on this single organization (much like Facebook) that not only oversees all of this data, but can impose whatever type of censorship or manipulation they want on users. Intentional or not. I use GNU Social[0], which is a federated service. I also host it myself, so I'm in complete control of my data. Because it's federated, the instance of anyone following me (or following others that repeat my messages) also have a copy of my messages, and I others; this makes censorship effectively impossible. In fact, it has some interesting side-effects: recently an instance dedicated to hosting pornographic material was federated with popular instances, which made many people uncomfortable; in that case, it's up to the individual instance to decide what to do (e.g. block the posts in the global feed). I'm sure the recent controversy surrounding Moxie's opinions on federation with Signal can help put this topic in perspective for many people. [0]: https://gnu.io/social/ https://gnu.io/social/

zxcvcxz 10y ago
Is it possible to connect to all the servers to get some global feed like a reddit /r/all? Also how are posts sorted? It sounds like an IRC.
wslh 10y ago
You can't build a Twitter clone in a decentralized way and expect to have good performance on the analytics side. This is a basic practical limitation. The power of Twitter is having a single firehose where you can hook and analyze ALL the tweets.
- narrowrail 10y ago
  First, I don't understand why one couldn't federate their instance with every other instance, essentially creating a firehose. It's not as if Twitter runs on a single machine. Secondly, I do not think most users care about "performance on the analytics side" which seems more like a business need.
  - wslh 10y ago
    Sorry, I don't want to be pedantic but this is a constraint on distributed systems. Like Google Search, Twitter doesn't run on a single machine but it is a very cohesive and optimized system (e.g: high speed networks, storage and performance).
    - sounds 10y ago
      And when a viable solution to the constraints imposed by CAP theorem arises? I would think that will happen sooner rather than later.
- mikegerwitz 10y ago
  > You can't build a Twitter clone Replacement, not clone; I don't care if it has all the features of Twitter. There are some instances that are more Twitter-like (e.g. Quitter), but they don't interest me. For me, personally, this has nothing to do with cloning Twitter. For others it might, but I think that is misguided. > in a decentralized way and expect to have good performance on the analytics side I'm not sure that this matters. As a user, I'd prefer that there _not_ be traditional analytics, because centralized services' analytics amount to surveillance. > The power of Twitter is having a single firehose where you can hook and analyze ALL the tweets. Federation doesn't prevent another service from collecting and performing its own analytics on a federation. It certainly wouldn't be as performant, sure---but that's not the issue that we're addressing. A decentralized service is worth any performance cost for many of us.
  - wslh 10y ago
    First, we are talking about different things if you don't want to clone Twitter. > Federation doesn't prevent another service from collecting and performing its own analytics on a federation. This will not be in realtime and that is my main point on the difficulty to replace Twitter. The "tweet" of an user alarming of an earthquake will take much longer than on a centralized system.

zxcvcxz 10y ago

Is it possible to connect to all the servers to get some global feed like a reddit /r/all? Also how are posts sorted? It sounds like an IRC.

wslh 10y ago

You can't build a Twitter clone in a decentralized way and expect to have good performance on the analytics side. This is a basic practical limitation. The power of Twitter is having a single firehose where you can hook and analyze ALL the tweets.

narrowrail 10y ago
First, I don't understand why one couldn't federate their instance with every other instance, essentially creating a firehose. It's not as if Twitter runs on a single machine. Secondly, I do not think most users care about "performance on the analytics side" which seems more like a business need.
- wslh 10y ago
  Sorry, I don't want to be pedantic but this is a constraint on distributed systems. Like Google Search, Twitter doesn't run on a single machine but it is a very cohesive and optimized system (e.g: high speed networks, storage and performance).
  - sounds 10y ago
    And when a viable solution to the constraints imposed by CAP theorem arises? I would think that will happen sooner rather than later.
mikegerwitz 10y ago
> You can't build a Twitter clone Replacement, not clone; I don't care if it has all the features of Twitter. There are some instances that are more Twitter-like (e.g. Quitter), but they don't interest me. For me, personally, this has nothing to do with cloning Twitter. For others it might, but I think that is misguided. > in a decentralized way and expect to have good performance on the analytics side I'm not sure that this matters. As a user, I'd prefer that there _not_ be traditional analytics, because centralized services' analytics amount to surveillance. > The power of Twitter is having a single firehose where you can hook and analyze ALL the tweets. Federation doesn't prevent another service from collecting and performing its own analytics on a federation. It certainly wouldn't be as performant, sure---but that's not the issue that we're addressing. A decentralized service is worth any performance cost for many of us.
- wslh 10y ago
  First, we are talking about different things if you don't want to clone Twitter. > Federation doesn't prevent another service from collecting and performing its own analytics on a federation. This will not be in realtime and that is my main point on the difficulty to replace Twitter. The "tweet" of an user alarming of an earthquake will take much longer than on a centralized system.