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Weak technology stack and deeply flawed concept of federation that enables local centralization of control by discord-mods-meme style with all the corresponding

Weak technology stack and deeply flawed concept of federation that enables local centralization of control by discord-mods-meme style with all the corresponding issues. Mastodon should have been based on DHT with each "terminal" aka "profile" having much higher autonomy. Otherwise, it just gives more tools to people who left Twitter to continue doing same societal damage. p.s.: it is time to stop writing back-ends in Ruby when every other popular alternative (sans Python-based ones) is more powerful and scalable.

aprdm 4y ago
Shopify, Basecamp and github sort of disagree with you.
CharlesW 4y ago
Disambiguating DHT in case it's helpful for others, even though I'm still unclear how this would be better than what ActivityPub does now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT
MuteXR 4y ago
How would a DHT be any better than AP? It's not even close to doing the same thing, very few people would want something that comes with all the massive disadvantages that a DHT would bring.
denysvitali 4y ago
IMHO decentralization is not the way to go, which is why I started OpenDolphin [1]. If you end up having a "decentralized system" with 30k users per instance, you basically just have a centralized system that federates with other instances. Sure, it is kind of decentralized, but the admins of that 30k instance are effectively able to read the DMs, impersonate users and delete their content. I personally think (and I'm trying to formalize my ideas somehow with OpenDolphin) that a centralized instance that is only used to serve the __signed__ / encrypted content solves some parts of the decentralization issues we're seeing here - whilst still giving the users some of the features of decentralized platforms. If you like / dislike the idea, help us out! We're trying to build a community to build together something great. Every contribution counts (: And btw, yes, I do agree: that hardware for 30k users doesn't make any sense - it really shows that something isn't optimized :( [1]: https://about.opendolphin.social/ https://about.opendolphin.social/
- tedivm 4y ago
  > Sure, it is kind of decentralized, but the admins of that 30k instance are effectively able to read the DMs, impersonate users and delete their content. There's a working group on end to end encryption already and I do believe they will solve that problem. Archiving content is trivial and can be automated. It's also pretty easy to migrate between instances- I started on one run by a friend but which I felt was too small, moved to one of the biggest ones, and then ended up on hachyderm. I may end up moving again as I feel like the service is getting rather big- it's one of the largest instances now and there are benefits to being on smaller instances that tend to push people towards them.
- vidarh 4y ago
  A centralised instance of any kind is a non-starter for a lot of those of us who have moved to Mastodon. And, yes, the admins of that 30k instance is able to do all kinds, and their users are able to leave if they do. I'd be all for improvements around signing and encryption, but not at the cost of centralisation (for my part, I run my own Mastodon server, but is also tinkering with my own ActivityPub implementation).
  - denysvitali 4y ago
    Care to elaborate what could be the reason why a centralized instance is a non-starter? It looks like Mastodon's approach is yes decentralized, but soffers from the same censorship issues like Twitter - instances are often blacklisted on Mastodon
    - ilyt 4y ago
      Users choosing to block someone vs server admins deciding to decide for their users to block whole other server. It would be fine if it was just "don't pull this server to public feeds", but as it is now it just repeats the problem of giving moderators too much power over users.
      - vidarh 4y ago
        It can be just "don't pull this server to public feeds. In fact it can be a lot more granular. You can: * "Silence" it - makes posts invisible on your instance for everyone not following them * "Suspend" - removes all content. * Reject media files. Avoids downloading media files locally from this instance. * Reject reports from instances that are abusing the reporting. But limiting an instance is often insufficient because it doesn't stop your users from then subsequently replying etc. and indirectly dragging the conversation onto your server, and doesn't stop the remote instances users from harassing your users. And so it's often users pushing for harsher blocking. In any case on Mastodon people have choice - if you don't like your local admins mod decisions, you can move elsewhere and take your followers with you, so if anything mods have far less power on Mastodon than most places.

aprdm 4y ago

Shopify, Basecamp and github sort of disagree with you.

CharlesW 4y ago

Disambiguating DHT in case it's helpful for others, even though I'm still unclear how this would be better than what ActivityPub does now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT

MuteXR 4y ago

How would a DHT be any better than AP? It's not even close to doing the same thing, very few people would want something that comes with all the massive disadvantages that a DHT would bring.

denysvitali 4y ago

IMHO decentralization is not the way to go, which is why I started OpenDolphin [1]. If you end up having a "decentralized system" with 30k users per instance, you basically just have a centralized system that federates with other instances. Sure, it is kind of decentralized, but the admins of that 30k instance are effectively able to read the DMs, impersonate users and delete their content. I personally think (and I'm trying to formalize my ideas somehow with OpenDolphin) that a centralized instance that is only used to serve the __signed__ / encrypted content solves some parts of the decentralization issues we're seeing here - whilst still giving the users some of the features of decentralized platforms. If you like / dislike the idea, help us out! We're trying to build a community to build together something great. Every contribution counts (: And btw, yes, I do agree: that hardware for 30k users doesn't make any sense - it really shows that something isn't optimized :( [1]: https://about.opendolphin.social/ https://about.opendolphin.social/

tedivm 4y ago
> Sure, it is kind of decentralized, but the admins of that 30k instance are effectively able to read the DMs, impersonate users and delete their content. There's a working group on end to end encryption already and I do believe they will solve that problem. Archiving content is trivial and can be automated. It's also pretty easy to migrate between instances- I started on one run by a friend but which I felt was too small, moved to one of the biggest ones, and then ended up on hachyderm. I may end up moving again as I feel like the service is getting rather big- it's one of the largest instances now and there are benefits to being on smaller instances that tend to push people towards them.
vidarh 4y ago
A centralised instance of any kind is a non-starter for a lot of those of us who have moved to Mastodon. And, yes, the admins of that 30k instance is able to do all kinds, and their users are able to leave if they do. I'd be all for improvements around signing and encryption, but not at the cost of centralisation (for my part, I run my own Mastodon server, but is also tinkering with my own ActivityPub implementation).
- denysvitali 4y ago
  Care to elaborate what could be the reason why a centralized instance is a non-starter? It looks like Mastodon's approach is yes decentralized, but soffers from the same censorship issues like Twitter - instances are often blacklisted on Mastodon
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Users choosing to block someone vs server admins deciding to decide for their users to block whole other server. It would be fine if it was just "don't pull this server to public feeds", but as it is now it just repeats the problem of giving moderators too much power over users.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      It can be just "don't pull this server to public feeds. In fact it can be a lot more granular. You can: * "Silence" it - makes posts invisible on your instance for everyone not following them * "Suspend" - removes all content. * Reject media files. Avoids downloading media files locally from this instance. * Reject reports from instances that are abusing the reporting. But limiting an instance is often insufficient because it doesn't stop your users from then subsequently replying etc. and indirectly dragging the conversation onto your server, and doesn't stop the remote instances users from harassing your users. And so it's often users pushing for harsher blocking. In any case on Mastodon people have choice - if you don't like your local admins mod decisions, you can move elsewhere and take your followers with you, so if anything mods have far less power on Mastodon than most places.