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Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
- jtode 4y agoWhat you're thinking of is called Nationalization, and they do not like it here.
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- jcarrano 4y agoShort answer: if it could it would already be. First, no one wants to move away from the "real" thing. The alternatives are there and there, even things line NOSTR where you own your own identity and not a server. Then, and most importantly, the fact that users do not make the rules is part of the appeal of twitter, even if users themselves do not recognize it. It forces the most dissenting people together on the same platform. If they had to agree on rules, then either everything would be banned, or islands of incompatible moderation policies would form.
- bitwize 4y agoComing up next on Hackernews: Should Twitter be owned by anyone other than its users? (jacobin.com)
- bohm 4y agoDo you have an actual critique of replacing centralized companies with decentralized protocols?
- rvz 4y agoSuch responses are typical from those emotionally invested in the perpetual Twitter schadenfreude brigade. They are too emotional to have an objective answer at the moment. The main difficulty is the network effect which Twitter has entrenched for decades. We're talking about 220M+ active users on the platform. Daily.
- jjcon 4y agoI’m as annoyed as the next person at those looking to see the new twitter fail, having said that I simultaneously love the idea of new things challenging the status quo. Decentralization is somewhat a core tenant of the hacker ethos so I don’t think it is strange to see that reflected here.
- dang 4y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- jacobreg 4y agoThere's a lot of consideration of if we could, and previous little of if we should. Unmoderated sites inevitably become breading grounds for harassment and worse, especially as more mainstream platforms get better at driving this content away. I would be terrified to live in a world where kiwifarms and its ilk cannot be shut down
- bohm 4y agoOP here. I don't expect these servers to become unmoderated. I think a lot of them will moderate as strictly or stricter than Twitter currently is.
- ryan29 4y agoThis is something I said, but didn't explain well in the thread about Bluesky using domains as handles. You did a much better job of explaining it in your article. Being able to adjust the moderation rules to fit specific scenarios is useful. I also think the use of domains could have a significant impact on the quality of online discourse because building a good reputation on a domain and having that transferable anywhere on the internet is a lot more valuable than a handle that's only usable within the silo of a single company. Sub-domains add another layer where the owner of the top level domain has incentive to make sure they're not bringing bad actors onto the network because moderation could be enacted against the base domain, not just individual sub-domains. Domain based attestation could also drive significant change. Imagine a system where spending money at a reputable company gave you a digital token / receipt that you could attribute to a domain (aka identity) as a way to attest to that domain being a good participant. The attestation wouldn't cost anything beyond what you're already spending, but it's valuable because it demonstrates you're spending real money somewhere and attributing it to an identity. That doesn't scale well for bad actors running millions of bots because someone like me might have thousands of dollars of spending per year that I can attribute to my reputation or the reputation of someone I've had a good interaction with and bots can't throw that kind of money away. IE: It's a good indicator that a domain / identity isn't a bot, spammer, jerk, etc..
- jacobreg 4y ago
- davidw 4y agoThe tricky bit is kind of hand-waved away here: > throw The One Ring (Twitter) back into the volcano from which it was forged What does content moderation and that whole thorny problem look like on this new system? I don't want to hang out in a bar with a drunk nazi and his buddies screaming at everyone. Yeah, it's tricky and there are all kinds of difficult considerations and tradeoffs and it's all quite imperfect, but for any new platform, I want to have some idea of how they imagine it all working.
- bohm 4y agoAuthor here. You get to have all the moderation, filtering, etc. that is implemented on the servers you use. I'm sure there will be servers that very closely try to approximate what Twitter is/has been doing. Servers also can share any and all information needed to effectively moderate.
- selectodude 4y agoSo it’s closed source Mastodon?
- bohm 4y agoI don't expect it to stay closed source. But there are significant differences to Mastodon. Just to give one example: Mastodon server admins actually can read your private messages. Also Blue Sky's approach to data portability and how to implement filtering/indexing is more developed. It might be personal preference, but I prefer AT Protocol's approach where the servers have less powers, and the users have more power. A lot of little design decisions add up to a qualitative difference.
- jrm4 4y agoWeird I haven't seen this idea: Microblogging shouldn't have private messages. Let people have a profile and a link to an email address or similar and be done with it. I'm not sure why a service designed to publicize things so that everyone can see them ALSO chooses to take on "private messages." I get that's how the big money incumbents see it, but I feel like less would be more here.
- 1attice 4y agoThe comparison to email (SMTP) is telling. I'm old enough to remember how SMTP almost collapsed beneath the first wave of spam in the nineties. These days, it's effectively centralized by an ogliopoly consisting of Gmail, Outlook, AWS, and whatever Apple calls its iCloud offering. If, like me, you run your own `maild`, you basically have to work incredibly hard to keep the ogliopols happy. You are always one bad DKIM keypair away from death. And the system is set up like this because, back when it was truly decentralized, it nearly collapsed. Centralization saved email. As much as I hate the ~ Big Corporations ~, they have preserved my ability to send and receive email. And what's more, I'm old enough to remember how NNTP (usenet) did, in effect, collapse, despite Google's attempts to rescue it. The dream of somehow doing away with: central banks; central social media; central servers, etc. is deep in the Internet's DNA. So is the pragmatism that comes from having tried all that.
- omeid2 4y agoIt is not that bad, there is many "mid-size" players like FastMail, ProtonMail, Yandex, Baidu, Zoho, GMX, Gandi, and heaps more.
- 1attice 4y agoIt's not that bad at all - that's my point. I use protonmail and for some other addresses, I self host. But it's the self hosting that showed me how much I live and die by the Big Ones. And yes, they set and drive policy for the whole system. You better believe I pay attention to my Gmail bounce rate.
- nextaccountic 4y agoI can't find it so I gotta ask: does Blue Sky integrates with mastodon instances and support ActivityPub?
- bohm 4y agoNope, AT Protocol is not compatible with ActivityPub.
- nextaccountic 4y agoBut what are the differences? Does Blue Sky use another protocol just to be deliberately incompatible with existing federated networks? Could mastodon instances theoretically be made compatible with AT Protocol anyway, and federate through both it and ActivityPub?
- zol 4y ago> Having all the data of the entire network on all the Big-World Servers. That's what you need to do if you want to crunch the data, make it searchable, and provide algorithms that help you discover new content and new people to follow. How is this all possible if the data is encrypted? Also, what’s the economic incentive for building and maintaining the software that runs on the servers?
- bohm 4y agoThe posts and likes are all public. Some servers can charge users, and will likely have more resources to improve their offerings that way.
- zol 4y ago> A centralized service runs on computers wholly under control of a single entity. They can change, monitor, amplify and bury all information. They can read your private messages. They can delete content, promote other content, and even impersonate you. Apart from reading your private messages, does that mean you still need to trust that the server you’re connected to isn’t doing all those other things?
- bohm 4y agoNope. You own your keys, and you can switch to a different server instantly while retaining both your username and your followers. They can't impersonate you because they don't have your keys. They can't ready your messages because they don't have your keys. It's a bit more complex underneath (e.g. the are light-clients that you can entrust with part of your key), but that's the gist.
- thrashh 4y agoI don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this. A server can’t really charge its users. I and most people would probably not pay to help support a server. Twitter works because most people who actually interact on it don’t pay. And the source of Twitter’s woes is honestly because the company has never been profitable (unlike Facebook, Google and so on which did). Also, requiring a domain name to have an alias? So this service is just going to be a community of sysadmins and web developers?
- jrm4 4y agoUm, ever heard of email?
- ryan29 4y ago> I don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this. I'd pay something for it. The way the author describes it I would have a 'Small-World' server. I'd be willing to pay $5-10 per month to connect that to a 'Big-World' server. After that I'd expect the costs to scale with the size of my 'Small-World' server. As long as that's based on resource consumption rather than some kind of per-user scheme I think it would work fairly well. The biggest issue for me would be setting up and maintaining a server. I don't really want to do that and a hosted service for it probably skews towards costs that are more than I'd be willing to pay just to be connected to the network.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y agoThe simplest/best way I could think of is for users to be paid for their messages. You post something insightful, funny, worthy of attention, other users decide to pay you 0.00whatever USD. The problem then becomes that we haven't actually solved micro and nano-transactions in these 30-something years of HTTP over TCP connections [1]. [1] RFC 8905 - The 'payto' URI Scheme for Payments, https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8905.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8905.html
- diordiderot 4y ago> Also, requiring a domain name to have an alias? So this service is just going to be a community of sysadmins and web developers e.g. mastodon