13 ms·

The case for the decentralization of online forums

171 points by viksit 3y ago

marginalia_nu 3y ago
A big reason forums centralized in the first place was the maintenance cost. I don't see anything has changed in that regard. Reddit and similar solved it through economics of scale.
- blantonl 3y ago
  How did they "solve" it, from a business sense? Don't they readily admit that they aren't profitable?
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Neither were the forums of yore, to be fair. They were mostly run by volunteers.
dv_dt 3y ago
Not to say there should be only centralized solutions, but there are tradeoffs. The case against decentralization is that moderation and resisting network attacks can be non-trivial amounts of work. Many newspapers shut down their forums for lack of being able to form a quality level of conversation forum without a massive amount of work. In the case of reddit, a subreddit could share the work of building common moderation strategies and tools, increasing the quality accessible. Ironically, reddit killing their third-party api, kills some of their centralization advantages in this respect. Sharing common work is possible in decentralized forums, but only with somewhat standardized interfaces. Of which activity-pub and mastodon et al are sort of just on the starting path. Every forum choosing among a myriad of forum interfaces makes other subdomains of the same solution harder to coordinate and mature vs centralized.
- viksit 3y ago
  (author here) this is a great point, thank you for posting it. i've been researching this problem for a year now, and came across some interesting technical and social povs on moderation and network attacks. - moderation: my pov is that large companies with teams of moderators (such as twitter or facebook) wont and cant scale to varied moderation policies across the world. so the task of moderation has to be boiled down to the communities themselves. the question then is - a) how do you prevent a moderator from getting power hungry, b) how do you incentivize them to do the work and c) how do you make this auditable and provide recourse mechanisms? for all of this, open access to an API to build the right tools is super important as you said. and having this done on a protocol is the only real way to scale it imo. - network attacks: we've done a lot of work in approximate solutions for sybil attacks. using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) as a way to order messages, and having them stored on multiple locations (eg arweave) in append only ways gives a lot more resilience / provides a way towards solutions here.
  - than3 3y ago
    I'd like to add that looking at sybil attacks as just a network attack would be a mistake. These type of attacks apply broadly at many different levels, for example the minimum thresholds for amplification/de-amplification can be significantly lower than the 51% that's normally attributed by definition to these type of attacks. Any decentralized moderation system would run into issues with a sybil attack distorting reflected appraisal within a community. Some benefits of such an attack might be dropping the post out of view/delisting it, using generative ai to create harassing/malign responses attacking volunteer psychology (where they stop contributing/volunteering when it costs them). Useless/mindless generative chatter that is akin to jamming a communications channel, but indistinguishable by most people which in the absence of a clear signal causes isolation (thanks AI). Some of these challenges also don't have a good answer because they are fundamental problems where a solution would break automata theory/determinism. So you are left with only a bad, potential liability from an approximate solution. Most propaganda and political warfare focuses on attacking various parts of communications with the intent to either isolate, or destroy/debase personal identity, which is largely determined by reflected appraisal. Once isolated, with their belief system destabilized it makes people vulnerable and does dangerous/weird things to people's psychology. This has been known for quite some time though hasn't gotten much attention outside certain academic circles, and by quite some time I mean roughly generally known between the 1920s-50s. The main driving component was formalized under the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (1929), though it was in common use by governments prior to that. Since most social media already has these issues (but they don't communicate about them in public regularly if at all), internally they do recognize these issues and take a Signals and Systems approach, but the result is as you've seen. If you cant exceed parity vs. competitive solutions you wont be able to increase marketshare/market penetration.
olh 3y ago
Flarum got a grant to make it federated like Mastodon. https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2023-balancing-open-source-and-success https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2...
- viksit 3y ago
  this is a really interesting point, thanks for pointing to it. Flarium to me competes with discourse in many ways, vs say, Reddit. one of the biggest challenges to this model (IMO) has been that there is no "subreddit" or "stack exchange" model for discovery, or for communities to build their own "spaces". my post comes at this from the perspective of - what would it take to create a decentralized "reddit", complete with subreddits etc. your comment makes me realize that I can do better in addressing this point! ty!
  - coldcode 3y ago
    I don't want spaces where people talk about one thing in a bubble, and then have to manually jump from space to space. Reddit is both cesspool and useful resource, but I can easily move from space to space or combine them all into a bigger space of my choosing. Being able to build a multi-space of things that interest me and leave out (at least some) of what I don't like or care for is necessary. Mastodon isn't that. Reddit is, or was. Can both ideas be combined? I am not sure yet.
deleted 3y ago
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hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Sorry, I don't buy it: 1. Regarding the monetization scheme, nobody has ever gotten anything to really significantly work beyond advertising. Yes, there are some niche solutions that can support a dev team of maybe 1, but at the end of the day most people aren't willing to pay with anything except their time. 2. Social networks that don't have at least some level of top-down moderation always seem to turn into complete cesspools that fail. You could say reddit relies on their volunteer moderators, and that's totally true, but even these moderators must abide by rules, reddit has terminated numerous subreddits in the past for breaking the rules, etc. I think people should fundamentally accept that humans can't "self organize" at a very large scale on the Internet. I think the reason for this is that anonymity (and I obviously see the irony in me posting about this) completely breaks our normal human systems of "checks and balances". I honestly think Mike Tyson said it best: "Social media made you all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." There are just too few downsides to being a complete asshole or troll online, where in the real world there are natural consequences for acting that way.
- swayvil 3y ago
  1) Agreed. Here's are 2 alternatives. Make it so cheap that it doesn't matter. Distribute the hosting. 2) Gotta quibble. I've seen (on reddit) plenty of top-down moderated cesspools. And several totally hand-off utopias too. I think the trick is 1) a subject matter that touches no nerves 2) a high enough bar for entry/respect that excludes the average riffraff. Also we need a way to punch people in the face over the internet. Best I can think of is everybody gets a permanent dossier, publicly shared, that records all your good and bad deeds (and your judgment of good and bad too, for weighting). This makes assholish behavior muchbmore detrimental to a happy online social life.
  - viksit 3y ago
    re (1) - how do you think about doing (1)? one of the biggest challenges in hosting this is who pays for the electricity in running the machines! re (2) - I wish we had a way to do subjects that touched no nerves on the internet. that said - an identity system which keeps track of your activity (anonymously, pseudonymously, or real identity) is a great suggestion and something we've implemented in our protocol.
mikece 3y ago
Couldn't ActivityPub be used to as the protocol for this without any modifications? I don't see a logical difference between the structure of Pleroma/Mastodon conversations and a message forum aside from how the UI is presented. If someone took the UI of phpBB but used ActivityPub as the data source it should Just Work(tm).
- viksit 3y ago
  great point. IMO, there are a few things that are needed at the technical level for a system like this to work. - identity - a common id system across the whole system that supports all existing means (think oauth based) - a mechanism to sign your messages to prove that you truly were the poster (since there is no longer a central authority to validate that) - a mechanism to store these messages and get them in real time (this is where activitypub can be super handy) - a way to search / index these messages for retrieval - a way to create a feed of activity that uses some algorithm for ranking - a way to discover other forums / communities so while activity pub serves well for one aspect, the other ones aren't quite there yet to be used in a decentralized fashion.
nunobrito 3y ago
On that article, decentralization only means going back to early 2000's with small hosted forum sites or something still centralized like Mastodon. Technology truly moved far in the meanwhile. At the moment the only protocol that goes beyond expectations is Nostr. Over there it doesn't matter where your data is hosted and there are zero blochains. The only thing that matters is your private key (identity) and with that you can always write wherever someone is willing to accept your writings. Quite a novelty paradigm, worthy of a true sucessor to Usenet.
- throwaway420690 3y ago
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moneywoes 3y ago
How does moderation work with decentralization
- viksit 3y ago
  great question - something i've been thinking about a lot. my framework is, - moderation needs two levels (top level and grassroots) - top level - has to come from communities that are not in an "accepted" list which shouldn't be allowed to form. (the usual suspects like hate speech, CSAM). one way to think about is having community server owners "stake" some sort of investment and risk losing it in case communities on their servers get banned. this would happen for instance if you run a server for this protocol, and someone on your server creates a community against policies set by the protocol steering committee. - grassroots level - moderators are those who actively contribute to the community, can be elected, have audits on their logs, and can also be incentivized for their work (eg, given a "salary" every month) through that staked fund we talked about earlier. ultimately, no one is doing any of this free and we should assume that monetary incentives in some way that are aligned with the community's have to be factored in.
  - flagrant_taco 3y ago
    > top level - has to come from communities that are not in an "accepted" list which shouldn't be allowed to form. (the usual suspects like hate speech, CSAM) Even this becomes tricky because you first have to make a common list of banned content and define the lines between what each category of content is. Sure a huge majority of people would like to see CSAM on the list, but they definitely won't agree on what is/isn't CSAM in their opinion I've recently been working through whether any level of content centralization is possible without the fundamental challenge of moderation. If anyone can follow me by consuming content I post to my own site then the main questions are around discoverability. If I'm posting content to a server and service that someone else is directly responsible for, even if federated, they have to consider moderation and the array of different content laws globally.
- throwaway420690 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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rsync 3y ago
We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, web1.0 forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most valuable and enriching forums currently online. What's wrong with HN ? What's wrong with metafilter ? What's wrong with letsrun or doom9 ? The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big businesses. If you can let go of the economics there is no technical - or usability - hurdle. We know this because we're already doing it right here.
- Miraste 3y ago
  There's nothing wrong with them, but reddit's size lets it gather a lot of extremely specific knowledge that, were all subreddits separate forums, would be lost. Sure, many of these communities are strong enough to run their own infrastructure, but more of them are not.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    Before Reddit, almost immediately before, that's what Usenet was for. Google kind of ruined it by hijacking it with Groups, then Reddit took over. Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet.
    - jjav 3y ago
      > Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet. That is ... Usenet. That's exactly what Usenet is (not was, because it's still there, even if not many people use it. I still read it on many days.)
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        It's not decentralized in the modern sense, and doesn't offer the functionality I would want from a modern decentralized solution.
        jjav 3y ago
        What are those "modern" characteristics you seek? I'll note that everyone who has claimed to build a better email or better Usenet for the last 4 decades has invariably failed. So there's that. In the short term, it's very easy to build a more sleek and fancy communications platforms. Hundreds have been built and they can be nice for a while. All of them eventually fail due to the inherent limitation of proprietary profit-seeking closed systems. Of course I'm not claiming NNTP and Usenet are perfect. Sure we could tweak them for this and that improvements. But the fundamental principle of decentralized peer to peer distribution is the core strength. Without that, any solution will ultimately fail in the long run.
Berticus12 3y ago
Moderation and ownership should go hand and hand. Moderators in Reddit essentially have fake sweat equity for their efforts. There has to be a better model and I think decentralization is key.
- janoc 3y ago
  You forgot to say why and how exactly. A decentralized network won't magically remove the need for moderation or make the job less onerous or more attractive to do. Only now the server/instance owner is not only paying for the hosting out of their own pocket, now they are (also legally in many cases!) responsible for the content moderation too! What a win! That totally makes it super attractive to do.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  We need more tools that encode the decision making methods of deliberative bodies, and allow groups to moderate themselves. They should be distributed-first. The only method that we use so far in software is dictatorship. edit: I think that the Community Notes function of nu twitter is a serious step in the right direction, and there should be more academic discussion about how processes like that could be implemented best, or even updated on the fly to match the changing desires of users.
armchairhacker 3y ago
Decentralization is important because you need a point of reach in case you get cut off from the centralized platform or (more likely) it gets taken down. Otherwise you’re cut off, or a group is cut off and dissolves. But word spreads around pretty easily, and even though most forums are centralized, there are a lot of forums. Many centralized platforms = a decentralized platform, because people connected to multiple will share messages across channels. The biggest issue is like, in the Reddit debacle, many communities are likely to be hurt or even destroyed. And it will be hard to re-form them and get near the same amount of popularity
flagrant_taco 3y ago
I've never quite wrapped my head around where decentralization ends and federation begins. What's really the difference between the two? Is it a question of degree, or in this example is it only decentralized if individuals in the network own their own content?
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Don't worry about definitions. Explain exactly what you're discussing, then introduce the technical term as a shorthand. Even if people had a previous understanding of that term, they'll know what you're talking about, which is all that matters. I associate arguments about the meaning of the word "decentralization" with pseudo-arguments about how nobody wants to run a server that require "decentralization" to mean that everybody has to run a server.
  - flagrant_taco 3y ago
    The definitions are interesting to me because the terms are often used as as punchline with little extra context. Agreed that the context of how a person intends to use each term is more important. I just wish we could have a consistent definition so it didn't require a full explantion each time.
- 1123581321 3y ago
  It’s not just degree. In the context of social networks, decentralization refers to the location(s) of the servers and federation refers to ownership of the data. In that context, federation refers to multiple operators owning portions of the data in the wider network, not the ops structure a single provider is using in their back end. Theoretically you could have a centralized federated model where users own servers in a single data center! The most extreme form of both decentralization and federation is a p2p model where each user owns their own data on their own computer. I agree with the other thread that it’s best to understand the meaning behind these terms and not to rely on them as shorthand or gotchas, but we do need separate terms for these two concepts.
  - 3y ago
rambambram 3y ago
And then at the end of an article with nice ideas for an open web, there's a link to a Twitter account. Viksit.com has an RSS feed (which I follow now, with my own website that works perfect on an open web), but there's no mention anywhere, also no RSS logo anywhere. Strange, haha.
- viksit 3y ago
  haha touché. i rolled this site myself via gatsby and forgot to add the RSS icon - thanks for pointing this out.
throwaway420690 3y ago
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imtringued 3y ago
The problem with online forums is the need for moderation. Decentralisation doesn't make moderation irrelevanty in fact it becomes more relevant because people have to store other people's data and trust me you don't want to store everything.
janoc 3y ago
The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run. Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the content, lock down APIs and push in your face ads happen. The VCs that were paying for Twitter or Reddit aren't willing to do that forever - and neither of the companies are actually making profit or even not making a loss. Whether that is because the business is poorly run or some other problem is secondary but unless they start to make money somehow, they will close down at some point. It is that simple. The article - like most that spout these 'decentralization solves everything' (same like blockchain/crypto/web3/metaverse/etc.) mantras completely ignore this problem or handwave it away. As if a decentralized system ran on fairy dust and unicorn poop and didn't need to pay for servers, electricity, wages, etc. Sorry, but that's not how the world works, folks. If you don't want to pay money for a service then that leaves the operator with either ads - or has to pay it out of their own pocket. No "defi" or "fedi" solves that - only makes things maybe more resilient when one operator goes bankrupt or rogue. But the rest still have to pay their expenses somehow. Also the entire premise is BS - as if online forums were somehow centralized and everyone was prevented from running their own server and community, using their own rules (no "censorship" or "cancel culture"! Yay!) and money (a-ha!). Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc. aren't the only places where one can have a discussion or post information.
- NoraCodes 3y ago
  > Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users. The problem is when people want to make a profit on their internet community. Then, no amount of community support is enough, because nobody wants to donate to your investors.
  - janoc 3y ago
    >Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users. And that is somehow invalidating what I have said? Sure, if you have 10 users then your costs are going to be negligible and you can probably sustain it from your own pocket or donations. But good luck running a larger/popular service like that. There are reasons why the more popular Mastodon servers had to stop accepting new users after the Twitter/Musk fiasco - it was simply not sustainable for the one-man operator crews.
seydor 3y ago
we have tried decentralization and it doesnt work because the internet is no longer in its baby state. People reminisce of those rosy times where only a few select highly educated people were online but this is not going to be the case ever again. Trust is not a solved problem The best we can hope is we can build AI-moderated content systems where the AI is subject to some form of self-governement by the community by e.g. voting among possible moderation models. Adding humans into the mix always invite uncomfortable gatekeeping and political issues
- naravara 3y ago
  > People reminisce of those rosy times where only a few select highly educated people were online but this is not going to be the case ever again. It doesn’t need to be. Forums can just be unfriendly to people who don’t meet the standards for discussion. They can do this overtly, through moderation that shoves out low value contributors, or more subtly through design choices and cultural factors that discourage low tier posting.
phas0ruk 3y ago
If the platforms revenue doesn’t come from ads, where does it come from?
EuAndreh 3y ago
Why not email and mailing lists? Past all email limitations, a simple mbox archives everything. It works offline, is decentralized, etc.
andreygrehov 3y ago
I think decentralization is important. Many centralized forums these days have their own "narrative". It could be of a political or economical nature. For example, each moderator on Reddit is biased towards what should and should not be published on "their" sub-reddit. Here on HN unconventional wisdom is not welcomed either. Posts get easily downvoted to the bottom and then visually suppressed, hinting other readers: "hey, look, this opinion is not important, feel free to either ignore it or downvote". This visual suppression is, imho, a subconscious manipulation. Why nudge readers toward a certain direction? Let everyone decide on their own. The current standard is "agree with me or you’re a white supremacist tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and a nazi". Alternative opinion is akin to a crime. Twitter is moving in the right direction (unconventional wisdom). There are very few bots left (barely see any). Irrespective of your political spectrum, nobody's going to ban you. Everyone is welcome on the platform. Twitter is about to start sharing ad revenue with content creators, which is a fantastic move in my opinion. Lack of moderation brings everything into a balance – a self-organized chaos which is the closest thing to what our everyday lives are.
mnd999 3y ago
This is just Usenet. Everyone used to use it and it still exists.
samsquire 3y ago
I'm starting a decentralised blog network I want people to create GitHub repositories for their blogs and just post to README.md in reverse chronological order. Then email me your blog repository URL or reply here and I'll create a curated list of blogs.
- wktra 3y ago
  Are there any examples of blogs already doing this?
joker99 3y ago
In all of this I'm wondering: why not apply the Wikipedia model to reddit? Create a foundation that employs a couple of people, that host and develop the site. Keep the volunteer mods, but lay down some guidelines for moderation. Fund it like Wikipedia is funded, like lots of submissions on HN have shown in the past, Wikipedia is swimming in money. Not everything needs to be for profit... Decentralized funding combined with centralized non profit operation would seem like a non perfect but very workable solution to this problem
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I’m just kind of … aghast … at the thought of reviving UseNet. Mastodon seems to be a good canary, to see how decentralization works. It’s already well under way. But I’m just a scarred, traumatized old soldier, and my opinion probably doesn’t count for much. Maybe we really do need another alt.tasteless. It would seem quaint, compared to today’s foolishness.
jedberg 3y ago
I see a lot of people throwing out Usenet as an option, and I wonder, did anyone here ever have to admin a Usenet node? It's a huge pain in the ass. First off, the storage requirements are both unlimited and unpredictable. Someone might post some huge files to a group, and all of a sudden your server disk is full. You could set your server to drop large messages or attachments, but then you didn't have the complete message. Then there was spam. Everyone had to do their own spam filtering. Or ... pay an upstream provider to do it for you. In which case they're basically the centralized solution. The reason Internet forums took off was because it was way easier to let one central group manager the spam and load and network and disk and.... instead of everyone doing it themselves.
mikewarot 3y ago
You'll always keep running into security issues AND the need for moderation at the heart of any community. It is possible to actually solve the security issues technically, but that is likely a generation away. Until then, the fact that the servers AND the users computer are insecure lead almost inevitably to walled gardens, and avoiding innovation. Thus there will be centralized locii of control for the foreseeable future. We can't democratize the way we use the internet back into a true commons until usable secure general purpose computing becomes widely available and adopted. We had it (secure general purpose computing) in the early 1980s with floppy based computers and dialup. I thought we'd get it back by 2030, but I'm not as hopeful any more.
acco102 3y ago
Bitmessage is decentralized and works.
deafpolygon 3y ago
I think we need a decentralization authentication platform. Not a decentralized online forum. One of the reasons why people don't like going to different forums - having to make a new sign-up, having to give out your e-mail, and having to remember a new set of passwords. In a world when security breaches are common, having to remember that one forum you created an account for and logged into... is off-putting. People love Facebook because, log in and done. Log into Messenger, connect it to WhatsApp, Instagram. Their entire world is right there. The first step to cut through all that is the ability to get everyone onto a common auth platform. But no one wants to do that because that means sharing user data, having to share the users with other possible platforms.
sebastos 3y ago
Like many of you, I often get nerd-sniped into thinking about what it would take to create a perfect, frictionless medium for decentralized communication. All of the usual hits, like IPFS, paid posts via micro-transactions, etc. often make an appearance in these brainstorms. But today, I took another tack: I started wondering what it would actually _be_ like if you had such a technology. Skip the 'how', and just imagine there was a way to open an edit-text field and send your message to "the world", with no intervening centralized boogeyman waiting in the middle. The thing that suddenly struck me is the question of how anybody would _find_ your message. Ok, you yeeted your thought out into cyberspace - who cares? Who's going to read it? I find that in my own habits, the question of who's going to read my message has a LOT to do with how interested I am in sending it. I suddenly realized that this is the critical point. Something that Reddit has going for it is that using it has the subjective quality of going to a _place_ in the world - a fixed place that others can find. It's not just that your content is discoverable per se, but rather that it _will be discovered_, because it is posted in a known, frequented place that will have other eyeballs. Like Martin Luther's 95 Theses, _where_ you post most messages has a lot to do with how interesting they are. It's accessibility, yes, but also the practical question of whether people will actually exercise their ability to access it. If Martin Luther had nailed his theses to a random tree in the forest with complex directions on how to go find it, it just wouldn't have been the same. They would have been almost as easy to access (except perhaps for people who didn't find it easy to navigate the forest), but the fact the church door was an inherently centralized high-traffic zone WAS what made it interesting. Perhaps this sounds a bit trite, but I've started to realize that we crave centralized places to converse because conversing isn't nearly as much fun without an audience. The Reddits and Twitters of the world are popular and interesting _because_ they are a centralization of our communications - a front door of the church we can pin things to. If you find yourself thinking this is very incomplete, give it a beat. For instance, like me, you might have some level of disdain for performative soap-box'ing on a platform like Twitter. You might object that "sure, a lot of Reddit was crappy, affected karma-farming, but I just used it to discuss analog audio equipment and ask tech support questions about Rust!". But even niche interests, tech support, NSFW subreddits - the are all fundamentally relying on the same principles of knowing that you will have an audience. You might want different audiences at different times, of course, but most of the fun is related to how close you can get to the upper bound of who you wish could look at your content. Maybe you don't really care that the whole WORLD can see your post, just that the entire world of ukulele enthusiasts can see it. But within that slice, the more the better. Also the more that you put those disparate audiences next to each together with a central nexus / map, the bigger overall audience you can expect to have due to cross-pollination. I bet that if you're really honest with yourself about what your favorite places to discuss weird topics in the 90's were, you'll realize that even though it was some phpbb forum, there was some microcosm of centralization going on, if even just at the level of human affairs. If it was some esoteric hobby, then you were probably talking on the official forums of some organization that ran the biggest public events related to that hobby, or whatever. Whatever it was, there was _some_ germ of a winner of a popularity contest - some entity that had the visibility and recognition to centralize the discussion and make it a place where you might get some interesting eyes on your text. I could be misunderstanding some of the fediverse, but it seems like there's an explicit intention to create these autonomous sub-communities and remove any kind of centralizing authority. But really, that top layer generally IS the value, and is how you create a sense of Place. You can make the infrastructure as decentralized as you want, of course, but if the discussions themselves don't feel like they're happening on the church doors, you really don't have anything a phpbb forum doesn't have. You've basically just got people sending messages out into the void, which is about as fun and interesting as talking to a customer support chatbot. So, at _some_ resolution, none of this is interesting unless you're giving people a way to post their content in THE place to discuss this topic. "A" place to discuss this topic is comparatively worthless. Zooming way way out, I want to make a higher-level comment using an analogy. All of online experience is a lot like a party. There are many things that it's good to have for a party: food, music, drinks, entertainment, shuttle service - lots of things. Yet we can all think back to parties that forewent some or all of these things and still gave us fond memories. There are a few things, however, that your party _has_ to have, like, definitionally: a place to be, and great people that show up. A party without these things isn't a party. And if you organize all of the nice-to-haves, but skip the essentials, then you've just got something very sad... like a loud, well-catered, empty basement. Related - sometimes bigger parties are better, but at a certain point, things just end up crowded, and probably a lot of your favorite people have left anyway. Once somebody starts charging exorbitant rates at the door, things might be headed downhill. The point of the analogy is that where we humans choose to gather online is a fluid and vexing thing. You're going to find it impossible to write hard-and-fast laws about how your new discussion space should work because all that really matters is people are finding a way to have fun. This party-like quality, more than anything else, accounts for the ephemeral nature of all online platforms, and the natural herd migrations from myspaces to facebooks to instagrams to snapchats to tiktoks, etc. And sure, AFTER the fact, you can look back and give a technical analysis of why Facebook succeeded. You can also look back on your party and point to specific things that created a fun situation. But this never transmutes into some kind of formula for future success, and if you think you have one, you're probably chasing last night's party. Are we so sure that holding the party at Brad's house is what made the party bad? Yeah, he started charging $5 a head, and a bunch of jerks showed up at the end. But I'm not so sure that means we should swear off house parties from now on. Like, I salute the open-mindedness of the guys trying to figure out a way to hold a party without a host... you know, as a thought experiment. But it would be cool if there was a place to hang out next Friday, too...

171 points by viksit 3y ago

A big reason forums centralized in the first place was the maintenance cost. I don't see anything has changed in that regard. Reddit and similar solved it through economics of scale.

blantonl 3y ago
How did they "solve" it, from a business sense? Don't they readily admit that they aren't profitable?
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Neither were the forums of yore, to be fair. They were mostly run by volunteers.

dv_dt 3y ago

Not to say there should be only centralized solutions, but there are tradeoffs. The case against decentralization is that moderation and resisting network attacks can be non-trivial amounts of work. Many newspapers shut down their forums for lack of being able to form a quality level of conversation forum without a massive amount of work. In the case of reddit, a subreddit could share the work of building common moderation strategies and tools, increasing the quality accessible. Ironically, reddit killing their third-party api, kills some of their centralization advantages in this respect. Sharing common work is possible in decentralized forums, but only with somewhat standardized interfaces. Of which activity-pub and mastodon et al are sort of just on the starting path. Every forum choosing among a myriad of forum interfaces makes other subdomains of the same solution harder to coordinate and mature vs centralized.

viksit 3y ago
(author here) this is a great point, thank you for posting it. i've been researching this problem for a year now, and came across some interesting technical and social povs on moderation and network attacks. - moderation: my pov is that large companies with teams of moderators (such as twitter or facebook) wont and cant scale to varied moderation policies across the world. so the task of moderation has to be boiled down to the communities themselves. the question then is - a) how do you prevent a moderator from getting power hungry, b) how do you incentivize them to do the work and c) how do you make this auditable and provide recourse mechanisms? for all of this, open access to an API to build the right tools is super important as you said. and having this done on a protocol is the only real way to scale it imo. - network attacks: we've done a lot of work in approximate solutions for sybil attacks. using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) as a way to order messages, and having them stored on multiple locations (eg arweave) in append only ways gives a lot more resilience / provides a way towards solutions here.
- than3 3y ago
  I'd like to add that looking at sybil attacks as just a network attack would be a mistake. These type of attacks apply broadly at many different levels, for example the minimum thresholds for amplification/de-amplification can be significantly lower than the 51% that's normally attributed by definition to these type of attacks. Any decentralized moderation system would run into issues with a sybil attack distorting reflected appraisal within a community. Some benefits of such an attack might be dropping the post out of view/delisting it, using generative ai to create harassing/malign responses attacking volunteer psychology (where they stop contributing/volunteering when it costs them). Useless/mindless generative chatter that is akin to jamming a communications channel, but indistinguishable by most people which in the absence of a clear signal causes isolation (thanks AI). Some of these challenges also don't have a good answer because they are fundamental problems where a solution would break automata theory/determinism. So you are left with only a bad, potential liability from an approximate solution. Most propaganda and political warfare focuses on attacking various parts of communications with the intent to either isolate, or destroy/debase personal identity, which is largely determined by reflected appraisal. Once isolated, with their belief system destabilized it makes people vulnerable and does dangerous/weird things to people's psychology. This has been known for quite some time though hasn't gotten much attention outside certain academic circles, and by quite some time I mean roughly generally known between the 1920s-50s. The main driving component was formalized under the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (1929), though it was in common use by governments prior to that. Since most social media already has these issues (but they don't communicate about them in public regularly if at all), internally they do recognize these issues and take a Signals and Systems approach, but the result is as you've seen. If you cant exceed parity vs. competitive solutions you wont be able to increase marketshare/market penetration.

olh 3y ago

Flarum got a grant to make it federated like Mastodon. https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2023-balancing-open-source-and-success https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2...

viksit 3y ago
this is a really interesting point, thanks for pointing to it. Flarium to me competes with discourse in many ways, vs say, Reddit. one of the biggest challenges to this model (IMO) has been that there is no "subreddit" or "stack exchange" model for discovery, or for communities to build their own "spaces". my post comes at this from the perspective of - what would it take to create a decentralized "reddit", complete with subreddits etc. your comment makes me realize that I can do better in addressing this point! ty!
- coldcode 3y ago
  I don't want spaces where people talk about one thing in a bubble, and then have to manually jump from space to space. Reddit is both cesspool and useful resource, but I can easily move from space to space or combine them all into a bigger space of my choosing. Being able to build a multi-space of things that interest me and leave out (at least some) of what I don't like or care for is necessary. Mastodon isn't that. Reddit is, or was. Can both ideas be combined? I am not sure yet.

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hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Sorry, I don't buy it: 1. Regarding the monetization scheme, nobody has ever gotten anything to really significantly work beyond advertising. Yes, there are some niche solutions that can support a dev team of maybe 1, but at the end of the day most people aren't willing to pay with anything except their time. 2. Social networks that don't have at least some level of top-down moderation always seem to turn into complete cesspools that fail. You could say reddit relies on their volunteer moderators, and that's totally true, but even these moderators must abide by rules, reddit has terminated numerous subreddits in the past for breaking the rules, etc. I think people should fundamentally accept that humans can't "self organize" at a very large scale on the Internet. I think the reason for this is that anonymity (and I obviously see the irony in me posting about this) completely breaks our normal human systems of "checks and balances". I honestly think Mike Tyson said it best: "Social media made you all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." There are just too few downsides to being a complete asshole or troll online, where in the real world there are natural consequences for acting that way.

swayvil 3y ago
1) Agreed. Here's are 2 alternatives. Make it so cheap that it doesn't matter. Distribute the hosting. 2) Gotta quibble. I've seen (on reddit) plenty of top-down moderated cesspools. And several totally hand-off utopias too. I think the trick is 1) a subject matter that touches no nerves 2) a high enough bar for entry/respect that excludes the average riffraff. Also we need a way to punch people in the face over the internet. Best I can think of is everybody gets a permanent dossier, publicly shared, that records all your good and bad deeds (and your judgment of good and bad too, for weighting). This makes assholish behavior muchbmore detrimental to a happy online social life.
- viksit 3y ago
  re (1) - how do you think about doing (1)? one of the biggest challenges in hosting this is who pays for the electricity in running the machines! re (2) - I wish we had a way to do subjects that touched no nerves on the internet. that said - an identity system which keeps track of your activity (anonymously, pseudonymously, or real identity) is a great suggestion and something we've implemented in our protocol.

mikece 3y ago

Couldn't ActivityPub be used to as the protocol for this without any modifications? I don't see a logical difference between the structure of Pleroma/Mastodon conversations and a message forum aside from how the UI is presented. If someone took the UI of phpBB but used ActivityPub as the data source it should Just Work(tm).

viksit 3y ago
great point. IMO, there are a few things that are needed at the technical level for a system like this to work. - identity - a common id system across the whole system that supports all existing means (think oauth based) - a mechanism to sign your messages to prove that you truly were the poster (since there is no longer a central authority to validate that) - a mechanism to store these messages and get them in real time (this is where activitypub can be super handy) - a way to search / index these messages for retrieval - a way to create a feed of activity that uses some algorithm for ranking - a way to discover other forums / communities so while activity pub serves well for one aspect, the other ones aren't quite there yet to be used in a decentralized fashion.

nunobrito 3y ago

On that article, decentralization only means going back to early 2000's with small hosted forum sites or something still centralized like Mastodon. Technology truly moved far in the meanwhile. At the moment the only protocol that goes beyond expectations is Nostr. Over there it doesn't matter where your data is hosted and there are zero blochains. The only thing that matters is your private key (identity) and with that you can always write wherever someone is willing to accept your writings. Quite a novelty paradigm, worthy of a true sucessor to Usenet.

throwaway420690 3y ago
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moneywoes 3y ago

How does moderation work with decentralization

viksit 3y ago
great question - something i've been thinking about a lot. my framework is, - moderation needs two levels (top level and grassroots) - top level - has to come from communities that are not in an "accepted" list which shouldn't be allowed to form. (the usual suspects like hate speech, CSAM). one way to think about is having community server owners "stake" some sort of investment and risk losing it in case communities on their servers get banned. this would happen for instance if you run a server for this protocol, and someone on your server creates a community against policies set by the protocol steering committee. - grassroots level - moderators are those who actively contribute to the community, can be elected, have audits on their logs, and can also be incentivized for their work (eg, given a "salary" every month) through that staked fund we talked about earlier. ultimately, no one is doing any of this free and we should assume that monetary incentives in some way that are aligned with the community's have to be factored in.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  > top level - has to come from communities that are not in an "accepted" list which shouldn't be allowed to form. (the usual suspects like hate speech, CSAM) Even this becomes tricky because you first have to make a common list of banned content and define the lines between what each category of content is. Sure a huge majority of people would like to see CSAM on the list, but they definitely won't agree on what is/isn't CSAM in their opinion I've recently been working through whether any level of content centralization is possible without the fundamental challenge of moderation. If anyone can follow me by consuming content I post to my own site then the main questions are around discoverability. If I'm posting content to a server and service that someone else is directly responsible for, even if federated, they have to consider moderation and the array of different content laws globally.
throwaway420690 3y ago
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rsync 3y ago

We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, web1.0 forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most valuable and enriching forums currently online. What's wrong with HN ? What's wrong with metafilter ? What's wrong with letsrun or doom9 ? The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big businesses. If you can let go of the economics there is no technical - or usability - hurdle. We know this because we're already doing it right here.

Miraste 3y ago
There's nothing wrong with them, but reddit's size lets it gather a lot of extremely specific knowledge that, were all subreddits separate forums, would be lost. Sure, many of these communities are strong enough to run their own infrastructure, but more of them are not.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  Before Reddit, almost immediately before, that's what Usenet was for. Google kind of ruined it by hijacking it with Groups, then Reddit took over. Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet.
  - jjav 3y ago
    > Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet. That is ... Usenet. That's exactly what Usenet is (not was, because it's still there, even if not many people use it. I still read it on many days.)
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      It's not decentralized in the modern sense, and doesn't offer the functionality I would want from a modern decentralized solution.
      - jjav 3y ago
        What are those "modern" characteristics you seek? I'll note that everyone who has claimed to build a better email or better Usenet for the last 4 decades has invariably failed. So there's that. In the short term, it's very easy to build a more sleek and fancy communications platforms. Hundreds have been built and they can be nice for a while. All of them eventually fail due to the inherent limitation of proprietary profit-seeking closed systems. Of course I'm not claiming NNTP and Usenet are perfect. Sure we could tweak them for this and that improvements. But the fundamental principle of decentralized peer to peer distribution is the core strength. Without that, any solution will ultimately fail in the long run.

Berticus12 3y ago

Moderation and ownership should go hand and hand. Moderators in Reddit essentially have fake sweat equity for their efforts. There has to be a better model and I think decentralization is key.

janoc 3y ago
You forgot to say why and how exactly. A decentralized network won't magically remove the need for moderation or make the job less onerous or more attractive to do. Only now the server/instance owner is not only paying for the hosting out of their own pocket, now they are (also legally in many cases!) responsible for the content moderation too! What a win! That totally makes it super attractive to do.
pessimizer 3y ago
We need more tools that encode the decision making methods of deliberative bodies, and allow groups to moderate themselves. They should be distributed-first. The only method that we use so far in software is dictatorship. edit: I think that the Community Notes function of nu twitter is a serious step in the right direction, and there should be more academic discussion about how processes like that could be implemented best, or even updated on the fly to match the changing desires of users.

armchairhacker 3y ago

Decentralization is important because you need a point of reach in case you get cut off from the centralized platform or (more likely) it gets taken down. Otherwise you’re cut off, or a group is cut off and dissolves. But word spreads around pretty easily, and even though most forums are centralized, there are a lot of forums. Many centralized platforms = a decentralized platform, because people connected to multiple will share messages across channels. The biggest issue is like, in the Reddit debacle, many communities are likely to be hurt or even destroyed. And it will be hard to re-form them and get near the same amount of popularity

flagrant_taco 3y ago

I've never quite wrapped my head around where decentralization ends and federation begins. What's really the difference between the two? Is it a question of degree, or in this example is it only decentralized if individuals in the network own their own content?

pessimizer 3y ago
Don't worry about definitions. Explain exactly what you're discussing, then introduce the technical term as a shorthand. Even if people had a previous understanding of that term, they'll know what you're talking about, which is all that matters. I associate arguments about the meaning of the word "decentralization" with pseudo-arguments about how nobody wants to run a server that require "decentralization" to mean that everybody has to run a server.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  The definitions are interesting to me because the terms are often used as as punchline with little extra context. Agreed that the context of how a person intends to use each term is more important. I just wish we could have a consistent definition so it didn't require a full explantion each time.
1123581321 3y ago
It’s not just degree. In the context of social networks, decentralization refers to the location(s) of the servers and federation refers to ownership of the data. In that context, federation refers to multiple operators owning portions of the data in the wider network, not the ops structure a single provider is using in their back end. Theoretically you could have a centralized federated model where users own servers in a single data center! The most extreme form of both decentralization and federation is a p2p model where each user owns their own data on their own computer. I agree with the other thread that it’s best to understand the meaning behind these terms and not to rely on them as shorthand or gotchas, but we do need separate terms for these two concepts.
- 3y ago

rambambram 3y ago

And then at the end of an article with nice ideas for an open web, there's a link to a Twitter account. Viksit.com has an RSS feed (which I follow now, with my own website that works perfect on an open web), but there's no mention anywhere, also no RSS logo anywhere. Strange, haha.

viksit 3y ago
haha touché. i rolled this site myself via gatsby and forgot to add the RSS icon - thanks for pointing this out.

throwaway420690 3y ago

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imtringued 3y ago

The problem with online forums is the need for moderation. Decentralisation doesn't make moderation irrelevanty in fact it becomes more relevant because people have to store other people's data and trust me you don't want to store everything.

janoc 3y ago

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run. Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the content, lock down APIs and push in your face ads happen. The VCs that were paying for Twitter or Reddit aren't willing to do that forever - and neither of the companies are actually making profit or even not making a loss. Whether that is because the business is poorly run or some other problem is secondary but unless they start to make money somehow, they will close down at some point. It is that simple. The article - like most that spout these 'decentralization solves everything' (same like blockchain/crypto/web3/metaverse/etc.) mantras completely ignore this problem or handwave it away. As if a decentralized system ran on fairy dust and unicorn poop and didn't need to pay for servers, electricity, wages, etc. Sorry, but that's not how the world works, folks. If you don't want to pay money for a service then that leaves the operator with either ads - or has to pay it out of their own pocket. No "defi" or "fedi" solves that - only makes things maybe more resilient when one operator goes bankrupt or rogue. But the rest still have to pay their expenses somehow. Also the entire premise is BS - as if online forums were somehow centralized and everyone was prevented from running their own server and community, using their own rules (no "censorship" or "cancel culture"! Yay!) and money (a-ha!). Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc. aren't the only places where one can have a discussion or post information.

NoraCodes 3y ago
> Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users. The problem is when people want to make a profit on their internet community. Then, no amount of community support is enough, because nobody wants to donate to your investors.
- janoc 3y ago
  >Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users. And that is somehow invalidating what I have said? Sure, if you have 10 users then your costs are going to be negligible and you can probably sustain it from your own pocket or donations. But good luck running a larger/popular service like that. There are reasons why the more popular Mastodon servers had to stop accepting new users after the Twitter/Musk fiasco - it was simply not sustainable for the one-man operator crews.

seydor 3y ago

we have tried decentralization and it doesnt work because the internet is no longer in its baby state. People reminisce of those rosy times where only a few select highly educated people were online but this is not going to be the case ever again. Trust is not a solved problem The best we can hope is we can build AI-moderated content systems where the AI is subject to some form of self-governement by the community by e.g. voting among possible moderation models. Adding humans into the mix always invite uncomfortable gatekeeping and political issues

naravara 3y ago
> People reminisce of those rosy times where only a few select highly educated people were online but this is not going to be the case ever again. It doesn’t need to be. Forums can just be unfriendly to people who don’t meet the standards for discussion. They can do this overtly, through moderation that shoves out low value contributors, or more subtly through design choices and cultural factors that discourage low tier posting.

phas0ruk 3y ago

If the platforms revenue doesn’t come from ads, where does it come from?

EuAndreh 3y ago

Why not email and mailing lists? Past all email limitations, a simple mbox archives everything. It works offline, is decentralized, etc.

andreygrehov 3y ago

I think decentralization is important. Many centralized forums these days have their own "narrative". It could be of a political or economical nature. For example, each moderator on Reddit is biased towards what should and should not be published on "their" sub-reddit. Here on HN unconventional wisdom is not welcomed either. Posts get easily downvoted to the bottom and then visually suppressed, hinting other readers: "hey, look, this opinion is not important, feel free to either ignore it or downvote". This visual suppression is, imho, a subconscious manipulation. Why nudge readers toward a certain direction? Let everyone decide on their own. The current standard is "agree with me or you’re a white supremacist tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and a nazi". Alternative opinion is akin to a crime. Twitter is moving in the right direction (unconventional wisdom). There are very few bots left (barely see any). Irrespective of your political spectrum, nobody's going to ban you. Everyone is welcome on the platform. Twitter is about to start sharing ad revenue with content creators, which is a fantastic move in my opinion. Lack of moderation brings everything into a balance – a self-organized chaos which is the closest thing to what our everyday lives are.

mnd999 3y ago

This is just Usenet. Everyone used to use it and it still exists.

samsquire 3y ago

I'm starting a decentralised blog network I want people to create GitHub repositories for their blogs and just post to README.md in reverse chronological order. Then email me your blog repository URL or reply here and I'll create a curated list of blogs.

wktra 3y ago
Are there any examples of blogs already doing this?

joker99 3y ago

In all of this I'm wondering: why not apply the Wikipedia model to reddit? Create a foundation that employs a couple of people, that host and develop the site. Keep the volunteer mods, but lay down some guidelines for moderation. Fund it like Wikipedia is funded, like lots of submissions on HN have shown in the past, Wikipedia is swimming in money. Not everything needs to be for profit... Decentralized funding combined with centralized non profit operation would seem like a non perfect but very workable solution to this problem

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I’m just kind of … aghast … at the thought of reviving UseNet. Mastodon seems to be a good canary, to see how decentralization works. It’s already well under way. But I’m just a scarred, traumatized old soldier, and my opinion probably doesn’t count for much. Maybe we really do need another alt.tasteless. It would seem quaint, compared to today’s foolishness.

jedberg 3y ago

I see a lot of people throwing out Usenet as an option, and I wonder, did anyone here ever have to admin a Usenet node? It's a huge pain in the ass. First off, the storage requirements are both unlimited and unpredictable. Someone might post some huge files to a group, and all of a sudden your server disk is full. You could set your server to drop large messages or attachments, but then you didn't have the complete message. Then there was spam. Everyone had to do their own spam filtering. Or ... pay an upstream provider to do it for you. In which case they're basically the centralized solution. The reason Internet forums took off was because it was way easier to let one central group manager the spam and load and network and disk and.... instead of everyone doing it themselves.

mikewarot 3y ago

You'll always keep running into security issues AND the need for moderation at the heart of any community. It is possible to actually solve the security issues technically, but that is likely a generation away. Until then, the fact that the servers AND the users computer are insecure lead almost inevitably to walled gardens, and avoiding innovation. Thus there will be centralized locii of control for the foreseeable future. We can't democratize the way we use the internet back into a true commons until usable secure general purpose computing becomes widely available and adopted. We had it (secure general purpose computing) in the early 1980s with floppy based computers and dialup. I thought we'd get it back by 2030, but I'm not as hopeful any more.

acco102 3y ago

Bitmessage is decentralized and works.

deafpolygon 3y ago

I think we need a decentralization authentication platform. Not a decentralized online forum. One of the reasons why people don't like going to different forums - having to make a new sign-up, having to give out your e-mail, and having to remember a new set of passwords. In a world when security breaches are common, having to remember that one forum you created an account for and logged into... is off-putting. People love Facebook because, log in and done. Log into Messenger, connect it to WhatsApp, Instagram. Their entire world is right there. The first step to cut through all that is the ability to get everyone onto a common auth platform. But no one wants to do that because that means sharing user data, having to share the users with other possible platforms.

sebastos 3y ago

Like many of you, I often get nerd-sniped into thinking about what it would take to create a perfect, frictionless medium for decentralized communication. All of the usual hits, like IPFS, paid posts via micro-transactions, etc. often make an appearance in these brainstorms. But today, I took another tack: I started wondering what it would actually _be_ like if you had such a technology. Skip the 'how', and just imagine there was a way to open an edit-text field and send your message to "the world", with no intervening centralized boogeyman waiting in the middle. The thing that suddenly struck me is the question of how anybody would _find_ your message. Ok, you yeeted your thought out into cyberspace - who cares? Who's going to read it? I find that in my own habits, the question of who's going to read my message has a LOT to do with how interested I am in sending it. I suddenly realized that this is the critical point. Something that Reddit has going for it is that using it has the subjective quality of going to a _place_ in the world - a fixed place that others can find. It's not just that your content is discoverable per se, but rather that it _will be discovered_, because it is posted in a known, frequented place that will have other eyeballs. Like Martin Luther's 95 Theses, _where_ you post most messages has a lot to do with how interesting they are. It's accessibility, yes, but also the practical question of whether people will actually exercise their ability to access it. If Martin Luther had nailed his theses to a random tree in the forest with complex directions on how to go find it, it just wouldn't have been the same. They would have been almost as easy to access (except perhaps for people who didn't find it easy to navigate the forest), but the fact the church door was an inherently centralized high-traffic zone WAS what made it interesting. Perhaps this sounds a bit trite, but I've started to realize that we crave centralized places to converse because conversing isn't nearly as much fun without an audience. The Reddits and Twitters of the world are popular and interesting _because_ they are a centralization of our communications - a front door of the church we can pin things to. If you find yourself thinking this is very incomplete, give it a beat. For instance, like me, you might have some level of disdain for performative soap-box'ing on a platform like Twitter. You might object that "sure, a lot of Reddit was crappy, affected karma-farming, but I just used it to discuss analog audio equipment and ask tech support questions about Rust!". But even niche interests, tech support, NSFW subreddits - the are all fundamentally relying on the same principles of knowing that you will have an audience. You might want different audiences at different times, of course, but most of the fun is related to how close you can get to the upper bound of who you wish could look at your content. Maybe you don't really care that the whole WORLD can see your post, just that the entire world of ukulele enthusiasts can see it. But within that slice, the more the better. Also the more that you put those disparate audiences next to each together with a central nexus / map, the bigger overall audience you can expect to have due to cross-pollination. I bet that if you're really honest with yourself about what your favorite places to discuss weird topics in the 90's were, you'll realize that even though it was some phpbb forum, there was some microcosm of centralization going on, if even just at the level of human affairs. If it was some esoteric hobby, then you were probably talking on the official forums of some organization that ran the biggest public events related to that hobby, or whatever. Whatever it was, there was _some_ germ of a winner of a popularity contest - some entity that had the visibility and recognition to centralize the discussion and make it a place where you might get some interesting eyes on your text. I could be misunderstanding some of the fediverse, but it seems like there's an explicit intention to create these autonomous sub-communities and remove any kind of centralizing authority. But really, that top layer generally IS the value, and is how you create a sense of Place. You can make the infrastructure as decentralized as you want, of course, but if the discussions themselves don't feel like they're happening on the church doors, you really don't have anything a phpbb forum doesn't have. You've basically just got people sending messages out into the void, which is about as fun and interesting as talking to a customer support chatbot. So, at _some_ resolution, none of this is interesting unless you're giving people a way to post their content in THE place to discuss this topic. "A" place to discuss this topic is comparatively worthless. Zooming way way out, I want to make a higher-level comment using an analogy. All of online experience is a lot like a party. There are many things that it's good to have for a party: food, music, drinks, entertainment, shuttle service - lots of things. Yet we can all think back to parties that forewent some or all of these things and still gave us fond memories. There are a few things, however, that your party _has_ to have, like, definitionally: a place to be, and great people that show up. A party without these things isn't a party. And if you organize all of the nice-to-haves, but skip the essentials, then you've just got something very sad... like a loud, well-catered, empty basement. Related - sometimes bigger parties are better, but at a certain point, things just end up crowded, and probably a lot of your favorite people have left anyway. Once somebody starts charging exorbitant rates at the door, things might be headed downhill. The point of the analogy is that where we humans choose to gather online is a fluid and vexing thing. You're going to find it impossible to write hard-and-fast laws about how your new discussion space should work because all that really matters is people are finding a way to have fun. This party-like quality, more than anything else, accounts for the ephemeral nature of all online platforms, and the natural herd migrations from myspaces to facebooks to instagrams to snapchats to tiktoks, etc. And sure, AFTER the fact, you can look back and give a technical analysis of why Facebook succeeded. You can also look back on your party and point to specific things that created a fun situation. But this never transmutes into some kind of formula for future success, and if you think you have one, you're probably chasing last night's party. Are we so sure that holding the party at Brad's house is what made the party bad? Yeah, he started charging $5 a head, and a bunch of jerks showed up at the end. But I'm not so sure that means we should swear off house parties from now on. Like, I salute the open-mindedness of the guys trying to figure out a way to hold a party without a host... you know, as a thought experiment. But it would be cool if there was a place to hang out next Friday, too...