12 ms·

A native internet protocol for social media

122 points by ttepasse 4y ago

acjohnson55 4y ago
Poor Jack. He just never had the power to do the things he knew were right all along.
deleted 4y ago
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throwntoday 4y ago
I genuinely don't know how to read Jack. His actions contradict his words, and it's tough to believe he didn't know what Vidjya was up to. Playing ignorant makes it hard to trust anything he says.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  It seems like the more successful you get, the more you lose touch with reality. Jack's intentions seem well intentioned but his execution seems so poor and misguided.
  - api 4y ago
    You elevate yourself to higher and higher levels of abstraction until you aren’t even here anymore. You tell people what to do but no longer have a clue what they are doing. You get fed so much information that you can only consider any idea for a few minutes. You are surrounded by people pretending to agree with you to get money or favors.
- hintymad 4y ago
  According to the book Hatching Twitter and the YouTube channel ModernMBA[1], Jack was very careful of cultivating his public image to the point of public deception. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DudWfJXHN9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DudWfJXHN9g
- wmf 4y ago
  It sounds like he was uncomfortable with his power as Twitter CEO but he couldn't get rid of that power (because of "the shareholders") so he let Twitter run on autopilot and vetoed everything that his executives tried to do. Unfortunately that's not a neutral position given that evil flourishes when Jack does nothing. (Clearly he's not a consequentialist.)
- thomassmith65 4y ago
  Considering he ran Twitter for several years from an empty chair, he strikes me as another extremely lucky, opinionated moron. Edit: Aha, I just noticed the acronymn for 'extremely lucky, opinionated moron' is elom... so close.
  - m_eiman 4y ago
    Replace the moron with nitwit and you’re good to go.
marstall 4y ago
I do hate to sound like the neckbeard that I am, but what about RSS? Doesn't it fit the bill as far as the three principles? > Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control. > Only the original author may remove content they produce. ... these are the same point? but RSS addresses them both by the fact that content can be hosted on blogging software running in one's basement. > Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice. ... accomplished by having a choice of a variety of RSS clients. RSS also, by being significantly less efficient at spreading information, seemingly would mitigate/eliminate many of the more harmful aspects of a single-platform publisher/feed aggregator like twitter.
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  RSS doesn't have any concept of interaction between users. In social media, replies to posts are delivered to all of the original post's recipients.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    RSS would (hypothetically) just be the feed protocol for posts. Replies would be handled out of band, potentially using mechanisms that already exist.¹ Heck, replies could be published using RSS too, with a reference to the original so client apps could thread them. In that scenario there'd be an opportunity for third parties to associate replies with posts for user who want hear from users they don't follow. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback
    - acjohnson55 4y ago
      Good point. I was aware Linkbacks existed, and had tried to read that article before, but never really understood why they were supposed to be useful. Especially in the way they manifest as visual clutter on my Wordpress blog. But I can see now that they are potentially a way for distributed conversation to happen (with a lot of work on building better UX norms). I wonder what the pros and cons are compared to ActivityPub.
fluidcruft 4y ago
I didn't quite follow his call-out to Signal at the end? Is Signal working in this space?
- throwntoday 4y ago
  The new stories feature seems to signal a shift towards some kind of social networking beyond messaging.
- crossroadsguy 4y ago
  Ends a public message on a charitable tone.
riffic 4y ago
hey Dorsey: ActivityPub exists. work with the W3C, your former company always could have pulled a chair up to the table.
- forthorbor 4y ago
  He has to have known about ActivityPub, but with bluesky and now this he seems determined to create a competing standard. Reminds me of that XKCD comic.
- rektide 4y ago
  I agree, ActivityPub could/should be a huge player in these changes. Jack recognizes ActivityPub's potential too, albiet as "Mastadon" rather than ActivityPub, which is somewhat a self-own to his point: the title is about internet protocols, yet here he is citing the implementation, not the protocol (which tbf was a late-coming change for Mastadon): > As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, Mastodon another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more. ActivityPub is a good tool, but there's still a lot more required. Starring someone's post kind of goes nowhere. Having a network that can at least in some cases make this popularity information or some kind of visible reaction system should at least be an option. We could have a stream of ActivityPub "Like" actions. But how do we gather & see those viewer's likes? How would we add more flexible reactions? There's work to do here, with interaction among feeds. Moderation decisions are yet further- far further- behind, are just a couple bits of data inside most implementations. Being able to have multiple different sources of moderation, broadcasting their moderation, and letting us mix & remix these moderation feeds into our experiences is, to me, the essence of what Jack was talking about. ActivityPub has "Flag" actions which we could make a feed out of, but those are pretty bare-bones signals that I feel we'd need to expand on significantly. We don't even have a feed of moderation we can begin to work from here. ActivityPub implementations today are a reasonably good first-order social network. We can swap toots, yay. But Jack here is talking about the higher-order networks that emerge atop the feed of posts. There's a compounding of further levels of social data, being networked too, that's not really happening so far. ActivityPub can and likely will come around to being relevant here... but right now it's too early days & that maturation into social-moderation hasn't really begun at all. Jack's post sets some good long term view, in my opinion, that ActivityPub needs to bring itself towards, regardless of this post or anyone or any org else.
deleted 4y ago
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eyelidlessness 4y ago
In the article, Jack links the Twitter thread wherein he reflects on a specific controversial ban. He only links the first tweet in the thread, but clearly still intends it to be read long-form and stands by his prior reasoning despite any principles enumerated in this article itself. In the thread’s second tweet, Jack wrote: > We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all. In the current article, he doesn’t address this topic at all. In fact, he focuses very much on eliminating barriers to serving content which, again according to his own thread, was inciting offline violence. He proposes solutions which instead put users in control of moderating whether their feed is full of incitement to violence. In other words, he’s proposing that the people who would be incited to violence are the ones who should moderate their exposure to such incitement, without interference, and suggests that this would encourage healthier dialogue, with greater transparency, reducing the influence of powerful governments and businesses on acceptable speech. What happens offline vanished from his analysis, but it can’t be ignored. If all OtherPlatformBesidesTwitter users have a free hand in deciding what OPBT serves them, and it’s acknowledged that content on OBPT can pose safety risks to other people completely off-platform… … what Jack is suggesting here is that the incitement to violence should be facilitated without hindrance, and the potential victims should just tune it out because it’s not their preferred content. Somewhat amusingly at an emotional distance, that’s almost exactly Twitter with human moderation removed. More darkly, what he’s proposing is a recruitment tool for literally any wonder imaginable, no matter how much it would also be an unspeakable horror. I share most of Jack’s stated principles, as a former anarchist who mostly hasn’t shifted values apart from some more nuanced analysis of power. It’s unforgivable that he’s using that analysis to promote a model of social media that puts the onus on platforms to serve those eager for violence and gives no consideration for anyone who doesn’t want to be their victim.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  Also, say what you want about Elon Musk, but at least he doesn’t have much pretense about twirling his evil mustache. Jack doesn’t even seem to want to figure out what side anything is on. I take that back: that’s his whole thesis, “seem” is too mealymouthed.
jacooper 4y ago
Maybe this is just what he wants us to think, but I still think jack and twitter were different, different to other social media, old twitter was thoughtful, unique, not a run of the mill maximizing eye balls social media company (zuck mostly) This post seems to prove that, and I truly hope we can break free of central influence on society's conversations.
- jacooper 4y ago
  > Maybe this is just what he wants us to think... Looks like it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978481
- winternett 4y ago
  Of course the fraudsters that created scams like Crypto and NFT would love to unleash a decentralized network that could not be regulated or moderated by congress, and that could not be properly logged anywhere by anyone, so that fraud could more easily be foisted upon everyone. If this is permitted, and people buy into the crap peddling, then the outcome is well deserved by the victims. Sorry to be so glum, but Jack had a big role in promotion and fosterance of Crypto and NFT while he served as Twitter CEO... It should not be given free pass. The Internet was not meant to be without credibility and accountability, in the age where the warnings are clearly visible, accountability and credibility should cancel most social media platforms based on their performance to date alone for creating stable new business models. Current Social Media is built on ID theft, deception, unpaid labor, and fraud. Mark my words. It's not a stable platform to build anything else on at all.
- prawn 4y ago
  They all seem different in the beginning before they hone their revenue model and the casual users are swamped or intimidated by professional users. Early Twitter was where friends hung out, before they left for Instagram and the resulting Twitter became about politics and opinion and personal brands. Early Instagram was great too.
  - jacooper 4y ago
CGamesPlay 4y ago
I want a federated platform where I can moderate content for myself, and other users can federate my moderation actions. Moderation actions include "delete", "upvote", and "downvote". Oh, and the interface needs to be more like Reddit/HN rather than Twitter/Mastodon: something that's conducive to actual conversation rather than disconnected streams of thoughts. Aether [0] had some of the right concepts here, but made bad choices in technology (P2P instead of federated; custom app instead of web) and ultimately couldn't get traction. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208
- nofrspch9 4y ago
  You have one; it’s called “the internet.” No one is asking for a universal protocol or language to share cat pics. Technocrats want to provide the next unicorn that captures attention thereby making a new centralized system. I use Go, net/http, and oh look, I can share state across the internet. In physics electromagnetism came together after ditching all the literal knobs and pulleys used prior to get a handle on the behaviors. IMO computer science needs to do that too; it’s creating tons of jargon as if there’s anything more than electron state in a machine that actually exists. The simplest option is change laws to require ISPs provide a static IP on request. Then all of jacks goals can be met without over engineering another protocol.
  - CGamesPlay 4y ago
    What's the Go method to upvote a content and how do other federated endpoints receive that signal? Or are you telling me to build it myself, in which case... yeah, that's what this thread is about?
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - bayindirh 4y ago
komali2 4y ago
What about interoperability, as Doctorow argues for? https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#monkeys-paw https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pion...
enahs-sf 4y ago
I read the whole thing but stopped taking it seriously after this line: > Only the original author may remove content they produce. This has some pretty bad implications if we think about obvious content problems like child abuse. And sure, algorithms can remove this from people’s feeds, but what about the victims? Am I the only person who thinks this is a giant, glaring hole in this whole argument?
- pedybr2 4y ago
  No, I think you are right. I think it is a very important function of a society to decide on things that should not be public or even illegal. This has always been the case and child abuse is the most obvious example.
- derbOac 4y ago
  I read that with a bit of nuance, like "only the original author or someone who has taken control of their resources" or something although you're right that some care would be needed in considering a statement like that. I understood the statement relative to the case where someone else centralized ultimately has control of your content, like Twitter. The other extreme is some decentralized equivalent to the case of hard-encrypted files that are only openable to a person with special knowledge. There's lots of grey there, and decentralization opens up lots of questions, like "does any one person really have control over content in a decentralized system?" I guess the comment seemed too fuzzy to me to be interpreted in much detail, so I was willing to flow with it, at least to some level.
- poisonborz 4y ago
  Almost this whole issue boils down to this, "do we need, and if, how do we handle forced content removal". And I have to say I'm on the freedom side here. Just like with encryption, you can't have a "trusted" middle men with a backdoor. You can't trust a state, a corporation, a "committee of wise men". You can't have a central dependable authoriser for a complex, abstract entity like content. There are two forces at play here, general public ("everyone else outside the poster") and law enforcement. - Groups will always be able to flag/hide/shadowban content. Yes this is not not scaleable to millions of people/posts (without masses of slave wage moderators or automation, both which would make ample mistakes). But I also think that communities are not scaleable to millions of people/posts. For all the necessary "common space", it is, and probably should be "the frontier/wild west". Clients might be restricted from accessing it or may have filtering safeguards. - Law enforcement should have the right to pursue people posting illegal content in real life, and remove it on their behalf with whatever means they have at hand - no matter if in the US, Europe, China or North Korea. But they should be only able to do this via their own (black-hat) methods and not built-in switches served conveniently by the network protocol. Just because the digital world allows complete control, that doesn't mean society should utilise it for its own steering. In the end my guess is that such debates are kind of needless/theoretical - the world will gravitate to some similar kind of self-balancing anyway, like how it did with digital content piracy.
xg15 4y ago
> Only the original author may remove content they produce. Counter example: Cyber bullying. Person A and B talk on twitter about how to best hurt person C, damage C's reputation, invite others to hurt C, etc. C himself is never part of the conversation. As for A, B and all the others which are part of the conversation, none of those people have any interest to end the conversation or to retract anything they said. Nevertheless, the conversation can cause real harm to C, even though C is not part of it. How would Jack's philosophy deal with that?
- nathias 4y ago
  why would a protocol do the task of a state? if it's illegal the person C can go to the police
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Jack is trying to design it specifically to prevent the state being able to intervene at all. Also, which state? These things may be international.
    - nathias 4y ago
      why would the state intervene with the protocol? the state interacts with their citizens, and should leave everyone else alone (any state)
      - consumer451 4y ago
        So in Jack's model, as far as I understand it, a bad actor could dox and post a bounty on someone's life, lose or destroy their key, and no one in the world could delete or block this information? Do I have that scenario correct? Counterpoint/question: Isn't this already all possible on TOR? Would ease of access make Jack's proposal more dangerous?
        nathias 4y ago
        I think Jack's model it would decrease the reach of illegal content, but it would still be accessible if you had a direct link.
croes 4y ago
>Only the original author may remove content they produce So if someone puts a bounty on his head next to his whereabouts in this social medium only the author should have the possibility to remove it?
- blowski 4y ago
  Great point. This is the root of so much of the challenge on the internet. There's a certain techno-utopianism libertarian view that says "absolutely, anybody should be able to say anything". And then there's a totalitarian authoritarian view that says "nobody should be able to post anything unless the Government authorises it". Most people exist somewhere in the middle, recognising there is a lot of nuance. It's impossible to draw a clear, consistent boundary. So instead we depend on human intervention, and often the humans get it wrong - but it's the best we have.
  - _8j50 4y ago
    The key is accepting legitimacy of various authorities under their respective domains and architecting protocols that respect and delegate or federate decisions to them as needed.
  - soco 4y ago
    What makes that "complete freedom" claim weird is also its (historical) novelty. Nobody was ever able to say everything without consequences, yet this utopia claims it's a forever right. Or maybe I understand them wrong, and they only defend the right to say bad stuff right before going to jail for it? Fine, but in this case there's no novelty at all, so it's probably not this.
  - croes 4y ago
    I think one of the problems is reach. Back then your free speech had limted reach, nowadays the reach is globally.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    > There's a certain techno-utopianism libertarian view that says "absolutely, anybody should be able to say anything". Scratch beneath the surface and it's usually BS. "Free speech" in tech seems to mostly be about who gets to be the gatekeeper, rather than removing gatekeepers altogether.
shanebellone 4y ago
Reach is the problem. Frankly, most say nothing of consequence. I wish we'd stop pretending that every voice matters.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I was just thinking "this is bitcoin but for social media" when he said it out loud: > It has to be something akin to what bitcoin has shown to be possible. If you want proof of this, get out of the US and European bubble of the bitcoin price fluctuations and learn how real people are using it for censorship resistance in Africa and Central/South America. It just seems like classic libertarian niavety.
blacklight 4y ago
The open native protocol for social media already exists. It's called ActivityPub, it's a W3C standard, and millions already use everyday through many platforms that support it. Jack (on behalf of Twitter) walked away from the consortium that was discussing the protocol, came up with a copycat that has only a few incremental changes, probably lost the chance of showcasing BlueSky on a large platform like Twitter, is now working on yet another social platform just to showcase it, and he wants us to take him seriously. Why bother? This guy has already missed his train, he's years behind, and the only reason why a platform should use BlueSky over ActivityPub seems to be "because I've built it and I want to make some money out of it".
- red_trumpet 4y ago
  > Jack (on behalf of Twitter) walked away from the consortium that was discussing the protocol, Can you provide more info about the history and entanglement of ActivityPub with Twitter/Jack Dorsey?
  - rapnie 4y ago
    There's not really entanglement AFAIK, but Bluesky did an investigation of existing decentralized network protocols and ActivityPub was one of them. There's a paper reporting the results of this investigation, but I do not have the link at hand. Update: It looks like the paper has been split into various README's on this location: https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosystem/-/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosyste...
throwaway290 4y ago
> As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, Mastodon another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet. TL;DR what we need is another standard!
asim 4y ago
I think he's wrong. Honestly the idea that "social" needs a protocol isn't right. It's that services need a protocol. HTTP was about information retrieval, it wasn't about services. It was simply about rendering web pages, we then moved into creating services on top of that. SMTP was very much about text based messaging asynchronously. That scaled very well. XMPP failed due to it's complexity. Any social protocol IMO would fail due to this inherit baggage in attempting to build it for Twitter like behaviour. What we need to do is separate out what is the service from the protocol. The protocol is simple, we need a way to communicate with services that provide some functionality that's action driven. The services themselves can then implement all the complexity, but they too should be open, but most likely open source with open APIs. People are getting lost in the dream of a twitter protocol. It's not the right framing. We have a bigger issue. All current centralised services are closed source and closed APIs. We need open source services and open APIs with an agreement on a communication protocol that goes beyond HTTP. What's frustrating is this will mostly fall on deaf ears and I don't think Jack or anyone at his level is the person to execute on this. I don't think high profile people or high profile projects are going to do it. It needs time to bake in a different way. It needs actual use before it sees the light of day.
- red_trumpet 4y ago
  > We need open source services and open APIs with an agreement on a communication protocol that goes beyond HTTP. I don't disagree, but wouldn't that be a "Twitter Protocol"? For example ActivityPub does this?
  - asim 4y ago
    I think ActivityPub isn't so much a protocol as it is an API. Doesn't matter that it has a spec, it's just something defined on top of HTTP. There' an API doc, you can implement it. Has some nice interop. Essentially ActivityPub is a Mastodon API at this point. Twitter is a centralised platform, a Twitter protocol would just end up looking like a documented API spec which anyone could then implement. It's a bit like AWS S3. S3 has now been implemented by most of the major cloud providers and there's some other open source software that does it too. Does it make it a universal storage service? I'm not so sure, but at least you know you can get data in/out of these various clouds using it. Social as a protocol came close in XMPP but anything in this feed/timeline model doesn't have a good solution yet and I'm not seeing ActivityPub as that either. I'd be more inclined to lean into an open API for social and a protocol for communication between services that lets us build on top of these things in a standardised way. Because even open APIs evolve and move too quickly to bake too deeply into a protocol. We need to strike a balance between the things that need to evolve versus the thing that need a stable interface. Protocols give us stability with an envelope for something that's constantly changing.
cqwww 4y ago
If you've not heard about it, check out nostr protocol -- https://krisconstable.com/check-out-the-nostr-protocol/ https://krisconstable.com/check-out-the-nostr-protocol/ "nostr - Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays". "The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global "social" network once and for all." Jack stumbled upon it yesterday and created an account, so there have been a flood of new users already in the last 16 hours. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr I recommend https://astral.ninja https://astral.ninja as a first time user as it's easy to generate a key pair, which you can then use as you try the many other clients. This is a very new protocol, so the clients are still dev level and not production level, but development has been very rapid on this protocol. One thing that stands out to me as a privacy advocate, is that unlike Twitter or Mastadon, the admins (relay operators in the case of nostr) can't read your DMs, so nostr is already ahead of both of these technologies in that regard.
- avinassh 4y ago
  > Jack stumbled upon it yesterday and created an account, so there have been a flood of new users already in the last 16 hours. Where did he create an account?
borbulon 4y ago
> I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. I think he's lived in the bubble too long, tbh. Addressable how? "Addressable" assumes an equal balance of power between the one putting up the content and the one addressing the content.
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dzonga 4y ago
we already have something over this order: RSS
vaughan 4y ago
I cannot understand how everyone avoids the most obvious solution to all of this. Blocking. Instead of bans, Twitter could just add people to their own block list, and then tell new and existing users that they can opt-in to a moderated Twitter experience. They could have different block lists for different moderation reasons. E.g. Bots, spam, vs terms violations. An even better solution is a delegative blocking system for accounts and keywords. It's basically crowd-sourcing account blocking, where you are saying: "I want to block all accounts and keywords that this person blocks". Then you can have an allowlist to override some blocks. Don't like conspiracy theorists? I am certain there are many people willing to tag all the conspiracy theorists they find. The best part would be having a toggle that can show you all the content that is blocked, and why it was blocked (i.e. You delegated all your blocking to account X, and they delegated their blocking to account Y, and account Y placed this account on their block list named Z). You could also have "smart block lists" where you could use queries to block people. E.g. "Block all followers of X". An issue you might have though is to differentiate between those that follow in support of someone, or follow simply to know what they said and challenge it. Twitter used to have block lists but they got rid of the feature. See: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-block-options https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-b... Ideally I would like this for all internet content. So I agree with Jack when he says: > The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves Just as long as its always opt-in for everyone individually.
- mmastrac 4y ago
  What you're describing is basically Mastodon and the ability for instances to federate or not.
  - pschuegr 4y ago
    There is some similarity but I can imagine that a list-based version of this would allow union/intersection and customization, etc.
- est 4y ago
est 4y ago
> Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice. Here's an idea: moderation is best implemented by everyone. You follow well-known algorithms after initial register, then you can tweak the algorithm or apply algorithms made by others.
guessbest 4y ago
We already had FOAF as far back as 2004 with the semantic web. But the problem is that the network of connections, the social graph, is a a moat to prevent users from leaving the network and joining another. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCXu10eDtcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCXu10eDtcA > http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/

122 points by ttepasse 4y ago

acjohnson55 4y ago

Poor Jack. He just never had the power to do the things he knew were right all along.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

throwntoday 4y ago

I genuinely don't know how to read Jack. His actions contradict his words, and it's tough to believe he didn't know what Vidjya was up to. Playing ignorant makes it hard to trust anything he says.

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
It seems like the more successful you get, the more you lose touch with reality. Jack's intentions seem well intentioned but his execution seems so poor and misguided.
- api 4y ago
  You elevate yourself to higher and higher levels of abstraction until you aren’t even here anymore. You tell people what to do but no longer have a clue what they are doing. You get fed so much information that you can only consider any idea for a few minutes. You are surrounded by people pretending to agree with you to get money or favors.
hintymad 4y ago
According to the book Hatching Twitter and the YouTube channel ModernMBA[1], Jack was very careful of cultivating his public image to the point of public deception. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DudWfJXHN9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DudWfJXHN9g
wmf 4y ago
It sounds like he was uncomfortable with his power as Twitter CEO but he couldn't get rid of that power (because of "the shareholders") so he let Twitter run on autopilot and vetoed everything that his executives tried to do. Unfortunately that's not a neutral position given that evil flourishes when Jack does nothing. (Clearly he's not a consequentialist.)
thomassmith65 4y ago
Considering he ran Twitter for several years from an empty chair, he strikes me as another extremely lucky, opinionated moron. Edit: Aha, I just noticed the acronymn for 'extremely lucky, opinionated moron' is elom... so close.
- m_eiman 4y ago
  Replace the moron with nitwit and you’re good to go.

marstall 4y ago

I do hate to sound like the neckbeard that I am, but what about RSS? Doesn't it fit the bill as far as the three principles? > Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control. > Only the original author may remove content they produce. ... these are the same point? but RSS addresses them both by the fact that content can be hosted on blogging software running in one's basement. > Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice. ... accomplished by having a choice of a variety of RSS clients. RSS also, by being significantly less efficient at spreading information, seemingly would mitigate/eliminate many of the more harmful aspects of a single-platform publisher/feed aggregator like twitter.

acjohnson55 4y ago
RSS doesn't have any concept of interaction between users. In social media, replies to posts are delivered to all of the original post's recipients.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  RSS would (hypothetically) just be the feed protocol for posts. Replies would be handled out of band, potentially using mechanisms that already exist.¹ Heck, replies could be published using RSS too, with a reference to the original so client apps could thread them. In that scenario there'd be an opportunity for third parties to associate replies with posts for user who want hear from users they don't follow. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback
  - acjohnson55 4y ago
    Good point. I was aware Linkbacks existed, and had tried to read that article before, but never really understood why they were supposed to be useful. Especially in the way they manifest as visual clutter on my Wordpress blog. But I can see now that they are potentially a way for distributed conversation to happen (with a lot of work on building better UX norms). I wonder what the pros and cons are compared to ActivityPub.

fluidcruft 4y ago

I didn't quite follow his call-out to Signal at the end? Is Signal working in this space?

throwntoday 4y ago
The new stories feature seems to signal a shift towards some kind of social networking beyond messaging.
crossroadsguy 4y ago
Ends a public message on a charitable tone.

riffic 4y ago

hey Dorsey: ActivityPub exists. work with the W3C, your former company always could have pulled a chair up to the table.

forthorbor 4y ago
He has to have known about ActivityPub, but with bluesky and now this he seems determined to create a competing standard. Reminds me of that XKCD comic.
rektide 4y ago
I agree, ActivityPub could/should be a huge player in these changes. Jack recognizes ActivityPub's potential too, albiet as "Mastadon" rather than ActivityPub, which is somewhat a self-own to his point: the title is about internet protocols, yet here he is citing the implementation, not the protocol (which tbf was a late-coming change for Mastadon): > As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, Mastodon another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more. ActivityPub is a good tool, but there's still a lot more required. Starring someone's post kind of goes nowhere. Having a network that can at least in some cases make this popularity information or some kind of visible reaction system should at least be an option. We could have a stream of ActivityPub "Like" actions. But how do we gather & see those viewer's likes? How would we add more flexible reactions? There's work to do here, with interaction among feeds. Moderation decisions are yet further- far further- behind, are just a couple bits of data inside most implementations. Being able to have multiple different sources of moderation, broadcasting their moderation, and letting us mix & remix these moderation feeds into our experiences is, to me, the essence of what Jack was talking about. ActivityPub has "Flag" actions which we could make a feed out of, but those are pretty bare-bones signals that I feel we'd need to expand on significantly. We don't even have a feed of moderation we can begin to work from here. ActivityPub implementations today are a reasonably good first-order social network. We can swap toots, yay. But Jack here is talking about the higher-order networks that emerge atop the feed of posts. There's a compounding of further levels of social data, being networked too, that's not really happening so far. ActivityPub can and likely will come around to being relevant here... but right now it's too early days & that maturation into social-moderation hasn't really begun at all. Jack's post sets some good long term view, in my opinion, that ActivityPub needs to bring itself towards, regardless of this post or anyone or any org else.

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eyelidlessness 4y ago

In the article, Jack links the Twitter thread wherein he reflects on a specific controversial ban. He only links the first tweet in the thread, but clearly still intends it to be read long-form and stands by his prior reasoning despite any principles enumerated in this article itself. In the thread’s second tweet, Jack wrote: > We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all. In the current article, he doesn’t address this topic at all. In fact, he focuses very much on eliminating barriers to serving content which, again according to his own thread, was inciting offline violence. He proposes solutions which instead put users in control of moderating whether their feed is full of incitement to violence. In other words, he’s proposing that the people who would be incited to violence are the ones who should moderate their exposure to such incitement, without interference, and suggests that this would encourage healthier dialogue, with greater transparency, reducing the influence of powerful governments and businesses on acceptable speech. What happens offline vanished from his analysis, but it can’t be ignored. If all OtherPlatformBesidesTwitter users have a free hand in deciding what OPBT serves them, and it’s acknowledged that content on OBPT can pose safety risks to other people completely off-platform… … what Jack is suggesting here is that the incitement to violence should be facilitated without hindrance, and the potential victims should just tune it out because it’s not their preferred content. Somewhat amusingly at an emotional distance, that’s almost exactly Twitter with human moderation removed. More darkly, what he’s proposing is a recruitment tool for literally any wonder imaginable, no matter how much it would also be an unspeakable horror. I share most of Jack’s stated principles, as a former anarchist who mostly hasn’t shifted values apart from some more nuanced analysis of power. It’s unforgivable that he’s using that analysis to promote a model of social media that puts the onus on platforms to serve those eager for violence and gives no consideration for anyone who doesn’t want to be their victim.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
Also, say what you want about Elon Musk, but at least he doesn’t have much pretense about twirling his evil mustache. Jack doesn’t even seem to want to figure out what side anything is on. I take that back: that’s his whole thesis, “seem” is too mealymouthed.

jacooper 4y ago

Maybe this is just what he wants us to think, but I still think jack and twitter were different, different to other social media, old twitter was thoughtful, unique, not a run of the mill maximizing eye balls social media company (zuck mostly) This post seems to prove that, and I truly hope we can break free of central influence on society's conversations.

jacooper 4y ago
> Maybe this is just what he wants us to think... Looks like it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978481
winternett 4y ago
Of course the fraudsters that created scams like Crypto and NFT would love to unleash a decentralized network that could not be regulated or moderated by congress, and that could not be properly logged anywhere by anyone, so that fraud could more easily be foisted upon everyone. If this is permitted, and people buy into the crap peddling, then the outcome is well deserved by the victims. Sorry to be so glum, but Jack had a big role in promotion and fosterance of Crypto and NFT while he served as Twitter CEO... It should not be given free pass. The Internet was not meant to be without credibility and accountability, in the age where the warnings are clearly visible, accountability and credibility should cancel most social media platforms based on their performance to date alone for creating stable new business models. Current Social Media is built on ID theft, deception, unpaid labor, and fraud. Mark my words. It's not a stable platform to build anything else on at all.
prawn 4y ago
They all seem different in the beginning before they hone their revenue model and the casual users are swamped or intimidated by professional users. Early Twitter was where friends hung out, before they left for Instagram and the resulting Twitter became about politics and opinion and personal brands. Early Instagram was great too.
- jacooper 4y ago

CGamesPlay 4y ago

I want a federated platform where I can moderate content for myself, and other users can federate my moderation actions. Moderation actions include "delete", "upvote", and "downvote". Oh, and the interface needs to be more like Reddit/HN rather than Twitter/Mastodon: something that's conducive to actual conversation rather than disconnected streams of thoughts. Aether [0] had some of the right concepts here, but made bad choices in technology (P2P instead of federated; custom app instead of web) and ultimately couldn't get traction. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208

nofrspch9 4y ago
You have one; it’s called “the internet.” No one is asking for a universal protocol or language to share cat pics. Technocrats want to provide the next unicorn that captures attention thereby making a new centralized system. I use Go, net/http, and oh look, I can share state across the internet. In physics electromagnetism came together after ditching all the literal knobs and pulleys used prior to get a handle on the behaviors. IMO computer science needs to do that too; it’s creating tons of jargon as if there’s anything more than electron state in a machine that actually exists. The simplest option is change laws to require ISPs provide a static IP on request. Then all of jacks goals can be met without over engineering another protocol.
- CGamesPlay 4y ago
  What's the Go method to upvote a content and how do other federated endpoints receive that signal? Or are you telling me to build it myself, in which case... yeah, that's what this thread is about?
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komali2 4y ago

What about interoperability, as Doctorow argues for? https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#monkeys-paw https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pion...

enahs-sf 4y ago

I read the whole thing but stopped taking it seriously after this line: > Only the original author may remove content they produce. This has some pretty bad implications if we think about obvious content problems like child abuse. And sure, algorithms can remove this from people’s feeds, but what about the victims? Am I the only person who thinks this is a giant, glaring hole in this whole argument?

pedybr2 4y ago
No, I think you are right. I think it is a very important function of a society to decide on things that should not be public or even illegal. This has always been the case and child abuse is the most obvious example.
derbOac 4y ago
I read that with a bit of nuance, like "only the original author or someone who has taken control of their resources" or something although you're right that some care would be needed in considering a statement like that. I understood the statement relative to the case where someone else centralized ultimately has control of your content, like Twitter. The other extreme is some decentralized equivalent to the case of hard-encrypted files that are only openable to a person with special knowledge. There's lots of grey there, and decentralization opens up lots of questions, like "does any one person really have control over content in a decentralized system?" I guess the comment seemed too fuzzy to me to be interpreted in much detail, so I was willing to flow with it, at least to some level.
poisonborz 4y ago
Almost this whole issue boils down to this, "do we need, and if, how do we handle forced content removal". And I have to say I'm on the freedom side here. Just like with encryption, you can't have a "trusted" middle men with a backdoor. You can't trust a state, a corporation, a "committee of wise men". You can't have a central dependable authoriser for a complex, abstract entity like content. There are two forces at play here, general public ("everyone else outside the poster") and law enforcement. - Groups will always be able to flag/hide/shadowban content. Yes this is not not scaleable to millions of people/posts (without masses of slave wage moderators or automation, both which would make ample mistakes). But I also think that communities are not scaleable to millions of people/posts. For all the necessary "common space", it is, and probably should be "the frontier/wild west". Clients might be restricted from accessing it or may have filtering safeguards. - Law enforcement should have the right to pursue people posting illegal content in real life, and remove it on their behalf with whatever means they have at hand - no matter if in the US, Europe, China or North Korea. But they should be only able to do this via their own (black-hat) methods and not built-in switches served conveniently by the network protocol. Just because the digital world allows complete control, that doesn't mean society should utilise it for its own steering. In the end my guess is that such debates are kind of needless/theoretical - the world will gravitate to some similar kind of self-balancing anyway, like how it did with digital content piracy.

xg15 4y ago

> Only the original author may remove content they produce. Counter example: Cyber bullying. Person A and B talk on twitter about how to best hurt person C, damage C's reputation, invite others to hurt C, etc. C himself is never part of the conversation. As for A, B and all the others which are part of the conversation, none of those people have any interest to end the conversation or to retract anything they said. Nevertheless, the conversation can cause real harm to C, even though C is not part of it. How would Jack's philosophy deal with that?

nathias 4y ago
why would a protocol do the task of a state? if it's illegal the person C can go to the police
- pjc50 4y ago
  Jack is trying to design it specifically to prevent the state being able to intervene at all. Also, which state? These things may be international.
  - nathias 4y ago
    why would the state intervene with the protocol? the state interacts with their citizens, and should leave everyone else alone (any state)
    - consumer451 4y ago
      So in Jack's model, as far as I understand it, a bad actor could dox and post a bounty on someone's life, lose or destroy their key, and no one in the world could delete or block this information? Do I have that scenario correct? Counterpoint/question: Isn't this already all possible on TOR? Would ease of access make Jack's proposal more dangerous?
      - nathias 4y ago
        I think Jack's model it would decrease the reach of illegal content, but it would still be accessible if you had a direct link.

croes 4y ago

>Only the original author may remove content they produce So if someone puts a bounty on his head next to his whereabouts in this social medium only the author should have the possibility to remove it?

blowski 4y ago
Great point. This is the root of so much of the challenge on the internet. There's a certain techno-utopianism libertarian view that says "absolutely, anybody should be able to say anything". And then there's a totalitarian authoritarian view that says "nobody should be able to post anything unless the Government authorises it". Most people exist somewhere in the middle, recognising there is a lot of nuance. It's impossible to draw a clear, consistent boundary. So instead we depend on human intervention, and often the humans get it wrong - but it's the best we have.
- _8j50 4y ago
  The key is accepting legitimacy of various authorities under their respective domains and architecting protocols that respect and delegate or federate decisions to them as needed.
- soco 4y ago
  What makes that "complete freedom" claim weird is also its (historical) novelty. Nobody was ever able to say everything without consequences, yet this utopia claims it's a forever right. Or maybe I understand them wrong, and they only defend the right to say bad stuff right before going to jail for it? Fine, but in this case there's no novelty at all, so it's probably not this.
- croes 4y ago
  I think one of the problems is reach. Back then your free speech had limted reach, nowadays the reach is globally.
- rchaud 4y ago
  > There's a certain techno-utopianism libertarian view that says "absolutely, anybody should be able to say anything". Scratch beneath the surface and it's usually BS. "Free speech" in tech seems to mostly be about who gets to be the gatekeeper, rather than removing gatekeepers altogether.

shanebellone 4y ago

Reach is the problem. Frankly, most say nothing of consequence. I wish we'd stop pretending that every voice matters.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I was just thinking "this is bitcoin but for social media" when he said it out loud: > It has to be something akin to what bitcoin has shown to be possible. If you want proof of this, get out of the US and European bubble of the bitcoin price fluctuations and learn how real people are using it for censorship resistance in Africa and Central/South America. It just seems like classic libertarian niavety.

blacklight 4y ago

The open native protocol for social media already exists. It's called ActivityPub, it's a W3C standard, and millions already use everyday through many platforms that support it. Jack (on behalf of Twitter) walked away from the consortium that was discussing the protocol, came up with a copycat that has only a few incremental changes, probably lost the chance of showcasing BlueSky on a large platform like Twitter, is now working on yet another social platform just to showcase it, and he wants us to take him seriously. Why bother? This guy has already missed his train, he's years behind, and the only reason why a platform should use BlueSky over ActivityPub seems to be "because I've built it and I want to make some money out of it".

red_trumpet 4y ago
> Jack (on behalf of Twitter) walked away from the consortium that was discussing the protocol, Can you provide more info about the history and entanglement of ActivityPub with Twitter/Jack Dorsey?
- rapnie 4y ago
  There's not really entanglement AFAIK, but Bluesky did an investigation of existing decentralized network protocols and ActivityPub was one of them. There's a paper reporting the results of this investigation, but I do not have the link at hand. Update: It looks like the paper has been split into various README's on this location: https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosystem/-/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosyste...

throwaway290 4y ago

> As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, Mastodon another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet. TL;DR what we need is another standard!

asim 4y ago

I think he's wrong. Honestly the idea that "social" needs a protocol isn't right. It's that services need a protocol. HTTP was about information retrieval, it wasn't about services. It was simply about rendering web pages, we then moved into creating services on top of that. SMTP was very much about text based messaging asynchronously. That scaled very well. XMPP failed due to it's complexity. Any social protocol IMO would fail due to this inherit baggage in attempting to build it for Twitter like behaviour. What we need to do is separate out what is the service from the protocol. The protocol is simple, we need a way to communicate with services that provide some functionality that's action driven. The services themselves can then implement all the complexity, but they too should be open, but most likely open source with open APIs. People are getting lost in the dream of a twitter protocol. It's not the right framing. We have a bigger issue. All current centralised services are closed source and closed APIs. We need open source services and open APIs with an agreement on a communication protocol that goes beyond HTTP. What's frustrating is this will mostly fall on deaf ears and I don't think Jack or anyone at his level is the person to execute on this. I don't think high profile people or high profile projects are going to do it. It needs time to bake in a different way. It needs actual use before it sees the light of day.

red_trumpet 4y ago
> We need open source services and open APIs with an agreement on a communication protocol that goes beyond HTTP. I don't disagree, but wouldn't that be a "Twitter Protocol"? For example ActivityPub does this?
- asim 4y ago
  I think ActivityPub isn't so much a protocol as it is an API. Doesn't matter that it has a spec, it's just something defined on top of HTTP. There' an API doc, you can implement it. Has some nice interop. Essentially ActivityPub is a Mastodon API at this point. Twitter is a centralised platform, a Twitter protocol would just end up looking like a documented API spec which anyone could then implement. It's a bit like AWS S3. S3 has now been implemented by most of the major cloud providers and there's some other open source software that does it too. Does it make it a universal storage service? I'm not so sure, but at least you know you can get data in/out of these various clouds using it. Social as a protocol came close in XMPP but anything in this feed/timeline model doesn't have a good solution yet and I'm not seeing ActivityPub as that either. I'd be more inclined to lean into an open API for social and a protocol for communication between services that lets us build on top of these things in a standardised way. Because even open APIs evolve and move too quickly to bake too deeply into a protocol. We need to strike a balance between the things that need to evolve versus the thing that need a stable interface. Protocols give us stability with an envelope for something that's constantly changing.

cqwww 4y ago

If you've not heard about it, check out nostr protocol -- https://krisconstable.com/check-out-the-nostr-protocol/ https://krisconstable.com/check-out-the-nostr-protocol/ "nostr - Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays". "The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global "social" network once and for all." Jack stumbled upon it yesterday and created an account, so there have been a flood of new users already in the last 16 hours. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr I recommend https://astral.ninja https://astral.ninja as a first time user as it's easy to generate a key pair, which you can then use as you try the many other clients. This is a very new protocol, so the clients are still dev level and not production level, but development has been very rapid on this protocol. One thing that stands out to me as a privacy advocate, is that unlike Twitter or Mastadon, the admins (relay operators in the case of nostr) can't read your DMs, so nostr is already ahead of both of these technologies in that regard.

avinassh 4y ago
> Jack stumbled upon it yesterday and created an account, so there have been a flood of new users already in the last 16 hours. Where did he create an account?

borbulon 4y ago

> I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. I think he's lived in the bubble too long, tbh. Addressable how? "Addressable" assumes an equal balance of power between the one putting up the content and the one addressing the content.

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dzonga 4y ago

we already have something over this order: RSS

vaughan 4y ago

I cannot understand how everyone avoids the most obvious solution to all of this. Blocking. Instead of bans, Twitter could just add people to their own block list, and then tell new and existing users that they can opt-in to a moderated Twitter experience. They could have different block lists for different moderation reasons. E.g. Bots, spam, vs terms violations. An even better solution is a delegative blocking system for accounts and keywords. It's basically crowd-sourcing account blocking, where you are saying: "I want to block all accounts and keywords that this person blocks". Then you can have an allowlist to override some blocks. Don't like conspiracy theorists? I am certain there are many people willing to tag all the conspiracy theorists they find. The best part would be having a toggle that can show you all the content that is blocked, and why it was blocked (i.e. You delegated all your blocking to account X, and they delegated their blocking to account Y, and account Y placed this account on their block list named Z). You could also have "smart block lists" where you could use queries to block people. E.g. "Block all followers of X". An issue you might have though is to differentiate between those that follow in support of someone, or follow simply to know what they said and challenge it. Twitter used to have block lists but they got rid of the feature. See: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-block-options https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-b... Ideally I would like this for all internet content. So I agree with Jack when he says: > The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves Just as long as its always opt-in for everyone individually.

mmastrac 4y ago
What you're describing is basically Mastodon and the ability for instances to federate or not.
- pschuegr 4y ago
  There is some similarity but I can imagine that a list-based version of this would allow union/intersection and customization, etc.
est 4y ago

est 4y ago

> Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice. Here's an idea: moderation is best implemented by everyone. You follow well-known algorithms after initial register, then you can tweak the algorithm or apply algorithms made by others.

guessbest 4y ago

We already had FOAF as far back as 2004 with the semantic web. But the problem is that the network of connections, the social graph, is a a moat to prevent users from leaving the network and joining another. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCXu10eDtcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCXu10eDtcA > http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/