5 ms·

The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instan

The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instant messenger that bounces messages through a central server. Only then can you assure a fix to interference. This requires: * Routes - both parties to be on IPv6 or either party to have something like port address translation on a IPv6 interface. * Identity - This will require a combination of CA and STUN. The certificate from the CA and corresponding key pair associated with that certificate ensures a user is who they say they are and their keys are respectable. The corresponding key exchange ensures the data is confined to the two parties. The STUN server correlates the unique user ID, such as that which is certified by the certificate, to an IP address. Anything less is just another game for some media company to use you as a product.

nobody9999 5y ago
>The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instant messenger that bounces messages through a central server. Only then can you assure a fix to interference. This is my go to response as to "what to do about social media." And I opine|rant|blather on about it whenever I see folks complaining about or claiming that some rules|regulation|policy will "fix" social media. And such tracts are becoming more and more common (cf. this article[0][1], entitled OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts. from today). But, as in the article linked, no one ever suggests decentralized communications. I'm not sure why, but there certainly are barriers to making decentralized "social media" work. Those same barriers are what make centralization of much of our digital universe necessary and hugely profitable. Those barriers are primarily (there are other issues, but are mostly part of the result rather than the cause) related to the ways in which end-users are provided access to the Internet. I'm specifically referring to asymmetric internet links. Most internet links are $X Mb/sec download and ($X / 25 or so) Mb/sec upload. What's more, there are often policy restrictions on "consumer" internet links that block them from "running servers," whether that be port blocking or throttling. This keeps decentralized communication from being viable. Other than these artificial barriers, there's nothing stopping folks from hosting their own cat/family/meme photos/videos and/or other content. There are plenty of decentralized platforms that can do so with minimal set up and configuration. However, if you can't serve more than a couple of concurrent connections at a reasonable speed, that breaks the whole decentralized/P2P paradigm. Because my upload bandwidth is the limiting factor in being able to host content. If, on the other hand, you have a link with symmetric bandwidth without policy restrictions, serving your own content is a no-brainer. As such, my "solution" for addressing the "censorship" of the centralized "social media" platforms is to make them irrelevant by eliminating the entire reason for their existence -- asymmetric bandwidth favoring download vs. upload on internet links. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts.... [1] (same as [0], just from archive.md): https://archive.md/qpNtV https://archive.md/qpNtV Edit: Added title of linked article in the comment.
- austincheney 5y ago
  YouTube was founded when most people had slow internet and they seemed to have done ok. I have fiber at my house and do about 920mb/s both up and down. It’s only a matter of time before that becomes almost universally common enough to rule out bandwidth from any consideration. As a result I am writing a peer-to-peer application assuming universal fiber, 4K displays, and IPv6 are already common.
  - morsch 5y ago
    At the same time YouTube was founded we also had widespread peer to peer audio and video distribution, despite asymmetric Internet connections. Probably the largest peer to peer networks? It worked fine. It was on the verge of being real time for video, when it was replaced by centralised, commercial technology.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >I have fiber at my house and do about 920mb/s both up and down. It’s only a matter of time before that becomes almost universally common enough to rule out bandwidth from any consideration. I hope you're right. Where I live (the US), most ISPs have cable TV systems, interests in streaming platforms, or both. That provides incentives to maintain the status quo WRT asymmetric links and centralization. ISPs like Verizon, which had previously pushed hard on fiber deployment, are refocusing on wireless, as that's a much bigger profit center for them. I hope you're right about the inevitability of (multi-)GB/sec symmetric connections, but the current incentive structure argues against it, at least in the US. Which is why I believe that last-mile FTTP[0] should largely be local, public/quasi-public[1] utilities that support themselves by selling interconnects to multiple ISPs. Those ISPs can then compete on speed, price, services, etc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x#FTTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x#FTTP [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quasi_public_corporation.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quasi_public_corporatio...
JoshCole 5y ago
Calling the problems faced by social media simple is the sort of hubris that only comes about because of the Dunning–Kruger effect. You're underestimating the complexity of the problem because you're under-informed. Some aspects of your proposal have been tried before. They aren't new. History indicates that your proposal fails to achieve long term product-market fit. It also fails this entirely because of being decentralized and associating IP addresses with people and having high friction - not because of corporate dystopia. Let's raise the level of discourse by reviewing our history. There are and have been in the past decentralized social applications. One of the most notable of them in terms of adoption was Skype. It was acquired by Microsoft. In the past it was normal to use Skype in gaming communities. It was a competitor to Ventrillo and TeamSpeak. Skype moved away from decentralization. It's really common at this point for people who are simultaneously paranoid and outraged to start exclaiming with indignation that clearly corporations are evil. This failure to engage with reality is common online. Putting aside that social companies only discovered a few years ago that connecting people had disastrous consequence and have been devoting billions to try to address these so-called simple problems ever since it became clear these problems existed lets try to see if we can find a non-paranoid good-faith reason for Microsoft to have moved away from decentralization. What do you know, but Discord displaced Skype for a reason within gaming communities! Why did gaming communities move away from Skype? I've been in gaming communities. I've heard people express some of their problems with Skype. One of the issues that Skype had was that... it was decentralized and that could lead to the leaking of your IP address. Therefore if a streamer or even another person accidentally showed their Skype they could get DDoSed. At high levels in various competitive games this was a severe problem, because as you might guess... in social media you tend to be connected with people who are socially connected to you! So you leaked your IP address very often to just the sort of people with the incentive to capitalize on that by DDoSing you so they could beat you in a game. Now Skype isn't decentralized, but it didn't matter. They didn't do a good enough job to serve some segment of the community. So Skype was doing just what you suggested. Being decentralized. And they had a higher friction process than a competitor, which is the case for your solution. And as a direct result of these things... (and others, mind, but we have to simplify reality at least a little to understand it)... Discord found product-market fit in the gaming niche! And it grew increasingly popular. And now everyone in the gaming communities is on Discord, not Skype. Moreover, Skype has lost share even outside of gaming to Discord as Discord executes the standard niche to general playbook that so many social companies have found success executing. Congratulations: your simple solution has already failed. You thought it was simple, but you were just ignorant of the actual challenges. But now we get to the real problem. The problem you completely missed. All of what I just said? It isn't the real problem. Those are details. They are suggestive of the real problem, but you need to step back and think about this from a level higher to see the true problem. It isn't technical. It is social. It's in the name. Not technical media, social media. The true problem is so complex that it is almost certainly impossible to solve in a way which will please everyone. I'd go as far as to say it's probably fundamentally unsolvable. Here is the real problem outlined using what we covered above: 1. Notice that decentralization is important to you. 2. Notice that it is outright against the desires of others. 3. Notice that social applications get more powerful as the number of participants increase. Now lets generalize the above and make it more clear why those things matter: 1. Some people love X where X is something. 2. Some people hate X where X is something. 3. These people are incentivized to use the same application due to the utility of social tools growing with number of participants. This problem is absolutely nutty in its complexity. It's also the actual reality of social applications. Almost all the issues with social applications boil down to the problem that people have different desires and those desires aren't in alignment with each other. The technical aspects of the problem don't even matter. The problem isn't simple. As proof of this: mass murder and every other woe you try to lay at the feet of social media applications predates those applications. In actuality, the difference is that poor people have more power now relative to how much they had before.

nobody9999 5y ago

>The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instant messenger that bounces messages through a central server. Only then can you assure a fix to interference. This is my go to response as to "what to do about social media." And I opine|rant|blather on about it whenever I see folks complaining about or claiming that some rules|regulation|policy will "fix" social media. And such tracts are becoming more and more common (cf. this article[0][1], entitled OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts. from today). But, as in the article linked, no one ever suggests decentralized communications. I'm not sure why, but there certainly are barriers to making decentralized "social media" work. Those same barriers are what make centralization of much of our digital universe necessary and hugely profitable. Those barriers are primarily (there are other issues, but are mostly part of the result rather than the cause) related to the ways in which end-users are provided access to the Internet. I'm specifically referring to asymmetric internet links. Most internet links are $X Mb/sec download and ($X / 25 or so) Mb/sec upload. What's more, there are often policy restrictions on "consumer" internet links that block them from "running servers," whether that be port blocking or throttling. This keeps decentralized communication from being viable. Other than these artificial barriers, there's nothing stopping folks from hosting their own cat/family/meme photos/videos and/or other content. There are plenty of decentralized platforms that can do so with minimal set up and configuration. However, if you can't serve more than a couple of concurrent connections at a reasonable speed, that breaks the whole decentralized/P2P paradigm. Because my upload bandwidth is the limiting factor in being able to host content. If, on the other hand, you have a link with symmetric bandwidth without policy restrictions, serving your own content is a no-brainer. As such, my "solution" for addressing the "censorship" of the centralized "social media" platforms is to make them irrelevant by eliminating the entire reason for their existence -- asymmetric bandwidth favoring download vs. upload on internet links. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts.... [1] (same as [0], just from archive.md): https://archive.md/qpNtV https://archive.md/qpNtV Edit: Added title of linked article in the comment.

austincheney 5y ago
YouTube was founded when most people had slow internet and they seemed to have done ok. I have fiber at my house and do about 920mb/s both up and down. It’s only a matter of time before that becomes almost universally common enough to rule out bandwidth from any consideration. As a result I am writing a peer-to-peer application assuming universal fiber, 4K displays, and IPv6 are already common.
- morsch 5y ago
  At the same time YouTube was founded we also had widespread peer to peer audio and video distribution, despite asymmetric Internet connections. Probably the largest peer to peer networks? It worked fine. It was on the verge of being real time for video, when it was replaced by centralised, commercial technology.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >I have fiber at my house and do about 920mb/s both up and down. It’s only a matter of time before that becomes almost universally common enough to rule out bandwidth from any consideration. I hope you're right. Where I live (the US), most ISPs have cable TV systems, interests in streaming platforms, or both. That provides incentives to maintain the status quo WRT asymmetric links and centralization. ISPs like Verizon, which had previously pushed hard on fiber deployment, are refocusing on wireless, as that's a much bigger profit center for them. I hope you're right about the inevitability of (multi-)GB/sec symmetric connections, but the current incentive structure argues against it, at least in the US. Which is why I believe that last-mile FTTP[0] should largely be local, public/quasi-public[1] utilities that support themselves by selling interconnects to multiple ISPs. Those ISPs can then compete on speed, price, services, etc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x#FTTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x#FTTP [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quasi_public_corporation.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quasi_public_corporatio...

JoshCole 5y ago

Calling the problems faced by social media simple is the sort of hubris that only comes about because of the Dunning–Kruger effect. You're underestimating the complexity of the problem because you're under-informed. Some aspects of your proposal have been tried before. They aren't new. History indicates that your proposal fails to achieve long term product-market fit. It also fails this entirely because of being decentralized and associating IP addresses with people and having high friction - not because of corporate dystopia. Let's raise the level of discourse by reviewing our history. There are and have been in the past decentralized social applications. One of the most notable of them in terms of adoption was Skype. It was acquired by Microsoft. In the past it was normal to use Skype in gaming communities. It was a competitor to Ventrillo and TeamSpeak. Skype moved away from decentralization. It's really common at this point for people who are simultaneously paranoid and outraged to start exclaiming with indignation that clearly corporations are evil. This failure to engage with reality is common online. Putting aside that social companies only discovered a few years ago that connecting people had disastrous consequence and have been devoting billions to try to address these so-called simple problems ever since it became clear these problems existed lets try to see if we can find a non-paranoid good-faith reason for Microsoft to have moved away from decentralization. What do you know, but Discord displaced Skype for a reason within gaming communities! Why did gaming communities move away from Skype? I've been in gaming communities. I've heard people express some of their problems with Skype. One of the issues that Skype had was that... it was decentralized and that could lead to the leaking of your IP address. Therefore if a streamer or even another person accidentally showed their Skype they could get DDoSed. At high levels in various competitive games this was a severe problem, because as you might guess... in social media you tend to be connected with people who are socially connected to you! So you leaked your IP address very often to just the sort of people with the incentive to capitalize on that by DDoSing you so they could beat you in a game. Now Skype isn't decentralized, but it didn't matter. They didn't do a good enough job to serve some segment of the community. So Skype was doing just what you suggested. Being decentralized. And they had a higher friction process than a competitor, which is the case for your solution. And as a direct result of these things... (and others, mind, but we have to simplify reality at least a little to understand it)... Discord found product-market fit in the gaming niche! And it grew increasingly popular. And now everyone in the gaming communities is on Discord, not Skype. Moreover, Skype has lost share even outside of gaming to Discord as Discord executes the standard niche to general playbook that so many social companies have found success executing. Congratulations: your simple solution has already failed. You thought it was simple, but you were just ignorant of the actual challenges. But now we get to the real problem. The problem you completely missed. All of what I just said? It isn't the real problem. Those are details. They are suggestive of the real problem, but you need to step back and think about this from a level higher to see the true problem. It isn't technical. It is social. It's in the name. Not technical media, social media. The true problem is so complex that it is almost certainly impossible to solve in a way which will please everyone. I'd go as far as to say it's probably fundamentally unsolvable. Here is the real problem outlined using what we covered above: 1. Notice that decentralization is important to you. 2. Notice that it is outright against the desires of others. 3. Notice that social applications get more powerful as the number of participants increase. Now lets generalize the above and make it more clear why those things matter: 1. Some people love X where X is something. 2. Some people hate X where X is something. 3. These people are incentivized to use the same application due to the utility of social tools growing with number of participants. This problem is absolutely nutty in its complexity. It's also the actual reality of social applications. Almost all the issues with social applications boil down to the problem that people have different desires and those desires aren't in alignment with each other. The technical aspects of the problem don't even matter. The problem isn't simple. As proof of this: mass murder and every other woe you try to lay at the feet of social media applications predates those applications. In actuality, the difference is that poor people have more power now relative to how much they had before.