4 ms·

I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Twitter is probably the best social media platform for interplanetary communication, where low bandwidth and delayed tra

I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Twitter is probably the best social media platform for interplanetary communication, where low bandwidth and delayed transmission are fundamental bottlenecks, and both limitations are considered part of the appeal (character limitations and a format where you simply disperse messages and have no real notion of when they'll be received). In that case, I wonder if the monetization will ultimately be based on latency and message size: pay more for your message to be sent from Mars in the next transmission, and pay more to send a larger message. Locally, I wonder if Twitter will be tied to starlink in some fashion. If this does become some kind of interplanetary messaging system, I wouldn't be surprised if other technologies are built around it. Maybe Dorsey's decentralization attempt will be used as the infrastructure for the free tier of Twitter, and starlink is the infrastructure for the paid version (pay more to send faster, or to another planetary body). Edit: I can imagine a rebuilt backend that's decentralized across large (planetary?) regions, where messages are just the tweet content & metadata and passed between nodes. Very efficient, and the non-technical user already has the right expectations.

Hendrikto 5y ago
> both limitations are considered part of the appeal I don‘t think so. That‘s why you get people posting screenshots of text, or 50 tweet threads including a link to a thread reader "unroll" service. Many people want to use Twitter like a blog. But it is terrible for that use case.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  I would like to see an option to turn off all images by default, and possibly enable them per user followed.
- krono 5y ago
  It would work fine for those purposes if it weren't for the confusing and unreliable order in which these tweets are rendered, and all the unrelated crap they've put everywhere in between, over top, and all around the actual content. It's so terrible that it must have been implemented this way on purpose.
  - worker_person 5y ago
    But is it worse than any recipe site?
    - krono 5y ago
      Asking the real questions :) They do share a great many similarities. Both seem incapable of logically structuring their content, but most of it consists of gibberish and made-up facts anyway.
mateo1 5y ago
This is either peak sarcasm or post-peak hn.
disqard 5y ago
It's hard to tell whether you're being serious.... A single tweet is so incredibly bloated and inefficient for transmission through space, that it would not have any chance of arriving uncorrupted on the other side. "If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big. That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew. For a single tweet." (https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)
- scrumbledober 5y ago
  right but the content of the tweet is much smaller than the javascript bundle that twitter.com sends users...
- motoboi 5y ago
  Yeah, but nothing stops you from serving twitter.com from a CDN on Mars for Mars users, right? They'll even have netflix, if you think about it. Not youtube thought.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Unfortunately they'll only have access to the old style disk Netflix and those envelopes will come with a hell of a postage cost on them. /s More seriously, I don't know why you assume Netflix would be accessible or a priority for settling on Mars - or that Youtube wouldn't be.
    - memetomancer 5y ago
      because Netflix data is measure in GB / week, while Youtube is measure in TB / second.
      - munk-a 5y ago
shadowofneptune 5y ago
Reason Twitter's messages were so small was because they were originally sent over SMS. I suppose formats like SMS could be sent that far, but it's more likely that protocols built for that exact purpose would succeed.
ljm 5y ago
If I move to Mars and my only contact with Earth is via Twitter over Starlink in Elon’s Hyperverse, then I think I’ll take my chances with the climate catastrophe on Earth. Death would be more merciful.
- _justinfunk 5y ago
  Off topic, but I heard it said that Earth in the worst case of climate catastrophe would still be far more habitable than Mars. Seems to make sense. If we could build a "bubbled" city on Mars, we could do it on Earth far more cheaply, it seems. I'm not sure if that is the same case if a meteor strikes.
  - ebiester 5y ago
    A bubbled city on mars will not be immune to climate refugees. It's about how many bubbles we would need, and how many people might not fit. And it's easier to ignore people on another planet. Empathy does not survive distance, and on Earth even a wall is enough to remove empathy.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - munk-a 5y ago
      It's a bit depressing that Zardoz[1] might suddenly become a relevant piece of social commentary. If we get to the point where we need to choose who gets to be inside or outside of the bubble our ethical codes are going to collapse. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz
  - pfarrell 5y ago
    Follow up to off-topic. I have also thought the arcologies of Sim City 3000 or the unexplained environment in the Black Mirror episode "15 million merits"[1] are likely in our future. 0: https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Arcology https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Arcology 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
boringg 5y ago
Interplanetary communication is actually an interesting angle though I don't think he's bringing into his portfolio of companies for that angle. I haven't given much thought to this but managing earth time zones and other planet timezones is going to be a real PITA - obviously these are smaller issues. I would have to imagine that interplanetary communication wouldn't be as frivolous as the stuff we waste energy on here currently as the deployment costs are much larger.
lcnmrn 5y ago
I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of KBs of metadata with each tweet. For comparison, each page on Subreply takes 5 KB of data transfer and server response is around 100ms.
sampo 5y ago
> I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Twitter is probably the best social media platform for interplanetary communication, where low bandwidth and delayed transmission are fundamental bottlenecks In a Vernon Vinge's novel, they used a kind of galaxy-wide Usenet.
noobermin 5y ago
Is this really a serious take? The best means of interplanetary communication one way messages and a delayed confirmation. The distances with the speed of light disallows anything else.
- generalizations 5y ago
  > The best means of interplanetary communication one way messages and a delayed confirmation. I mean, yeah - my whole point is that's not far from what twitter is already. Musk is getting a social media platform full of users that's tailor-made for interplanetary latency.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    Twitter is RESTful (I think, not web expert) so they are just get requests, but the low latency makes it appear as live communication because you can just keep sending gets and update the client. Over an interplanetary scale with minutes to hours of delay between sending and recieving a signal, it would just be infeasible to create the same experience. It would be much better to just use one way messages, like that of video recordings or sets of texts that are recieved in full, with whatever losses would have to be simply accepted as part of the cost of communicating in space. Confirming receipt and communicating errors to the sender (like that of TCP) would just mean now you have to wait 2x times more to get the next chuck of the message again and hope that that too isn't degraded, so it would be pretty lossy, pretty "slow" level of communication, very much unlike the internet here on earth. Social media in general would be infeasible on an interplanetary scale.
    - usrn 5y ago
      Nah, social media is plenty feasible and the Twitter UI/abstraction is probably ideal like GP says (although I think the implementation would be different than you're imagining.) They'd just colocate on the other planets and replicate the database. Stuff like that is a solved problem (in the case of TCP, just increase the window size. Although you'd probably want to make sure transaction boundaries and packet boundaries line up to minimize latency/jitter. If they wanted to minimize the latency they'd make large media available as a merkle tree and make blocks available as they arrived correctly a la Bittorent or IPFS (heh.)) The delay this introduced would have a social effect similar to time zones: "Oh the martians are caught up to event <x> and their reaction is <y>" instead of "Oh the Australians are waking up after event <x> happened today and their reaction is <y>."
munk-a 5y ago
I don't know if Twitter's particular length limit is applicable to interplanetary communication. It was originally dictated by the arbitrarily chosen data packet size for communicating with cell towers which in turn impacted how large SMSes could be. Recently tweet limits were relaxed, but it still remains the normal to communicate "significant dialog" through image macros which are extremely unfriendly on transmission size and threaded discussions (multi-part tweets) tend to mesh very poorly with how the social features of twitter work, where certain chunks of the thread often get different levels of promotion leading to incomplete segments of the conversation being conveyed. I don't really think twitter has any real advantage over any of the other social networks (outside of the explicitly image focused) except through its arbitrary payload limit which, as I mentioned, is no longer a firm limit and often comes with additional auxiliary payloads (like a linked image) to actually communicate - AFAIK the actual mechanics of how communication is executed isn't particularly well suited for this sort of lossy transmission, at least in any way that isn't matched by other social companies. It's much more likely, IMO, that mars based communication would just use emails since that transmission format already comes with the ability to embed images as needed and works well enough that it's survived decades of existence.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > It was originally dictated by the arbitrarily chosen data packet size for communicating with cell towers which in turn impacted how large SMSes could be. The current limit was not.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    The current limit was still arbitrarily chosen and image macros are still legion on twitter. The limit was not chosen because it's particularly well aligned for interplanetary communication so I'm still confused as to why twitter is being touted as the best aligned social media platform.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The current limit was still arbitrarily chosen Right, it was even more arbitrarily chosen based on stylistic preferences not any communication system constraint.
astrange 5y ago
This post is sort of an update of "A Fire Upon The Deep" by Vernor Vinge.
JetAlone 5y ago
>I'm surprised no one has mentioned[...] Well, it seems you had a notably unique idea. Your comment got presented on the Timcast, and a 20 minute clip containing it has over 90,000 views at the time of writing this comment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyrf5wLit34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyrf5wLit34 I think a lot of the child comments have very valid criticisms, particularly concerns with bloat and other existing character limitations often being more about managing the user experience than bandwidth constraints. But your comment's a magnified part of the conversation now, so we'll just have to see how the narratives develop and the nuts and bolts of "interplanetary twitter" and the "Elon Musk NeuraStarLink Space Dystopia" actually plays out. IMO, it's still too early to really expect much of interplanetary anything. I would expect Twitter to reach the end of its lifecycle and be replaced by something new, and then for that new technology to reach the end of its lifecycle and be replaced with another new thing which might be ready for integration in interplanetary communication. Notable too, I think we're seeing here news people sympathetic to the right wing looking for large, active, engaged "intelligentsia" social media alternatives to twitter to quote comments from that use chilling moderation strategies. Ones that aren't completely overrun and saturated by fringe far right content refugees. Hacker news is probably going to get quoted more often by those kinds of sources until its owners/operators feel like taking some Illuminati Deep State money or whatever. That is, if there's any of that money left.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  Bleh, missed a correction, "that use chilling moderation strategies less"

Hendrikto 5y ago

> both limitations are considered part of the appeal I don‘t think so. That‘s why you get people posting screenshots of text, or 50 tweet threads including a link to a thread reader "unroll" service. Many people want to use Twitter like a blog. But it is terrible for that use case.

wrycoder 5y ago
I would like to see an option to turn off all images by default, and possibly enable them per user followed.
krono 5y ago
It would work fine for those purposes if it weren't for the confusing and unreliable order in which these tweets are rendered, and all the unrelated crap they've put everywhere in between, over top, and all around the actual content. It's so terrible that it must have been implemented this way on purpose.
- worker_person 5y ago
  But is it worse than any recipe site?
  - krono 5y ago
    Asking the real questions :) They do share a great many similarities. Both seem incapable of logically structuring their content, but most of it consists of gibberish and made-up facts anyway.

mateo1 5y ago

This is either peak sarcasm or post-peak hn.

disqard 5y ago

It's hard to tell whether you're being serious.... A single tweet is so incredibly bloated and inefficient for transmission through space, that it would not have any chance of arriving uncorrupted on the other side. "If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big. That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew. For a single tweet." (https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

scrumbledober 5y ago
right but the content of the tweet is much smaller than the javascript bundle that twitter.com sends users...
motoboi 5y ago
Yeah, but nothing stops you from serving twitter.com from a CDN on Mars for Mars users, right? They'll even have netflix, if you think about it. Not youtube thought.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Unfortunately they'll only have access to the old style disk Netflix and those envelopes will come with a hell of a postage cost on them. /s More seriously, I don't know why you assume Netflix would be accessible or a priority for settling on Mars - or that Youtube wouldn't be.
  - memetomancer 5y ago
    because Netflix data is measure in GB / week, while Youtube is measure in TB / second.
    - munk-a 5y ago

shadowofneptune 5y ago

Reason Twitter's messages were so small was because they were originally sent over SMS. I suppose formats like SMS could be sent that far, but it's more likely that protocols built for that exact purpose would succeed.

ljm 5y ago

If I move to Mars and my only contact with Earth is via Twitter over Starlink in Elon’s Hyperverse, then I think I’ll take my chances with the climate catastrophe on Earth. Death would be more merciful.

_justinfunk 5y ago
Off topic, but I heard it said that Earth in the worst case of climate catastrophe would still be far more habitable than Mars. Seems to make sense. If we could build a "bubbled" city on Mars, we could do it on Earth far more cheaply, it seems. I'm not sure if that is the same case if a meteor strikes.
- ebiester 5y ago
  A bubbled city on mars will not be immune to climate refugees. It's about how many bubbles we would need, and how many people might not fit. And it's easier to ignore people on another planet. Empathy does not survive distance, and on Earth even a wall is enough to remove empathy.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - munk-a 5y ago
    It's a bit depressing that Zardoz[1] might suddenly become a relevant piece of social commentary. If we get to the point where we need to choose who gets to be inside or outside of the bubble our ethical codes are going to collapse. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz
- pfarrell 5y ago
  Follow up to off-topic. I have also thought the arcologies of Sim City 3000 or the unexplained environment in the Black Mirror episode "15 million merits"[1] are likely in our future. 0: https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Arcology https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Arcology 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

boringg 5y ago

Interplanetary communication is actually an interesting angle though I don't think he's bringing into his portfolio of companies for that angle. I haven't given much thought to this but managing earth time zones and other planet timezones is going to be a real PITA - obviously these are smaller issues. I would have to imagine that interplanetary communication wouldn't be as frivolous as the stuff we waste energy on here currently as the deployment costs are much larger.

lcnmrn 5y ago

I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of KBs of metadata with each tweet. For comparison, each page on Subreply takes 5 KB of data transfer and server response is around 100ms.

sampo 5y ago

> I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Twitter is probably the best social media platform for interplanetary communication, where low bandwidth and delayed transmission are fundamental bottlenecks In a Vernon Vinge's novel, they used a kind of galaxy-wide Usenet.

noobermin 5y ago

Is this really a serious take? The best means of interplanetary communication one way messages and a delayed confirmation. The distances with the speed of light disallows anything else.

generalizations 5y ago
> The best means of interplanetary communication one way messages and a delayed confirmation. I mean, yeah - my whole point is that's not far from what twitter is already. Musk is getting a social media platform full of users that's tailor-made for interplanetary latency.
- noobermin 5y ago
  Twitter is RESTful (I think, not web expert) so they are just get requests, but the low latency makes it appear as live communication because you can just keep sending gets and update the client. Over an interplanetary scale with minutes to hours of delay between sending and recieving a signal, it would just be infeasible to create the same experience. It would be much better to just use one way messages, like that of video recordings or sets of texts that are recieved in full, with whatever losses would have to be simply accepted as part of the cost of communicating in space. Confirming receipt and communicating errors to the sender (like that of TCP) would just mean now you have to wait 2x times more to get the next chuck of the message again and hope that that too isn't degraded, so it would be pretty lossy, pretty "slow" level of communication, very much unlike the internet here on earth. Social media in general would be infeasible on an interplanetary scale.
  - usrn 5y ago
    Nah, social media is plenty feasible and the Twitter UI/abstraction is probably ideal like GP says (although I think the implementation would be different than you're imagining.) They'd just colocate on the other planets and replicate the database. Stuff like that is a solved problem (in the case of TCP, just increase the window size. Although you'd probably want to make sure transaction boundaries and packet boundaries line up to minimize latency/jitter. If they wanted to minimize the latency they'd make large media available as a merkle tree and make blocks available as they arrived correctly a la Bittorent or IPFS (heh.)) The delay this introduced would have a social effect similar to time zones: "Oh the martians are caught up to event <x> and their reaction is <y>" instead of "Oh the Australians are waking up after event <x> happened today and their reaction is <y>."

munk-a 5y ago

I don't know if Twitter's particular length limit is applicable to interplanetary communication. It was originally dictated by the arbitrarily chosen data packet size for communicating with cell towers which in turn impacted how large SMSes could be. Recently tweet limits were relaxed, but it still remains the normal to communicate "significant dialog" through image macros which are extremely unfriendly on transmission size and threaded discussions (multi-part tweets) tend to mesh very poorly with how the social features of twitter work, where certain chunks of the thread often get different levels of promotion leading to incomplete segments of the conversation being conveyed. I don't really think twitter has any real advantage over any of the other social networks (outside of the explicitly image focused) except through its arbitrary payload limit which, as I mentioned, is no longer a firm limit and often comes with additional auxiliary payloads (like a linked image) to actually communicate - AFAIK the actual mechanics of how communication is executed isn't particularly well suited for this sort of lossy transmission, at least in any way that isn't matched by other social companies. It's much more likely, IMO, that mars based communication would just use emails since that transmission format already comes with the ability to embed images as needed and works well enough that it's survived decades of existence.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> It was originally dictated by the arbitrarily chosen data packet size for communicating with cell towers which in turn impacted how large SMSes could be. The current limit was not.
- munk-a 5y ago
  The current limit was still arbitrarily chosen and image macros are still legion on twitter. The limit was not chosen because it's particularly well aligned for interplanetary communication so I'm still confused as to why twitter is being touted as the best aligned social media platform.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The current limit was still arbitrarily chosen Right, it was even more arbitrarily chosen based on stylistic preferences not any communication system constraint.

astrange 5y ago

This post is sort of an update of "A Fire Upon The Deep" by Vernor Vinge.

JetAlone 5y ago

>I'm surprised no one has mentioned[...] Well, it seems you had a notably unique idea. Your comment got presented on the Timcast, and a 20 minute clip containing it has over 90,000 views at the time of writing this comment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyrf5wLit34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyrf5wLit34 I think a lot of the child comments have very valid criticisms, particularly concerns with bloat and other existing character limitations often being more about managing the user experience than bandwidth constraints. But your comment's a magnified part of the conversation now, so we'll just have to see how the narratives develop and the nuts and bolts of "interplanetary twitter" and the "Elon Musk NeuraStarLink Space Dystopia" actually plays out. IMO, it's still too early to really expect much of interplanetary anything. I would expect Twitter to reach the end of its lifecycle and be replaced by something new, and then for that new technology to reach the end of its lifecycle and be replaced with another new thing which might be ready for integration in interplanetary communication. Notable too, I think we're seeing here news people sympathetic to the right wing looking for large, active, engaged "intelligentsia" social media alternatives to twitter to quote comments from that use chilling moderation strategies. Ones that aren't completely overrun and saturated by fringe far right content refugees. Hacker news is probably going to get quoted more often by those kinds of sources until its owners/operators feel like taking some Illuminati Deep State money or whatever. That is, if there's any of that money left.

JetAlone 5y ago
Bleh, missed a correction, "that use chilling moderation strategies less"