9 ms·

How much decentralisation is too much?

98 points by robin_reala 4y ago

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
>predictions 0. a twitter clone backed by a few billion VC dollars will emerge with the promise to continue the practices described in the twitter files, and the refugees will flock to the warm and familiar embrace
- capitalsigma 4y ago
  The year of the decentralized social network is right around the corner, just past the year of the Linux desktop
  - _chu1 4y ago
    Do we need social media? Can this just be the age of "maybe we should all stop mindlessly scrolling through crap we dont care about"
    - phailhaus 4y ago
      But we do care about it, that's why we're all scrolling through it.
      - gamerDude 4y ago
        I think there is a difference between actually caring (when you reflect on your life, it is important to you) and having a rush of dopamine that makes you feel the need to check these apps and continue scrolling.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Who gets to define 'actually caring'?
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      It's a drug that younger generations have taken their entire life. It's not going away.
      - deadly_syn 4y ago
        You say that, but its my parents who are the ones still clinging to social media out of the rest of my immediate family. Thsts entirely anecdotal of course, but I think phrasing it as an issue of the newer generstions doesnt encapsulate the whole problemspace. If anything id say those who didnt grow up with tech is even more susceptable to dark patterns.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Do we need the internet? Do we need electricity? ... Do we need writing? (Plato, 600BC)
      - 082349872349872 4y ago
        Do we need drinking cups/glasses? (Diogenes, ca. 350BC) (btw, anigbrowl, in case you haven't already seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942280 )
        anigbrowl 4y ago
        I had missed it! Thanks so much for following up with that.
- yonaguska 4y ago
- CM30 4y ago
  Eh, I'm starting to suspect maybe nothing will replace Twitter. Or that nothing consistent will anyway. We've got Mastodon, and it's doing a bit better. We had Hive, which did okay til the security issues and shut down. Cohost and Post kinda... exist I suppose? And there are a few more I can't remember. I've got an account on each one, and about 1/10th of those I follow exist across all of them combined. Maybe most people just don't care about a Twitter replacement and are fine without one.
  - serverholic 4y ago
    I always try to steer people away from Post because one of their founders thinks prejudice based on net worth is up there with racism and homophobia.
  - jimmytidey 4y ago
    I'm an unashamed Mastodon advocate. Firstly, a significant fraction of the most interesting accounts I follow on Twitter have moved to Mastodon. Secondly, Mastodon feels incredibly fresher than Twitter, which has completely ossified. Thirdly, I know this sounds slightly contradictory, but it really is quite a lot like Twitter, in terms of recreating the good aspects of Twitter.
    - dack 4y ago
      what does "fresher" mean to you?
      - helf 4y ago
        New shiny!
        jimmytidey 4y ago
        Yes this. I've been on Twitter for decade, it's nice to be somewhere different.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
z3c0 4y ago
I'm disappointed that there aren't more conversations about the merits of "distributed" vs "decentralized". Federated addresses really seem better suited for a distributed approach. Decentralization would encourage that everyone run their own instance, but in that case, what's even the point of the Fediverse?
dspillett 4y ago
> But it chews up battery and Apple bans the iOS version for no good reason. I'm not Apple defender at all, but if they did that I would say chewing battery unnecessarily is a pretty good reason. Of course they would likely have other reasons, actually not good ones, too.
gillesjacobs 4y ago
Decentralisation is as much a technology as it is an ideology. The technical solutions are relatively mature, but to become ingrained there has to be value shift in appreciation of the decentralisation of power, democracy, and privacy. And we can't take for granted that society will evolve towards continued progress because it clearly won't without advocates.
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  You are right. But I would contend that the technical solutions still have a lot of friction. Remember back in the day, when you just downloaded limewire or kazaa and that was all that was needed to get on a decentralized file sharing network. Compare this to the recent experience of many people deciding on a mastodon server and joining it and figuring out how to follow people from other servers.
sshine 4y ago
> Twitter's over, my dudes! Is Twitter really over, though? I wish people wouldn't try to make Twitter over by self-prophecy. It feels disingenuous. If it were over, where are the stats? Twitter seemed to be in decline 3 years ago [1], but its revenue seems to have been somewhat stable since 2020 [2]. Maybe declaring Twitter dead will never go out of fashion, and we just come up with different reasons. Maybe "Twitter is dead." is the kind of statement that ultimately keeps Twitter alive, because you need platforms like Twitter to keep fake news alive. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/04/23/a-fading-twitter-changes-its-user-metrics-once-again/?sh=5b520c7a31eb https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/04/23/a-fadin... [2]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
- yunwal 4y ago
  I took that line as tongue in cheek. The whole article is kind of making fun of people who think decentralized/federated platforms will solve all problems with social media, so it's also making fun of the type of people who would say something like that.
- jimmaswell 4y ago
  It's been taken over by someone making erratic emotionally-driven changes every 10 minutes, firing people with domain knowledge left and right and already under various investigations. Maybe it'll be fine, but it's really up in the air.
  - nailer 4y ago
    What erratic emotionally driven changes have there been? > Firing people with domain knowledge From the sounds of it, many deserved to be fired: > teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users. https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601008766861815808?s=20&t=LQt2gKG8pkzRKvgNn9G47g https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601008766861815808?s=2...
  - sshine 4y ago
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
What stops Twitter from becoming a member of the fediverse? Like others have done in technology, they can become initially equal members, then degrade the others, and finally make it painful to use/participate with other members of the federation. This would force federation members and users to succumb and join the empire as a subject versus equal.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  Or, the reverse: what stops the fediverse from becoming Twitter? Like the post shows, it seems like these apps tend to consolidate around one or two instances. So you just end up making Twitter again.
  - blamestross 4y ago
    It probably will. This is normal and we will need to rebel again in a decade.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > Like the post shows, it seems like these apps tend to consolidate around one or two instances. For now, I'd say that was probably because it's a new thing to most people and people hear "Mastodon" and, understandably, head for mastodon.social. Give it a year and I think people will be much more spread out than they are now.
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  Other fediverse servers can quickly block them from federating. Gab (the Nazi thing) and Truth Social (the Trump thing) are both based on Mastodon, but nobody wants to federate with them.
rambambram 4y ago
I have a website (well, multiple websites actually). I host them on cheap webhosts, which there are hundreds of in my country. These websites/domains can communicate with other websites by sending emails from my domains, or by clicking a hyperlink (thanks Tim) to visit other websites and webpages. I get updates by RSS feeds. I would say the decentralization works, for a quarter of a century already. One thing I really would like to have and get working, is a little selfhosted homeserver, instead of putting my websites on someone else's servers (although cheap). It becomes more peer-to-peer this way, and I'm only relying on an internet service provider. The best thing is already suggested by the article: how cool would it be if your smartphone (or pocket computer) functions as a server!?
- nine_k 4y ago
  > how cool would it be if your smartphone (or pocket computer) functions as a server!? Completely not cool, that is, pretty hot. And short-lived. Mobile devices are only practical because they don't work 80-90% of time. Being awake for longer requires larger batteries. Being suddenly popular and thus withstanding much more load would just physically kill a node, by depleting its battery quickly and suddenly. The luxury of peer to peer networks requires either a large power supply, or a limited availability of each node. If you introduce super-nodes with good power and constant connectivity, where weaker nodes can post their data to be cached and replicated, you just invent servers again.
  - mtkhaos 4y ago
    Could just plug it in. The main detractors from making this uneconomical in the US is the lack of consumer infrastructure for upload.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      If you had to keep it plugged in, then it wouldn't be very mobile, would it?
      - 4y ago
olodus 4y ago
I kinda prefer cooperation over decentralization. Decentralization as a design goal is a way to reach cooperation. You can have very well cooperating system parts in a centralised solution. The thing is that most centralised platforms has been really bad at incorporating cooperation so I can understand if some people are leaning on decentralization being the only way to reach this.
- OctopusLupid 4y ago
  Do you mean like https://social.coop/ https://social.coop/, which is a cooperatively-run server? Can you elaborate? :)
- int_19h 4y ago
  Centralized platforms by necessity have a power nexus. Whoever controls that nexus, has little reason to cooperate with everybody else. Even when the arrangement is truly democratic, it still sucks for everyone in the minority.
INTPenis 4y ago
A worrying trend in the fedi lately is de-federation of entire servers because of misunderstandings, or arguments between admins. It really sucks. This is not what I wanted for the fedi when I started back in 2017. It has lead to some admins forming "federations", silos, inside the fediverse. Like I can see technical solutions for some problems, like DNSSEC verification similar to that of E-mail. But there is no technical solution to snowflakes acting butthurt.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  There is no technical solution to humans. These decentralized platforms just keep re-learning what the rest of the industry already knows.
- OctopusLupid 4y ago
  I'm an admin and I've noticed this issue as well, INTPenis. I've just resolved to taking the fediblock tag with a huge grain of salt. Stick to your values and do your own investigations instead of caving to social pressure. Of course, that didn't work when people started doing that whole "block X or we'll block you" guilt-by-association thing. But I just hope that's a minority. I believe a solution to this may be more decentralisation, so a small number of admins with old and bitter feuds aren't able to control the experience for the majority of users on large servers. Admins should be friends, not celebrities. That's why I'm not part of the whole UFoI thing, but I'm sympathetic to its existence.
  - dack 4y ago
    What do you think about giving individual users more power to moderate amongst themselves rather than having server admins do it? For example, a much more powerful "blocklist" type feature that you can share with others? So a could spend a bunch of time doing moderation, and publish a "blocklist" that other users could then install on their account so they don't see some set of people / content.
  - INTPenis 4y ago
    What we need is some universal moderation guidelines. Like for example; sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me. As long as people follow the server rules, aggressively presented arguments, anger, fear, rude words said to famous accounts, should not lead to de-federation. Our rules already disallow all forms of xenophobia, transphobia, attacks, doxing and all that stuff. End users need to take more responsibility for moderation in the fedi. That's why we have the Mute button. But people would rather take "action" with the Report button, than the Mute button. Because they get so angry at some stranger online. You don't know anything about that person, or what they're going through. I have experience meeting reformed nazis, previously violent people who are trying to reform. So people go through stages in life, and maybe sometimes they're a bit off, but some day that person is going to wake up and then we should be able to help them out of their daze. De-federation makes this impossible.
jmyeet 4y ago
This isn't really about centralization. It's about federation. And as much as HNers may want it, nobody else does. Let me introduce use to the Plain Old Telephone System ("POTS"). POTS is a federated system. It's true it's also open addressing, which is a factor but not as much as you might think. People hate POTS. You're identified by a number. It includes a (now meaningless) area code. Portability is a problem. You can switch carriers (although prepaid portability can still be an issue) but it's a process. Also, whatever portability you have disappears when you cross a border. POTS is filled with spam. Just like email (another federated service). As soon as something is federated it becomes incredibly difficult to police bad actors. If you, as a telephone exchange has too much spam (eg robocall) traffic, you might find yourself blacklisted by large players like Verizon and AT&T. So what do you do? You "launder" such traffic with enough legitimate traffic so as to not trigger any enforcement while charging extra for known offenders. Because that is profit. A federated system is inherently a game of whack-a-mole with bad actors while being a race to the bottom. Messaging services like Twitter, FB (Messenger) and WhatsApp all grew and continue to exist because of centralization while federated alternatives inevitably always die or simply never gain real traction. There are real efficiency issues. For example, when policing offensive material (eg CSAM) is each entity responsible? How is that efficient? They might have to do because given material may never leave a given node. The question you should always ask is: what problem does this solve for the user that they care about?
- int_19h 4y ago
  Given that what is and isn't legal varies a lot between countries, how anything but federation can be a sensible approach for a truly global Net?
- OctopusLupid 4y ago
  > There are real efficiency issues. For example, when policing offensive material (eg CSAM) is each entity responsible? How is that efficient? Related: https://berk.es/2022/11/08/fediverse-inefficiencies/ https://berk.es/2022/11/08/fediverse-inefficiencies/
- dack 4y ago
  I think some users liked Twitter exactly the way it was, so yeah, there was no need to change anything. Other users were literally blacklisted, or blocked from search, or banned. Or they wanted to follow such people and couldn't. Yes, some of them were actual trolls or spammers, but many were just ideologically misaligned with Twitter the company (and/or their advertisers). I think the problem to solve is how can we allow people to communicate AND DISCOVER other people's opinions without a particular company/organization making that decision for them. Websites aren't good enough because they aren't very discoverable and don't have a robust discussion mechanism. I don't even think Mastodon allows this because admins seem pretty opinionated and end up cutting out chunks of the fediverse without the users' consent. I'm not sure what the solution is but that is a real problem and it does seem necessary to "decentralize" to some extent as every group will always have conflicting opinions with other groups
hilbert42 4y ago
"We're all apart, even when we're together. This is the joy - and the sorrow - of decentralization. What's the optimal size of a server?" The facts indicate that we just don't know and it's likely that we will not know for quite some time until we've a much better handle on and understanding of the long-term statistics about how connectivity and centralization impinges upon human behavior and how humans socially adapt—or do not do so. That's to say we need to know both the positive and negative impacts on society of the internet with reasonable accuracy before we can make any authoritative assessment and I reckon we are nowhere near that point yet. Let's look back a little. Until the 1970s the connections between people were reasonably stable and established, radio TV and newspapers were usually conservative and reasonably accurate in reporting - sensationalism in reporting wasn't yet commonplace. Then in the 1970s we had the arrival of radio shock-jocks, and beat-ups and sensationalism in television news and newspaper reporting became commonplace. This in-your-face type of media presentation altered the way the population thought and behaved, and the fact is we still haven't fully analyzed or accurately know the effects that those changes brought to society over the past 50 years. The internet and social media have brought about social and political changes to the way people think and act and similarly to the collective social fabric and those effects have been much faster and dramatically greater than those that occurred in the immediate pre-internet era. This is a huge subject and we've only just recognized how important this issue is. Next stage is to gather even more data and it'll be years before we have any definitive answers.
tabtab 4y ago
Centralization is usually cheaper and easier to manage. Don't decentralize because it seems "the in thing". There are exceptions, but they are relatively rare. Everyone wants to grow to the size of Facebook, Amazon, etc., but the unpleasant truth is you probably won't, and pre-scaling is wasteful.
manv1 4y ago
As an example, police departments in the US are decentralized, in that there's no overarching police authority in the US; there are local police departments, various state-level police departments, and various federal departments. The state police doesn't really have oversight over the local departments. In fact, I don't think anyone really has oversight of local police departments except possibly for local voters. They are all bound by the various laws, but within those laws they have tremendous amounts of flexibility. It's in their self-interest to cooperate, but they don't have to cooperate if they don't want to.
- LeanderK 4y ago
  I do not live in the US, but your comment is not meant to be positive, right? > In fact, I don't think anyone really has oversight of local police departments except possibly for local voters. this does not feel right at all, especially with all I read about the problems with the police and the lack of accountability of the actions of individual police officers. I do not feel confident in directly overseeing something as complicated as a police force. What do you do if you feel the handling of your police force is inadequate?
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    I am American and interpreted his comment as positive. I live in a small town, with a handful of police officers, and their boss (the commissioner) is elected by me and my neighbors. There's no greater accountability than that!
the-printer 4y ago
I think that we need to just…de-emphasize online communication significantly. I say this, as a stranger communicating with strangers online, but I think that this activity is a lot more pleasant without having to consider all of the technological underpinnings (and the goofy name) of the Fediverse. When I chose a social media platform in the past, I didn’t care about engagement, or who was there or how to find people, or the philosophy behind how it operated, all I really cared about that the content. I didn’t even care about the content being moderated. Why would I care about Nazis using Tumblr if I didn’t follow any? I think that some people have become almost dependent on the concept of online social networks. Yes they are cool and all and its cool to find ideas and conversations online, but I think we are heading down a road where that intangible taste and intrigue is being lost because certain factors are being prioritized to the point where people are forgetting that if they just cared a little bit less, they could disregard the whole jumble of protocols and policies and start a message board.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > Why would I care about Nazis using Tumblr if I didn’t follow any? But other people, possibly young and impressionable people, will.
  - the-printer 4y ago
    I understand that. And it makes sense. Speaking for myself, there are other things that I also find are harmful to people who are either young, impressionable, or both. I seem to be in a bind here, using the person who I was during that period of my life (Tumblr using) as a measuring stick for how I see things today. There are clearly some faults with this. The thing is that, if I were to affect my beliefs and moral coordinates as an expectation on social media and the channels of public discourse…I would have to settle on just a message board. I’m using message boards as just an example of a possible solution where the desired control is there minus federation (which I don’t care about). If we all were to affect our beliefs and moral coordinates as expectations onto social media and online discourse…what would come about? This is a conflicting topic to me. I’m aware that I’m speaking into the void here now, zimpenfish. I don’t expect you to respond or read where I’m going with all of this but you’ve got me going now. All in all I just think that there are some issues present online that will not be solved online, necessarily. On one side are the real life matters relevant to society and our well-being. And then there are things like “open standards”…and then there’s everything in between that connects the two. I think the message board idea is a fine one.
THENATHE 4y ago
IMO the idea of decentralization is kinda flawed in todays world. I’m going to go on a somewhat long anecdote, but I promise it’ll all make sense in the end. I recently swapped email to protonmail from gmail. Why? Because I read an article about the Terraria developer just getting banned and losing his email for no reason. “That could happen to me!” After a long while of using proton (9 months or so) I got really tired of the lack of ecosystem (at this time there were no public apps on iOS or android besides mail) and I still had to use google for my contacts sync, notes, etc. So what I ended up doing is moving all my shit BACK to google from proton (massive headache by the way) and then just self hosted my own email address domain. That way if google ever decides to ban me, I can hop over to Cloudflare and point the email domain to another email provider and violà! One of my main complains with protonmail was that the search function actually kinda sucks. GMails search is so good, and the filters you can make are so easy, I could go on. That’s why google is the industry leader! But why does proton make me feel more comfortable? Zero-trust. Proton doesn’t know what is in my emails at rest, but google does. So I propose the idea: why decentralize? Compare mastodon and Twitter (pre-Musk). The whole reason that Twitter got huge is that everyone is on it. I loved the old school “everyone had their own message board community” internet, and IRC was really cool. But the VAST majority of users don’t want that back. It’s much more convenient to load up discord to talk to people than an irc client that has like 40 different segregated communities, in the same way that it is much easier and more convenient to use Twitter than to manage all of what mastodon is. Even then, look at something like Session (the username only fork of signal). I’m not 100% on the details, but they claim to be decentralized, but yet I don’t have to input server details. That means that there has to be some sort of centralized database or application or table that tells me where all of the servers I can connect to are (or perhaps a first server that you connect to that then spreads to another server etc) You have 4 choices in the modern world: google (nothing protected, totally centralized, but the most feature rich and fastest) protonmail (centralized, protected, but not as feature rich and fast) session (decentralized but there’s still a layer of centralization to make it easy to use, but still more complicated than the first two options) Mastodon (fully decentralized but wildly inconvenient for the average person, significantly more difficult to use, and likely will never adopt the number of users that Twitter has) Remember, we are the minority. Google is the best for most people, as is Twitter, as is Discord, as is iMessage or SMS, etc. People use what is the easiest and most feature rich. Decentralized stuff will never meet all categories of feature rich, fast, and easy to use. It just isn’t possible, and if it was it would be the biggest smash hit in history and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
84 comments on this post appeared to be posted in 5 min. Was this thread killed and revived somehow?
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Needs more until it is fully distributed.
maltris 4y ago
I dont get his point about the email providers and spending a full time jobs worth of time for that. Setup and maintenance of the mailcow dockerized stack is quick and easy. Add a $12 VPS of your choice to it, et voila.
BizarroLand 4y ago
What I would like to see is a decentralized "city" of sites. Such a city could have space for 25-100 federated tenants, and if you go to the city, you can stroll through the tenant sites all in one. Such a thing would make joining and using federated systems much easier in my opinion, and the easier it is, the easier it is to gain adoption, and the easier the adoption, the more likely to gain traction.

98 points by robin_reala 4y ago

>predictions 0. a twitter clone backed by a few billion VC dollars will emerge with the promise to continue the practices described in the twitter files, and the refugees will flock to the warm and familiar embrace

capitalsigma 4y ago
The year of the decentralized social network is right around the corner, just past the year of the Linux desktop
- _chu1 4y ago
  Do we need social media? Can this just be the age of "maybe we should all stop mindlessly scrolling through crap we dont care about"
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    But we do care about it, that's why we're all scrolling through it.
    - gamerDude 4y ago
      I think there is a difference between actually caring (when you reflect on your life, it is important to you) and having a rush of dopamine that makes you feel the need to check these apps and continue scrolling.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Who gets to define 'actually caring'?
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    It's a drug that younger generations have taken their entire life. It's not going away.
    - deadly_syn 4y ago
      You say that, but its my parents who are the ones still clinging to social media out of the rest of my immediate family. Thsts entirely anecdotal of course, but I think phrasing it as an issue of the newer generstions doesnt encapsulate the whole problemspace. If anything id say those who didnt grow up with tech is even more susceptable to dark patterns.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Do we need the internet? Do we need electricity? ... Do we need writing? (Plato, 600BC)
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      Do we need drinking cups/glasses? (Diogenes, ca. 350BC) (btw, anigbrowl, in case you haven't already seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942280 )
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        I had missed it! Thanks so much for following up with that.
yonaguska 4y ago
CM30 4y ago
Eh, I'm starting to suspect maybe nothing will replace Twitter. Or that nothing consistent will anyway. We've got Mastodon, and it's doing a bit better. We had Hive, which did okay til the security issues and shut down. Cohost and Post kinda... exist I suppose? And there are a few more I can't remember. I've got an account on each one, and about 1/10th of those I follow exist across all of them combined. Maybe most people just don't care about a Twitter replacement and are fine without one.
- serverholic 4y ago
  I always try to steer people away from Post because one of their founders thinks prejudice based on net worth is up there with racism and homophobia.
- jimmytidey 4y ago
  I'm an unashamed Mastodon advocate. Firstly, a significant fraction of the most interesting accounts I follow on Twitter have moved to Mastodon. Secondly, Mastodon feels incredibly fresher than Twitter, which has completely ossified. Thirdly, I know this sounds slightly contradictory, but it really is quite a lot like Twitter, in terms of recreating the good aspects of Twitter.
  - dack 4y ago
    what does "fresher" mean to you?
    - helf 4y ago
      New shiny!
      - jimmytidey 4y ago
        Yes this. I've been on Twitter for decade, it's nice to be somewhere different.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

z3c0 4y ago

I'm disappointed that there aren't more conversations about the merits of "distributed" vs "decentralized". Federated addresses really seem better suited for a distributed approach. Decentralization would encourage that everyone run their own instance, but in that case, what's even the point of the Fediverse?

dspillett 4y ago

> But it chews up battery and Apple bans the iOS version for no good reason. I'm not Apple defender at all, but if they did that I would say chewing battery unnecessarily is a pretty good reason. Of course they would likely have other reasons, actually not good ones, too.

gillesjacobs 4y ago

Decentralisation is as much a technology as it is an ideology. The technical solutions are relatively mature, but to become ingrained there has to be value shift in appreciation of the decentralisation of power, democracy, and privacy. And we can't take for granted that society will evolve towards continued progress because it clearly won't without advocates.

abdullahkhalids 4y ago
You are right. But I would contend that the technical solutions still have a lot of friction. Remember back in the day, when you just downloaded limewire or kazaa and that was all that was needed to get on a decentralized file sharing network. Compare this to the recent experience of many people deciding on a mastodon server and joining it and figuring out how to follow people from other servers.

sshine 4y ago

> Twitter's over, my dudes! Is Twitter really over, though? I wish people wouldn't try to make Twitter over by self-prophecy. It feels disingenuous. If it were over, where are the stats? Twitter seemed to be in decline 3 years ago [1], but its revenue seems to have been somewhat stable since 2020 [2]. Maybe declaring Twitter dead will never go out of fashion, and we just come up with different reasons. Maybe "Twitter is dead." is the kind of statement that ultimately keeps Twitter alive, because you need platforms like Twitter to keep fake news alive. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/04/23/a-fading-twitter-changes-its-user-metrics-once-again/?sh=5b520c7a31eb https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/04/23/a-fadin... [2]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

yunwal 4y ago
I took that line as tongue in cheek. The whole article is kind of making fun of people who think decentralized/federated platforms will solve all problems with social media, so it's also making fun of the type of people who would say something like that.
jimmaswell 4y ago
It's been taken over by someone making erratic emotionally-driven changes every 10 minutes, firing people with domain knowledge left and right and already under various investigations. Maybe it'll be fine, but it's really up in the air.
- nailer 4y ago
  What erratic emotionally driven changes have there been? > Firing people with domain knowledge From the sounds of it, many deserved to be fired: > teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users. https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601008766861815808?s=20&t=LQt2gKG8pkzRKvgNn9G47g https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601008766861815808?s=2...
- sshine 4y ago

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

What stops Twitter from becoming a member of the fediverse? Like others have done in technology, they can become initially equal members, then degrade the others, and finally make it painful to use/participate with other members of the federation. This would force federation members and users to succumb and join the empire as a subject versus equal.

phailhaus 4y ago
Or, the reverse: what stops the fediverse from becoming Twitter? Like the post shows, it seems like these apps tend to consolidate around one or two instances. So you just end up making Twitter again.
- blamestross 4y ago
  It probably will. This is normal and we will need to rebel again in a decade.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > Like the post shows, it seems like these apps tend to consolidate around one or two instances. For now, I'd say that was probably because it's a new thing to most people and people hear "Mastodon" and, understandably, head for mastodon.social. Give it a year and I think people will be much more spread out than they are now.
shp0ngle 4y ago
Other fediverse servers can quickly block them from federating. Gab (the Nazi thing) and Truth Social (the Trump thing) are both based on Mastodon, but nobody wants to federate with them.

rambambram 4y ago

I have a website (well, multiple websites actually). I host them on cheap webhosts, which there are hundreds of in my country. These websites/domains can communicate with other websites by sending emails from my domains, or by clicking a hyperlink (thanks Tim) to visit other websites and webpages. I get updates by RSS feeds. I would say the decentralization works, for a quarter of a century already. One thing I really would like to have and get working, is a little selfhosted homeserver, instead of putting my websites on someone else's servers (although cheap). It becomes more peer-to-peer this way, and I'm only relying on an internet service provider. The best thing is already suggested by the article: how cool would it be if your smartphone (or pocket computer) functions as a server!?

nine_k 4y ago
> how cool would it be if your smartphone (or pocket computer) functions as a server!? Completely not cool, that is, pretty hot. And short-lived. Mobile devices are only practical because they don't work 80-90% of time. Being awake for longer requires larger batteries. Being suddenly popular and thus withstanding much more load would just physically kill a node, by depleting its battery quickly and suddenly. The luxury of peer to peer networks requires either a large power supply, or a limited availability of each node. If you introduce super-nodes with good power and constant connectivity, where weaker nodes can post their data to be cached and replicated, you just invent servers again.
- mtkhaos 4y ago
  Could just plug it in. The main detractors from making this uneconomical in the US is the lack of consumer infrastructure for upload.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    If you had to keep it plugged in, then it wouldn't be very mobile, would it?
    - 4y ago

olodus 4y ago

I kinda prefer cooperation over decentralization. Decentralization as a design goal is a way to reach cooperation. You can have very well cooperating system parts in a centralised solution. The thing is that most centralised platforms has been really bad at incorporating cooperation so I can understand if some people are leaning on decentralization being the only way to reach this.

OctopusLupid 4y ago
Do you mean like https://social.coop/ https://social.coop/, which is a cooperatively-run server? Can you elaborate? :)
int_19h 4y ago
Centralized platforms by necessity have a power nexus. Whoever controls that nexus, has little reason to cooperate with everybody else. Even when the arrangement is truly democratic, it still sucks for everyone in the minority.

INTPenis 4y ago

A worrying trend in the fedi lately is de-federation of entire servers because of misunderstandings, or arguments between admins. It really sucks. This is not what I wanted for the fedi when I started back in 2017. It has lead to some admins forming "federations", silos, inside the fediverse. Like I can see technical solutions for some problems, like DNSSEC verification similar to that of E-mail. But there is no technical solution to snowflakes acting butthurt.

phailhaus 4y ago
There is no technical solution to humans. These decentralized platforms just keep re-learning what the rest of the industry already knows.
OctopusLupid 4y ago
I'm an admin and I've noticed this issue as well, INTPenis. I've just resolved to taking the fediblock tag with a huge grain of salt. Stick to your values and do your own investigations instead of caving to social pressure. Of course, that didn't work when people started doing that whole "block X or we'll block you" guilt-by-association thing. But I just hope that's a minority. I believe a solution to this may be more decentralisation, so a small number of admins with old and bitter feuds aren't able to control the experience for the majority of users on large servers. Admins should be friends, not celebrities. That's why I'm not part of the whole UFoI thing, but I'm sympathetic to its existence.
- dack 4y ago
  What do you think about giving individual users more power to moderate amongst themselves rather than having server admins do it? For example, a much more powerful "blocklist" type feature that you can share with others? So a could spend a bunch of time doing moderation, and publish a "blocklist" that other users could then install on their account so they don't see some set of people / content.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  What we need is some universal moderation guidelines. Like for example; sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me. As long as people follow the server rules, aggressively presented arguments, anger, fear, rude words said to famous accounts, should not lead to de-federation. Our rules already disallow all forms of xenophobia, transphobia, attacks, doxing and all that stuff. End users need to take more responsibility for moderation in the fedi. That's why we have the Mute button. But people would rather take "action" with the Report button, than the Mute button. Because they get so angry at some stranger online. You don't know anything about that person, or what they're going through. I have experience meeting reformed nazis, previously violent people who are trying to reform. So people go through stages in life, and maybe sometimes they're a bit off, but some day that person is going to wake up and then we should be able to help them out of their daze. De-federation makes this impossible.

jmyeet 4y ago

This isn't really about centralization. It's about federation. And as much as HNers may want it, nobody else does. Let me introduce use to the Plain Old Telephone System ("POTS"). POTS is a federated system. It's true it's also open addressing, which is a factor but not as much as you might think. People hate POTS. You're identified by a number. It includes a (now meaningless) area code. Portability is a problem. You can switch carriers (although prepaid portability can still be an issue) but it's a process. Also, whatever portability you have disappears when you cross a border. POTS is filled with spam. Just like email (another federated service). As soon as something is federated it becomes incredibly difficult to police bad actors. If you, as a telephone exchange has too much spam (eg robocall) traffic, you might find yourself blacklisted by large players like Verizon and AT&T. So what do you do? You "launder" such traffic with enough legitimate traffic so as to not trigger any enforcement while charging extra for known offenders. Because that is profit. A federated system is inherently a game of whack-a-mole with bad actors while being a race to the bottom. Messaging services like Twitter, FB (Messenger) and WhatsApp all grew and continue to exist because of centralization while federated alternatives inevitably always die or simply never gain real traction. There are real efficiency issues. For example, when policing offensive material (eg CSAM) is each entity responsible? How is that efficient? They might have to do because given material may never leave a given node. The question you should always ask is: what problem does this solve for the user that they care about?

int_19h 4y ago
Given that what is and isn't legal varies a lot between countries, how anything but federation can be a sensible approach for a truly global Net?
OctopusLupid 4y ago
> There are real efficiency issues. For example, when policing offensive material (eg CSAM) is each entity responsible? How is that efficient? Related: https://berk.es/2022/11/08/fediverse-inefficiencies/ https://berk.es/2022/11/08/fediverse-inefficiencies/
dack 4y ago
I think some users liked Twitter exactly the way it was, so yeah, there was no need to change anything. Other users were literally blacklisted, or blocked from search, or banned. Or they wanted to follow such people and couldn't. Yes, some of them were actual trolls or spammers, but many were just ideologically misaligned with Twitter the company (and/or their advertisers). I think the problem to solve is how can we allow people to communicate AND DISCOVER other people's opinions without a particular company/organization making that decision for them. Websites aren't good enough because they aren't very discoverable and don't have a robust discussion mechanism. I don't even think Mastodon allows this because admins seem pretty opinionated and end up cutting out chunks of the fediverse without the users' consent. I'm not sure what the solution is but that is a real problem and it does seem necessary to "decentralize" to some extent as every group will always have conflicting opinions with other groups

hilbert42 4y ago

"We're all apart, even when we're together. This is the joy - and the sorrow - of decentralization. What's the optimal size of a server?" The facts indicate that we just don't know and it's likely that we will not know for quite some time until we've a much better handle on and understanding of the long-term statistics about how connectivity and centralization impinges upon human behavior and how humans socially adapt—or do not do so. That's to say we need to know both the positive and negative impacts on society of the internet with reasonable accuracy before we can make any authoritative assessment and I reckon we are nowhere near that point yet. Let's look back a little. Until the 1970s the connections between people were reasonably stable and established, radio TV and newspapers were usually conservative and reasonably accurate in reporting - sensationalism in reporting wasn't yet commonplace. Then in the 1970s we had the arrival of radio shock-jocks, and beat-ups and sensationalism in television news and newspaper reporting became commonplace. This in-your-face type of media presentation altered the way the population thought and behaved, and the fact is we still haven't fully analyzed or accurately know the effects that those changes brought to society over the past 50 years. The internet and social media have brought about social and political changes to the way people think and act and similarly to the collective social fabric and those effects have been much faster and dramatically greater than those that occurred in the immediate pre-internet era. This is a huge subject and we've only just recognized how important this issue is. Next stage is to gather even more data and it'll be years before we have any definitive answers.

tabtab 4y ago

Centralization is usually cheaper and easier to manage. Don't decentralize because it seems "the in thing". There are exceptions, but they are relatively rare. Everyone wants to grow to the size of Facebook, Amazon, etc., but the unpleasant truth is you probably won't, and pre-scaling is wasteful.

manv1 4y ago

As an example, police departments in the US are decentralized, in that there's no overarching police authority in the US; there are local police departments, various state-level police departments, and various federal departments. The state police doesn't really have oversight over the local departments. In fact, I don't think anyone really has oversight of local police departments except possibly for local voters. They are all bound by the various laws, but within those laws they have tremendous amounts of flexibility. It's in their self-interest to cooperate, but they don't have to cooperate if they don't want to.

LeanderK 4y ago
I do not live in the US, but your comment is not meant to be positive, right? > In fact, I don't think anyone really has oversight of local police departments except possibly for local voters. this does not feel right at all, especially with all I read about the problems with the police and the lack of accountability of the actions of individual police officers. I do not feel confident in directly overseeing something as complicated as a police force. What do you do if you feel the handling of your police force is inadequate?
- xyzelement 4y ago
  I am American and interpreted his comment as positive. I live in a small town, with a handful of police officers, and their boss (the commissioner) is elected by me and my neighbors. There's no greater accountability than that!

the-printer 4y ago

I think that we need to just…de-emphasize online communication significantly. I say this, as a stranger communicating with strangers online, but I think that this activity is a lot more pleasant without having to consider all of the technological underpinnings (and the goofy name) of the Fediverse. When I chose a social media platform in the past, I didn’t care about engagement, or who was there or how to find people, or the philosophy behind how it operated, all I really cared about that the content. I didn’t even care about the content being moderated. Why would I care about Nazis using Tumblr if I didn’t follow any? I think that some people have become almost dependent on the concept of online social networks. Yes they are cool and all and its cool to find ideas and conversations online, but I think we are heading down a road where that intangible taste and intrigue is being lost because certain factors are being prioritized to the point where people are forgetting that if they just cared a little bit less, they could disregard the whole jumble of protocols and policies and start a message board.

zimpenfish 4y ago
> Why would I care about Nazis using Tumblr if I didn’t follow any? But other people, possibly young and impressionable people, will.
- the-printer 4y ago
  I understand that. And it makes sense. Speaking for myself, there are other things that I also find are harmful to people who are either young, impressionable, or both. I seem to be in a bind here, using the person who I was during that period of my life (Tumblr using) as a measuring stick for how I see things today. There are clearly some faults with this. The thing is that, if I were to affect my beliefs and moral coordinates as an expectation on social media and the channels of public discourse…I would have to settle on just a message board. I’m using message boards as just an example of a possible solution where the desired control is there minus federation (which I don’t care about). If we all were to affect our beliefs and moral coordinates as expectations onto social media and online discourse…what would come about? This is a conflicting topic to me. I’m aware that I’m speaking into the void here now, zimpenfish. I don’t expect you to respond or read where I’m going with all of this but you’ve got me going now. All in all I just think that there are some issues present online that will not be solved online, necessarily. On one side are the real life matters relevant to society and our well-being. And then there are things like “open standards”…and then there’s everything in between that connects the two. I think the message board idea is a fine one.

THENATHE 4y ago

IMO the idea of decentralization is kinda flawed in todays world. I’m going to go on a somewhat long anecdote, but I promise it’ll all make sense in the end. I recently swapped email to protonmail from gmail. Why? Because I read an article about the Terraria developer just getting banned and losing his email for no reason. “That could happen to me!” After a long while of using proton (9 months or so) I got really tired of the lack of ecosystem (at this time there were no public apps on iOS or android besides mail) and I still had to use google for my contacts sync, notes, etc. So what I ended up doing is moving all my shit BACK to google from proton (massive headache by the way) and then just self hosted my own email address domain. That way if google ever decides to ban me, I can hop over to Cloudflare and point the email domain to another email provider and violà! One of my main complains with protonmail was that the search function actually kinda sucks. GMails search is so good, and the filters you can make are so easy, I could go on. That’s why google is the industry leader! But why does proton make me feel more comfortable? Zero-trust. Proton doesn’t know what is in my emails at rest, but google does. So I propose the idea: why decentralize? Compare mastodon and Twitter (pre-Musk). The whole reason that Twitter got huge is that everyone is on it. I loved the old school “everyone had their own message board community” internet, and IRC was really cool. But the VAST majority of users don’t want that back. It’s much more convenient to load up discord to talk to people than an irc client that has like 40 different segregated communities, in the same way that it is much easier and more convenient to use Twitter than to manage all of what mastodon is. Even then, look at something like Session (the username only fork of signal). I’m not 100% on the details, but they claim to be decentralized, but yet I don’t have to input server details. That means that there has to be some sort of centralized database or application or table that tells me where all of the servers I can connect to are (or perhaps a first server that you connect to that then spreads to another server etc) You have 4 choices in the modern world: google (nothing protected, totally centralized, but the most feature rich and fastest) protonmail (centralized, protected, but not as feature rich and fast) session (decentralized but there’s still a layer of centralization to make it easy to use, but still more complicated than the first two options) Mastodon (fully decentralized but wildly inconvenient for the average person, significantly more difficult to use, and likely will never adopt the number of users that Twitter has) Remember, we are the minority. Google is the best for most people, as is Twitter, as is Discord, as is iMessage or SMS, etc. People use what is the easiest and most feature rich. Decentralized stuff will never meet all categories of feature rich, fast, and easy to use. It just isn’t possible, and if it was it would be the biggest smash hit in history and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

84 comments on this post appeared to be posted in 5 min. Was this thread killed and revived somehow?

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago

Needs more until it is fully distributed.

maltris 4y ago

I dont get his point about the email providers and spending a full time jobs worth of time for that. Setup and maintenance of the mailcow dockerized stack is quick and easy. Add a $12 VPS of your choice to it, et voila.

BizarroLand 4y ago

What I would like to see is a decentralized "city" of sites. Such a city could have space for 25-100 federated tenants, and if you go to the city, you can stroll through the tenant sites all in one. Such a thing would make joining and using federated systems much easier in my opinion, and the easier it is, the easier it is to gain adoption, and the easier the adoption, the more likely to gain traction.