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Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- buboard 7y agothe choice is pretty obvious, whatever mastodon uses
- philpem 7y agoThat would be ActivityPub.
- malvosenior 7y agoTwitter has repeatedly demonstrated that they are not a developer friendly company and that you should never build anything on their APIs. Since day one, they've done nothing but crack down on 3rd party development and peel away access. They are the last company that should be trusted to develop an open standard.
- techlaw 7y agoWell, maybe second-to-last.
- HJain13 7y agoYou can't just say that and not tell who you think is last
- majormjr 7y agoIt's going to be Oracle.
- frogpelt 7y agoObviously, it's Facebook. Because there has to be one giant tech company that everyone hates and Microsoft lost interest in the position over 5 years ago.
- MrZongle2 7y agoFrom this thread the only conclusion I can draw is that Twitter is in the bottom five. Which is bad enough.
- alexis_fr 7y agoBut it looks like a ranking where one can only rank at the bottom. Who is the company most loved by developers? GitHub? Stripe? Atlassian? SalesForce? Each of them has done something wrong at some point, and it may even be the sign of management’s ability to get rid of cruft, even if those choices don’t make us happy.
- philpem 7y agoPretty sure Oracle trumps Google too, which puts them in second. I guess that makes Twitter third-to-last on that list. ... and Oracle's got one hell of a lead on the rest of the race.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- apeace 7y agoI think they meant Google, who are notorious for shutting down projects.
- zemo 7y agoFacebook
- aranw 7y agoI've been banned for many years and can no longer get access to even my own data
- javiermares 7y agoi'm with you but isn't this different, given that it's open source? of which twitter itself will eventually be a client
- Porthos9K 7y agoI'd say they should use ActivityPub[1] instead of wasting time on their own incompatible solution, but quite frankly I don't want Twitter federating with Mastodon. We get our fill of chuds with anime avatars thanks to Pleroma, and don't really need or want Twitter around because decentralization won't make it any less of a digital sacrifice zone[2]. 1: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_zone
- hnuser77 7y agoFor those unfamiliar with this situation: Pleroma is an ActivityPub server and frontend written in Elixir and designed for low resource consumption, somewhat of an alterative to Mastodon. One or two of the most prominent early Pleroma instances had very sparse moderation policies, leading some to associate Pleroma with trolls and far-right users. Today, most Pleroma instances prohibit hate speech, harassment, and so on. Of course, anyone is free to make their own Pleroma or Mastodon instance with whatever rules and federation policies they like, and the most "chud-filled" instance in the entire fediverse (Gab) is running a Mastodon fork, not Pleroma.
- api 7y ago> get our fill of chuds with anime avatars thanks to Pleroma "In 2019 Anime will be associated with fascism, neo-Nazis, and hard-core misogyny." - Time traveler me from the future. "LOL WUT?" - Me in 2005 before murdering this obviously false me from an obviously impossible timeline to prevent damage to the space-time continuum.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- verdverm 7y agoActivityPub?
- thosakwe 7y agoWhy not ActivityPub?
- Vinnl 7y agoIt doesn't sound like he's ruling it out explicitly; presumably, it will be something for the team to evaluate. Of course, plenty of reasons to be sceptical about them either going with ActivityPub, or not.
- false-mirror 7y agobecause it's not built on crypto, and Jack wants to control a new coin a la Libra
- robobro 7y agowhy does Twitter need to be built on crypto? Ugh. This brings to mind the (truthfully) quite useless Minds.com social network. Twitter doesn't NEED a blockchain. Just look at Pleroma, Mastodon, or Gab to see p2p twitter replacements that are blockchain-free.
- walt74 7y agoInteresting. Twitter early kicked open standards in the nuts, so I understand everyone who's sceptical to say the least. But if they manage to detangle that ugly mess that is the Fediverse this could be a real and good step into the right direction.
- Kye 7y agoNo one should trust them to do it without making it favorable to them and their business model. Microsoft was just the first to get caught and punished for embracing, extending, and extinguishing in the new century. The pattern is as old as time.
- kashprime 7y agoThey should use RSS; Youtube, Medium and most blogs already generate RSS feeds for their content.
- OzzyB 7y ago“There's an old saying on the Internet — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”
- gkoberger 7y agoI know it seems like Bush forgot the quote, but in reality he likely realized halfway through he didn't want a soundbite of him saying "Shame on me".
- ndarwincorn 7y agoThis retconned history of the mistake that's popped up in the last few years is bizarre. No one thought this at the time. Bush tripped over his words all the time. It's much more likely that than a calculated move (that backfired btw, it's been his most famous quote since the day he said it.)
- 1shooner 7y agoRarely is the question asked: is our children learning?
- mr__y 7y agoit depends on how much is brazilian
- munificent 7y ago> No one thought this at the time. I remember hearing people suggest this is why he misspoke shortly after it happened.
- throwaway_tech 7y ago>I know it seems like Bush forgot the quote Of all people to give the benefit of the doubt to...you give it to a bumbling idiot who was known for misspeaking and tongue tying himself into knots? Before he even messed up the saying, he messed up his own introduction to the saying: >There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee...
- techlaw 7y agoYes, protocols, not platforms -- but BigTech cannot be involved beyond funding. We've already been down their road.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- d--b 7y agoHow is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation? It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.
- faitswulff 7y agoWorks out quite well if you want to get out of the business of moderating.
- izzydata 7y agoI get the feeling that is the idea. They want a "neutral" platform where they have no responsibility.
- Porthos9K 7y agoModeration's easy in a decentralized model: run your own server, and refuse to federate with servers that are run by (or used by) people you consider to be assholes. Server admins can easily band together to contain (or isolate) "bad" servers as most of the Fediverse has done with Gab.
- rvrabec 7y agoSame concern - I'm working on getting some info removed from mastodon. it's terrifying how hard it is to get someone (volunteer mods) to actually remove something... This sort of case makes me an advocate for centralized access to moderate/regulate/also be accountable... but then if there's this magic backdoor to data access and removal...?
- rmtech 7y ago> How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation? There will be a space where different people and organizations can build filters that rate information for veracity and other traits. Over time these filters will develop a track record. People will be able to filter their feed through such filters. Centralized orgs can already do this, but they make a central and opaque choice about it. This means that there is a lot of pressure from various interest groups to make sure that the hidden filter is biased towards their favored viewpoint, and the users cannot really see what the result of this fight is. It's like how it probably wouldn't be a good idea to have just one news organization that served the whole US.
- pretfood 7y agoHa, I knew it wouldn't take long for web 2 to get in on the web 3 act.
- dmead 7y agoI don't understand how this solves anything. What can stop shitty people from joining and posting content to any of this?
- deweller 7y agoNothing will stop unwanted posts. But crowdsourcing moderation could theoretically give you a cleaner feed.
- Kye 7y agoThe Mastodon project Twitter helpfully provided a list of existing projects that are robust and already fairly popular. https://twitter.com/MastodonProject/status/1204774808015327232 https://twitter.com/MastodonProject/status/12047748080153272... Mastodon has a number of instance and user-level boundary controls, like image muting for porn and sex work instances, that let people still federate with instances that could be trouble without that boundary. It would keep a hypothetical Twitter.com instance from causing what happened when AOL brought millions of people online.
- rapnie 7y agoHere is a long list of AP projects in various stages of development: https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/watch...
- tuukkah 7y agoThere are multiple ways they could decentralise, Mastodon-like or not. I bet the prime requirement is securing a business model for Twitter.
- phoe-krk 7y agoIsn't this called ActivityPub and hasn't this been working well for the last couple of years?
- mactavish88 7y agoExactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization? Are there genuine technical shortcomings in the ActivityPub standard that Twitter's engineering team has identified? Why not talk about that and contribute improvements to the standard? Are there shortcomings to being part of the standardization process in the W3C? Then talk about that and make the processes better. Is it that he needs his name stamped on a new protocol? I'm not sure we can do much about the terminal egotism of the ultra wealthy and its pernicious effects on our society. Solving this will take a tremendous amount of collective effort.
- kick 7y agoActivityPub is a horrible protocol, and not decentralized. Neither of you know what you're talking about, and not even the people working on AP like AP!
- rvense 7y agoWhy build anything? Just[0] make Twitter a Mastodon instance. [0] Haha
- kick 7y agoMastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).
- Angostura 7y agoIt’s not clear to me what ‘decentralized’ means her, if not federated. Perhaps you could explain?
- EGreg 7y agoFederated means you’re part of a giant tree with some authority on the top (like DNS has with ICANN). Decentralized means there is no center I would add that Distributed to me seems there are no inherent “domains” you need to belong to, like for example email is federated but with scuttlebutt you’re identified by your public key and a hub is just a dumb relay and you can have many. Non-federated routing alternatives include Kademlia (used in BitTorrent) and simple flooding/gossipping (like in Kazaa) or ad-hoc networks
- Gaelan 7y agoI've generally seen decentralized as a synonym for federated, not distributed.
- danShumway 7y agoWhat's the authority at the top of Mastadon? You can have private instances that don't federate with anyone, and there's no coordinated authority that controls any other instance. For that matter, what is the authority at the top of email? You and I can set up an email server and start talking to each other right now without anyone's permission. We don't have to be connected to anyone else, and we don't have any authority that can control our implementations or even that keeps track of what servers exist. I don't get the comparison between Email or Mastadon to ICANN.
- faitswulff 7y agoIs there anything wrong with targeting GNU Social and/or ActivityPub for Twitter's use case?
- kick 7y agoMastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys). Further, GNU Social still doesn't implement AP. This is largely because AP is very annoying to implement, but also because GNU Social sucks.
- jstewartmobile 7y agoOld Jack seems a little wild these days--like some of that Paul LeRoux / John McAfee outlaw energy has entered his soul. Will keep my fingers crossed.
- Angostura 7y agoMastodon, anyone? https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
- kick 7y agoMastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).
- dgellow 7y agoThat's a type of decentralization. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network which is using both terms: > A distributed social network or federated social network is an Internet social networking service that is decentralized and distributed across distinct providers (something like email but for social networks), such as the Fediverse.
- Gaelan 7y agoThe terminology I've most commonly seen used is this: Centralized = One central system runs everything (i.e. Twitter, Facebook) Decentralized = Multiple central systems run everything, but they talk to each other and you can build your own (i.e. email, Mastodon/ActivityPub) Distributed = No central system at all (i.e. Bitcoin)
- M2Ys4U 7y agoDecentralised implies distributed (although the inverse is not true - one can have a distributed yet centralised model).
- miguelmota 7y ago> Distributed = No central system at all I can have a single non-distributed computer system and have that single computer be decentralized by having the programs it runs be done through achieving consensus. Your definitions are a bit off because Mastadon and Bitcoin are both distributed and decentralized systems.
- jellicle 7y agoSeems like Twitter is looking to embrace, extend and extinguish Mastodon, etc. This is good, in a sense - means Twitter is feeling the competition. But any open source developers out there should trust Twitter just as far as you can throw them.
- mathnmusic 7y agoThey should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon. In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub client. Implementation was easy and the data model is quite easy to understand. ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter could have been. https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/ https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/ http://activitypub.rocks/ http://activitypub.rocks/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- edf13 7y agoThat's not going to work.... There are egos at stake here!
- ilaksh 7y agoI don't think its mostly about egos but rather about money. Something like Ethereum offers a potential profit model which ActivityPub does not. Also ActivityPub relies on servers/federated rather than p2p.
- edf13 7y agoIt's been tried before on Eth... can't recall the name now but the biggest issue is the Gas price/cost to post any update. As with all(Most) Blockchains ~ it simply is too expensive to store data. Especially at any scale.
- deweller 7y agoA typical solution to this is to store the data outside of the blockchain and then checkpoint a hash of the data snapshot into the blockchain at regular intervals. This provides tamper resistance to the data. Incentivizing users or organizations to store large amounts of data is still a problem of course.
- EGreg 7y agoTo be fair, Twitter did pioneer oAuth back in the day, and now everyone uses it... worked better than Meebo’s xAuth
- bjt2n3904 7y agoI'm cautiously optimistic. Twitter has been been making some bad decisions with content moderation, and has abandoned the idea of being the "Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party". Decentralization should restore that... ...should. That notion could disappear really fast if Twitter gets to decide who can run an instance based on their belief systems. In the mean time, it's an interesting case study of what happened to Wil Wheaton when he tried to join a Mastodon instance. Already, even in these comments, people are expressing concerns about how Twitter will be able to maintain control over "misinformation and abuse". That's the whole point of decentralization guys. It's impossible to moderate Twitter without being authoritarian and creepy. Bail on the concept of controlling others, and delegate that power to the end user by means of improved blocking tools. If decentralization is going to work, we have to abandon our desire to control others with a centralized authority, and accept that responsibility as our own.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago“Free speech” twitter alternatives exist, and invariably turn into cesspools (see gab.ai).
- UserIsUnused 7y agoI believe they turn into those cesspools because only people that feel outside of mainstream networks due to bans and stuff, end up there. It would be a different scenario if it was the big network that supported free speech instead of a new ban reactionary network
- ratsmack 7y agoFree speech includes things people may not want to hear, plus the definition of hate speech is a constantly moving target.
- larnmar 7y agoIs gab really a “cesspool”? I just looked at it for the first time. The way people talk about it I was expecting /pol/ squared, but the parts I could see without making an account seemed surprisingly normie, more reminiscent of instapundit than Stormfront.
- sonofgod 7y agoyay, blockchain. :( https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766085037248512 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766085037248512 "Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there."
- treelovinhippie 7y agoAll blockchains fundamentally do not scale. Global universal consensus and a global centralized datastore (ledger) is an anti-pattern found nowhere in nature. If the Twitter team go for a blockchain stack, they're doing so for the mass surveillance and control feature. P2P is the way: see Holochain, Scuttlebutt etc.
- mackrevinack 7y agoor the Safe Network as well
- nenolod 7y agoActually a hybrid approach is the way. Nobody wants to wait hours to download GBs of new gossip to get started. Streaming the gossip is necessary to make the technology viable.
- kick 7y agoWhile it's probably just an extension of Jack's obsession over blockchain, it's a bit interesting that you'd have to use Twitter to apply: there are a few truly-decentralized/or federated solutions that have been proposed and have an active userbase, and the authors of the good stuff don't tend to be on Twitter. For example, one of the people working on one of the most prominent pieces of software implementing the ActivityPub specification has proposed/is ~close to releasing a reference-implementation of one [a non-AP distributed protocol], which seems to solve most of the issues that Twitter would need to solve for privately-scoped posts (a major problem with most federated and decentralized social media), with plans to ~eventually get around to solving publicly-scoped things: https://socially.whimsic.al/notice/9p6cjMLaIZxtCKyNto https://socially.whimsic.al/notice/9p6cjMLaIZxtCKyNto (Pleroma doesn't really do per-user threading, so the responses to the original post are mixed in with the author continuing the original thread. Reader beware, etc.)
- anaphor 7y agoI'm glad they're planning on using ocaps. Not so optimistic that twitter understands ocaps though. They should hire Mark S. Miller to consult for them or something.
- robobro 7y agoOCAP is such a needed feature. One of my concerns with Twitter is that it's essentially unsafe -- while safety is a tricky thing to guarantee in decentralized networks, OCAP makes serious steps towards addressing the problem.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- buboard 7y agoNNTP FTW! He's CEO of twitter and Square. His plan is for square to be at the center of decentralized payments via cryptocoins. Africa will be a huge place to start, as the incumbents in the west will sabotage any such effort
- crabasa 7y agoHonestly... I've never wanted to embed an image in HN more than now. Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown says what 1000 words cannot. https://giphy.com/gifs/football-prank-Ou18ZgE49Fss0 https://giphy.com/gifs/football-prank-Ou18ZgE49Fss0
- mathgenius 7y ago"the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention" I really wish I could hack on the youtube recommendation algorithm. It seems to be tuned for zombie viewing pleasure, and totally not for finding surprising new content. Even just having several "personas" would be a big help.
- lucideer 7y agoThe problem is the revenue model. Zombie viewing is more profitable than surprising new content. If you were asked to hack on YouTube's algorithm, any modifications you'd produce, no matter their merit, would be tested against the status quo for their ability to generate revenue.
- mathgenius 7y agoI'm sure that is what they tell themselves at youtube HQ. But I'm not convinced. Why should one A.I. fit everyone? It just seems like laziness, ie. corporate inertia, to me. If they could open up an API for third party recommenders this would really be interesting.
- bduerst 7y agoNot really. Surprising new content has more active engagement which is crucial for acquisition ads. Revenue for pay-per-click is always better than display.
- softawre 7y agoSounds like you have a billion dollar idea then that you can sell to Google.
- mattrp 7y agoYes I feel like personal ownership of the recommendation engine is the key battleground..otherwise whatever the data is a third party is always deciding what you see.
- 7y ago
- dchuk 7y agoI wonder if he realizes how terrible Twitter is for long form writing and publishing like this when he does it. It’s always baffled me why they haven’t removed the character limit entirely and instantly become the largest networked publishing platform that’s ever existed over night.
- buboard 7y agoi like the character limit. Twitter is a telegraph office, not a magazine. he kinda has to use these threads himself, because it's his company. Hopefully his new system will suppport dual "excerpt/full text" publishing, because i 'd hate my feed to be full of 3 page articles instead of TL-DRs
- robobro 7y agoit made more sense when mobile phones operated via SMS rather than 3g/4g/wifi, but it doesn't make a lot of sense now to have the character limit. What do you actually gain by capping posts to 240 characters per message? People seem to primarily use Twitter to communicate and forcing people to break a thought into multiple posts adds nothing to the experience. "Twitter is a telegraph office" -- but should it be? Look at ATOM/RSS, they are telegraph offices too, yet they don't have character limits. ActivityPub services like Pleroma also are "telegraph offices" without strict character limits yet they don't seem to suffer for it. In fact it's much more pleasant to use Pleroma for this reason, you have the freedom to express complete thoughts.
- buboard 7y ago> What do you actually gain by capping posts to 240 characters per message brevity? it s a virtue
- deegles 7y agoSo now instead of a focused team of experts detecting and removing disinformation campaigns, each user will have to figure it out on their own or hire a service to do it.
- banads 7y agoGood, then people will be more inclined towards independent critical thinking
- M2Ys4U 7y agoGood luck with that
- banads 7y agoBetter long term odds than having 1,500 people do it for 321,000,000 (MAU)
- dragonelite 7y agothis, and people are free to believe what they how bad and stupid it might look to others.
- riffic 7y agoJack is building his own Fediverse. I think Twitter should whitelabel its application and sell 'instances' to media, publishers, government agencies, and other organizations who would benefit over control of their namespace. G Suite seems to be a good model to follow. What I'd really like to see would be a focus on nonprofits and grassroots political candidates, such as a NationBuilder for the Fediverse.
- trollied 7y agoSounds like a plot from Silicon Valley :) Twitter PiperNet?
- phoe-krk 7y agoDuplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780
- kick 7y agoTo those of you pushing for ActivityPub: Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (Pleroma). AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped content, relying on a lot of trust for every party involved. This gets broken frequently, and has had consequences so far on networks implementing it (like half of them are incompatible implementations, so I think it's completely fine to say "networks"). The specification itself is far too ambiguous. Here's a post by a maintainer of Diaspora explaining this part further: https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to-rule-them-all.html https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to... So let's assume you can get Twitter to implement ActivityPub perfectly to-spec. Great! It doesn't work with literally any pre-existing ActivityPub software, and users' DMs and are more or less public, with users' private accounts literally being public. I use AP daily, and while it's fine for technical users with a reasonable understanding that anything they post is public, putting naive users' data at risk has never and will never be acceptable; pushing AP will harm everyone.
- laksmanv 7y agoCould I shoot you an email about this?
- RubberShoes 7y agoIs he aware PiperNet didn't work after all
- NetBeck 7y agoI wonder how much user engagement would decrease if a CAPTCHA was needed to read a tweet. I think a big percentage of accounts are bots either trying to gauge sentiment, or push groups further to their respective political corners.
- jitl 7y agoHow could they avoid mentioning ActivityPub? This already exists! This goal is full of double-think.
- masukomi 7y agoActivityPub isn't decentralized. It's federated. There's a big difference. That being said, solutions like Scuttlebutt, DAT, & IPFS are decentralized, do work, and do have social networks.
- ummonk 7y agoJack mentioned SMTP as a similar standard for email, so I think by decentralized they do mean federated.
- zmzrr 7y agoWhat's the difference between decentralised and federated?
- bilbo0s 7y agoFederated has some, perhaps different, individual or organization in charge of each server to which users are able to connect. There may be hundreds of different individuals and companies hosting and controlling different servers. All of which could either choose to communicate with each other, or not. Each of these servers would have, perhaps, millions of users who would then be beholden to the regulatory whims of the individual or organization controlling the server they join. An example would be Mastadon. In a completely decentralized architecture, every client would also be a server. And every client could, potentially, connect to every other client. So every user is beholden only to himself. Other users would be free, of course, not to connect to that user, but the user could post whatever s/he wanted without fear of being cut off. There is no good example of this architecture out there right now. Basically with Mastadon, you can be cut off. With a hypothetical completely distributed social network architecture, you can't. (Well, maybe your ISP could cut off your internet connection? But that's a whole other issue.)
- laksmanv 7y agoDoes anyone on HN have an interest in building a decentralized social network together? I've been thinking about doing this for a while now. Feel free to shoot me an email laksman [at] stanford [dot] edu
- M2Ys4U 7y agohttps://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
- riffic 7y agoI want to build the "NationBuilder" of the Fediverse. A PaaS / SaaS giving nonprofits, indie media, and grassroots pols access to host their own social media platform on their own web domain.
- 80386 7y agoWhat's the problem with existing ones? And why do social networks draw so much attention relative to other social platform patterns, like forums? I've been thinking for a while that there should be something like a decentralized omni-Reddit. I liked forums, but people don't want to use them anymore, because there are too many different signups and too many different notification streams/etc. on too many different sites to bother with - so if you had something like Mastodon for forums, that could mitigate that. But it seems like a consensus has set in that Facebook/Twitter-like social networks are the One True Model, and very few people are interested in things like forums anymore.
- kixiQu 7y agoAlways love boosting other people's open-source projects: https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy "A link aggregator / reddit clone for the fediverse."
- ChristianBundy 7y agoIf you're interested in joining an existing group of folks who are already working on this: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ Feel free to email me if you'd like an invite to the network.
- 0XAFFE 7y agoThis sounds more like Scuttlebutt[1] than Mastodon. [1] https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/
- wufufufu 7y agoI think Jack's ideas usually should be new companies and not changes to Square or Twitter. I also am disappointed that Vine was shuttered when TikTok is basically the same thing and now is a massive social network[1]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/01/instagram-vs-tiktok/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/01/instagram-vs-tiktok/
- ilaksh 7y agoI think that most monopoly technology companies now expect decentralized systems to challenge them eventually. So its smart to try to build and promote something that is decentralized but also allows them a profit model. It also makes sense just from an architectural standpoint in terms of scaling. I think Ethereum offers at least a chance they may do both of those things.
- Nasrudith 7y agoDecentralization first came to mind as a "try to pawn off the hosting costs" as a motivation but I can see trying legal zones to try to adapt to the multiple conflicting legal requirements and demands because countries would never agree on "neutral international business rules". It is certainly rational and often of questionable legal fairness to expect otherwise. I am not happy with the balkanization involved in that concept - part of the beauty of the internet is a disregard for the globe's petty fiefdoms and their ability to literally divide and conquer.
- panarky 7y agoActivityPub? Who cares about what JSON schema gets adopted? Much more interesting is the why, not the how. #1 reason to decentralize: "Centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people." #2 reason: "The value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention. Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can’t choose or build alternatives. Yet." #3 reason: "social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health."
- M2Ys4U 7y ago> ActivityPub? Who cares about what JSON schema gets adopted? It's less the wire format (JSON-LD) and more the semantics (ActivityStreams) that are important, to be honest.
- auiya 7y ago> "social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health." This seems to run anathema to the concept of social media platforms being run by for-profit companies. Monetization absolutely mandates the need for controversy and outrage, as opposed to social welfare.
- larnmar 7y agoThat’s the thing, I’m not really sure it does. Never-ending social media political flamewars increase engagement for a few people but drive others away. Personally I deleted my twitter account and barely use Facebook any more for this reason. If there was a fun happy version of these networks that showed me stuff I wanted to see rather than stuff that annoys me, I’d use it.
- quirkot 7y agoIt's RSS. Twitter invented RSS.
- robobro 7y agoOld Twitter even included RSS for user profiles & hashtags I believe, much like how Pleroma provides ATOM feeds for user profiles and hashtags/search queries.
- thisisbrians 7y agoCool idea, sure. Maybe they should have had the marketing team look at the banner image before going live. Definitely undermines the perceived legitimacy of the effort in my opinion: https://twitter.com/bluesky https://twitter.com/bluesky
- arthurcolle 7y agoI love that little creature. Why don't you?
- save_ferris 7y agoI personally get really strong uncanny valley vibes from that thing. I might dig a cartoon version of it, but that banner image seriously creeps me out.
- arthurcolle 7y agoI don't even think it is a real animal, it looks like a capuchin monkey or something. Anyone know what species it is?
- kixiQu 7y agoit's an art doll (like a puppet)
- macawfish 7y agoMy feeling is that they're hackers who are already working in dweb/crypto
- macawfish 7y agoShould say "targeting hackers"
- javiermares 7y agoif anything, whimsical memery adds authenticity, sincerity, hacky feeling. i'd be suspicious of anything more packaged or polished
- M2Ys4U 7y agoI'm willing to bet this is a reaction to a the Indian exodus from Twitter to the fediverse
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zmzrr 7y agoYes, that is exactly what has happened.
- dajohnson89 7y agocould you elaborate? or provide a link?
- M2Ys4U 7y agoSure: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-50343054 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-50343054 https://qz.com/india/1746734/angry-twitter-india-users-are-migrating-to-mastodon-in-thousands/ https://qz.com/india/1746734/angry-twitter-india-users-are-m... https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/mastodon-happening-in-india/article29924141.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/mastodon-happening-in... https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/indians-leaving-twitter-join-mastodon-what-is-it-how-does-it-work-1617030-2019-11-08 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/indians-leav... https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/social-network-mastodon-suspends-assam-police-account-6123408/ https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/social-n...
- M2Ys4U 7y agoI'm willing to bet this is a reaction to a the Indian exodus from Twitter to the fediverse
- Arathorn 7y agoFor what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes here - complete with relative reputation systems (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/proposals/2313-moderation-policy-rooms.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos...) and an open standard (https://matrix.org/docs/spec https://matrix.org/docs/spec) and even an open governance process and foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation) - and with work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix. Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some opportunity to join forces on this.
- pat2man 7y agoBut Matrix is mostly built around chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter. I would assume any new system would take some parts of Matrix and some parts of ActivityPub but not the entire thing.
- Arathorn 7y agoWe built Matrix to synchronise any kind of comms data - we just call the primitive a “room” rather than (say) a “pubsub topic” or whatever more general term. You can absolutely build microblogging on top of Matrix; there are already a few toy examples already.
- hobofan 7y agoReally glad you mentioned that! I was looking into building something on top of SecureScuttleButt, but didn't like some of the opinionated choices in it (same goes for ActivityPub). Looking at Matrix spec, the two seem to be somewhat conceptually similar, and Matrix seems to cover my needs. Never even thought to consider it before, but it might actually be a really good fit!
- asymmetric 7y agoWhat were the choices you didn’t like about Scuttlebutt?
- LockAndLol 7y ago> Instead he pointed to the principle of decentralization, and key technologies, such as blockchain, as the solution. Ah... so that's how he's going to get the funding: https://external-preview.redd.it/CypLdP3MLDVm15Lwm1f-M98gyMhcUkj9_yd0CfOpZHw.png?s=10fd0161fb48dfe7393aa8d62873b88baeec91f3 https://external-preview.redd.it/CypLdP3MLDVm15Lwm1f-M98gyMh... Why else would you need to insert a blockchain into the solution? Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/) is already one possible solution and they wouldn't have to reinvent some new protocol.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ChristianBundy 7y agoIt's worth mentioning that Secure Scuttlebutt uses a signature chain, which provides many benefits of conventional blockchains without forcing a consensus (which is the part that requires "mining"). My experience with SSB has been very positive.
- davefp 7y agoHow do you write a tweet that cribs the ideals of existing federated social media projects (Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, Write Freely etc.) without at least acknowledging their existence? Also: Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- eitland 7y agoNow if we could get - a few proper web frontends (and especially one like Google+), - groups (like Google+, WhatsApp, Telegram) then this would start to look seriously promising. I'd happily pay a 20-40 bucks a year for that and (if Telegram didn't exist) a bit more to get a hosted but private instance for my extended family. (That said I have been experimenting with hubzilla this year and it seems seriously promising but all instances seems to be locked down really hard or doesn't acvept new members and testing on my own instance alone doesn't really give me a feel for how it works in practice.)
- Arathorn 7y agoFor what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes here - complete with relative reputation systems (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/proposals/2313-moderation-policy-rooms.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos...) and an open standard (https://matrix.org/docs/spec https://matrix.org/docs/spec) and even an open governance process and foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation) - and with work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix. Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some opportunity to join forces on this.
- dang 7y agoCan you please not post duplicate comments to HN? It lowers the signal/noise ratio of the site and creates a headache when we merge threads, like we did in this case. If two threads are so much the same that you want to post the same comment to both, that's a strong indication that they should be merged. Sending us a heads up at hn@ycombinator.com is a forcing function to make that happen. (Parent is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763925. We merged the replies from here to there.)
- tingletech 7y agoI thought at first by "kick off" they had banned a competitor.
- captainbland 7y agoA team of "up to five" - is this actually a serious effort? I get that five strong minds can do quite a lot but from a corporate strategic point of view this is a minnow, surely?
- PleaseHelpMe 7y agodear mod, this is a dup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780
- marban 7y agoWhen in Africa...
- ryanmarsh 7y agoI can't help but think there is nothing altruistic about this.
- voidfiles 7y agoRSS?
- onreact 7y agoAh, the impact of Mastodon - the decentralized Twitter-alternative. I highly recommend it. You can even run an instance yourself, just like you run WordPress.
- ummonk 7y agoThis is huge. The problem for any federated initiative is that most of the users are already on established social media platforms. If Twitter adopts an existing protocol (or creates a new one that others can join on), then new services can be compatible with Twitter's massive user base.
- choiway 7y agoDoes he have the Pied Piper USB key?
- The_rationalist 7y agoHow much is this in intersection with the https://datatransferproject.dev https://datatransferproject.dev currently also supported officially by Twitter.
- p0la 7y agoWhat does that mean in terms of responsibility to take bad content content down? Seems like this would allow them to argue fake news is not their problem anymore. They are just a nice interface to visualise stuff that is stored in a decentralised way, outside of their direct control. Also I guess it means you can cut this AWS bill by like a lot. And it feels like it gives a very clear path to direct monetisation.
- TomMckenny 7y agoWisely so: eventually two autocrats are going to pressure him to remove the other for policy violations. Better to decentralize than collect Interpol warrants.
- robobro 7y agoGosh I hope they buy pleroma. Compared to mastodon and gab it's objectively the best decentralized Twitter.
- robobro 7y agoPleroma is light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi; its primary web interface is inspired by Twitter but it also includes the classic Mastodon interface at https://host/web https://host/web endpoint. It's very easy to set up and run. It's also compatible with anything that works with Mastodon via MastodonAPI (bots, desktop clients, mobile clients such as FediLab). Definitely the best ActivityPub software on the market!
- miguelmota 7y agoDecentralized non-blockchain social network and messaging protocols that have existed for years: - Scuttlebutt - GNUnet - Secureshare - Fereenet - ZeroNet - Retroshare - Diaspora - Mastadon - Matrix - Cabal
- floatingatoll 7y agoTwitter and Facebook and Google and others share one common concern that, if addressed, would see their staffing budgets massively reduced (and thus profits increased): Human moderators. Each grudgingly uses human moderators to squash the worst of the problems on their platform, and does a terrible job of it. Each underspends on human beings, using contractors without sufficient mental health care to ensure their well-being as they sift through our online sewer pipes. Google outsources YouTube moderation to third-parties: the Content ID system is a labor shifting device designed to force the labor cost of enforcement outside of Google’s responsibility. Twitter ended political advertisements rather than spend the human cost required to moderate them, and is now proposing a decentralized platform where Twitter is no longer responsible for content moderation for other platforms. By doing so, they can continue to act as your “aggregator” of individual (RSS-like) Twitter accounts, so that they can continue showing you ads based on the data they harvest from you and your feeds — while outsourcing responsibility for moderation to others. This is an effective strategy for increasing profits and if implemented correctly will permit mass layoffs of most of their content moderation workforce. This will also vastly increase the prevalence of abuse, racism, and other societal ills that infect Twitter with its underpowered moderation today. Props to Twitter for identifying a way to externalize the cost of civility while continuing to profit from the resulting cesspool that will ensue.
- woah 7y agoMicrosoft and Gmail make a lot of money from the email protocol, despite the fact that they don't moderate it. Is this immoral?
- floatingatoll 7y agoI wouldn’t know, that question is apples and oranges different. Twitter is creating a syndicated public one-to-all feed system; Email is a syndicated private one-to-many feed system. The public/private difference cannot be discarded and makes your question unrelated to my statement. I encourage you to pursue a top-level thread about your concern instead, so that it’s not disregarded as a reply to mine.
- dang 7y agoThe "Protocols Not Platforms" article that he references was discussed here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059
- Advaith 7y agoThanks, this was a great discussion to go over.
- Advaith 7y agoIt will be interesting to see how this pans out. Twitter seems to be going w/ the ethos.
- turdnagel 7y agoIn my mind Twitter’s streaming API (user feeds) _was_ the standard. I understand there were technical reasons for shutting it down, but is there any reason they couldn’t rearchitect it and have eventing with the same format?
- egfx 7y agoI operate an open source standard called Shareable Tweets http://2fb.me http://2fb.me A service designed to get tweets to a larger audience. But Twitter banned the account that was working to put this standard into practice @shareU Ironically Twitter has been, historically; the most restrictive force in social media.
- schmichael 7y agoMCC did a great job bringing up Twitter's awful record on open APIs in a reply: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1204807272226082817 https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1204807272226082817 While I'm all for open standards and protocols, Twitter has proven itself hostile to 3rd party developers. Even if their proposals are good Twitter has a long way to go to prove themselves trustworthy participants in open networks.
- egfx 7y agoYes exactly, instead of being open they’ve consistently shut the doors. You have no idea the lengths I’ve been through to keep that service up. In fact the technology decisions by the guy charged with leading this effort (CTO) have been more restrictive as of late not less. For example the web UI is now totally obfuscated server rendered code in effect nullifying any chrome extension that wants to work on top of it. If anyone is interested I wrote a piece about democratizing social media https://medium.com/@shareU/we-built-this-city-2cb97437942f https://medium.com/@shareU/we-built-this-city-2cb97437942f
- nkkollaw 7y agoGreat, another standard for social media!
- jacquesm 7y agoTwitter, the company that started out with an open API which attracted lots of developers who then got kicked off once the company figured out what worked. Good luck with your 'open standard'.
- tomaszs 7y agoWe have a lots of great initiatives these days: wt.social, brave, twitter+. Monopoly stopped not being evil. Puts shadow on the Internet. But there are still people who believe. Who try to save it!
- seph-reed 7y agoI'm kind of tired of Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, and all the other big names. Do we really need a billion dollar company to figure this out, or is it just an advertising issue?
- askvictor 7y agoThe cynic in me thinks that by adding yet another open standard into the mix, this will ultimately help in preventing any open standard from gaining critical mass, thus keeping the status quo.
- woadwarrior01 7y ago“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves” - Lenin
- JoshMandel 7y agoThis can also seen as Twitter getting out ahead of https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s2658/BILLS-116s2658is.pdf https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s2658/BILLS-116s2658is.pd... (press release at https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/10/senators-introduce-bipartisan-bill-to-encourage-competition-in-social-media https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/10/senat...) -- which would call for NIST to define: model technical standards by which to make interoperable popular classes of communications or information services, including— (1) online messaging; (2) multimedia sharing; and (3) social networking (And all within 180 days ;-) No small feat.)
- Teknoman117 7y agoI'm curious about their motives here. One of the massive "troubles" that social media has been having to deal with in recent years is the whole fake news problem. (in quotes, because it also has driven social media engagement, and thus revenue from ad impressions up, so from a business perspective it's a boon with the right narrative) Admittedly, it isn't a new problem, it just it's perceived impact has grown to the point of catching the public eye. Twitter's response is that they're banning political speech entirely, to try and get out of the fake news domains that people care the most about. Now, they're pushing a decentralized social media system that by it's very definition will be hard to control content on. In being a client for said open standard, they are certainly free to block whatever comes in that suits their fancy, but to me, it feels more than they're using this as a way to shift blame with regulation looking like it's on the horizon. It'd be an awful conveinent excuse to say "but Mr/Mrs/Miss regulator, we're just an aggregator, other entities are responsible for this content." Maybe they really do believe the best approach to combatting this is to serve as a principled (by someone's definition) client of a sewer of public content, or maybe this is a strategic move to shift responsibility. I wonder which it'll be...
- dgellow 7y ago> Twitter's response is that they're banning political speech entirely, to try and get out of the fake news domains that people care the most about. Twitter doesn't ban political speech, what they will stop accepting are political ads.
- Teknoman117 7y agoYou're right, I don't quite recall what I was thinking at the time.
- nathanvanfleet 7y agoI am worried that ultimately this means that the twitter of the future will be something where people can't be deplatformed. It's been pretty effective in the past to deplatform some outrageous individuals who have stoked racial hatred and violence. They get deplatformed, and their audience disappears. There are a lot of places where hate speech is illegal. And I know that Twitter has had huge problems when called to censor things and making it completely decentralized would allow them not have to. Also it's weird but Jack follows Cernovich.
- paggle 7y agoWell others of us are sick of deplatforming regardless of the speaker.
- dcolkitt 7y agoEven if you think the current usage of deplatforming has been positive, it poses a huge black swan risk. If our major communication platforms expose a centralized censorship mechanism, that becomes a deliciously tempting target to be leveraged by authoritarian regimes. Even if I trust the Twitter mod team, what's to stop tomorrow's jack-booted thugs from shooting the Twitter team and seizing control of the servers? I'd much rather we as a society move to decentralized censorship-resistant networks while we still have the freedom to openly build and advocate for them. I really doubt that banning Hitler's social media accounts in the 1920s would have done anything to stop the Nazi rise to power. Whereas in the 1930s, rest assured that centralized platforms would have made the Gestapo's life a hundred times easier.
- darkwizard42 7y agoThen people stop using Twitter... The solution to your problem is quite simple. The network will die off.
- thinkloop 7y ago> A third-party Twitter client might be prettier and more functional than Twitter’s own client — shout out to Tweetbot! — but it certainly would not be more profitable. I never understood this, why can't the API/firehose serve ads that would be presented in the 3rd-party apps? Additionally 90% of users would naturally gravitate to the default app regardless, leaving 3rd-parties for cool/interesting/advanced/innovative use-cases. I still feel this was a mistake - not as some hippy idealogue - but from a ruthless capitalist perspective. This was their like button.
- jokoon 7y agoThe core problem will be privacy. I think it will not be difficult for anybody to siphon that data, and I don't know how one could prevent it, and it would be nice to see it done without complicated solutions. I think twitter could be biased. I don't know if a law like GDPR would prevent it. If it doesn't, there should be law forbidding entities to gather data.
- shotashotashota 7y agoUnless its open source and everyone can contribute, decentralized enough that everyone can set up their own networks, then its just another company trying to make long term investment in their company I am not going to trust Jack, any company, on any single person on anything.
- ainiriand 7y agoApparently they want to create a distributed ledger using something akin to a blockchain. If that is the case then they can benefit from transactions going over their network but I doubt that it will be open source. Maybe the code to operate a node will be open sourced but just that.