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Prediction: Any distributed social media (like Mastodon) that gains mainstream popularity will share the same fate. Sure, you'll be able to host your own Mastod
by post-it 5y ago
Prediction: Any distributed social media (like Mastodon) that gains mainstream popularity will share the same fate. Sure, you'll be able to host your own Mastodon instance, but 99% of people will be on the top 10 hosts and they won't peer with you.
I think the only way to make distributed social media practical is to have an extremely inexpensive turnkey self-hosting solution for the average person. A Chromecast-like device that they plug into their TV that backs up all their photos, plays music, and also hosts a Mastodon instance. Some kind of very friendly backup solution where you make an "emergency contacts" list, and the device encrypts all of your data and stores it on your emergency contacts' devices as a backup, and vice-versa.
- mypalmike 5y agoOn Mastodon, I believe it's currently somewhat backwards from this. The largest instances are filled with Japanese anime porn, and the smaller instances end up blacklisting them.
- rootusrootus 5y agoAnecdotally, this has happened every time I've set up any kind of social media instance / discussion forum / BBS (back in the day!) / whatever. It immediately gets consumed by people who use it to host porn, and then all the intended users leave.
- derefr 5y agoHave you considered creating a discussion platform where people can't post images, URLs / things that would be URLs if you added a URL scheme to them, ASCII-armored baseN-encoded anything, etc? For 99% of the discussion you want on the platform, text is all you need. For spammers and people who want to host porn, text alone is useless.
- sodality2 5y agoPlenty of spammers rely on text, though. A good chunk of my spam folder is text only.
- derefr 5y agoLikely text containing URLs, though, which your email client likely helpfully auto-formats into links. Which is why spammers would bother. They need you to go visit something to make money. There are types of bulk unsolicited email/web-comments which involve text without links, but they aren't spam per se; they're (the initial bait emails for) scams. (And the usual solution to scam postings on forums, is to prevent people from sharing any off-forum contact details, except maybe via forum private message. No Nigerian prince is going to run their whole scam through the forum; they want/need to convert you ASAP into having a non-intermediated conversation with them. So they won't bother with any forum where they can't stuff their email address / Telegram handle / etc into each post.)
- Induane 5y agoI've been itching for an experiment; might be fun to make a modernized BBS system for people to deploy.
- Tao332 5y agoIf you're not spontaneously flooded with hentai, how do you even know your internet is working?
- skocznymroczny 5y agoJapanese anime porn is not something that would trigger a banwave. A few posts from Trump, however...
- lostcolony 5y agoWell, one of them is rotting the moral fabric of the country, and the other is just some hand drawn people having sex.
- pbreit 5y agoDisagree. If the authentication mechanism are available from the get-go, it could work.
- post-it 5y agoUnless you can reliably tie a user to their real-life identity, authentication isn't useful in this case. If a spambot tries to peer with my instance, it's not super helpful to know that their accounts will always be the same spambot and not a different one.
- thomastjeffery 5y agoIdentities could be signed by a centralized authority, which would have the same desired effect as centralized hosting without the drawbacks.
- akimball 5y agoA person is not required. A reputation is required.
- deltree7 5y agoIn a digital world, with no financial penalties, it's easy to build reputation with 'spurious' transactions and exhaust that reputation for one "Large Evil Event" and rinse and repeat.
- rglullis 5y agoThe problem with email is that identity and authentication are an afterthought. Don't forget that (in theory) it is possible to get any email server to relay a message for you. Newer protocols do not have these kind of problems.
- ehPReth 5y agoindeed, my ISP only recently closed their open relay for all customers I remember back in the day having to change your SMTP settings whenever you travelled to whatever the ISP was where you were staying. then you could finally send email from your @homeisp.example email
- wrycoder 5y agoIf it was only open to their customers, that’s a closed relay, and typical for an ISP.
- upofadown 5y ago>Don't forget that (in theory) it is possible to get any email server to relay a message for you. That would be an open relay. That is simply not something that mail servers do anymore. If one was to deliberately set up an open relay, one would find that their email server was blacklisted pretty much immediately.
- em3rgent0rdr 5y agobut then they just start a new relay.
- drdaeman 5y agoI don't think so, I believe open relays are virtually extinct. People rarely run MTAs those days, and default configurations are quite protective. And if someone still manages to mess it up, they're gonna get famous with all the RBLs in days if not hours. I self-host my mail for over 17 years. Most of the spam I'm observing those days comes from hacked/broken websites (sometimes it's probably some stolen SMTP credentials, sometimes sent from the server directly). Legit domain name, SPF and even DKIM present, looks totally legit in this regard - only stopped by RBLs and content filtering.
- giords 5y agoI was reading these tweets today confirming that this is already happening in Mastodon: https://twitter.com/Gravecat/status/1518598015396818944 https://twitter.com/Gravecat/status/1518598015396818944
- rglullis 5y agoIf anything, their story is more likely than not showing that the centralization is not going to happen. If the users of the instances were the ones doing the segregation (due to some tribal/cultural divide), then you'd end up with a small number of highly polarized instances. But if this is only a fight between admins, the intuition is that we would end up with the big instances constantly losing users to smaller ones (created by those breaking away from the bad admins) who would then federate among themselves.
- omoikane 5y agoThis thread matches my experience with Mastodon and Diaspora*. It's fine if you are happy to live on individual instances and pretend that other instances do not exist, but they are not so great if you want a global audience. In this sense, they are more like the random disjoint online forums of the early 2000s, and not so much like the large monolithic social networks that people have come to expect.
- wardedVibe 5y agoSounds like discord without voice and with easier linking. It does seem like forum approaches are becoming more common. I've heard that groups were the only part of Facebook with a lot of activity, but I'm not on that platform.
- werber 5y agoI am hardware stupid, but I have thought about this exact solution for so long. I hope someone figures this problem out!
- shadowgovt 5y agoArguably, your prediction is even a feature, not a bug. The right to peer implies the right to not peer.
- Tao332 5y agoAgreed. I suspect most users have been tricked into thinking they want massive, global social media platforms. (1) People are turning their noses up at Mastodon because all of Twitter isn't already there and because you'll be cut off from instances that aren't federated with yours. (2) People are worried about "all of Twitter" becoming more people than they would like. There are communities they'd rather be cut off from and words they'd rather not read. It's not a bug, it's a feature. Unfortunately, very influential companies that have figured out how to game our attention have tricked users into thinking they want something they don't.
- account42 5y ago> The right to peer implies the right to not peer. No? Even if you don't want to force smaller instances to peer (which generally makes sense) you can apply more strict requirements to huge instances that contain a significant portion of the population.
- abecedarius 5y ago> Any distributed social media that gains mainstream popularity will share the same fate. The experience behind this predated peer-to-peer electronic cash and related developments. You may be right, and it may still be too soon. But problems can be solved.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoI noticed a lot of German sites don't peer with anyone who has the exact same rules (as in almost literally the same) as them. I was surprised to see such kind of box-thinking in a protocol that's been designed to be as open as possible.
- Ambolia 5y agoI assume this is unavoidable. The only solution are protocols where the network is owned and stored in the data (cryptographically) rather than in the servers. Then the servers apply censorship and rules over the data, but you can still rebuild any conversation chain as long as you connect to enough servers that don't censor it instead of requiring 1 server to keep all the network relationships. This also allows authors to seamlessly switch servers without losing audience or at least being able to recreate it very easily.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoThat's another problem: Moving your account to a different server in the fediverse. Which is indeed not possible currently. Perhaps some kind of blockchain would be a solution? (No, I'm not trying to appeal to tech investors, I actually think it might offer just the solution here :P )
- Ambolia 5y agonostr (https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr) seems to be a minimal possible solution. It doesn't seem to be much in use though, so I guess once that happens a few issues will come up.
- jonathankoren 5y agoEven a magic dongle isn’t going to work. People don’t want to buy things, let alone sysadmin their own television. I’d love a world where data was truly distributed and federated, but unfortunately, the barrier of entry is too high. Because of this people will start hosting nodes for people. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but network effects will take over, and we’ll be back where we started. Look at git. It’s distributed in all the right ways, but almost everyone uses github. The web is decentralized, but the same few websites dominate to the point that people — even people on this very site — think that you can’t post a video except to YouTube.
- seanp2k2 5y agocough XMPP federation cough Not only did Facebook and GChat refuse to peer with little players, they refused to peer among the big players too. We could have had something like IRC for the masses, peered chat servers with bring-your-own-client. Instead, we waited decades for iMessage to get Android support which only happened long after everyone moved on to IG, Messenger, WeChat, etc. Email is probably one of the last great open[ish] distributed systems we’ll ever see. There are just too many incentives to build walled gardens instead.
- surge 4y agomatrix.org has entered the chat XMPP doesn't even support E2E encryption out of the box. It's as outmoded as IRC.
- zaik 4y agoLots of XMPP clients support E2EE/OMEMO out of the box now. If you think XMPP is outmoded you should try it again some time. I recommend Conversations on Android.
- ThunderSizzle 5y agoI'm not sure what the competitive edge could be to not wall garden. It's always going to be more expensive to try to work with those who don't work with you. Going the self-host route, I'd still want a service of some sort so I didn't have to maintain it myself. Almost like an evergreen program that self-hosts my data and synchronizes and backups and transfers anything and everything. Everything would be accessible outside of the program as local human readable or viewable files where possible. That'd be the best way to be non-walled garden.
- TheColorYellow 5y agoDoes this give credence to cryptoeconomics?
- Ancapistani 5y ago> I'm not sure what the competitive edge could be to not wall garden. If only one entity does it, as far as I can imagine it is only a marketing statement to appeal to a niche demographic - people who care about it from an ideological standpoint. If more than one entity does it, it could lower the bar for critical mass. Instead of having to get enough people on your platform to start benefiting from the network effect, you only have to get enough people on your platform and platforms that you have bidirectional integration with.
- TZubiri 5y agoIf it's so easy to self host, surely attackers will host thousand of those instances and spam you. PoW has been the best solution so far.
- bccdee 5y agoCan you give me an example of a PoW-based social network or chat application which has been more successful than conventional alternatives like Mastodon?
- dotnet00 5y agoOne idea I've had is what if the protocol were designed in a way that a server can't be scaled too much, thus forcing lots of small servers to federate instead of having single entities running a large server with tens of thousands of users.
- random314 5y agoGeneral observation: no matter how distributed you make a system or protocol, it eventually becomes centralized.
- poisonborz 5y agoJust because at one time the majority of users are federated, a market/threat force can enter any time that would drive users to centralised solutions.
- ptman 5y agoI hope matrix can avoid this fate. The federation can of course be limited, but currently it seems like most users are federated. And they have plans to combat spam etc. https://element.io/blog/moderation-needs-a-radical-change/ https://element.io/blog/moderation-needs-a-radical-change/
- account42 5y ago> I think the only way to make distributed social media practical The only technical way maybe. You could always legislate that large enough networks MUST peer.