11 ms·

Fediverse

198 points by the-mitr 4y ago

Kye 4y ago
The page for Mastodon reminded me of the alternate web interfaces, Pinafore and Halcyon: https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/ https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/
Ambolia 4y ago
Which are the platforms that let you own your data cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly for yourself and your followers? Basically the network should be in the data and the servers should be replaceable. I think those are very obvious bottlenecks that affect most of these alternative networks. On the other side, censorship is also very important, nobody wants to have to dwell into spam and filth to read a small amount of valuable content. Maybe be able to choose your own censors somehow? Or build chains of trusts with your friends and "friends-of-friends" that can be revoked at any point?
- emptysongglass 4y ago
  Urbit does this: https://urbit.org/blog/an-urbit-overview https://urbit.org/blog/an-urbit-overview
  - riffic 4y ago
    no one's adopting urbit, let's be real.
    - emptysongglass 4y ago
      You didn't come with any numbers so I will and they contradict your claims: https://hatryx-lastud.tlon.network/newsletter/urbit-takeoff-is-here https://hatryx-lastud.tlon.network/newsletter/urbit-takeoff-...
    - woojoo666 4y ago
      > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    Love the idea and will look more into it. Not sure why you got such a non-constructive and rude dismissal in another comment, especially given the hacker news guidelines
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > Which are the platforms that let you own your data cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly for yourself and your followers? If you know of a homomorphic encryption scheme that would work for this and remain economically viable for other people to host, let me know. I simply don't think it's reasonable to expect that degree of privacy, much less on a Twitter clone. If you want privacy, use Matrix or OMEMO.
  - Ambolia 4y ago
    I mean "own" not in the sense of privacy in this case. But in the sense that the account (public key) belongs to the person who has a certain private key. So you can move your content to a different server or domain and keep all your audience, maybe with a small transition period while the new server becomes well known, but not like now getting kicked out of twitter or youtube just results on a bunch or broken links and contextless comments.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      AFAIK Mastodon implements a migration feature that lets you move your followers to/from different accounts if you want to use a new homeserver. Not sure how it works on the backend, but it's got this base mostly covered.
- mescaline 4y ago
  I was thinking about "physical reality" as a means to establish a chain of trust. If you and I sit next to each other, we have vocal and image chat available. Other than someone coming and physically injecting themselves into our "sphere", our communications can be trustworthy and reliable. If a "chunk" of data could be "sovereignized" by association with other "nearby" chunks of data (through some common signing event), one could "move" seamlessly from one chunk to the other, regardless of where it was being "served" from. When I talk about "chunks" here, I'm talking about document boundaries and ownership/control of the data. If we were in some sort of simulation, moving from my sphere of data to yours would look something like a probability distribution. By having signed contracts between the spheres, one could increase the probability that movement in a general direction resulted in access and loading of trusted data. Because the chains start out empty, nobody "owns" these fictitious plots until they are established through preexisting trusted channels. Various channels as well. None of this bullshit NFT land grab crap that nobody can trust. Use NFTs, or even better, Lightning payments to establish the "authenticity" of the nearby data spheres.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- rglullis 4y ago
  I believe this is possible with ActivityPub already, and the servers just need to start making a distinction between the identities from its users and the "federation": https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/106825107786781891 https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/106825107786781891
  - pat2man 4y ago
    Its interesting that DNS doesn't come up more often as the solution here. Owning a domain (or subdomain) seems a whole lot easier than most of the other "decentralized" solutions that get discussed. And if DNS is too centralized for you then something like ENS can replace it without needing very many changes to the rest of the stack.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Exactly. That's the approach defended and promoted by the indieweb thinking heads: start with identity and structure things bottom-up. Machines are quite good at translating between the different protocols. If I want to publish my content using RSS and you want to consume it using ActivityPub, it is easy to write software that makes the bridge, provided your identity doesn't change.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  What you describe is essentially Tim Berners-Lee's vision for Solid: https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ The idea is that every individual person has a container for their own data, and then platforms interact with that data using methods built on the Semantic Web. I frankly don't think it has a hope in hell of succeeding, but I love the concept!
  - bduerst 4y ago
    I haven't dived into the specs, but how does solid solve bad actors getting access to your pod? Usually today your data is fragmented across platforms (so damage is reduced) which have centralized authorities who can step in and fix bad actor issues.
    - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      Honestly, I'm gonna be super lazy and just quote the front page of the site: > Anyone or anything that accesses data in a Solid Pod uses a unique ID, authenticated by a decentralized extension of OpenID Connect. Solid's access control system uses these IDs to determine whether a person or application has access to a resource in a Pod. Of course, as a data owner, you could accidentally grant a bad actor access to your data, but presumably you can also revoke that access as well.
      - bduerst 4y ago
        But that's just it though - if bad actors gain control, you lose the ability to reject OAuth creds (which is what OpenID is). Things like social engineering or phishing of credentials, which happens at scale today. They need a way to handle situations when bad actors take over, because other solutions handle this with centralized authorities who step in and rectify the issue.
        BaseballPhysics 4y ago
        I'm now confused by what you mean when you say "gain control". Are you talking about literally exploiting a bug and hacking the underlying service that is providing access to the pod? In that case, it's a question of who owns and operates the pod. Solid is conceived as a set of standards that can be implemented by either individuals, or by companies on behalf of individuals. Think "data ownership as a service". So you can still have centralized entities that implement the spec and provide support and other services for users, including dealing with security incidents.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- grenran 4y ago
  I think this was the premise of the original World Wide Web (minus the cryptographic part) before everything was centralised. Essentially people would have their own personal web pages and readers subscribe via RSS.
  - leephillips 4y ago
    That’s, to a large extent, what the WWW is today. I have my own personal site, and a collection of RSS/Atom feeds that I check to see what’s happening on other people’s personal sites. It’s surely an exaggeration to say that “everything” is centralized, despite the rise of the huge monoliths such as Twitter.
- dharma1 4y ago
  Try https://lens.dev https://lens.dev if you’re interested in portable data/social graph that is onchain (disclaimer - I work on this)
  - emptysongglass 4y ago
    What does this solve that Urbit doesn't?
- k__ 4y ago
  Permissionless decentralized platforms. This includes Radicle, IPFS, Skynet, SSB, Arweave, Ethererum, and many more.
- ianopolous 4y ago
  You might be interested in Peergos - https://peergos.org https://peergos.org (co-founder here) Properties: * fully self-authenticating protocol independent of DNS and the TLS certificate authorities * self sovereign identity * you can migrate to a different host and keep all your data, and social graph, and old links continue to work. * You can authorize and run live mirrors of your data which help provide bandwidth * you only see things from or via people you follow
fsflover 4y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009468.
echelon 4y ago
A Twitter replacement shouldn't be federated. It should be fully P2P. Federated platforms can still be censored and walled off. Not all Mastodon instances are peers, and your data isn't portable. It still has most of the same pitfalls as the platforms we complain about today. P2P is naturally efficient. The best ideas will gain traction within their memetic networks, and you can branch out and explore anything and respond to it. Sign and publish with a pubkey so you have pseudonymous identity and can keep track of peers. Publish and consume through a gateway proxy or VPN if you want to keep your IP private. Supernodes can help with scaling, especially for mobile clients. You can block whomever you dislike or share only with your direct network. You can write your own prioritization algorithm to cut down on noise and create high signal channels. You can archive whatever you like easily. It should have been P2P all along.
- anderspitman 4y ago
  P2P is just a special case of federation, where n=1. IMO PKI is simply not a realistic identity platform for the average person. You have to back your private key up with some reliable third party and their recovery system is going to be based on email so you may as well just use email for identity.
- elitepleb 4y ago
  there's a project brewing hoping to do just that by july https://liberapay.com/Revolver https://liberapay.com/Revolver
- grishka 4y ago
  No, P2P is impractical and it inevitably leaks into the UX, making it significantly more cumbersome. With a P2P system, you can't just send someone a link to something you found — you either expect them to have a client for the service, or use a web proxy. > Sign and publish with a pubkey No, absolutely not. Public keys make terrible identifiers. You leak it and anyone can impresonate you, with you having no recourse. You lose it and you have to start a new life basically. Account recovery and the ability to revoke access are not "nice to have" things — they're hard requirements for any identity system that is to be used in the real world by real, including non-tech, people. Trust me, I worked at the largest Russian social media company, they have a dedicated account recovery department for a reason.
luciusdomitius 4y ago
If anyone wonders why LBRY (Odyssee) is not part of Fediverse, despite dwarving PeerTube or whatever it is called: https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/issues/3982 https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/issues/3982
DerekBickerton 4y ago
Is having both a normal social media account & a federated version okay? I've seen a lot of people delete their Twitter and then hop on Mastodon because they're worried about Musk. Whether their concern about Musk is valid is another question. How do people see his acquisition of Twitter as a bad thing? If anything he will try to improve it no?
- lynndotpy 4y ago
  You can certainly have a normal and a federated social media. I do. You likely already have email, which is also kind of federated and kind of social media.
- Ambolia 4y ago
  Intra-elite competition between old media types and silicon valley types has being on for a while in different ways. Musk has been openly exposing some outsider narratives, so he is seen as an enemy to the old media types. I think this is most of it. The "billionaire" narrative doesn't make any sense. It's not like Twitter, or any other media companies, were owned by poor people until now.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    >It's not like Twitter, or any other media companies, were owned by poor people until now To an extent they were because they're a public company. A public company is accountable to its shareholders which in principle is open to everyone (generally represented by institutional investors in practice), whereas a private company is, in this case, only answering to one person, and only really serving one person. That basic democratic aspect of American capitalism where everyone can take a stake in the economy is undermined when people withdraw from public markets altogether. It looks more like another gilded age.
- simonw 4y ago
  This is the best commentary I've seen about the Twitter situation, from someone who worked there for four years at a senior level (but isn't there now so is free to share their thoughts): https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2022/04/anchors-away https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2022/04/anchors-away The short version: Twitter's challenges are not hard technology problems, they're hard social and community problems. These are not areas Elon has shown any interest in understanding or respecting.
taurusnoises 4y ago
I have tried to wrap my head around how this works as a total outsider noob, and I just can not get it! But, I want to. I get the email comparison (different platforms can all speak, so why not have social media be the same?). But, then the white sheets are just all php and python and all this stuff that doesn't make any sense (I know what they are, just not what to do with that info), and for better or worse doesn't make sense to anyone I know. I'm, like, doing the Odin Project, actively trying to learn, and I still can't really get it. How is this supposed to translate to anyone else? But, again, I want it to.
- luciusdomitius 4y ago
  Basically you have e-mail, which is a protocol (actually a set of protocols, but ignore for now). Thus you can e-mail a protonmail user from your gmail/corporate account without any issues. However Twitter and Facebook are proprietary black box services and beyond using a Facebook-provided identity to create a Twitter account, there is no way to 'friend' a Twitter user on your FB account or interact with content in any way. Then there comes a protocol called ActivityPub[1], which "e-mailifies" social networking. So far Mastodon and their goodreads clone are harvesting modest success. I am a great fan of the goal, but not of the top-down approach W3C have taken with ActivityPub. For example LBRY solves this problem in a different way and is way more successful than all of Fediverse in total. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
  - ancientsofmumu 4y ago
    > So far Mastodon and their goodreads clone Had to look this up, I think you mean BookWyrm(?). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420580 https://bookwyrm.social/ https://bookwyrm.social/
    - luciusdomitius 4y ago
      Yes, exactly this, thank you. It is actually quite good, shame that their main node seems to be out of capacity.
k101 4y ago
It seems to me that the main reason for unpopularity, in addition to the lack of advertising, is monetization. How can I recoup my production of content that can be expensive? It seems to me that a competent symbiosis of fediverse and cryptocurrency is the real web3.
- proactivesvcs 4y ago
  The Fediverse is not for your target market. We hate Internet advertising: it serves to use and abuse us, and is a security risk to our devices. It exists in opposition of monetising people and what they do and say, because we're sick of being retreated like we're worth a ton of beans. We don't live to be a part of profit.
  - k101 4y ago
    And how can fediverse survive, and how can it pay for servers? Who among the professionals will do this? If you leave this system only for enthusiasts, then you can leave everything as it is and improve only the code. And if you want to overthrow the monopoly without violence, then the authors will need monetization tools and not necessarily advertising . Linux would not have become so popular without redhat and other commercial companies. P. S I myself really like everything free and use only open source software, give donates periodically to the authors.
    - proactivesvcs 4y ago
      How does it / will it pay for servers? This is a great question and I can guarantee if you set up an account somewhere, and start asking instance admins this question, you'll find out exactly how. I'd answer your question but you'll get much more organic answers and they'll answer you in a way you'll believe and understand far better than just from me. The system is not, and was never, just for technology enthusiasts. The majority of people I chat with probably wouldn't know their RAM from their GPU and I wouldn't expect them to. Sure there are a lot of Linux/FOSS enthusiasts there, but they're the minority. I don't know anyone trying to overthrow monopolies by running an instance because again, I say that not everyone's motivation for everything they do is for the acquisition of wealth.
moron4hire 4y ago
General purpose social media will be considered the greatest mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented discussion boards. When you have no common topic around which to organize, then people have to search each other's personalities for commonality. And in doing so, they stratify along political lines. This isn't enough, so then they micro-stratify into various, rabid subgroups within those political wings. But when you have the only message board dedicated to an obscure brand of motorcycle from the 1940s (or whatever, IDK), then you're stuck with those people. You're stuck with either having to learn to get along or lose out on your favorite thing. Go back to topic-oriented message boards. You don't need identity continuity between all the message boards you are membered in. That serves the corporate surveillance state more than it serves you. You don't need people on Board A to see what you're doing on Board B. If it's important and relevant, you can tell them. You dn't need to be friended with all your aunts and cousins and ex boyfriends. That shit is weird, family is for seeing at Thanksgiving to remember why you hate them and then go back to being happy for the rest of the year. Go back to topic-oriented message boards.
- fsflover 4y ago
  > Go back to topic-oriented message boards. This is essentially what Mastodon instances are. As a bonus, they can interact if they want it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rglullis 4y ago
    No, this is how a subset of its users treat it, and there is a significant amount of people (myself included) who think topic-based instances are a poorly conceived idea for federated systems [0]. [0] https://raphael.lullis.net/federations-and-identity/ https://raphael.lullis.net/federations-and-identity/
- parksy 4y ago
  This is not going against what you said in principle, I feel what you are saying, but I feel the need to add that I was admin of a few topic oriented message boards in the 90's and early 2000's, and yeah as you said it was pretty good simply to be able to be part of some group that cared about the same random stuff as me, and I think a big part of it is because humanity literally had not ever been able to connect so quickly on shared interests from such geographically diverse regions before, but it wasn't all roses there either. Personality cults were a regular theme. Honestly just one individual with no other goals in life could wreak havoc by constantly weaving between the rules, launching sock puppets to do some virtual Munchausen-by-proxy performance, painting admin as the bad guys, staging crises that didn't really exist to get more followers (in the social sense, there was not really a "follow" option in the platforms at the time). These topic-based forums were often in direct competition, and on more than one occasion it was revealed (usually by infiltrating via long-term social engineering so you could get to see the IP addresses of the members) that these users were from competitors trying to stir trouble and siphon off members. Diversity and cliquishness was an issue. Generally a community would kick off around some exciting new theme, or just a general shared interest and grow organically from there. This was great but the longer the same group hangs together, the more insular the atmosphere and inside references became. It's just what groups of people do in physical groups when they hang together a lot - they grow bonds with each other, their shared experiences strengthen these bonds, and newcomers see this and can see that it will take a lot of effort and patience to reach the same level of acceptance, and the older and more insular a community becomes, the less people are attracted to it. Then eventually the older members see there's nothing new to learn here and drift off. So the lifecycle of topic-based message boards followed a standard inception/growth/stagnation/diaspora pattern. Generalised social media puts everyone on an even platform - albeit a pretty shitty one - everyone sucks equally by default. You're correct in that the centralisation has a ton of other side effects and I don't disagree that many of these aren't what people want (if they're aware of it). Just that as I said it wasn't all roses and we can't just "go back". There were tons of reasons why the topic-oriented message boards faded away and it wasn't just laziness or convenience. It is human nature to desire connection and a sense of place, balanced with a need for novelty and invigoration of ideas. Generalised social media provides that routinely and formulaically, they basically hacked our brains. Also on practicality of your suggestion, we can't force people to go back. You can't put a gun to people's heads and force them to only use single issue forums. I get the nostalgia because I was a part of it and it was great for a time, but it did also have a ton of downsides. I think we need to move forward not go back. Federated social networks are one attempt at this. It's a lot to take on board as we have to learn new things like managing our identity / signatures and learning differences between providers, but efforts are underway to try and shift us away from the big old attention silos people have been trained to use these days.
wellpast 4y ago
Wither is #nostr [1]? [1] https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr
kovalevski 4y ago
the most federated thing - indie web - is not mention there, unfortunately. it'd be great to have a link to some list of indieweb websites.
- easrng 4y ago
  Mastodon uses microformats so you can follow Mastodon accounts with an IndieWeb h-feed reader. I don't think it handles WebMentions though.
pavlov 4y ago
I feel the branding here is just not very appealing. "Federated" brings up associations of something boring and complicated and bureaucratic. And now because of the metaverse hype, "Fediverse" sounds like a VR training program for FBI agents. Take a leaf from the crypto pumpers and call it web4? "It's like web3 but advanced beyond money. You know, like in Star Trek. Hoarding tokens is just so 20th century."
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Every time I see "fediverse", I think it's some kind of US federal government cloud, until I remember that it's something else... I'm still not sure what.
- cowtools 4y ago
  >"Fediverse" sounds like a VR training program for FBI agents. This made me spit out my coffee laughing
- jug 4y ago
  I agree — I find this more exciting and approachable than the name implies! It’s striking how much sense this makes to me: you interact in social networks like mail servers interact with each other. How did this concept take this long! (I know it’s not NEW new but still… fairly new) Suddenly, due to the distributed nature, it doesn’t need to be expensive to have your own server to be part of it, like how running a mail server can be cheap. But if you don’t want to care about that, just sign up on an existing server like most do! In either case, it’s cheaper because it’s not centralized and because it’s cheaper it doesn’t need ads for funding and because it doesn’t need ads it doesn’t need to keep distracting you with an ever changing feed and pulling in “suggestions” (read: AI noise) So, there is really not that much to it! Like mail servers or chat servers (remember XMPP?), but now social network servers. And now Mastodon has an official app too, besides an approachable web interface. And thanks to the ActivityPub standard, anyone can write a server, or client app. I think it’s pretty revolutionizing with the voice now put in our hands rather than in a corporation’s. Definitely deserving of something more fun than “Fediverse” which sounds geeky and alienating.
- efsavage 4y ago
monkin 4y ago
Ratio of active vs created accounts is very low, it feels like most of them ware abandon by users after the initial boom. That one that’s stands out is Mastodon which isn’t a surprise. For whole fediverse to succeed it will have to jump out from niche groups and fight for ordinary users that are used to Facebook or Twitter. Which will not happen until some big brands/interesting people start to use them as PR/commentary tools. And, yes, that’s the single point of all social networks, and not connecting with friends.
- kvetching 4y ago
- proactivesvcs 4y ago
  Niche groups? Have you seen how huge and heterogeneous mastodon.social and the likes are? They're even bigger than that ;-) Even the "niche" instances have sufficient numbers that there are enough niches for many people to see something of interest there, and most of them freely allow off-topic chatter, nay welcome it. One of the benefits of the Fediverse is that even if you're on an instance that's for talking about movies, you can a) almost always talk about anything and b) talk to your followers about whatever you please. The Fediverse isn't about brands or influencers using them for PR or commentary, although there's nothing to stop that. It's kinda against the fundamental ethos: that it's about people not brands. And in that, it enjoys the fact that it's already succeeded, but it inherently doesn't want to "succeed" in the commercial or capitalistic sense. All it needs to do is continue to exist.
JadoJodo 4y ago
The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients B. Understands the value of decentralized platforms and holds those values themselves C. Knows more than 1-2 people who ALSO meet the qualifications of A and B (aside from me) I think this leaves two possibilities: 1. There can be a small number of large instances, which removes the issues caused by A and B but has the effect of reducing most of the benefits found in B (focus, privacy, catered speech, etc). 2. There will need to be a million tiny silo'd instances (<5 people). This solves B, but we run into the issues of A and C. I realize this is closer to the goal. I'd love to see Fediverse “platforms” succeed, but I'm not sure how they can since the network effect is what is needed.
- jedimastert 4y ago
  I completely agree, there's such a barrier for entry that's incredibly difficult for not-tech people to emphasize with. I think there's an interesting case to be looked at with Discord. Not that discord itself is decentralized, but the surprising amount of vibrant and active communities in the form of Discord servers. If the client-side barrier can be sufficiently lowered, I'm sure many communities like that have at least one or two people knowledgeable enough to set up an instance or two
- anderspitman 4y ago
  > Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients Yep. Self-hosting something like Plex (please consider Jellyfin instead) or a social Fediverse server shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone. I think projects like Sandstorm, yunohost, Cloudron, etc have the right idea, but they're still way too complicated for the average person to get up and running. I've been chewing on this problem for about a year, and I believe it's solvable with technologies that are currently available. This is the focus of my current main side project.
- 4y ago
zzo38computer 4y ago
I think that the ActivityPub protocol is better than Twitter, Facebook, etc, but is still too many problematic and is more complicated than it should be. I can see many problems, one of which is that it seems to default to HTML and some services seem to require it, and that it probably requires Unicode too, and that auth services may also need a web browser to work, which is also no good. There is NNTP, email, IRC, etc, that you can use, which I think can work better. (I invented "Unusenet" to avoid namespace collision, if needed; there are a few different ways to define names in Unusenet, one of which is reverse domain names) An implementation should not need a web browser or something as complicated as it, and should be independent of the programming language to be used (you could use C, JavaScript, etc), with optional TLS. Of course you will need to be able to block messages, or to not block them if that is what you wish, but that will be possible easily enough. ActivityPub does this too, but so does NNTP, email, IRC, etc; you can define your own filter criteria, and NNTP can have moderated or unmoderated newsgroups. Many clients can have scoring files, and a few support global scoring files (which the user can install or not at their choice, but unfortunately these do not seem to be portable across different implementations, as far as I can tell). Mailing lists are still sometimes used, but NNTP would be better, I think.
- easrng 4y ago
  The subset of HTML supported by Mastodon is quite small and would likely be easy to parse and render without a browser. Misskey and glitch-soc support more IIRC, but still not everything. RE: Unicode, of course it uses Unicode. What else would it use??
armchairhacker 4y ago
I joined a fediverse group but it’s all just random short posts. Kind of like knock-off Twitter to put it bluntly. Also the “home” tab is empty which is a bit confusing. I want this to succeed, but as a social media site in order to succeed they need people (interesting people who like to post interesting things), and a good feed algorithm. This is where Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc. are worth a lot: many social media sites could easily replace Twitter except they don’t have these.
- zaarn 4y ago
  For the home tab to populate, you need to follow people. Mastodon doesn't push content you didn't ask for. I would recommend checking out the local and federated timelines and see what people are up to.
  - slkdk32 4y ago
- easrng 4y ago
  It's like twitter but decentralized and with no algorithm. You follow people and you see their posts in chronological order. It works great once you've started, but yeah if you don't know anyone on fedi to begin with you're going to have a rough time finding people to follow. If you already know people who have fedi, follow them and when they boost posts see if the person who wrote the post they boosted is interesting. If they are, follow. Don't follow too many people though or you will have an unmanageably large timeline. I've been on fedi for about a year and a quarter. I started out following one person (@maia@crimew.gay) and now I follow 108 people and have made ~3.2k posts. It works for me and my friends at least and I don't really care about adoption beyond that.
krinchan 4y ago
As someone whose primary social media is in the Fediverse, the discussion in this thread is ... confusing? It's so disconnected from my experienced reality of the Fediverse I don't even know where to begin. Functionally, my experience within the Fediverse is it's literally just Twitter but with moderation fully broken up between instances and not agreed on. An instance's administrator(s) can decide what instances users are allowed to interact with. This is done either via whitelisting or blacklisting, though almost all instances work via blacklisting. Furthermore, administrators have total control over moderation. Users pick the instances that closely align with their own ideals. If they don't like the moderation, they can move instances. The software that backs the Fediverse and the software that consumes it is quite varied. Users are unusually adept at navigating all this. We had the same sort of frontend diversity in Twitter for many years. This isn't much more than that, honestly. Now you just can match any client with any set of moderation rules you like best. It's very much a free market approach to the question of moderation of user generated content by Big Tech. When it's so easy to move between instances and you have a large selection of moderation rules to select from for your account's "residence", you no longer really have a legal leg to stand on for "censorship" because you can just move next door where explicit adult gifs are totes cool and your followers will be updated with your new home. There's literally a network of instances that can be as moderated as your most loathsome ban happy video game board to as unmoderated as your favorite anonymous image board. And you get to pick. Not Musk. Not wall street. And certainly not Congress.
- hello_marmalade 4y ago
  This is a nice idea in theory, but the issue then becomes inconsistent moderation that affects what is visible to everyone. If you get banned or have posts deleted on one platform, presumably those posts disappear from that instance, and thus the Fediverse as a whole. This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or instances at large, which seems pretty unhealthy. Not to mention, people don't typically want to pay for these services, or pay to host them, they want to access them for free. On top of that, with something like Twitter, the desire is to be visible to all, rather than just a few. Most people use Twitter to interact with 'the world', not just a local part of it.

198 points by the-mitr 4y ago

Kye 4y ago

The page for Mastodon reminded me of the alternate web interfaces, Pinafore and Halcyon: https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/ https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/

Ambolia 4y ago

Which are the platforms that let you own your data cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly for yourself and your followers? Basically the network should be in the data and the servers should be replaceable. I think those are very obvious bottlenecks that affect most of these alternative networks. On the other side, censorship is also very important, nobody wants to have to dwell into spam and filth to read a small amount of valuable content. Maybe be able to choose your own censors somehow? Or build chains of trusts with your friends and "friends-of-friends" that can be revoked at any point?

emptysongglass 4y ago
Urbit does this: https://urbit.org/blog/an-urbit-overview https://urbit.org/blog/an-urbit-overview
- riffic 4y ago
  no one's adopting urbit, let's be real.
  - emptysongglass 4y ago
    You didn't come with any numbers so I will and they contradict your claims: https://hatryx-lastud.tlon.network/newsletter/urbit-takeoff-is-here https://hatryx-lastud.tlon.network/newsletter/urbit-takeoff-...
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- woojoo666 4y ago
  Love the idea and will look more into it. Not sure why you got such a non-constructive and rude dismissal in another comment, especially given the hacker news guidelines
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
smoldesu 4y ago
> Which are the platforms that let you own your data cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly for yourself and your followers? If you know of a homomorphic encryption scheme that would work for this and remain economically viable for other people to host, let me know. I simply don't think it's reasonable to expect that degree of privacy, much less on a Twitter clone. If you want privacy, use Matrix or OMEMO.
- Ambolia 4y ago
  I mean "own" not in the sense of privacy in this case. But in the sense that the account (public key) belongs to the person who has a certain private key. So you can move your content to a different server or domain and keep all your audience, maybe with a small transition period while the new server becomes well known, but not like now getting kicked out of twitter or youtube just results on a bunch or broken links and contextless comments.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    AFAIK Mastodon implements a migration feature that lets you move your followers to/from different accounts if you want to use a new homeserver. Not sure how it works on the backend, but it's got this base mostly covered.
mescaline 4y ago
I was thinking about "physical reality" as a means to establish a chain of trust. If you and I sit next to each other, we have vocal and image chat available. Other than someone coming and physically injecting themselves into our "sphere", our communications can be trustworthy and reliable. If a "chunk" of data could be "sovereignized" by association with other "nearby" chunks of data (through some common signing event), one could "move" seamlessly from one chunk to the other, regardless of where it was being "served" from. When I talk about "chunks" here, I'm talking about document boundaries and ownership/control of the data. If we were in some sort of simulation, moving from my sphere of data to yours would look something like a probability distribution. By having signed contracts between the spheres, one could increase the probability that movement in a general direction resulted in access and loading of trusted data. Because the chains start out empty, nobody "owns" these fictitious plots until they are established through preexisting trusted channels. Various channels as well. None of this bullshit NFT land grab crap that nobody can trust. Use NFTs, or even better, Lightning payments to establish the "authenticity" of the nearby data spheres.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rglullis 4y ago
I believe this is possible with ActivityPub already, and the servers just need to start making a distinction between the identities from its users and the "federation": https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/106825107786781891 https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/106825107786781891
- pat2man 4y ago
  Its interesting that DNS doesn't come up more often as the solution here. Owning a domain (or subdomain) seems a whole lot easier than most of the other "decentralized" solutions that get discussed. And if DNS is too centralized for you then something like ENS can replace it without needing very many changes to the rest of the stack.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Exactly. That's the approach defended and promoted by the indieweb thinking heads: start with identity and structure things bottom-up. Machines are quite good at translating between the different protocols. If I want to publish my content using RSS and you want to consume it using ActivityPub, it is easy to write software that makes the bridge, provided your identity doesn't change.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
What you describe is essentially Tim Berners-Lee's vision for Solid: https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ The idea is that every individual person has a container for their own data, and then platforms interact with that data using methods built on the Semantic Web. I frankly don't think it has a hope in hell of succeeding, but I love the concept!
- bduerst 4y ago
  I haven't dived into the specs, but how does solid solve bad actors getting access to your pod? Usually today your data is fragmented across platforms (so damage is reduced) which have centralized authorities who can step in and fix bad actor issues.
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    Honestly, I'm gonna be super lazy and just quote the front page of the site: > Anyone or anything that accesses data in a Solid Pod uses a unique ID, authenticated by a decentralized extension of OpenID Connect. Solid's access control system uses these IDs to determine whether a person or application has access to a resource in a Pod. Of course, as a data owner, you could accidentally grant a bad actor access to your data, but presumably you can also revoke that access as well.
    - bduerst 4y ago
      But that's just it though - if bad actors gain control, you lose the ability to reject OAuth creds (which is what OpenID is). Things like social engineering or phishing of credentials, which happens at scale today. They need a way to handle situations when bad actors take over, because other solutions handle this with centralized authorities who step in and rectify the issue.
      - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
        I'm now confused by what you mean when you say "gain control". Are you talking about literally exploiting a bug and hacking the underlying service that is providing access to the pod? In that case, it's a question of who owns and operates the pod. Solid is conceived as a set of standards that can be implemented by either individuals, or by companies on behalf of individuals. Think "data ownership as a service". So you can still have centralized entities that implement the spec and provide support and other services for users, including dealing with security incidents.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
grenran 4y ago
I think this was the premise of the original World Wide Web (minus the cryptographic part) before everything was centralised. Essentially people would have their own personal web pages and readers subscribe via RSS.
- leephillips 4y ago
  That’s, to a large extent, what the WWW is today. I have my own personal site, and a collection of RSS/Atom feeds that I check to see what’s happening on other people’s personal sites. It’s surely an exaggeration to say that “everything” is centralized, despite the rise of the huge monoliths such as Twitter.
dharma1 4y ago
Try https://lens.dev https://lens.dev if you’re interested in portable data/social graph that is onchain (disclaimer - I work on this)
- emptysongglass 4y ago
  What does this solve that Urbit doesn't?
k__ 4y ago
Permissionless decentralized platforms. This includes Radicle, IPFS, Skynet, SSB, Arweave, Ethererum, and many more.
ianopolous 4y ago
You might be interested in Peergos - https://peergos.org https://peergos.org (co-founder here) Properties: * fully self-authenticating protocol independent of DNS and the TLS certificate authorities * self sovereign identity * you can migrate to a different host and keep all your data, and social graph, and old links continue to work. * You can authorize and run live mirrors of your data which help provide bandwidth * you only see things from or via people you follow

fsflover 4y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009468.

echelon 4y ago

A Twitter replacement shouldn't be federated. It should be fully P2P. Federated platforms can still be censored and walled off. Not all Mastodon instances are peers, and your data isn't portable. It still has most of the same pitfalls as the platforms we complain about today. P2P is naturally efficient. The best ideas will gain traction within their memetic networks, and you can branch out and explore anything and respond to it. Sign and publish with a pubkey so you have pseudonymous identity and can keep track of peers. Publish and consume through a gateway proxy or VPN if you want to keep your IP private. Supernodes can help with scaling, especially for mobile clients. You can block whomever you dislike or share only with your direct network. You can write your own prioritization algorithm to cut down on noise and create high signal channels. You can archive whatever you like easily. It should have been P2P all along.

anderspitman 4y ago
P2P is just a special case of federation, where n=1. IMO PKI is simply not a realistic identity platform for the average person. You have to back your private key up with some reliable third party and their recovery system is going to be based on email so you may as well just use email for identity.
elitepleb 4y ago
there's a project brewing hoping to do just that by july https://liberapay.com/Revolver https://liberapay.com/Revolver
grishka 4y ago
No, P2P is impractical and it inevitably leaks into the UX, making it significantly more cumbersome. With a P2P system, you can't just send someone a link to something you found — you either expect them to have a client for the service, or use a web proxy. > Sign and publish with a pubkey No, absolutely not. Public keys make terrible identifiers. You leak it and anyone can impresonate you, with you having no recourse. You lose it and you have to start a new life basically. Account recovery and the ability to revoke access are not "nice to have" things — they're hard requirements for any identity system that is to be used in the real world by real, including non-tech, people. Trust me, I worked at the largest Russian social media company, they have a dedicated account recovery department for a reason.

luciusdomitius 4y ago

If anyone wonders why LBRY (Odyssee) is not part of Fediverse, despite dwarving PeerTube or whatever it is called: https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/issues/3982 https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/issues/3982

DerekBickerton 4y ago

Is having both a normal social media account & a federated version okay? I've seen a lot of people delete their Twitter and then hop on Mastodon because they're worried about Musk. Whether their concern about Musk is valid is another question. How do people see his acquisition of Twitter as a bad thing? If anything he will try to improve it no?

lynndotpy 4y ago
You can certainly have a normal and a federated social media. I do. You likely already have email, which is also kind of federated and kind of social media.
Ambolia 4y ago
Intra-elite competition between old media types and silicon valley types has being on for a while in different ways. Musk has been openly exposing some outsider narratives, so he is seen as an enemy to the old media types. I think this is most of it. The "billionaire" narrative doesn't make any sense. It's not like Twitter, or any other media companies, were owned by poor people until now.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >It's not like Twitter, or any other media companies, were owned by poor people until now To an extent they were because they're a public company. A public company is accountable to its shareholders which in principle is open to everyone (generally represented by institutional investors in practice), whereas a private company is, in this case, only answering to one person, and only really serving one person. That basic democratic aspect of American capitalism where everyone can take a stake in the economy is undermined when people withdraw from public markets altogether. It looks more like another gilded age.
simonw 4y ago
This is the best commentary I've seen about the Twitter situation, from someone who worked there for four years at a senior level (but isn't there now so is free to share their thoughts): https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2022/04/anchors-away https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2022/04/anchors-away The short version: Twitter's challenges are not hard technology problems, they're hard social and community problems. These are not areas Elon has shown any interest in understanding or respecting.

taurusnoises 4y ago

I have tried to wrap my head around how this works as a total outsider noob, and I just can not get it! But, I want to. I get the email comparison (different platforms can all speak, so why not have social media be the same?). But, then the white sheets are just all php and python and all this stuff that doesn't make any sense (I know what they are, just not what to do with that info), and for better or worse doesn't make sense to anyone I know. I'm, like, doing the Odin Project, actively trying to learn, and I still can't really get it. How is this supposed to translate to anyone else? But, again, I want it to.

luciusdomitius 4y ago
Basically you have e-mail, which is a protocol (actually a set of protocols, but ignore for now). Thus you can e-mail a protonmail user from your gmail/corporate account without any issues. However Twitter and Facebook are proprietary black box services and beyond using a Facebook-provided identity to create a Twitter account, there is no way to 'friend' a Twitter user on your FB account or interact with content in any way. Then there comes a protocol called ActivityPub[1], which "e-mailifies" social networking. So far Mastodon and their goodreads clone are harvesting modest success. I am a great fan of the goal, but not of the top-down approach W3C have taken with ActivityPub. For example LBRY solves this problem in a different way and is way more successful than all of Fediverse in total. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
- ancientsofmumu 4y ago
  > So far Mastodon and their goodreads clone Had to look this up, I think you mean BookWyrm(?). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420580 https://bookwyrm.social/ https://bookwyrm.social/
  - luciusdomitius 4y ago
    Yes, exactly this, thank you. It is actually quite good, shame that their main node seems to be out of capacity.

k101 4y ago

It seems to me that the main reason for unpopularity, in addition to the lack of advertising, is monetization. How can I recoup my production of content that can be expensive? It seems to me that a competent symbiosis of fediverse and cryptocurrency is the real web3.

proactivesvcs 4y ago
The Fediverse is not for your target market. We hate Internet advertising: it serves to use and abuse us, and is a security risk to our devices. It exists in opposition of monetising people and what they do and say, because we're sick of being retreated like we're worth a ton of beans. We don't live to be a part of profit.
- k101 4y ago
  And how can fediverse survive, and how can it pay for servers? Who among the professionals will do this? If you leave this system only for enthusiasts, then you can leave everything as it is and improve only the code. And if you want to overthrow the monopoly without violence, then the authors will need monetization tools and not necessarily advertising . Linux would not have become so popular without redhat and other commercial companies. P. S I myself really like everything free and use only open source software, give donates periodically to the authors.
  - proactivesvcs 4y ago
    How does it / will it pay for servers? This is a great question and I can guarantee if you set up an account somewhere, and start asking instance admins this question, you'll find out exactly how. I'd answer your question but you'll get much more organic answers and they'll answer you in a way you'll believe and understand far better than just from me. The system is not, and was never, just for technology enthusiasts. The majority of people I chat with probably wouldn't know their RAM from their GPU and I wouldn't expect them to. Sure there are a lot of Linux/FOSS enthusiasts there, but they're the minority. I don't know anyone trying to overthrow monopolies by running an instance because again, I say that not everyone's motivation for everything they do is for the acquisition of wealth.

moron4hire 4y ago

General purpose social media will be considered the greatest mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented discussion boards. When you have no common topic around which to organize, then people have to search each other's personalities for commonality. And in doing so, they stratify along political lines. This isn't enough, so then they micro-stratify into various, rabid subgroups within those political wings. But when you have the only message board dedicated to an obscure brand of motorcycle from the 1940s (or whatever, IDK), then you're stuck with those people. You're stuck with either having to learn to get along or lose out on your favorite thing. Go back to topic-oriented message boards. You don't need identity continuity between all the message boards you are membered in. That serves the corporate surveillance state more than it serves you. You don't need people on Board A to see what you're doing on Board B. If it's important and relevant, you can tell them. You dn't need to be friended with all your aunts and cousins and ex boyfriends. That shit is weird, family is for seeing at Thanksgiving to remember why you hate them and then go back to being happy for the rest of the year. Go back to topic-oriented message boards.

fsflover 4y ago
> Go back to topic-oriented message boards. This is essentially what Mastodon instances are. As a bonus, they can interact if they want it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rglullis 4y ago
  No, this is how a subset of its users treat it, and there is a significant amount of people (myself included) who think topic-based instances are a poorly conceived idea for federated systems [0]. [0] https://raphael.lullis.net/federations-and-identity/ https://raphael.lullis.net/federations-and-identity/
parksy 4y ago
This is not going against what you said in principle, I feel what you are saying, but I feel the need to add that I was admin of a few topic oriented message boards in the 90's and early 2000's, and yeah as you said it was pretty good simply to be able to be part of some group that cared about the same random stuff as me, and I think a big part of it is because humanity literally had not ever been able to connect so quickly on shared interests from such geographically diverse regions before, but it wasn't all roses there either. Personality cults were a regular theme. Honestly just one individual with no other goals in life could wreak havoc by constantly weaving between the rules, launching sock puppets to do some virtual Munchausen-by-proxy performance, painting admin as the bad guys, staging crises that didn't really exist to get more followers (in the social sense, there was not really a "follow" option in the platforms at the time). These topic-based forums were often in direct competition, and on more than one occasion it was revealed (usually by infiltrating via long-term social engineering so you could get to see the IP addresses of the members) that these users were from competitors trying to stir trouble and siphon off members. Diversity and cliquishness was an issue. Generally a community would kick off around some exciting new theme, or just a general shared interest and grow organically from there. This was great but the longer the same group hangs together, the more insular the atmosphere and inside references became. It's just what groups of people do in physical groups when they hang together a lot - they grow bonds with each other, their shared experiences strengthen these bonds, and newcomers see this and can see that it will take a lot of effort and patience to reach the same level of acceptance, and the older and more insular a community becomes, the less people are attracted to it. Then eventually the older members see there's nothing new to learn here and drift off. So the lifecycle of topic-based message boards followed a standard inception/growth/stagnation/diaspora pattern. Generalised social media puts everyone on an even platform - albeit a pretty shitty one - everyone sucks equally by default. You're correct in that the centralisation has a ton of other side effects and I don't disagree that many of these aren't what people want (if they're aware of it). Just that as I said it wasn't all roses and we can't just "go back". There were tons of reasons why the topic-oriented message boards faded away and it wasn't just laziness or convenience. It is human nature to desire connection and a sense of place, balanced with a need for novelty and invigoration of ideas. Generalised social media provides that routinely and formulaically, they basically hacked our brains. Also on practicality of your suggestion, we can't force people to go back. You can't put a gun to people's heads and force them to only use single issue forums. I get the nostalgia because I was a part of it and it was great for a time, but it did also have a ton of downsides. I think we need to move forward not go back. Federated social networks are one attempt at this. It's a lot to take on board as we have to learn new things like managing our identity / signatures and learning differences between providers, but efforts are underway to try and shift us away from the big old attention silos people have been trained to use these days.

wellpast 4y ago

Wither is #nostr [1]? [1] https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr

kovalevski 4y ago

the most federated thing - indie web - is not mention there, unfortunately. it'd be great to have a link to some list of indieweb websites.

easrng 4y ago
Mastodon uses microformats so you can follow Mastodon accounts with an IndieWeb h-feed reader. I don't think it handles WebMentions though.

pavlov 4y ago

I feel the branding here is just not very appealing. "Federated" brings up associations of something boring and complicated and bureaucratic. And now because of the metaverse hype, "Fediverse" sounds like a VR training program for FBI agents. Take a leaf from the crypto pumpers and call it web4? "It's like web3 but advanced beyond money. You know, like in Star Trek. Hoarding tokens is just so 20th century."

jrochkind1 4y ago
Every time I see "fediverse", I think it's some kind of US federal government cloud, until I remember that it's something else... I'm still not sure what.
cowtools 4y ago
>"Fediverse" sounds like a VR training program for FBI agents. This made me spit out my coffee laughing
jug 4y ago
I agree — I find this more exciting and approachable than the name implies! It’s striking how much sense this makes to me: you interact in social networks like mail servers interact with each other. How did this concept take this long! (I know it’s not NEW new but still… fairly new) Suddenly, due to the distributed nature, it doesn’t need to be expensive to have your own server to be part of it, like how running a mail server can be cheap. But if you don’t want to care about that, just sign up on an existing server like most do! In either case, it’s cheaper because it’s not centralized and because it’s cheaper it doesn’t need ads for funding and because it doesn’t need ads it doesn’t need to keep distracting you with an ever changing feed and pulling in “suggestions” (read: AI noise) So, there is really not that much to it! Like mail servers or chat servers (remember XMPP?), but now social network servers. And now Mastodon has an official app too, besides an approachable web interface. And thanks to the ActivityPub standard, anyone can write a server, or client app. I think it’s pretty revolutionizing with the voice now put in our hands rather than in a corporation’s. Definitely deserving of something more fun than “Fediverse” which sounds geeky and alienating.
efsavage 4y ago

monkin 4y ago

Ratio of active vs created accounts is very low, it feels like most of them ware abandon by users after the initial boom. That one that’s stands out is Mastodon which isn’t a surprise. For whole fediverse to succeed it will have to jump out from niche groups and fight for ordinary users that are used to Facebook or Twitter. Which will not happen until some big brands/interesting people start to use them as PR/commentary tools. And, yes, that’s the single point of all social networks, and not connecting with friends.

kvetching 4y ago
proactivesvcs 4y ago
Niche groups? Have you seen how huge and heterogeneous mastodon.social and the likes are? They're even bigger than that ;-) Even the "niche" instances have sufficient numbers that there are enough niches for many people to see something of interest there, and most of them freely allow off-topic chatter, nay welcome it. One of the benefits of the Fediverse is that even if you're on an instance that's for talking about movies, you can a) almost always talk about anything and b) talk to your followers about whatever you please. The Fediverse isn't about brands or influencers using them for PR or commentary, although there's nothing to stop that. It's kinda against the fundamental ethos: that it's about people not brands. And in that, it enjoys the fact that it's already succeeded, but it inherently doesn't want to "succeed" in the commercial or capitalistic sense. All it needs to do is continue to exist.

JadoJodo 4y ago

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients B. Understands the value of decentralized platforms and holds those values themselves C. Knows more than 1-2 people who ALSO meet the qualifications of A and B (aside from me) I think this leaves two possibilities: 1. There can be a small number of large instances, which removes the issues caused by A and B but has the effect of reducing most of the benefits found in B (focus, privacy, catered speech, etc). 2. There will need to be a million tiny silo'd instances (<5 people). This solves B, but we run into the issues of A and C. I realize this is closer to the goal. I'd love to see Fediverse “platforms” succeed, but I'm not sure how they can since the network effect is what is needed.

jedimastert 4y ago
I completely agree, there's such a barrier for entry that's incredibly difficult for not-tech people to emphasize with. I think there's an interesting case to be looked at with Discord. Not that discord itself is decentralized, but the surprising amount of vibrant and active communities in the form of Discord servers. If the client-side barrier can be sufficiently lowered, I'm sure many communities like that have at least one or two people knowledgeable enough to set up an instance or two
anderspitman 4y ago
> Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients Yep. Self-hosting something like Plex (please consider Jellyfin instead) or a social Fediverse server shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone. I think projects like Sandstorm, yunohost, Cloudron, etc have the right idea, but they're still way too complicated for the average person to get up and running. I've been chewing on this problem for about a year, and I believe it's solvable with technologies that are currently available. This is the focus of my current main side project.
4y ago

zzo38computer 4y ago

I think that the ActivityPub protocol is better than Twitter, Facebook, etc, but is still too many problematic and is more complicated than it should be. I can see many problems, one of which is that it seems to default to HTML and some services seem to require it, and that it probably requires Unicode too, and that auth services may also need a web browser to work, which is also no good. There is NNTP, email, IRC, etc, that you can use, which I think can work better. (I invented "Unusenet" to avoid namespace collision, if needed; there are a few different ways to define names in Unusenet, one of which is reverse domain names) An implementation should not need a web browser or something as complicated as it, and should be independent of the programming language to be used (you could use C, JavaScript, etc), with optional TLS. Of course you will need to be able to block messages, or to not block them if that is what you wish, but that will be possible easily enough. ActivityPub does this too, but so does NNTP, email, IRC, etc; you can define your own filter criteria, and NNTP can have moderated or unmoderated newsgroups. Many clients can have scoring files, and a few support global scoring files (which the user can install or not at their choice, but unfortunately these do not seem to be portable across different implementations, as far as I can tell). Mailing lists are still sometimes used, but NNTP would be better, I think.

easrng 4y ago
The subset of HTML supported by Mastodon is quite small and would likely be easy to parse and render without a browser. Misskey and glitch-soc support more IIRC, but still not everything. RE: Unicode, of course it uses Unicode. What else would it use??

armchairhacker 4y ago

I joined a fediverse group but it’s all just random short posts. Kind of like knock-off Twitter to put it bluntly. Also the “home” tab is empty which is a bit confusing. I want this to succeed, but as a social media site in order to succeed they need people (interesting people who like to post interesting things), and a good feed algorithm. This is where Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc. are worth a lot: many social media sites could easily replace Twitter except they don’t have these.

zaarn 4y ago
For the home tab to populate, you need to follow people. Mastodon doesn't push content you didn't ask for. I would recommend checking out the local and federated timelines and see what people are up to.
- slkdk32 4y ago
easrng 4y ago
It's like twitter but decentralized and with no algorithm. You follow people and you see their posts in chronological order. It works great once you've started, but yeah if you don't know anyone on fedi to begin with you're going to have a rough time finding people to follow. If you already know people who have fedi, follow them and when they boost posts see if the person who wrote the post they boosted is interesting. If they are, follow. Don't follow too many people though or you will have an unmanageably large timeline. I've been on fedi for about a year and a quarter. I started out following one person (@maia@crimew.gay) and now I follow 108 people and have made ~3.2k posts. It works for me and my friends at least and I don't really care about adoption beyond that.

krinchan 4y ago

As someone whose primary social media is in the Fediverse, the discussion in this thread is ... confusing? It's so disconnected from my experienced reality of the Fediverse I don't even know where to begin. Functionally, my experience within the Fediverse is it's literally just Twitter but with moderation fully broken up between instances and not agreed on. An instance's administrator(s) can decide what instances users are allowed to interact with. This is done either via whitelisting or blacklisting, though almost all instances work via blacklisting. Furthermore, administrators have total control over moderation. Users pick the instances that closely align with their own ideals. If they don't like the moderation, they can move instances. The software that backs the Fediverse and the software that consumes it is quite varied. Users are unusually adept at navigating all this. We had the same sort of frontend diversity in Twitter for many years. This isn't much more than that, honestly. Now you just can match any client with any set of moderation rules you like best. It's very much a free market approach to the question of moderation of user generated content by Big Tech. When it's so easy to move between instances and you have a large selection of moderation rules to select from for your account's "residence", you no longer really have a legal leg to stand on for "censorship" because you can just move next door where explicit adult gifs are totes cool and your followers will be updated with your new home. There's literally a network of instances that can be as moderated as your most loathsome ban happy video game board to as unmoderated as your favorite anonymous image board. And you get to pick. Not Musk. Not wall street. And certainly not Congress.

hello_marmalade 4y ago
This is a nice idea in theory, but the issue then becomes inconsistent moderation that affects what is visible to everyone. If you get banned or have posts deleted on one platform, presumably those posts disappear from that instance, and thus the Fediverse as a whole. This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or instances at large, which seems pretty unhealthy. Not to mention, people don't typically want to pay for these services, or pay to host them, they want to access them for free. On top of that, with something like Twitter, the desire is to be visible to all, rather than just a few. Most people use Twitter to interact with 'the world', not just a local part of it.