8 ms·

They 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 us

They 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 ago
That's not going to work.... There are egos at stake here!
- ilaksh 7y ago
  I 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 ago
    It'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 ago
      A 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.
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        It costs ~$1500 for the Internet Archive to store a TB of data forever. Cut them a check or provide an ongoing endowment (along perhaps with some technical resources to scale up a distributed web instead of existing solely in SF) for them to be storage of last resort (everything else can be a tier of caching on your platform). Let's Encrypt runs for around $3MM/year. Same budget for Internet Archive allows for adding storage for 2PB of content. Scale up accordingly. No blockchain! [1] [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Die5UdaX0AALEtL.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Die5UdaX0AALEtL.jpg
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Depends... are decentralized version control systems like git "blockchains" or not?
jp555 7y ago
I thought the W3C has been captured by corporations?
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Not really? From my perspective as an outside observer, the WHATWG is the one built/captured by corporations. The W3C gave up and agrees now that the HTML spec is mostly just whatever WHATWG says it is, but that's partly because the W3C seems more interested in putting time/money/effort into standardizing things where they are wanted such as ActivityPub.
- nl 7y ago
  W3C has suffered a much worse fate: capture by academics. See their multi-year detour into the cul-de-sac of the semantic web.
  - detaro 7y ago
    It has learned from those times, as much as you can even talk about "W3C" as an entity doing coherent things. Individual working groups have can have very little overlap with other groups, and have a lot of freedom in how they work. Which means they can putter about in ivory towers, or do effective work, as they wish.
    - nl 7y ago
      Perhaps. I agree that sounds good, but can you point to something that they have actually done lately? The ActivityPub process is a good example - yes, it got there, but much of the difficulties around the standardisation process seem related to the W3C process, not standardisation itself. I was involved around the edges of the Atom standardisation process[1]. There's a reason that went through the IEFT and not the W3C[2]. [1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt [2] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/06/10/AtomIETFYes https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/06/10/AtomIETFY...
VectorLock 7y ago
>ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter could have been. Twitter management actively and specifically decided to not be that.
ummonk 7y ago
Apparently they will evaluate existing APIs: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766089353129984 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766089353129984
espadrine 7y ago
Three reasons why not: operational, business, and technical. Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen as embrace-extend-extinguish. Business: it would contribute work to their competitors. Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  This is doomed from the start, then. There’s no way for them to work on an open standard without leaking features or contributing work to their competitors.
  - espadrine 7y ago
    It depends on what goal you see being defined. I see one public and one private: Publicly, organize social engagement. As long as they are at the helm, and at the forefront of tech innovation, they won't have issues on that goal. Privately, diffuse regulatory pressure. If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter. It is the whack-a-mole approach, similar to BitTorrent vs. Napster.
    - RussianCow 7y ago
      > If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter. I don't buy this. Nothing is going to change from the user perspective, and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.
      - deusofnull 7y ago
        well it would solve problems for all the people who really do want to use a different / better social network or chat app but cant get their friends to switch too, killing the idea on arrival. that would change perception of social media, because it'd allow every host-site could be distinct to their targeted users' qualities as a group, but maintain connections to everyone in their lives. i mean, you arent really saying that you dont believe a massively-confederated social networking infrastructure would change the political perception of social media? i think it necessarily would, and change every individuals relationship to social media too. its like that marshall mcLuhan quote 'the medium is the message', ie the medium defines what it contains and what those contents mean.
ajudson 7y ago
They got rid of RSS to force everyone to have to engage with their timeline. I doubt they would be nice enough to do this
- markosaric 7y ago
  I hope they will be. About Twitter RSS: I recently discovered nitter.net. It's a Twitter front-end without all that tracking and with the addition of RSS. Jack's at https://nitter.net/jack https://nitter.net/jack and the RSS is https://nitter.net/jack/rss https://nitter.net/jack/rss
  - arminiusreturns 7y ago
    I really like this. I had been looking for a cli client and wasn't impressed by any of them, and this seems like a good compromise for reading others timelines, especially since I am an RSS-aholic.
staltz 7y ago
Very relevant context for what they are looking for can be found not in Jack's thread but Parag's thread: https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1204766188074459136?s=19 https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1204766188074459136?s=19 This rules out a lot of existing projects. IMO rules out AP, SSB, Matrix, etc
- mceoin 7y ago
  Specifically...? Small group vs Consensus building? Requirement for monetization mechanism and incentives?
  - mceoin 7y ago
    I found the answer in your twitter thread: https://twitter.com/i/status/1204847952134656000 https://twitter.com/i/status/1204847952134656000
ctrlaltdylan 7y ago
Can someone explain in 3 short phrases or less how ActivityPub or another standard actually solves the problems that centralized social media creates?
- tylerchilds 7y ago
  Best to think about it like email. You can send and receive email to anyone at any domain, if their server is set up for email. We all just happened to centralize ourselves onto Gmail and Google's servers. Replace email with "social media content" and you have ActivityPub.
- fenwick67 7y ago
  Choice of your instance, moderators, and client. It enables smaller, self-policing communities to run a compatible instance with minimal costs.
dnprock 7y ago
@jack's idea probably involves some kind of cryptocurrency integration into the protocol. I think having a digital native currency can alter the economics of protocols. The end result may be some combination of ActivityPub and an economic incentive layer.
sneak 7y ago
ActivityPub lacks cryptographic signing/identity (table stakes for 2020) and anti-censorship features. It is more of an MVP/example than a mature, forward-looking protocol design.
HyperLinear 7y ago
I am a daily and happy user of Mastodon. I honestly see no reason to use Twitter, nor one of their products at this time. Calling it now: too little, too late.
app4soft 7y ago
> They 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. Sadly, all centralized Facebook/Twitter/YouTube since 1st January of 2020 would add more restrictions (according each new ToS and Privacy rules). BTW, I already prepared for fully migrating my Twitter activity to Mastodon.
exadeci 7y ago
They will https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204952252747661312 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204952252747661312

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

edf13 7y ago

That's not going to work.... There are egos at stake here!

ilaksh 7y ago
I 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 ago
  It'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 ago
    A 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.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      It costs ~$1500 for the Internet Archive to store a TB of data forever. Cut them a check or provide an ongoing endowment (along perhaps with some technical resources to scale up a distributed web instead of existing solely in SF) for them to be storage of last resort (everything else can be a tier of caching on your platform). Let's Encrypt runs for around $3MM/year. Same budget for Internet Archive allows for adding storage for 2PB of content. Scale up accordingly. No blockchain! [1] [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Die5UdaX0AALEtL.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Die5UdaX0AALEtL.jpg
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Depends... are decentralized version control systems like git "blockchains" or not?

jp555 7y ago

I thought the W3C has been captured by corporations?

WorldMaker 7y ago
Not really? From my perspective as an outside observer, the WHATWG is the one built/captured by corporations. The W3C gave up and agrees now that the HTML spec is mostly just whatever WHATWG says it is, but that's partly because the W3C seems more interested in putting time/money/effort into standardizing things where they are wanted such as ActivityPub.
nl 7y ago
W3C has suffered a much worse fate: capture by academics. See their multi-year detour into the cul-de-sac of the semantic web.
- detaro 7y ago
  It has learned from those times, as much as you can even talk about "W3C" as an entity doing coherent things. Individual working groups have can have very little overlap with other groups, and have a lot of freedom in how they work. Which means they can putter about in ivory towers, or do effective work, as they wish.
  - nl 7y ago
    Perhaps. I agree that sounds good, but can you point to something that they have actually done lately? The ActivityPub process is a good example - yes, it got there, but much of the difficulties around the standardisation process seem related to the W3C process, not standardisation itself. I was involved around the edges of the Atom standardisation process[1]. There's a reason that went through the IEFT and not the W3C[2]. [1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt [2] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/06/10/AtomIETFYes https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/06/10/AtomIETFY...

VectorLock 7y ago

>ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter could have been. Twitter management actively and specifically decided to not be that.

ummonk 7y ago

Apparently they will evaluate existing APIs: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766089353129984 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766089353129984

espadrine 7y ago

Three reasons why not: operational, business, and technical. Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen as embrace-extend-extinguish. Business: it would contribute work to their competitors. Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.

jakelazaroff 7y ago
This is doomed from the start, then. There’s no way for them to work on an open standard without leaking features or contributing work to their competitors.
- espadrine 7y ago
  It depends on what goal you see being defined. I see one public and one private: Publicly, organize social engagement. As long as they are at the helm, and at the forefront of tech innovation, they won't have issues on that goal. Privately, diffuse regulatory pressure. If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter. It is the whack-a-mole approach, similar to BitTorrent vs. Napster.
  - RussianCow 7y ago
    > If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter. I don't buy this. Nothing is going to change from the user perspective, and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.
    - deusofnull 7y ago
      well it would solve problems for all the people who really do want to use a different / better social network or chat app but cant get their friends to switch too, killing the idea on arrival. that would change perception of social media, because it'd allow every host-site could be distinct to their targeted users' qualities as a group, but maintain connections to everyone in their lives. i mean, you arent really saying that you dont believe a massively-confederated social networking infrastructure would change the political perception of social media? i think it necessarily would, and change every individuals relationship to social media too. its like that marshall mcLuhan quote 'the medium is the message', ie the medium defines what it contains and what those contents mean.

ajudson 7y ago

They got rid of RSS to force everyone to have to engage with their timeline. I doubt they would be nice enough to do this

markosaric 7y ago
I hope they will be. About Twitter RSS: I recently discovered nitter.net. It's a Twitter front-end without all that tracking and with the addition of RSS. Jack's at https://nitter.net/jack https://nitter.net/jack and the RSS is https://nitter.net/jack/rss https://nitter.net/jack/rss
- arminiusreturns 7y ago
  I really like this. I had been looking for a cli client and wasn't impressed by any of them, and this seems like a good compromise for reading others timelines, especially since I am an RSS-aholic.

staltz 7y ago

Very relevant context for what they are looking for can be found not in Jack's thread but Parag's thread: https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1204766188074459136?s=19 https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1204766188074459136?s=19 This rules out a lot of existing projects. IMO rules out AP, SSB, Matrix, etc

mceoin 7y ago
Specifically...? Small group vs Consensus building? Requirement for monetization mechanism and incentives?
- mceoin 7y ago
  I found the answer in your twitter thread: https://twitter.com/i/status/1204847952134656000 https://twitter.com/i/status/1204847952134656000

ctrlaltdylan 7y ago

Can someone explain in 3 short phrases or less how ActivityPub or another standard actually solves the problems that centralized social media creates?

tylerchilds 7y ago
Best to think about it like email. You can send and receive email to anyone at any domain, if their server is set up for email. We all just happened to centralize ourselves onto Gmail and Google's servers. Replace email with "social media content" and you have ActivityPub.
fenwick67 7y ago
Choice of your instance, moderators, and client. It enables smaller, self-policing communities to run a compatible instance with minimal costs.

dnprock 7y ago

@jack's idea probably involves some kind of cryptocurrency integration into the protocol. I think having a digital native currency can alter the economics of protocols. The end result may be some combination of ActivityPub and an economic incentive layer.

sneak 7y ago

ActivityPub lacks cryptographic signing/identity (table stakes for 2020) and anti-censorship features. It is more of an MVP/example than a mature, forward-looking protocol design.

HyperLinear 7y ago

I am a daily and happy user of Mastodon. I honestly see no reason to use Twitter, nor one of their products at this time. Calling it now: too little, too late.

app4soft 7y ago

> They 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. Sadly, all centralized Facebook/Twitter/YouTube since 1st January of 2020 would add more restrictions (according each new ToS and Privacy rules). BTW, I already prepared for fully migrating my Twitter activity to Mastodon.

exadeci 7y ago

They will https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204952252747661312 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204952252747661312