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The details are immaterial. Who stores the data at rest? If it's distributed, you have a cesspool of spam and nonsense. If it's controlled by a central authorit

The details are immaterial. Who stores the data at rest? If it's distributed, you have a cesspool of spam and nonsense. If it's controlled by a central authority, it's subject to the whims of that authority. If you choose a federated hub (a la Mastodon), you're stuck in your echo chamber or an empty room. The protocol doesn't matter. Right now, those are the only three options (minus crypto) given our current technology. Without going into the technical feasibility of your solution of federated identity with distributed storage or deciding who becomes a moderator or how to avoid a bad actor spinning up thousands of servers to create millions of fake users to spam or any of the other problems, the issue is social: people choose to be in the place where the moderation is most agreeable to them, which will become the natural partition for how the users divide themselves. Whoever those moderators are responsible to (how do you get "fired"? who decides?) ultimately answers the question of centralized, federated, or distributed, and decides the implications and downsides of that approach.

crazygringo 3y ago
> Who stores the data at rest? Each channel stores all the comments left on it. (They're not copied anywhere else, except for caching clients might choose to implement.) > If it's distributed, you have a cesspool of spam and nonsense. Channels that moderate will not, and most people won't be viewing channels that don't moderate. > people choose to be in the place where the moderation is most agreeable to them Yes, those would be the lists of approved channels that clients use, like I said maintained analagously to adblock lists. There would probably be one or two popular "mainstream" lists, and then various "progressive-only", "right wing-only", "lulz" etc. ones. Think of it basically like Reddit, except each subreddit is its own server (channel) that moderates according to its own policies, and whenever you view a NYTimes article you pull up combined comments from the well-moderated subreddits and not from the badly/un-moderated ones. Does that make sense?
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  > Yes, those would be the lists of approved channels that clients use Who moderates the list of channels? Who decides which curated lists of channels are available? > most people won't be viewing channels that don't moderate. Who decides the moderation policies? Who enforces that the moderators are doing their jobs, nominates new ones, and fires ineffective ones? > Does that make sense? Nothing you described is technically infeasible, it's just you're trying to describe a federated system while avoiding storing data on federated servers. The problem is not in storing or distributing the bytes, it's about policy and governance. What you're describing is a federated system, with power being put in the hands of the people who maintain the lists of channels and the people who decide which lists to publish to their users (assuming they're different people). Someone is still in charge, just not a singular centralized authority. That's a federated system, and they exist already, and the social and political problems with running them are well known.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    > Who moderates the list of channels? Like I said, groups of people create lists the way adblock lists are currently created. > Who decides which curated lists of channels are available? Viewers will come with default popular lists (like adblockers do), but anyone can add any list or channels directly. > Who decides the moderation policies? Who enforces that The owner(s) of each channel. > it's just you're trying to describe a federated system while avoiding storing data on federated servers. Exactly, since there are a lot of problems we know are associated with that. > What you're describing is a federated system, with power being put in the hands of the people who maintain the lists of channels and the people who decide which lists to publish to their users (assuming they're different people) Exactly. That's really the most crucial part here. > the social and political problems with running them are well known. Are they? Because I'm not aware of any federated system set up in this particular way. Subreddit moderation works pretty well, and adblock lists that adblockers use work pretty well, so I'd love to know if there's an obvious social/political gotcha I'm missing here.
  - zeryx 3y ago
    I know crypto is a curse word here, but what you're describing is literally a perfect use case for IPFS and a DAO
    - Accujack 3y ago
      ...or just basic public key crypto for non repudiation and authorization of admin actions.
    - vineyardmike 3y ago
      How would IPFS help here? IPFS is a data-replication utility - it doesn't work well for mutable data (eg. comments).

crazygringo 3y ago

> Who stores the data at rest? Each channel stores all the comments left on it. (They're not copied anywhere else, except for caching clients might choose to implement.) > If it's distributed, you have a cesspool of spam and nonsense. Channels that moderate will not, and most people won't be viewing channels that don't moderate. > people choose to be in the place where the moderation is most agreeable to them Yes, those would be the lists of approved channels that clients use, like I said maintained analagously to adblock lists. There would probably be one or two popular "mainstream" lists, and then various "progressive-only", "right wing-only", "lulz" etc. ones. Think of it basically like Reddit, except each subreddit is its own server (channel) that moderates according to its own policies, and whenever you view a NYTimes article you pull up combined comments from the well-moderated subreddits and not from the badly/un-moderated ones. Does that make sense?

bastawhiz 3y ago
> Yes, those would be the lists of approved channels that clients use Who moderates the list of channels? Who decides which curated lists of channels are available? > most people won't be viewing channels that don't moderate. Who decides the moderation policies? Who enforces that the moderators are doing their jobs, nominates new ones, and fires ineffective ones? > Does that make sense? Nothing you described is technically infeasible, it's just you're trying to describe a federated system while avoiding storing data on federated servers. The problem is not in storing or distributing the bytes, it's about policy and governance. What you're describing is a federated system, with power being put in the hands of the people who maintain the lists of channels and the people who decide which lists to publish to their users (assuming they're different people). Someone is still in charge, just not a singular centralized authority. That's a federated system, and they exist already, and the social and political problems with running them are well known.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > Who moderates the list of channels? Like I said, groups of people create lists the way adblock lists are currently created. > Who decides which curated lists of channels are available? Viewers will come with default popular lists (like adblockers do), but anyone can add any list or channels directly. > Who decides the moderation policies? Who enforces that The owner(s) of each channel. > it's just you're trying to describe a federated system while avoiding storing data on federated servers. Exactly, since there are a lot of problems we know are associated with that. > What you're describing is a federated system, with power being put in the hands of the people who maintain the lists of channels and the people who decide which lists to publish to their users (assuming they're different people) Exactly. That's really the most crucial part here. > the social and political problems with running them are well known. Are they? Because I'm not aware of any federated system set up in this particular way. Subreddit moderation works pretty well, and adblock lists that adblockers use work pretty well, so I'd love to know if there's an obvious social/political gotcha I'm missing here.
- zeryx 3y ago
  I know crypto is a curse word here, but what you're describing is literally a perfect use case for IPFS and a DAO
  - Accujack 3y ago
    ...or just basic public key crypto for non repudiation and authorization of admin actions.
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    How would IPFS help here? IPFS is a data-replication utility - it doesn't work well for mutable data (eg. comments).