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(Disclaimer: self-promotion) This article echoes a lot of the reasons I'm working on Tildes (https://tildes.net https://tildes.net) and specifically founded it

(Disclaimer: self-promotion) This article echoes a lot of the reasons I'm working on Tildes (https://tildes.net https://tildes.net) and specifically founded it as a non-profit. My announcement post from last year discusses how the current approach to community-based sites -- specifically the dependence on venture capital and advertising -- makes companies chase goals that are harmful for the users themselves: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093) I believe that a non-profit model is the only way to break out of the current cycle of sites starting out as "too good to be true" (as they burn through their VC), and inevitably devolving into privacy-invading, advertising-heavy sites dominated by lowest-common-denominator content when they need to keep forcing growth and monetize their users. Tildes has been publicly visible for a while now, but still requires an invite to register an account. If you're interested in registering and participating just send me an email, the address is in the announcement post linked above. It's not intended to be difficult to get invites, I mostly just want to keep the growth rate under control while more features and the early site culture continue building up.

bscphil 7y ago
Quick thought: this looks like a clone of Reddit, or maybe more loosely HN, Lobsters, or Metafilter. I think the most important aspect of social media to most people is that it allows for people who are friends "in real life" to share text / media with a circle of friends in a semi-private forum. This is why such an apparently unlikely candidate as Discord has become the medium of choice for a lot of young people. It's basically group chat with a few extra features like history search, different "channels", and easy media sharing. It's also why I think a lot of the current open source attempts are likely doomed to failure for this purpose - they're basically decentralized Twitter. Do you have plans for Tildes to fill this kind of role? Admittedly, I didn't look all that closely at it, and so what you're getting from me is my surface impression.
- Deimorz 7y ago
  Yes, Tildes is a link-aggregator-style site that's similar to reddit, HN, etc. There's no capability for setting up private groups (though the site is open-source and someone could certainly run their own private instance if they wanted to). I usually think of the distinction as something like being "subject-based" instead of "people-based". Some sites focus on one or the other, and some try to do both. Tildes is definitely on the subject-based end.
  - Grumbledour 7y ago
    I use that distinction as well and find it really helpful. I am just sad that it seems many efforts these days are more focused on the people than the subject side. What I really think is missing is a discussion centered Platform. Reddit style is alright, I guess, but what I really miss is a modern, federated version of phpbb.
- thosakwe 7y ago
  > I think the most important aspect of social media to most people is that it allows for people who are friends "in real life" to share text / media with a circle of friends in a semi-private forum. I agree with this. In all of the decentralized social media iterations I've seen, the main two things I've always missed were the "personal aspect," and appealing visual design. It's worth asking, though, how possible it is to achieve that in a truly decentralized fashion, while still providing a good user experience. From a user's perspective, it doesn't make much sense to have separate sites with limited interoperability when you can simply just one (centralized) site. I guess that for the Fediverse to truly take off, there really needs to be a concept that simply cannot be implemented without de-centralization. Until then, it'll be an uphill battle.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    I agree that that's a problem. If Discord is "good enough" for social media, then Matrix is trying to be an open source, decentralized Discord. It's also (in my personal experience) unbelievably crappy, even if you stick to 1-1 conversations on the "default" matrix.org instance that Riot.im uses. Some security experts have indicated that it's not up to par with Signal for those who need the strongest confidentiality guarantees. (I wouldn't fully trust Signal either if my adversary was the NSA, but there might also be no better alternative you could get people to use.) So it's really telling to me that years of work on decentralized "personal" social media hasn't come up with anything that's fully functional, let alone a replacement to existing social media sites.
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      suprising and depressing that riot feels unbelievably crappy; lots of people seem to be able to use it ok. would be helpful to know what bits sucked most if you can face it.
      - bscphil 7y ago
        Okay, so maybe "unbelievable crappy" was a bit of an exaggeration. After all, I do use it. But I'll try to explain. It starts with the fact that so many of the features still aren't up to par with what e.g. Discord provides. It feels like a knock-off. The biggest problem I've faced is dealing with the encryption. Every new device in a conversation has to be verified with every other, which means you need n(n-1)/2 pairings for a room with n devices. That's right, if you're trying to set up a chat with 10 people who have an average of three devices, you're going to need to do 435 pairings. The pairings themselves are a huge pain: there are different pairing "methods" to use, and different clients will make guesses about the method the other client supports, and the whole thing falls apart if it guesses wrong (there's no negotiation, as far as I can tell) or if the person with the device doesn't immediately respond. There's no notion of a web of trust or trusting a person instead of a specific device. Even if everything goes right (it usually doesn't) it's going to take about 30 seconds per person to do each pairing, which means your group chat with just 10 people is going to take over 7 hours to set up. You could just ignore the verification stuff, but presumably the reason you wanted to use Matrix (instead of a centralized service) in the first place was because you thought it was more secure / private. Someone adds a new device, or logs out of a device, or there's some glitch (it's happened to me)? Everyone in the room gets to do another pairing. With every one of their devices. Another issue has been the unreliability of the service itself. Sometimes it breaks, logging you out. (Hope everyone backed up their keys!) Or they get hacked and the server goes down for days: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediations-for-apr-11-security-incident https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediati... And then there's just the random client bugs. I literally just opened the tab for Riot to remind myself of other issues and was greeted with this: https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png They don't seem to be keeping up with them, either. Riot Web alone has almost 4000 open issues: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues Having a searchable history is supposed to be one of the major advantages of a Discord-like interface, but I just did a search for a word that I'm looking at in the chat and got no results. So basically, it's a mess right now. I'm using it with one person because they're the only person who wants a Discord-like chat with me and are willing to put up with the amount of nonsense needed to use an alternative that doesn't siphon off your data to a private company.
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
Looks cool. What's your censorship policy?

bscphil 7y ago

Quick thought: this looks like a clone of Reddit, or maybe more loosely HN, Lobsters, or Metafilter. I think the most important aspect of social media to most people is that it allows for people who are friends "in real life" to share text / media with a circle of friends in a semi-private forum. This is why such an apparently unlikely candidate as Discord has become the medium of choice for a lot of young people. It's basically group chat with a few extra features like history search, different "channels", and easy media sharing. It's also why I think a lot of the current open source attempts are likely doomed to failure for this purpose - they're basically decentralized Twitter. Do you have plans for Tildes to fill this kind of role? Admittedly, I didn't look all that closely at it, and so what you're getting from me is my surface impression.

Deimorz 7y ago
Yes, Tildes is a link-aggregator-style site that's similar to reddit, HN, etc. There's no capability for setting up private groups (though the site is open-source and someone could certainly run their own private instance if they wanted to). I usually think of the distinction as something like being "subject-based" instead of "people-based". Some sites focus on one or the other, and some try to do both. Tildes is definitely on the subject-based end.
- Grumbledour 7y ago
  I use that distinction as well and find it really helpful. I am just sad that it seems many efforts these days are more focused on the people than the subject side. What I really think is missing is a discussion centered Platform. Reddit style is alright, I guess, but what I really miss is a modern, federated version of phpbb.
thosakwe 7y ago
> I think the most important aspect of social media to most people is that it allows for people who are friends "in real life" to share text / media with a circle of friends in a semi-private forum. I agree with this. In all of the decentralized social media iterations I've seen, the main two things I've always missed were the "personal aspect," and appealing visual design. It's worth asking, though, how possible it is to achieve that in a truly decentralized fashion, while still providing a good user experience. From a user's perspective, it doesn't make much sense to have separate sites with limited interoperability when you can simply just one (centralized) site. I guess that for the Fediverse to truly take off, there really needs to be a concept that simply cannot be implemented without de-centralization. Until then, it'll be an uphill battle.
- bscphil 7y ago
  I agree that that's a problem. If Discord is "good enough" for social media, then Matrix is trying to be an open source, decentralized Discord. It's also (in my personal experience) unbelievably crappy, even if you stick to 1-1 conversations on the "default" matrix.org instance that Riot.im uses. Some security experts have indicated that it's not up to par with Signal for those who need the strongest confidentiality guarantees. (I wouldn't fully trust Signal either if my adversary was the NSA, but there might also be no better alternative you could get people to use.) So it's really telling to me that years of work on decentralized "personal" social media hasn't come up with anything that's fully functional, let alone a replacement to existing social media sites.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    suprising and depressing that riot feels unbelievably crappy; lots of people seem to be able to use it ok. would be helpful to know what bits sucked most if you can face it.
    - bscphil 7y ago
      Okay, so maybe "unbelievable crappy" was a bit of an exaggeration. After all, I do use it. But I'll try to explain. It starts with the fact that so many of the features still aren't up to par with what e.g. Discord provides. It feels like a knock-off. The biggest problem I've faced is dealing with the encryption. Every new device in a conversation has to be verified with every other, which means you need n(n-1)/2 pairings for a room with n devices. That's right, if you're trying to set up a chat with 10 people who have an average of three devices, you're going to need to do 435 pairings. The pairings themselves are a huge pain: there are different pairing "methods" to use, and different clients will make guesses about the method the other client supports, and the whole thing falls apart if it guesses wrong (there's no negotiation, as far as I can tell) or if the person with the device doesn't immediately respond. There's no notion of a web of trust or trusting a person instead of a specific device. Even if everything goes right (it usually doesn't) it's going to take about 30 seconds per person to do each pairing, which means your group chat with just 10 people is going to take over 7 hours to set up. You could just ignore the verification stuff, but presumably the reason you wanted to use Matrix (instead of a centralized service) in the first place was because you thought it was more secure / private. Someone adds a new device, or logs out of a device, or there's some glitch (it's happened to me)? Everyone in the room gets to do another pairing. With every one of their devices. Another issue has been the unreliability of the service itself. Sometimes it breaks, logging you out. (Hope everyone backed up their keys!) Or they get hacked and the server goes down for days: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediations-for-apr-11-security-incident https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediati... And then there's just the random client bugs. I literally just opened the tab for Riot to remind myself of other issues and was greeted with this: https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png They don't seem to be keeping up with them, either. Riot Web alone has almost 4000 open issues: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues Having a searchable history is supposed to be one of the major advantages of a Discord-like interface, but I just did a search for a word that I'm looking at in the chat and got no results. So basically, it's a mess right now. I'm using it with one person because they're the only person who wants a Discord-like chat with me and are willing to put up with the amount of nonsense needed to use an alternative that doesn't siphon off your data to a private company.

lone_haxx0r 7y ago

Looks cool. What's your censorship policy?