14 ms·

Is he talking about ActivityPub[1, 2] and the Fediverse[3]? Just look at Mastodon[4, 5] if you're looking for something like twitter without the centralization

Is he talking about ActivityPub[1, 2] and the Fediverse[3]? Just look at Mastodon[4, 5] if you're looking for something like twitter without the centralization and the corporate greed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub [2] https://activitypub.rocks https://activitypub.rocks [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) [5] https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers

_-david-_ 4y ago
He is almost certainly talking about Bluesky. It was created by Twitter after all.
niutech 4y ago
There are also: GNU Social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social) and Friendica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica) both open source and based on OStatus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus).
kethinov 4y ago
It frustrates me that Jack seems to have genuine interest in this topic but seems to be totally averse to discussing Mastodon. It's hard to believe he's unaware of Mastodon, so we have to believe he thinks it's not the solution for some reason. But how could it not be? Why doesn't he just use his big name and significant influence to throw his weight behind Twitter's most successful open protocol competitor if he really wants this? None of it makes sense to me and I wish he would speak more plainly on the matter.
- stiltzkin 4y ago
  Does Mastodon have measures vs bots and spam?, I think that's one of the issues they want to face for an alternative to Twitter.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Yes, it does. Mastodon heavily emphasizes its moderation features. Pleroma has some moderation controls but does something even more powerful with its MRF [0]. Lastly, if you want to have crypto/web3 to monetize the content distribution, there is Mitra [1], which is an AP-server being developed by ONE person and in less than a year has delivered more than the whole vapoware from Bluesky team has done since Jack announced it. [0]: https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/mrf/ https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/mr... [1]: https://mitra.social https://mitra.social
    - stiltzkin 4y ago
      Really interesting about Mitra!.
- rglullis 4y ago
  The problem is that he is trying to monetize the distribution of content. All his talk about decentralization is pointless, because he wants a system where there are gatekeepers, the only difference from Twitter (or Facebook/Google) is that in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol. It would be comical if it wasn't diabolical.
  - PontifexMinimus 4y ago
    > he wants a system where there are gatekeepers Does he? He says "it can't have an advertising model" and that it shouldn't be centralised. > in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol I don't see how that could in practise be done, and my reading is that Dorsey either doesn't want it or doesn't think it's possible (or both).
    - loceng 4y ago
      In practice you rally all of the Bitcoin HODLers who are "desperate" and on average have "decent" losses - and want Bitcoin to become popular again, and ideally for them, become mainstream. This then incentivizes them to use only platforms and services that are integrated with Bitcoin (et al), in order to try to continue the charade that Bitcoin overall provides a net benefit, in hopes that its price, based on demand, reaches at least what they paid for it to begin with - but "hopefully 10x more!" However, it's described in part as Ponzi scheme as someone is always left holding the bag, and it will be the present moment wave who are most heavily holding the bag, who will then be more willing to rally and be a coercive group; it's like religion, or a cult, that you buy into - but where you not only have a profit motive, you're motivated to make back your losses too. The problem is they've never actually been able to compete with non-Bitcoin platforms and services - and perhaps at its foundation due to the higher cost of using Bitcoin vs. just using the internet with encryption and other security protocol; let alone story after story showing the $ billions stolen in Bitcoin; from the beginning in Bitcoin-related startup pitch decks - you'd never see a price comparison slide for Bitcoin vs. current offerings. This "army of HODLers" is however a potentially dangerous situation, as these are real people with voting power in democracies - and as I referenced above there was fairly early on an effort to "educate" politicians: how much the broader society be manipulated into adopting Bitcoin, simply through nudging of making it more normalized, all so the current HODLers can profit and pass the bag onto the next unsuspecting, misled laypeople? It only takes a single person with $ billions to $10s of billions to gain if this scheme continues, and who may already have $ billions of cash to spend say 50% of trying to manipulate to move it along strategically.
- pfarrell 4y ago
  He may not be clear of Twitter enough to do something like this. I’m wondering if a public action like that coukd open him up to some legal jeopardy. Just a guess.
  - kevinmchugh 4y ago
    Yeah, seeing these texts where a board member discussed starting a competitor certainly raised my eyebrows
    - sneak 4y ago
      He also plainly stated that the thing he wants to start is a protocol, not a company, so it is hard to class it as “a competitor” in the traditional sense. Does gmail compete with smtp?
      - CharlesW 4y ago
        > He also plainly stated that the thing he wants to start is a protocol… Yes, but not that one. He wants a protocol he can monetize using various forms of Web3 grifts.
        sneak 4y ago
        Your anti-cryptocurrency bias is blinding you to the fact that neither party to these conversations needs or wants any more money than they have presently. When you're a multibillionaire and you're still building new shit from scratch, you build to build. Monetary gains are a side effect.
- neilalexander 4y ago
  Bluesky performed a months-long discovery exercise of existing solutions and Mastodon was amongst them.
- detaro 4y ago
  At least the Blue Sky stuff he pushed has been very clearly on a crypto/web3 focus.
- jacooper 4y ago
  He said earlier that he wants to do it differently. Which I totally understand, Activity pub is an absolute failure when it comes to user discovery especially when a user is using his/her own server, which is the whole point of the entire protocol.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > Activity pub is an absolute failure when it comes to user discovery Yeah, finding out people who I want to exchange messages with is also impossible with IMAP, XMPP... "User discovery" is not part of the protocol. It's part of the application.
viridian 4y ago
For those scared of all the links, here's a simple summary from someone who runs a server with an instance of one of these applications. * ActivityPub is just an open, flexible protocol for sharing content * The fediverse is a nice, human friendly way to describe all the various services using activitypub to talk back and forth to each other. The value in this is that these projects are diverse, it's not all twitter clones. You have video hosting services like peertube, the twitter-esque sites like mastodon and pleroma, open source managed file stores like nextcloud, and all of them can chat if they want to * these services are hosted by whoever wants to host an instance, and they choose who they wish to federate with and who they don't, this optional interoperability is really the key feature for the entire network and protocol Mastodon, as a twitter replacement is good from a user perspective (except in 300+ comment threads) , but I'd strongly recommend Pleroma at this point if you intend to run your own instance. The software of the two is similar, but Mastodon is in a constant state of chasing new, usually niche or controversial features which have led to a lot of bloat in terms of both management tooling, setup, and hardware required to run it.
- biztos 4y ago
  I had not heard of Pleroma before, it looks nicely lightweight: https://pleroma.social https://pleroma.social
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Checked out a random 'featured instance', first post is an image with "DOES IT FEEL LIKE THE ENTIRE WORLD FELL APART WHEN TRUMP LEFT?" in gigantic letters. Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out... It's like leaving Reddit for Voat, you'll just end up in the midst of the worst fringe groups because they can't exist on the main platform where normal people are.
    - viridian 4y ago
      For some cultural context: If I had to sum up Pleroma's core audiences, it's right wing anime posters, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, privacy and selfhosting folks, terfs, people who like sharing Ukraine war footage and discussing war in general, and pornposters If I had to sum up Mastodon's core audiences, it's twitter-hating antifascists, European techies, post tumblr fetish sites, lgbt folks, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, and pornposters There's a lot of more random folks sprinkled throughout both, but these are definitely the most prevalent communities you'll run into just scrolling the network feeds.
www_harka_com 4y ago
Can someone invite me to mastodon.technology? Email on my profile.
- prepend 4y ago
  I like your earnest request. I’ve followed mastodon for a while but have never known anyone else who uses it so didn’t get into a particular server. All the public servers didn’t really seem interesting to me. So this seemed like a problem for me as a loner as the people I actually knew weren’t going to join. Twitter, for all its flaws, is dead simple to join and start yelling.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Unless you dont have a telephone, like me. You get to sign up, then inevitably after your first tweet your account is flagged for review, requiring phone to interact further. I don't have a phone, I'm Amish, I just wanted an account to see the 4th and 5th posts in a "twitter thread" someone posted to HN and it keeps locking the screen with a signup/login modal after I scroll to the 3rd tweet in the thread. After a while I just wonder if I'm not the target audience and move on, found nitter.net so that's neat.
    - gremlinsinc 4y ago
      Are you trolling? How are you on hn if you're Amish? I mean you at least need a PC or smartphone.
      - aliqot 4y ago
        You might look into what Amish life is actually like outside of movies. Most depictions in the media tend to at best be caricatures of our most conservative sects like Schwartzentruber Amish. Beachy Amish, Schwarzenau, even Mennonites have some conveniences; a computer is just a tool of my trade. Each community inside each sect will have its own Ordnung, which is just a mutual agreement on values and conduct when it comes to community. I like to joke with my English friends that we're the original neckbeards :) Here's a good depiction of midwest Amish and the diversity in their communities. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEyPgwIPkHo7lOk-72-tXJ-NjahfkNF_r https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEyPgwIPkHo7lOk-72-tX...
faller_slive 4y ago
He is talking about Bluesky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)
drexlspivey 4y ago
My main issue with Mastodon is that your identity is tied to whatever instance you signed up with. So if I sign up at example.social I will be bob@example.social. If the moderators ban me or the instance stops working I am losing all my tweets and followers. Ideally you would sign up with your own domain (bob@mydomain.com) and point some dns records to whichever instance you want, this way you stay flexible and you own your identity. There is a github issue for this that is open for 5 years but not much has been done https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
- aliqot 4y ago
  most federated projects work this way because of the homeserver model
- luxcem 4y ago
  Identity is always an issue in a decentralized systems. DNS can be used but not everybody owns a domain name. Ultimately if you want to keep your identity over a federated network you have to rely on an identity provider : Government issued, centralized platform that act as Id Provider (facebook, github, google, etc). I'm not aware of decentralized provider, maybe in a blockchain, there are a lot of writings on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1084804520302058 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10848...
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  Well there's nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr It solves this problem of being tied to a domain.
- kornhole 4y ago
  It is actually very easy to move your identity along with follows and followers from one Mastodon instance to another. I did it a couple times to finally land on my own instance I have running on a Raspberry PI.
throoo0ooowaway 4y ago
In this particular exchange, he is probably talking about BlueSky: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)
memish 4y ago
How long as Mastodon been out and still no one uses it? Obviously a different approach is needed to replace Twitter. Mastodon is a dead end.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BeetleB 4y ago
  Mastodon won't replace Twitter in terms of user base, but it's definitely not going to die. Plenty of niches are active on it.

_-david-_ 4y ago

He is almost certainly talking about Bluesky. It was created by Twitter after all.

niutech 4y ago

There are also: GNU Social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social) and Friendica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica) both open source and based on OStatus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus).

kethinov 4y ago

It frustrates me that Jack seems to have genuine interest in this topic but seems to be totally averse to discussing Mastodon. It's hard to believe he's unaware of Mastodon, so we have to believe he thinks it's not the solution for some reason. But how could it not be? Why doesn't he just use his big name and significant influence to throw his weight behind Twitter's most successful open protocol competitor if he really wants this? None of it makes sense to me and I wish he would speak more plainly on the matter.

stiltzkin 4y ago
Does Mastodon have measures vs bots and spam?, I think that's one of the issues they want to face for an alternative to Twitter.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Yes, it does. Mastodon heavily emphasizes its moderation features. Pleroma has some moderation controls but does something even more powerful with its MRF [0]. Lastly, if you want to have crypto/web3 to monetize the content distribution, there is Mitra [1], which is an AP-server being developed by ONE person and in less than a year has delivered more than the whole vapoware from Bluesky team has done since Jack announced it. [0]: https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/mrf/ https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/mr... [1]: https://mitra.social https://mitra.social
  - stiltzkin 4y ago
    Really interesting about Mitra!.
rglullis 4y ago
The problem is that he is trying to monetize the distribution of content. All his talk about decentralization is pointless, because he wants a system where there are gatekeepers, the only difference from Twitter (or Facebook/Google) is that in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol. It would be comical if it wasn't diabolical.
- PontifexMinimus 4y ago
  > he wants a system where there are gatekeepers Does he? He says "it can't have an advertising model" and that it shouldn't be centralised. > in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol I don't see how that could in practise be done, and my reading is that Dorsey either doesn't want it or doesn't think it's possible (or both).
  - loceng 4y ago
    In practice you rally all of the Bitcoin HODLers who are "desperate" and on average have "decent" losses - and want Bitcoin to become popular again, and ideally for them, become mainstream. This then incentivizes them to use only platforms and services that are integrated with Bitcoin (et al), in order to try to continue the charade that Bitcoin overall provides a net benefit, in hopes that its price, based on demand, reaches at least what they paid for it to begin with - but "hopefully 10x more!" However, it's described in part as Ponzi scheme as someone is always left holding the bag, and it will be the present moment wave who are most heavily holding the bag, who will then be more willing to rally and be a coercive group; it's like religion, or a cult, that you buy into - but where you not only have a profit motive, you're motivated to make back your losses too. The problem is they've never actually been able to compete with non-Bitcoin platforms and services - and perhaps at its foundation due to the higher cost of using Bitcoin vs. just using the internet with encryption and other security protocol; let alone story after story showing the $ billions stolen in Bitcoin; from the beginning in Bitcoin-related startup pitch decks - you'd never see a price comparison slide for Bitcoin vs. current offerings. This "army of HODLers" is however a potentially dangerous situation, as these are real people with voting power in democracies - and as I referenced above there was fairly early on an effort to "educate" politicians: how much the broader society be manipulated into adopting Bitcoin, simply through nudging of making it more normalized, all so the current HODLers can profit and pass the bag onto the next unsuspecting, misled laypeople? It only takes a single person with $ billions to $10s of billions to gain if this scheme continues, and who may already have $ billions of cash to spend say 50% of trying to manipulate to move it along strategically.
pfarrell 4y ago
He may not be clear of Twitter enough to do something like this. I’m wondering if a public action like that coukd open him up to some legal jeopardy. Just a guess.
- kevinmchugh 4y ago
  Yeah, seeing these texts where a board member discussed starting a competitor certainly raised my eyebrows
  - sneak 4y ago
    He also plainly stated that the thing he wants to start is a protocol, not a company, so it is hard to class it as “a competitor” in the traditional sense. Does gmail compete with smtp?
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      > He also plainly stated that the thing he wants to start is a protocol… Yes, but not that one. He wants a protocol he can monetize using various forms of Web3 grifts.
      - sneak 4y ago
        Your anti-cryptocurrency bias is blinding you to the fact that neither party to these conversations needs or wants any more money than they have presently. When you're a multibillionaire and you're still building new shit from scratch, you build to build. Monetary gains are a side effect.
neilalexander 4y ago
Bluesky performed a months-long discovery exercise of existing solutions and Mastodon was amongst them.
detaro 4y ago
At least the Blue Sky stuff he pushed has been very clearly on a crypto/web3 focus.
jacooper 4y ago
He said earlier that he wants to do it differently. Which I totally understand, Activity pub is an absolute failure when it comes to user discovery especially when a user is using his/her own server, which is the whole point of the entire protocol.
- rglullis 4y ago
  > Activity pub is an absolute failure when it comes to user discovery Yeah, finding out people who I want to exchange messages with is also impossible with IMAP, XMPP... "User discovery" is not part of the protocol. It's part of the application.

viridian 4y ago

For those scared of all the links, here's a simple summary from someone who runs a server with an instance of one of these applications. * ActivityPub is just an open, flexible protocol for sharing content * The fediverse is a nice, human friendly way to describe all the various services using activitypub to talk back and forth to each other. The value in this is that these projects are diverse, it's not all twitter clones. You have video hosting services like peertube, the twitter-esque sites like mastodon and pleroma, open source managed file stores like nextcloud, and all of them can chat if they want to * these services are hosted by whoever wants to host an instance, and they choose who they wish to federate with and who they don't, this optional interoperability is really the key feature for the entire network and protocol Mastodon, as a twitter replacement is good from a user perspective (except in 300+ comment threads) , but I'd strongly recommend Pleroma at this point if you intend to run your own instance. The software of the two is similar, but Mastodon is in a constant state of chasing new, usually niche or controversial features which have led to a lot of bloat in terms of both management tooling, setup, and hardware required to run it.

biztos 4y ago
I had not heard of Pleroma before, it looks nicely lightweight: https://pleroma.social https://pleroma.social
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Checked out a random 'featured instance', first post is an image with "DOES IT FEEL LIKE THE ENTIRE WORLD FELL APART WHEN TRUMP LEFT?" in gigantic letters. Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out... It's like leaving Reddit for Voat, you'll just end up in the midst of the worst fringe groups because they can't exist on the main platform where normal people are.
  - viridian 4y ago
    For some cultural context: If I had to sum up Pleroma's core audiences, it's right wing anime posters, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, privacy and selfhosting folks, terfs, people who like sharing Ukraine war footage and discussing war in general, and pornposters If I had to sum up Mastodon's core audiences, it's twitter-hating antifascists, European techies, post tumblr fetish sites, lgbt folks, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, and pornposters There's a lot of more random folks sprinkled throughout both, but these are definitely the most prevalent communities you'll run into just scrolling the network feeds.

www_harka_com 4y ago

Can someone invite me to mastodon.technology? Email on my profile.

prepend 4y ago
I like your earnest request. I’ve followed mastodon for a while but have never known anyone else who uses it so didn’t get into a particular server. All the public servers didn’t really seem interesting to me. So this seemed like a problem for me as a loner as the people I actually knew weren’t going to join. Twitter, for all its flaws, is dead simple to join and start yelling.
- aliqot 4y ago
  Unless you dont have a telephone, like me. You get to sign up, then inevitably after your first tweet your account is flagged for review, requiring phone to interact further. I don't have a phone, I'm Amish, I just wanted an account to see the 4th and 5th posts in a "twitter thread" someone posted to HN and it keeps locking the screen with a signup/login modal after I scroll to the 3rd tweet in the thread. After a while I just wonder if I'm not the target audience and move on, found nitter.net so that's neat.
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    Are you trolling? How are you on hn if you're Amish? I mean you at least need a PC or smartphone.
    - aliqot 4y ago
      You might look into what Amish life is actually like outside of movies. Most depictions in the media tend to at best be caricatures of our most conservative sects like Schwartzentruber Amish. Beachy Amish, Schwarzenau, even Mennonites have some conveniences; a computer is just a tool of my trade. Each community inside each sect will have its own Ordnung, which is just a mutual agreement on values and conduct when it comes to community. I like to joke with my English friends that we're the original neckbeards :) Here's a good depiction of midwest Amish and the diversity in their communities. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEyPgwIPkHo7lOk-72-tXJ-NjahfkNF_r https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEyPgwIPkHo7lOk-72-tX...

faller_slive 4y ago

He is talking about Bluesky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)

drexlspivey 4y ago

My main issue with Mastodon is that your identity is tied to whatever instance you signed up with. So if I sign up at example.social I will be bob@example.social. If the moderators ban me or the instance stops working I am losing all my tweets and followers. Ideally you would sign up with your own domain (bob@mydomain.com) and point some dns records to whichever instance you want, this way you stay flexible and you own your identity. There is a github issue for this that is open for 5 years but not much has been done https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668

aliqot 4y ago
most federated projects work this way because of the homeserver model
luxcem 4y ago
Identity is always an issue in a decentralized systems. DNS can be used but not everybody owns a domain name. Ultimately if you want to keep your identity over a federated network you have to rely on an identity provider : Government issued, centralized platform that act as Id Provider (facebook, github, google, etc). I'm not aware of decentralized provider, maybe in a blockchain, there are a lot of writings on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1084804520302058 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10848...
betwixthewires 4y ago
Well there's nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr It solves this problem of being tied to a domain.
kornhole 4y ago
It is actually very easy to move your identity along with follows and followers from one Mastodon instance to another. I did it a couple times to finally land on my own instance I have running on a Raspberry PI.

throoo0ooowaway 4y ago

In this particular exchange, he is probably talking about BlueSky: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)

memish 4y ago

How long as Mastodon been out and still no one uses it? Obviously a different approach is needed to replace Twitter. Mastodon is a dead end.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BeetleB 4y ago
Mastodon won't replace Twitter in terms of user base, but it's definitely not going to die. Plenty of niches are active on it.