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Thought experiment: How hard would it be to write a centralized 1-to-many message pipe that replicates Twitters core functionality? How hard would it be to ru
by Tipewryter 6y ago
Thought experiment:
How hard would it be to write a centralized 1-to-many message pipe that replicates Twitters core functionality?
How hard would it be to run such a thing? The moral and legal needs to censor content would probably be a bigger task then the technical implementation?
- sdan 6y agoIn the recent past, I've seen Twitter harshly ban account I randomly make. Sometimes its weeks before they ask for a phone number and if you don't have a real number (iirc they check against VoIP) they won't unrestrict you. If you have the same IP as other account I think they also might auto restrict you.
- hertzrat 6y agoThey banned my account for unnamed terms of use violations after my first post saying “well, I finally made a Twitter account.” Their support replied with “queries will not be responded to.” It was for the best
- encom 6y agoSeveral years ago I tried to make a Twitter account. It got banned before I posted anything. I hadn't even subscribed to any users. I was going through the settings, and then \bam\, banned for being a bot, or some such nonsense. Nothing of value was lost.
- 5560675260 6y agoTwitter aggressively tries to get phone numbers from new users - providing it is the main way to get unbanned in cases like this.
- encom 6y agoUnless you're my mother, or maybe if you're part of my immediate family, you're not getting my phone number. American giant corporation with questionable ethics: hard no.
- 5560675260 6y agoYeah, I had to get a separate number just to please twitter's automation. Their approach is somewhat understandable - stopping bots is a hard problem, phone number in theory represents a material cost and a hurdle to someone who wants to rapidly register thousands of new accounts.
- iso1210 6y agoDon't you have a burner phone/sim for these types of requests?
- encom 6y agoThis is brought up every time this subject is discussed. Is a burner phone a normal thing that regular people have? But no, I don't have a burner phone. I'm not going to buy a phone and a SIM just as some kind of non-solution to tech companies having a hard-on for invading peoples privacy.
- iso1210 6y agoI have an old phone (who doesn't) which I leave plugged in on my desk, with a £5 payg sim card.
- nebalee 6y agoWhen they locked my freshly created account and didn't let me use it unless I gave them my phone number I mailed them and told them I would not do so for privacy reasons. My account was unlocked the next day.
- tomjen3 6y agoYou can't even get people to write their stories on their blogs and then link to Twitter, instead somebody created a twitter bot that will do that, but it has to be summoned in the comments.
- darkhorn 6y agohttps://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon
- Tipewryter 6y agoThat is a software repo. Not a public centralized service that lets users communicate with each other.
- lixtra 6y agoOne more click leads to https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ > ... centralized ... That was not in the GP’s requirements. Edit: plus: GP explicitly asked for software.
- Nemo_bis 6y agoWhy do you want it to be centralised? Surely a federated system like email is just as fine, if it provides a good user experience?
- Tipewryter 6y agoIf. But so far, no federated system has resulted in good user experience.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoMany alternatives exist but none reach critical mass because twitter has buy in from the major media outlets and the journalists they employ. Unlike other social networks that grew spontaneously, Twitter was effectively crowned. Every twitter clone that tries to compete without first having the approval of the major media outlets will either be publicly ignored, belittled, or outright attacked.
- Tipewryter 6y agoCan you name some alternatives? I am not aware of any. Please note that I explicitly said "centralized". Because decentralized solutions like Mastodon have not resulted in viable alternatives for the average user so far.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoMinds, gab, and Parler come to mind. There are certainly others.
- Tipewryter 6y agoInteresting. Looking at Minds, I already see a big flaw: All posts are under the /newsfeed/ namespace. So instead of /username/1234 your posts are here: /newsfeed/1234 I don't think users want to get "robbed" of their posts like this. There also is no embed functionality. For Twitter type shoutouts it is absolutely vital that they can be embedded around the web.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoUsername in status url and “embedibility” are good features to have but i don’t think they are causal in determining whether or not an twitter clone reaches critical mass. Maybe they are though. You should build an alternative!
- saagarjha 6y agoFun fact: the user part of a Twitter URL isn’t important. You can replace it with any other user.
- Nemo_bis 6y agoMastodon (and other fediverse FLOSS) already have millions of active users across thousands of providers. https://the-federation.info/mastodon https://the-federation.info/mastodon It's easy to set up your presence and start small, e.g. with a web app which syncs your Mastodon and Twitter accounts. https://moa.party/ https://moa.party/
- sillysaurusx 6y agoIs it really "millions of active users"? (I don't doubt it's possible, but the incentives are very much aligned with "let's count this bot activity as a real user." It doesn't even need to be malicious -- I fell into that trap myself.) EDIT: Odd, I'd like to report a bug in that site. https://imgur.com/EsGyvnT https://imgur.com/EsGyvnT It doesn't seem to load. Or rather, I saw it briefly flash the statistics, once, before it went back to loading. The 0.3 seconds I saw the stats looked impressive though. :) The only thing in dev console is a warning that seems unrelated: "<ApolloProvider>.provide() is deprecated. Use the 'apolloProvider' option instead with the provider object directly." Ah, the root cause is that the graphql fetch takes ~32sec: https://imgur.com/q769ozR https://imgur.com/q769ozR So, never mind! Just a bit slow. --- Anyway, it claims 400,000 active users in the last month. What counts as an active Mastodon user? It also claims 400 million Mastodon posts (total?) which I suppose are tweets. Interesting... Twitter has about ~17M tweets per day, iirc. If this growth is legit – a big if – then Mastodon may be gaining more momentum than it seemed. Actually, twitter gets 431M tweets/day: https://twitter.com/jasonbaumgartne/status/1332003350192271360 https://twitter.com/jasonbaumgartne/status/13320033501922713... Hmm. I wonder how much exponential growth would be required for Mastodon to catch up to twitter...
- posguy 6y agoDoes it matter whether the aggregate Mastodon user count ever catches up to Twitter? Is Twitter today actually better for its users than the Twitter of yesteryear that only had ~17 million tweets per day? I have met many people on the fediverse, and at least two friends of mine have moved thousands of miles due to relationships and opportunities that likely would not have occured if the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc) and its variety of platforms and userbase did not congregate in this manner. One friend even bummed a plane ride on a tiny general aviation plane by serendipitous happenstance through the fediverse to make the multi-state move out of an abusive living situation. Unbounded growth is not always good, and many fediverse instances have limited or closed new account registrations to ensure their community doesn't become the next Voat, FreeSpeechExtremist (which I was banned from for fairly benign speech) or /r/TheDonald.
- betwixthewires 6y agoEasy. https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ is an interesting way to do it. RSS with comments can work. Mastodon, Pleroma, misskey, gnusocial all do it. They have the added benefit that a user cannot be censored from the network entirely, only from servers by their admins, and blocked by users.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago> moral and legal needs to censor content I for one would love for there to be a decentralized system that by design makes it impossible to censor any content, and if the content would be stored in a decentralized, encrypted manner it would also be impossible to legally enforce it as it would not even easily be known where it would be stored at all. Think of perhaps a network that retrieves its content viā an union-routing-esque mechanism where information is published that cannot feasibly be altered any more once put there whose origins and locations would be computationally infeasible to trace and as it's stored in an encrypted fashion the parts of the network that do store it do not even know what they are storing.
- posguy 6y agoThis exists, its called Freenet: https://freenetproject.org https://freenetproject.org Not a particularly new concept, Freenet has been around for over 20 years now. Tor and I2P have more traction in this segment.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoSounds like an interesting thing; let's see whether there's some interesting content on it amidst all the child porn. And sure enough, I already found a website that says: “Please note that the Freenet network (much like Tor) attracts pedophiles and a large amount of sites contain child pornography. Some sites jokingly add a disclaimer saying This site does not contain child pornography. click here to continue.”
- posguy 6y agoMhmm, hence why the Freenet proposition is a hard sell. The average person doesn't want to devote half their computer's storage space to storing encrypted data they have no insight into, especially when that data could be considered illicit in some jurisdictions when decrypted.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
- jasonkester 6y agoTwitter tried to build one of those back in 2007. You can go back and read tech media from the time about all the engineering challenges they ran into and the regular downtimes from trying to scale the thing to a tiny fraction of its current volume. Turns out to be hard.
- rusk 6y agoThat’s because they wrote it all in ruby, which don’t get me wrong is a fine language but did have scaling issues back in the day. As it happens this was a growth experience for ruby too. However limited their technology choice might have been from a performance standpoint it did give them the adapatability and flexibility to provide the fun and entertaining product that got them off the ground in the first place. It did inevitably lead to the growing pains we discuss but I doubt anybody expected it to get as big as it did. WRT the original comment here ... the main limiting factor nowadays is just getting people to use it. The network effect. Mastodon is a thing, and people do use it but it’s a minnow relatively speaking. The next big challenge I think will be some kind of decentralised twitter based on some kind of blockchain (by which I mean progressive content hashing and consensus) and I don’t mean federated, like mastodon. The mastodon name is ridiculous too .. I’m not going to go into why but if you know you know, and stupid as it is it does matter.