4 ms·

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 t

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.
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      I wonder that too. ActivityPub/ActivityStreams seems really interesting, but I haven’t found a good roll-up of (1) the problems it was designed to solve and (2) the design philosophy of this solution. Once I understand what’s possible vs. what Mastodon’s implementation of ActivityPub can do, I hope to be able to answer the question: Can an alternate implementation be less of a nightmare to scale, or is that intrinsic to the protocol?
- marstall 4y ago
  true. its a simpler, even dumber model. but the core thing - following people's posts - is preserved. And there are other benefits, and I'm really dating myself here - but it was nice that engaging with RSS often involved visiting someone's personal website - often a richer, quirkier and crankier space for self-expression than the few fields offered by the twitter profile. benefit #2 is that it just slows information down. I know I'm tilting at windmills on this one. But somehow the very speed of information on twitter seems to be a component of its societal risk. speed limit for memes?
- alxmng 4y ago
  RSS + webmention (standardized ping back) with rel=“in-reply-to”, known as the “indieweb” stack. ActivityPub is more comprehensive though, with a standardized vocabulary including followers/following.
- jerf 4y ago
  This may in fact be a feature rather than a bug. "Anyone in the world can slam their crappy reply to my post in my face and create a message, notification to my phone, etc." is probably a bad model. "Anyone in my personal friend list" is better but sometimes still too broad. Web logs had a characteristic where you kinda had to put a bit of elbow grease into seeking out replies, and that isn't all bad. There are plenty of instances in the old web log communities of some monomaniacal troll paralleling some bigger blog's every post with their inane (if not "insane" as my swipe keyboard started with) replies, but mostly nobody has to care. You visit the original web blog and you don't have to see it under every post. Even the original author can pretty much just get on with life without having to worry about it. This is not something "conventional" social media does well. I remain unconvinced that the model of pushing replies into everyone's face, bundled with the original content, is the best or only model for social media. It's probably a nontrivial part of the reason everything seems so homogenous nowadays... it really is. The same regress-to-the-mean in every "social" interaction because it's the same regress-to-the-mean people and patterns in every single one. Give people a place to be themselves without a hundred people tromping in and you get those unique voices back.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Most people aren't as misanthropic or introverted as this, want to seek out connections with people and find social media useful in that regard.
    - jerf 4y ago
      I understand why you may say that, but it's not about misanthropy or introversion. It's about scaling. If you are in a situation where your posts get maybe four comments, all from your real-life friends, all generally positive, hey, great. You don't have a problem. But let's say you're writing a technical blog, and you've picked up 10,000 readers. You may get a few hundred comments. And they're going to look like an HN discussion area; a few positive hints, but mostly negative comments. If you don't moderate, they're going to start to tend to actively insulting comments as the inevitable escalations develop. So maybe now you need a moderator. Who wants that. If anything, it's the misanthropic ones who don't care! They're the ones willing to host a brawl in their comment section and give as good as they get, if not better. They're the ones who don't lose any sleep over ban-hammering someone just because. It's the normies who start having problems here. The social media you describe and are implicitly praising promotes drive-by interactions and tons of shallow connections. The weblog community structure promoted fewer, but stronger connections. You might not have realized this, but a lot of "web rolls" back in the day weren't just "Hey, you may be randomly interested in these blogs"... after all, why would anybody put those up? They were actually a community. Conversations would wander back and forth in these communities for days at a time on a topic, with cross-linking, rebuttals, amplifications, etc. And it was nothing like the heat-but-no-light of a twitter reply chain. I miss it. It was much nicer in a lot of ways, and could have been improved even more. But it takes a bit of a critical mass, maybe not a ton, but even so we've lost it to an endless chain of mostly vapid, regress-to-the-mean boring homogeneity.

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.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    I wonder that too. ActivityPub/ActivityStreams seems really interesting, but I haven’t found a good roll-up of (1) the problems it was designed to solve and (2) the design philosophy of this solution. Once I understand what’s possible vs. what Mastodon’s implementation of ActivityPub can do, I hope to be able to answer the question: Can an alternate implementation be less of a nightmare to scale, or is that intrinsic to the protocol?
marstall 4y ago
true. its a simpler, even dumber model. but the core thing - following people's posts - is preserved. And there are other benefits, and I'm really dating myself here - but it was nice that engaging with RSS often involved visiting someone's personal website - often a richer, quirkier and crankier space for self-expression than the few fields offered by the twitter profile. benefit #2 is that it just slows information down. I know I'm tilting at windmills on this one. But somehow the very speed of information on twitter seems to be a component of its societal risk. speed limit for memes?
alxmng 4y ago
RSS + webmention (standardized ping back) with rel=“in-reply-to”, known as the “indieweb” stack. ActivityPub is more comprehensive though, with a standardized vocabulary including followers/following.
jerf 4y ago
This may in fact be a feature rather than a bug. "Anyone in the world can slam their crappy reply to my post in my face and create a message, notification to my phone, etc." is probably a bad model. "Anyone in my personal friend list" is better but sometimes still too broad. Web logs had a characteristic where you kinda had to put a bit of elbow grease into seeking out replies, and that isn't all bad. There are plenty of instances in the old web log communities of some monomaniacal troll paralleling some bigger blog's every post with their inane (if not "insane" as my swipe keyboard started with) replies, but mostly nobody has to care. You visit the original web blog and you don't have to see it under every post. Even the original author can pretty much just get on with life without having to worry about it. This is not something "conventional" social media does well. I remain unconvinced that the model of pushing replies into everyone's face, bundled with the original content, is the best or only model for social media. It's probably a nontrivial part of the reason everything seems so homogenous nowadays... it really is. The same regress-to-the-mean in every "social" interaction because it's the same regress-to-the-mean people and patterns in every single one. Give people a place to be themselves without a hundred people tromping in and you get those unique voices back.
- krapp 4y ago
  Most people aren't as misanthropic or introverted as this, want to seek out connections with people and find social media useful in that regard.
  - jerf 4y ago
    I understand why you may say that, but it's not about misanthropy or introversion. It's about scaling. If you are in a situation where your posts get maybe four comments, all from your real-life friends, all generally positive, hey, great. You don't have a problem. But let's say you're writing a technical blog, and you've picked up 10,000 readers. You may get a few hundred comments. And they're going to look like an HN discussion area; a few positive hints, but mostly negative comments. If you don't moderate, they're going to start to tend to actively insulting comments as the inevitable escalations develop. So maybe now you need a moderator. Who wants that. If anything, it's the misanthropic ones who don't care! They're the ones willing to host a brawl in their comment section and give as good as they get, if not better. They're the ones who don't lose any sleep over ban-hammering someone just because. It's the normies who start having problems here. The social media you describe and are implicitly praising promotes drive-by interactions and tons of shallow connections. The weblog community structure promoted fewer, but stronger connections. You might not have realized this, but a lot of "web rolls" back in the day weren't just "Hey, you may be randomly interested in these blogs"... after all, why would anybody put those up? They were actually a community. Conversations would wander back and forth in these communities for days at a time on a topic, with cross-linking, rebuttals, amplifications, etc. And it was nothing like the heat-but-no-light of a twitter reply chain. I miss it. It was much nicer in a lot of ways, and could have been improved even more. But it takes a bit of a critical mass, maybe not a ton, but even so we've lost it to an endless chain of mostly vapid, regress-to-the-mean boring homogeneity.