12 ms·

Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

108 points by lorean_victor 3y ago

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logicprog 3y ago
Pull not being a good model of two way communications is going to be the major blocker here in my opinion. It's going to mean that people are only going to see comments and reactions on their posts or comments from people they already subscribe to, because their RSS reader would have no possible way of knowing if anyone outside of that list commented, since you can't get notified of content sources you don't already know about, only poll ones you already know. That's already bad enough (one of the big negative things people with large followings on the fediverse talk about is how they can't see what people are saying in the replies to their posts a lot of the time if the servers those people are on are blocked by their server, which means hate and harassment and one sided conversations can fester, and often many commenters can't even see each others' comments, leading to people saying the same things over and over exhaustingly). This also means that people who don't have any followers will literally be essentially muted by default: no one will see their comments or interactions, because no one polls their feed yet, which means that it's basically pointless for them to interact at all, which sounds dispiriting and would probably lead to no one wanting to use this type of social media — moreover, it also creates a catch-22 problem, because a major way to get followers in the first place is to directly interact with other people and bigger blog posts, to make people aware of you and maybe get some of them interested in hearing more of what you have to say, yet in this model, you can't really interact until you have a following already, so your main means of getting a following is gated behind needing a following to work!
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  Yes it is a big hurdle. However, I think content discovery is generally a big part of any content platform, way broader than discovering "who have reacted to my content". Now if you want to solve the problem of content discovery in a broader sense, then you have already fixed this particular shortcoming of pull-model as well. If a service that can inform you about new posts with a particular hashtag, it most probably can also tell you about reactions to a particular post. And yes, I do realise that such services will tend to not be really decentralised (similar to the relationship of websites and search engines). But that means the downside is not that you don't get such discovery, but that you'll be reliant on more centralised services for such discovery, whereas in the fediverse you would be less reliant on such services for finding out who has commented on your post (though it will, as you've mentioned still not be enough).
  - logicprog 3y ago
    > Yes it is a big hurdle. However, I think content discovery is generally a big part of any content platform, way broader than discovering "who have reacted to my content". Now if you want to solve the problem of content discovery in a broader sense, then you have already fixed this particular shortcoming of pull-model as well. Right but I don't think as a general case finding all RSS feeds on the internet that satisfy a certain criteria, like publishing a hashtag or responding to a particular post, is a problem that can actually be solved in a principled way, because a fundamental limitation of the pull methodology is that you have to know the list of places you are checking beforehand, you can't get content from somewhere you didn't know about prior. The only way to solve this would be to have some kind of crawling and indexing system that regularly crawls the entire internet looking for these expanded RSS feeds and then categorized them according to various criteria in order to poll them. And that is both a very high technical investment and has a lot of limitations itself. So in the end it seems like you haven't really actually distributed the work of a social media system more equally after all, you've just inverted who is doing the work, going from a Federated set of servers that do all the work pushing content everywhere to a Federated set of servers that do all the work pulling content from places.
    - lorean_victor 3y ago
      I do recognise the fact that such "aggregators" would be hugely centralised (if not outright monopolised, like the search engine space). however, maybe I'm wrong but I don't see the federated model succeeding without such services either, so I think of "need for centralised content discovery" as an independent problem, honestly.
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  Pro tip: Split your gigantic (and certainly thoughtful!) comment[s] into paragraphs. Makes it a ton easier to parse. Cheers!
  - logicprog 3y ago
    Thanks for the advice and compliment! :D I usually write them out and then read them and use the edit function to insert paragraph breaks after the fact, but I forgot to do that this time lol
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Note RSS is an ill-defined polling protocol. The server emits an RSS file which has the top N pieces of content. All you can do is poll it at a greater or less frequency and hope you don't underpoll or overpoll. (I can easily fetch the RSS feed for an independent blog 1000 times for every time I fetch an HTML page, but should I? What if I wanted to follow 1000 independent blogs?) With ActivityPub on the other hand you can ask for all updates since the last time you checked so there is a well-defined strategy to keep synced.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Oh wow, RSS really doesn't support pagination? I didn't know that. WebSub can help with solving the poll rate issue, but that presumably wouldn't solve the problem for consumers that are offline for a while.
    - zozbot234 3y ago
      ActivityStreams could be seen as a viable extension of RSS (aside from ActivityPub being based off it already) and it does support some simple pagination via its "Collection" vocabulary. Since ActivityStreams is ultimately based on JSON+LD, one could also add seamless querying support to an ActivityStreams endpoint based on SPARQL, for more advanced uses.
    - ttepasse 3y ago
      There is RFC 5005 - Feed Paging and Arching, but sadly the world of RSS Tools has never been very specification-forward, mostly, because the publishers of RSS feeds are even more desinterested. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005.html
- egypturnash 3y ago
  In the olden days when bloggers walked the earth, emitting lengthy posts over RSS, they solved this problem in two ways: Firstly, by appending forms to the end of the post where someone could type out a reply that was more likely to be a few sentences or paragraph, rather than a full-blown essay. Secondly, by inventing "TrackBack", a standardized way for someone else's blog software to say "hey I wrote some stuff on my blog in response to this post of yours". Both of these would get appended to the end of the blog post's page as "comments". This very quickly enabled the new problem of "trackback/comment spam"; the enduring solution in the world of blogs to that has been "Wordpress' Askimet plugin", which is a very centralized piece of the otherwise mostly-distributed infrastructure of RSS-based blogs. I think it's like $15 a year on top of the $60 or so I pay for my Wordpress site on cheap hosting.
  - bigiain 3y ago
    Hmmmm. Now I'm wondering it Askimet are selling every blog comment they scan to OpenAI (and Palantir)?
    - krapp 3y ago
      I think it's safe to assume at this point that all public content and most private content on the internet is being fed to both AI and American intelligence services.
      - bigiain 3y ago
        And China. And Mossad...
    - egypturnash 3y ago
      Askimet is completely owned by Automattic (the corporate entity attached to the main author of Wordpress). And Wikipedia says this of Automattic: In February of 2024, Automattic announced that it would begin selling user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com to Midjourney and OpenAI.[27] 27: https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/ https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-d... "Announced" may be too strong; the link is to an internal email leak discussing this possibility, but "Automattic may be experimenting with selling data to midjourney/openai" is still pretty close to "Automattic's selling user data". Hell, I can see the positive spin blog post announcing this: "They're also giving Automattic a bunch of free cycles on improving Askimet's spam/ham filters, in exchange for a look at every other comment anyone is sending through Askimet ever. We're aware this is a thorny ethical issue; click HERE for the archives of our mailing list dedicated to this project." As for Palantir, my inner paranoid says that if the FBI/NSA/etc wants this data, they have some way of getting whether or not a deal with a public front like Palantir is involved.
- deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- krapp 3y ago
  I see your negatives as mostly positive. Engagement and virality are inevitably cancerous to any social network, and comment velocity needs to be suppressed and controlled to reduce entropy and limit the degree to which that network can be used by people primarily interested in "getting a following." Any feature (or anti-feature) that makes a platform unattractive to capitalists and influencers and shitposting trolls is a good thing. Discouraging people from posting and commenting is a good thing. Making it difficult to network is a good thing. None of these things need to be impossible, but I do believe there needs to be enough friction to make low hanging fruit and opportunism not worth the effort. Otherwise everything gets taken over by AI and bots and psychopaths and propagandists and turns to shit.
cousin_it 3y ago
I agree that pull is the best model for posts. For comments I still think the best model is to push them to the post author, and let the post author moderate. This way people who can behave civilly can get an initial audience by writing comments, and having a link to their blog in the profile, with no intermediaries involved. If someone doesn't like the moderation, they're always free to write a comment-as-post, where they can write anything they want but have to take care of distribution themselves.
- goda90 3y ago
  What if someone posts a dangerous lie? The post author is going to delete any comments that expose the lie. How would comments-as-posts be sufficiently linked to the original post so the lie can properly be exposed to as much of the audience as possible?
  - bdw5204 3y ago
    What if somebody posts a dangerous lie on a centralized platform and blocks everybody who criticizes it? Even if it doesn't allow deleting comments, you can effectively the same result with just block. A mute-only social media platform would be doable technically but it would likely involve tons of spammers replying to large accounts. Think about how unusable the replies to an American politician's tweets are on Twitter because the US courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional for politicians to block people on social media. The best solution to this problem I've seen so far is Community Notes on Twitter where a crowdsourced fact check is directly pinned to the tweet allowing users to challenge liars without directly calling them out and getting blocked. More centralized approaches to fact checking don't work particularly well because you end up with biased fact checkers who clearly have an agenda and thus aren't trusted at all by the liar's audience.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  the thing is, with no intermediaries involved, more specifically, without any proper "search engines" (or "aggregators") involved, the network will suffer greatly from a content discovery problem regardless (as the fediverse currently is, IMO). with presence of such services, the problem of comments (and reactions in general) can be solved too. if a poster is ok with engaging with potentially hostile content, then they can get reactions to their posts from aggregators that aren't heavy handed on moderation. if they don't want to bother with such interactions, then they can choose safer aggregators. if they want, they can only pull reactions from feeds they are already subscribed to, similar to private posts on twitter.
Zm44 3y ago
Yes, the answer is Nostr
- hugs 3y ago
  I'm a recent convert to Nostr. Four things I love about it: - It's "just" JSON and WebSockets. From a developer's perspective, it's incredibly easy to get started and build interesting things with it. (Like the early days of Twitter.) Which leads to... - Nostr culture is tolerant of bots and other automated workflows. (Unlike current management of Twitter) - Nostr culture is tolerant of search engines. (Unlike fediverse, or at least the Mastodon part, though I appreciate the reasons for that distinction.) - Built-in micropayment infrastructure with "zaps" and Lightning Network integration enables a ton of interesting new startup idea possibilities. One thing I don't like about Nostr, the social network. (Not Nostr, the protocol. Those two things are very easily conflated right now): - Too many Bitcoin bros. (Although personally I don't mind Bitcoin, a thriving platform should have more than one thing to talk about.)
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  looks quite interesting, I wasn't aware of that. it seems like a nice hybrid solution to pull/push problem (relays can push if they choose to, clients just publish and pull). I should say though, that upon first look, I wish it was built on top of some already existing standard (like rss), as it could get a great headstart in terms of content already circulating in the network that way.
  - hugs 3y ago
    Nostr can get complex, but at its core, it's deceptively simple. It's built on JSON, WebSockets, digital signatures, and sending a simple Event data structure over the wire. It can get complex, but its core is very small. Feels similar to how HTTP itself started. Also, it wouldn't be too hard too build bridges or bots that bring in other stuff (like RSS feeds or ActivityPub content) to Nostr. One already exists: https://mostr.pub https://mostr.pub
- dariosalvi78 3y ago
  the technology is cool, the people, not that much :)
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Sporktacular 3y ago
" Distributed, i.e. no centers (e.g. personal blogging)" Is it though? There are dependencies on DNS and CDNs along the way. Can anything ever be distributed without a fully distributed protocol stack?
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  you don't need a CDN or even a DNS to host your blog (though most probably you'd use them). you will still be at the mercy of registries to have an IP address other people can find, but I think practically speaking it is not far fetched to consider this a "distributed system" (for most use-cases anyways).
simonpure 3y ago
PubSubHubbub aka WebSub [0] is an extension of RSS feeds to solve the push/pull issue by introducing hubs. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  yes I think that'd be a great addition. any publisher can, optionally, introduce a hub for their feed, so people get realtime update of their content, and even a social hub, where other authors reacting to their content can use to notify them (and ease the aggregation of these "reactions"). I suspect that can lead to a situation where there are a few hubs and social hubs that anyone can use for their choosing.
ericyd 3y ago
This article, and many others that promote a highly decentralized internet, consistently fail to address the vast majority of the population who are not developers or extremely tech savvy. > This is in contrast to personal blogging, where every Bob can easily host their own (and they often do). A key word in this sentence is "often". I would argue that hosting your own blog is exceptionally rare at the population level. Most people do not have the interest or skill to accomplish it, so they use services. Similarly, this author proposes a system where every social interaction could be self-hosted. I fail to see who this benefits, beyond a vocal minority of smart technologists. I've seen arguments that suggest the bar should be lowered to allow everyone to do more technical things if so desired (self-hosting, domain registration, etc). I just think this misses the point that for most people, these topics are utterly uninteresting and unimportant. Unless the suggestion is to build a decentralized network for a very select few who wish to participate, I don't feel like these types of ideas will ever be relevant.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  thanks for taking the time to read through it regardless. I wrote this as a brain dump, and shared it mostly with the intent of learning more about the topic (which thanks to this thread, I already have), so I feel it is ok if it doesn't change the life of billions of people. the last part of the post, however, is dedicated to assessing whether such an idea would have any real bearing on, as you've put it, "the population", or not. I've tried to list potential benefits to the average user, if such a decentralised platform was ever built. since you are interested more in such evaluations rather than technical contemplations, I'd like to hear your feedback specifically on that part. https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935bd7e96707#back-to-reality https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935...
  - ericyd 3y ago
    I'm not sure I have strong feelings about it, but here are a few thoughts: 1. I think a more universal content aggregation / discovery tool would be beneficial for many people. Google might be the analog that comes to mind. This makes me wonder how such an aggregator/search tool would operate in a decentralized way. Would each user/node be responsible for maintaining its own index? My question to you is how does this differ from current centralized aggregators and search tools? 2. Regarding distribution vs. publication: its an interesting point that you could separate the two, but I personally believe this benefit would be moot for most people since they would be unlikely to self-publish content. My view is that most individuals will continue to use centralized services, regardless of the underlying protocol, due to a combination of convenience, ease, and cost. Like you identified, unless there is some critical mass of people self-publing and self-distributing, I'm not sure I see a tangible benefit here. Also, mea culpa, I sometimes forget that the author might read my response and perhaps my language in my initial post was too strong, I hope I did not offend.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.
- kornhole 3y ago
  Social media is the most important counter measure to propaganda. Before social media, we had a one way stream of information from the media outlets without much opportunity to question, discuss, and debunk. The fediverse resolves the problem of centrally controlled algorithms and censorship that manipulate people's speech depending on the moderation rules of individual instances.
  - logicprog 3y ago
    This is a good point actually, despite my reservations about social media, if you want to get a big message out quickly there really is nothing better than something like twitter.
  - speff 3y ago
    Your first sentence is the exact reason why propaganda thrives in social media. There's an understanding that fellow people are somehow more trustworthy than Big Media. The part that's not considered is that people on a whole are not able to understand every intricacy of problems out in the world - but they sure do love sharing opinions about every problem as if they do understand. Given this, easy-to-digest messages are easily amplified through social media and every complex detail is withered to nothing. This is why I stopped using Lemmy. The larger communities (read: the only ones that get any posts) ended up being a worse echo-chamber than every other platform due to people repeating the same simple concepts ad nauseam.
    - andoando 3y ago
      100% agree. I think Reddit is a huge propaganda machine in itself. The most ironic thread I’ve seen was a headline about how Republicans were more susceptible to propaganda, with every comment of course being 3-10 words amounting to “oh yeah so true, they’re terrible”. Anyone that actually read past the headline though could see the article was total nonsense. I suppose it may be harder to control since a central authority can’t publish anything they want.
lxgr 3y ago
> In the pull-based system, more work in the end is required (when should Alice query Bob? Also Bob needs to respond to the query, though thats super easy as it is static responses), but the work is better distributed, lowering the maximum amount of work someone has to do (in this case, Bob). I don't see how that follows. Yes, work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing), but the baseline load of these polls will in the end be larger than that of having to do the push fanout per post – at least for people posting less frequently than the average poll rate. Generally, the push-vs-pull discussion seems like a red herring: For every pull system, we'll want some push mechanism for efficiency reasons in the end anyway; for every push system, we'll need a pull way to catch up with posts potentially missed initially. To me, the practically relevant differences between Mastodon (push) and e.g. Bluesky (pull-ish, with aggregators) seem to revolve around the actual ease of self-hosting: As the author notes, setting up a Mastodon server seems roughly as complicated as self-hosting email (i.e. possible but practically almost nobody will do it), but I don't see this as a limitation of the protocol (Activitypub), but rather its implementation. Decoupling identity resolution from hosting an entire server would also be a smart move: Webfinger is way too complicated for this; DNS TXT records would be ideal.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  yes it is a federated system by design. doesn't mean it is not a limitation though. to give you an example: in case of email, though it is not that difficult to host your own server (and even if you are a small startup you'll most probably do so without much effort), in the end basically Google decides on "who is an accepted participant in the network". If Google deems you spam, you are spam. If Google deems your authentication emails "promotion", for most intents and purposes, you are "promotion" and your users will miss your emails. that, I feel, is an inherent limitation of any federated system, specifically one whose design is really inspired by email. > I don't see how that follows. as you've mentioned right after. > work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing).
  - lxgr 3y ago
CuriouslyC 3y ago
Sure. Instead of servers, you have friends, and you subscribe to your friends content, and discovery occurs through friend-of-a-friend network and "discovery hubs" like the old Yahoo, but for niches (i.e. Follow TechDude96 for hardware review aggregation, etc).
iteratethis 3y ago
I think world scale social networks as in an open "town square" are borderline impossible. Which is not that surprising as it's quite unnatural to talk and be seen by the entire world. However, if you do try it, I still believe a central network is superior. I would opt for baseline moderation (content should be legal) after which any further moderation should be in the hands of the user, not the network. Bluesky has interesting ideas in this area. For example, you can say to always block sexual content, show a warning, or just show it. To each their own. With that in place, a centralized network is superior as it tends to have excellent discovery, search, no weird syncing issues, it's centrally monetized, doesn't depend on lots of volunteer effort and the track record in keeping content online is far better compared to alternatives. That's a lot of benefits to consider. The only real downside is the algorithms that dictate reach and how they are gamed. Federated social media is a really bad idea. Having separate instances is fine if you want to carve out a community, it's the federation part that sucks. It's very resource hungry and still can't manage to properly sync up content, likes and replies. Discovery and search is very hard which beats the entire point of a social network, which is to find people and content. Reliability is low as any volunteer may quit on a whim, taking down your content. Instance moderation is very heavy-handed in that it not only dictates instance rules (which is fine) it also dictates federation. Which means you have no say in which outside content or people you can see. The solution is the dreaded "switch instance". Social media users don't know what an instance is, you're not getting it. The culture on the Fediverse is: connect nobody. Extreme safetyism. The lack of some type of ranked algorithm is a problem, not a solution. Reach is a problem. Bigger accounts, institutions, companies, news, sports...get no reach on the Fediverse. Bottom line: fully centralized social media or fully isolated ones. Federated is the worst of both worlds.
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  I think there is a huge issue with centralized social media. Why are unelected tycoons in the US dictating what the rest of the world should be allowed to see? What happens when they neglect languages and regions? It can go horribly wrong: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb.... Decentralized social media gives us a chance to take back control.
patriciapatp 3y ago
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samatman 3y ago
Yes, we can easily get more decentralized that the Fediverse, and we have. Both Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit are peer-to-peer social networking, with rather different takes on what that means. There might be more, those are the ones I'm aware of.
- theK 3y ago
  Urbit choosing to artificially limit their "address space" with an NFT sale was a bit of a gut punch tbh and I don't see how this will work out positively for the project in the long run.
  - samatman 3y ago
    Urbit's address space is 128 bits wide, so scarcity is physically impossible, unless there were a need for every atom in the observable universe to have many addresses. The decision to make the bottom 32 bits valuable was a clever one, but it's lead to some misunderstanding of how things actually work. Specifically, planets (a 32 bit address) only own an additional 2^32 addresses, called moons. That leaves 2^64 of the address space "wild", these are called comets. There are plenty. If you want a four-syllable address, they're loss leaders from hosting providers, currently. Two syllables you have to pay for, and one syllable is not usually on the market. A sixteen-syllable address is and will always be free. How this is handled socially, in a hypothetical future where there are more than 4 billion active Urbit users, is a problem for that future to address.
    - sureglymop 3y ago
      Why does it have to be so obscure? Why planets, moons, etc? It doesn't serve any purpose other than confusing anyone not familiar with it and making those familiar with it seem like the "all knowing" in group.
      - samatman 3y ago
        It depends on what you consider obscure, I guess. A planet is a /32, a star is a /16, a galaxy is an /8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing#IPv4_CIDR_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing... Moons are the /0 subdomain you get with a /32 aka planet, and comets are the 64 bits of free address space left over in the 128 bits of address width. To create a comet, you make a public-private keypair where the public key hash doesn't collide with owned address space. If you miss, you spin up another keypair and keep going until you get one. That's really the whole thing. These things need names, as evidence, I present the fact that in IPv4, they have names. To my taste "slash eight" is more obscure than "galaxy", your mileage may vary.
alkonaut 3y ago
Sure. But even slightly less decentralization has mostly proven clunky and unattractive when it comes to two-way communication social networking. I mean we all have accounts bluesky/mastodon/whatever the network du jour is, but it's on Twitter the posts are, despite its massive quality nosedive in recent time. The centralization of Twitter has massive benefits has almost zero downsides.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  it has downsides though. I am constantly jumping between twitter, reddit, spotify (for podcasts) and youtube to see the content and latest updates from the same people. when I want to share something, I should think where should I post it, is it more technical? then reddit and HN maybe, though on twitter I do have some technical people following me too. is it social / political? then its twitter, so on. then I find myself reading and discussing political posts on reddit which are screenshots of posts on twitter or vice versa. I don't know how much pain this is truly, but the unnecessary walls between these communities is indeed a pain point, both as a consumer (I need to check people on multiple places) or as a publisher (I have to partition the discussion to say the least, if not the audience in total). as for mastodon / bluesky / whatever, the main issue to me seems to be lack of content and content discovery. which is weird, since every youtuber, podcaster, subreddit, all of HN and medium, etc. is technically on RSS, and even more can be easily put on RSS with cheap bridges. but instead of unifying and enhancing all this existing shared content streams, we've broken off with new protocols and created separated and isolated communities.
digdugdirk 3y ago
What happened to Content-Centric-Networking? That seems to be an ideal model for a fully decentralized network, p2p or otherwise. Are there specific technical hurdles preventing adoption? Or is the allure of large companies hoarding all the data too good to pass up?
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  what do you mean by "content-centric-networking"? perhaps I have some reading to do. the "allure of large companies hoarding all the data" might be a factor independently though. I personally believe a proper content discovery service is key to any form of decentralisation, and that is, as far as I can imagine, highly dependent on centralised entities amassing and then processing large amounts of data. I mean we sold our data to Google and in return got the current decentralised web where anyone can make a website and get traffic if the content is good enough (or SEO-hacky enough).
  - digdugdirk 3y ago
    The wikipedia article is a decent high level overview: [1] "Content-Centric Networking (CCN) diverges from the IP-based, host-oriented Internet architecture by prioritizing content, making it directly addressable and routable. In CCN, endpoints communicate based on named data rather than IP addresses. This approach is a part of information-centric networking (ICN) architecture and involves the exchange of content request messages (termed "Interests") and content return messages (termed "Content Objects")." It seems well suited for a distributed p2p style network in my mind, but its definitely not anywhere near my area of expertise. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking
    - lorean_victor 3y ago
      thanks for the pointer!
- wmf 3y ago
  ISPs won't deploy IPv6 and CCNx is much more complex than IP. Getting ISPs to cache content for free also sounds like a fantasy.
davexunit 3y ago
Yes, we can. Christine Lemmer-Webber, coauthor of ActivityPub, cofounded the Spritely Institute to work on the next generation of decentralized online communities. https://spritely.institute https://spritely.institute
ianopolous 3y ago
Absolutely. We've pioneered portable identity (and links and data) in a decentralised social web in Peergos: https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media This is also pull based interestingly, but also has visibility controls being E2EE. I don't think society needs public, or at least public by default, social media. This is even more true now in the age of LLMs and mass data harvesting.
- x3haloed 3y ago
  > I don't think society needs public, or at least public by default, social media. This is even more true now in the age of LLMs and mass data harvesting. Depends on your definition of “social media.” Is a message board / forum considered social media? Because while they can be problematic, they’re still extremely useful. It would be interesting to think about decentralized Reddit and why lemmy is going nowhere.
  - ianopolous 3y ago
    That's a good question. I don't think I'm including reddit here because those are moderated spaces on a fixed topic. I consider social media more people posting top level things that others can choose to follow directly. So social media is more like people meeting and talking, whereas reddit is more like an interest-based society meeting and talking.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
> Personal instances will be pretty rare Personal instances of the US Post Office are also pretty rare, my dude. You gonna go deliver your mail yourself? If so, why write a letter? You want total distributed decentralization? Use Gnutella. It's equivalent to giving your letter to your neighbor and asking them to deliver it, and they ask their neighbor, etc, until it reaches a back alley in Algeria, and then that Algerian calls you on the phone, and if you're home, you read the letter out loud live on the phone. Turns out that's a pretty crap way to deliver letters. But it's decentralized!! People: Stop being so fucking obsessed with decentralization. It's not that great. I'm sure you're all having lots of fun inventing crap technology to solve an already solved problem, but you're just codesturbating.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  I wouldn't. I also wouldn't think about a decentralised email solution, or a decentralised messaging service. doesn't make sense. as for publishing my own blog though? nah I'd really rather a decentralised system where I can host my own blog wherever. and yes I do realise most people don't care about that, and yes I'm not sure if they'd care about other benefits of decentralisation as well or not, but its not like there is nothing there that would affect them.
- sedatk 3y ago
  People tend to forget that we had everything decentralized in the first place, then centralized them for the sake of convenience: Email -> GMail, IRC -> Slack, RSS -> Social Media, Blog -> Medium, Forums -> Reddit and so forth. And basically, convenience won big time. These are not mutually exclusive though. We need decentralized services to fight discrimination and censorship. But, I agree that there is also disproportionate obsession with decentralization at the moment.
  - lorean_victor 3y ago
    I wouldn't characterise the history of the internet as having started with "everything decentralised". if I'm not missing something, it was completely the other way around. introduction of general populous to the internet was through internet gatekeepers like aol or msn, with unimaginable convenience (and centralisation). that convenience lost, in the end, to the world wide web, where a ton of single individuals could set up a website and reach other people across the internet. some of the big central giants of today got born out of this transition (and some were instrumental to it, namely google). something similar happened to smartphones. ios was intended to be a closed off gatekeeper. people jailbroke it, and apple caved in and opened the system up, allowing anyone to provide services (apps) on it. similar to the www transition, we had a period were you could easily find popular apps made by a single programmer. this decentralisation also basically enabled most centralised social and messaging services of today. so I see it more as a cycle: in stable times, convenience causes a drift towards further centralisation. when there is a platform shift, established players lose their defensive power, some essential operational costs drop drastically, resulting in a sudden decentralisation: tons of small (mostly individual) players can now enter the market and gain prominence through it. the market then stabilises, thriving players shrink in number and grow in size, and become the convenient, centralised corps of the future, only to be similarly shaken by market forces that allowed them to exist in the first place. are we close to such a shift now? I think so. current version of the internet is clearly starting to rot and drown in noise, while we are the cusp of new heights of information processing and accessibility through LLMs, while also thriving to push the boundaries of the information we circulate (AR/VR). but who knows.
Dwedit 3y ago
For immutable content, there's still BitTorrent magnet links or IPFS.
x3haloed 3y ago
I’ve also been thinking about this problem for a while. The push model and account portability are definitely the most important dimensions of this issue. Can’t we just solve this problem with IPFS? And something like DHT tables for protocol-level awareness of state changes? Your client app would just be responsible for pushing and pinning content to IPFS, scanning state tables for interesting updates, and then sending you push notifications. Really simple to take your IPFS key with you can switch to a new app.
- anacrolix 3y ago
  There's nothing simple or reliable about IPFS.
kkfx 3y ago
IMVHO: - all distributed solutions show too much overhead to perform well for casual users, some (now abandoned) like ZeroNet was performant enough for some personal blog hosting, but barely and still no "indexing" solution stable enough; - classic decentralized social like Usenet seems to be abandoned by most people (except for commercial piracy) so well, most people do not really care enough to take this root if they do not feel something at hand immediately... Long story short: we "just" need IPv6 with a global per host AND a "family" domain name (with all relevant subdomains) per home, a homeserver (like common domestic "routers", just a bit more open/powerful in hw terms) and that's do the base to rebuild "the internet" with a connected desktop model where we no not need third parties or a VPS to traverse NAT, where we do not have to deal with strange long IDs instead of something like phone.bill.myfriendfamily.tld to make an IP2IP audio/video call and so on. All other approaches ESPECIALLY those who try to mimic big platforms will fails.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  I admire this vision, and also appreciate the fact that you quoted "just" to underline a recognition of how much of a fundamental shift this is :D
  - kkfx 3y ago
    Thanks, and yes it is, but technically we have all the pieces since decades, so while it would be a revolution it's not really something new to be created with uncertain results... The real revolution is a paradigm shift form the actual development focused on big of IT interests toward a classic desktop centered development, the needed ground is there and battle tested, the rest is "just" to be done on scale. A simple example: we have emails, almost any human on the planet have one, at least between those who use computers in a way or another. Today for 99% mail == webmail, something offered by some third party. We have some desktop MUAs but they are stuck in the '90s at best. However we have for instance OfflineIMAP, notmuch, storage normally big enough, so all we need to have emails on our iron is a MUAs friendly enough for end users, based on notmuch/mu like nomuch-emacs, mu4e, neomutt with notmuch backend and so on, that offer IMAP sync built in so and end user have only to enter relevant credentials and wait for the initial download time. The rest follow naturally. Similarly you buy an IoT sensor? Your homeserver speak MQTT, CoIoT etc all you need is connecting to the sensor via LAN or to the AP offered by the sensor and then configure your WLAN. You see the sensor pops up in HA or something similar, that's is. No need of a third party "cloud". And so on. The homeserver is simply a machine on 24/7/365 like most home "router", witch are actually embedded appliance, we only need them more powerful and open to be used by the end user, not only by the ISP. This "center point" offer "sync/services" to all families devices, that's is. The "cloud" became a simple backup/mirror of the homeserver for redundancy, availability, backup.
andoando 3y ago
Im confused. You can already set up your own fediverse server, just as you can host your own personal blog. Decentralization is just a parameter of how many people choose to join an existing server or create their own.
- godelski 3y ago
  The problem with fediverse style setups is that they tend to become highly centralized. Email being a great example. It's often pointed to as a perfect example of federation but naive because when highly centralized it only slightly reduces issues of full centralization. So the question is how you be federated while being highly decentralized. This of course isn't important for everything. Centralization can even be good at times. But an example might be like browsers. Technically anyone can run their own. But since the ecosystem is so Chrom{e,ium} based, Google can exert a lot of control over what standards are set on webpages and how to process data. You might have heard about them trying to destroy the cookie. Which in part I feel is great, but at the same time it's not like they aren't still tracking people. Either way, the point is that a singular (or even a few) compan{y,ies} shouldn't get to dictate critical infrastructure. This can actually even lead to fragmentation, especially when we consider that more than one country exists. So it has to be easy, near trivial, to run your own server, and must also be cheap, if you want a highly decentralized platform. If it isn't, there's always a strong pressure for centralization.
  - lorean_victor 3y ago
    exactly.
  - andoando 3y ago
    Sure, whats fundamentally difficult about setting up a federated instance? Its just a db, and backend/frontend service. You can put in a docker container and run it in minutes. Things tend to get centralized because users want to be where users are. Developing another platform doesn't change that. Even if that platform just straight up does not allow centralization, it doesn't stop people from using centralized platforms.
thinkerswell 3y ago
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thrwwycbr 3y ago
For me, the peak of decentralization efforts were Beaker Browser [1] and Stealth [2]. But one project didn't make enough money and the author of the other one got doxxed into oblivion, so I guess we can't have nice things. A peer to peer browser has so much potential, I wish somebody else might give it a try. Imagine the possibilities when you can just share the content with others, without needing a web server. Does anybody know whether there's a decentralized (static/generated) blog for ipfs or similar? Maybe that would make a nice starting point. [1] https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker [2] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth
- theamk 3y ago
  I actually can't imagine what are the possibilities the personal web server gives me, compared to github pages or cloudflare pages or tons of other super cheap web hosts. Ease of use / nice design tools? You don't need a new protocol for it, create your web editor and add plugins for common providers. Your website would be accessible from any browser, nicely solving chicken-and-egg problems. Free domain names? Plenty of existing systems exists, and many of them are actually compatible with existing browsers. Availability? Any real server will be way more reliable than your home machine that will go to sleep when unused, get updates, etc. And if you say "IPFS", then you still need to sign up with some centralized service to pin your site, so might as well sign up for webhost instead. Illegal content? P2P exposes your IP, so your local police has access to it. And if it's kind of the content that is not actually illegal, just heavily frowned upon, there would still be plenty of hosters willing to host you. Unlimited media storage? That could be a legitimate reason, but most people would want to store their video using dedicated system anyway (youtube / peertube), and modern storage is so cheap, the photos are not going to be a problem (Cloudflare free plan gives you up to 20,000 files up to 25 MB each for free for example)
  - theK 3y ago
    > if you say "IPFS", then you still need to sign up with some centralized service Ipfs actually has some inbuilt cashing, so visitors to your site also take part of the load and can serve your assets when your PC/internet is down. All without pinning, purely based on GC timing. So as long as you are online reasonably often and your content has readers you will be fine. Another idea has been to make it so that bookmarking works a bit like pinning so by using the decentralized web you actually archive it (sort of)
theamk 3y ago
This schema relies on "third-party aggregators / crawlers / search services" for critical parts like comments and content discovery. They are going to be responsible for things like spam filtering, misinformation removal, and blocking accounts which violate TOS. And those crawlers _have_ to be expensive - after all, you need to check every participating server to see comments. So instead of everyone running mastodon instance on $10/month machine, it's only going to be a few centralized services doing all the work.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  fair. but I'm assuming you need such expensive (and as a result, centralised) services regardless. a small part of content discovery is "who has reacted to my content", take the case of tiktok, in which a strong content discovery mechanism helped it soar through the ranks. I suspect without such a mechanism the system won't succeed either way (as the fediverse is suffering rn), so its a problem that we will have nevertheless (same as the problem we have with search engines).
s9df898r32h 3y ago
To be more decentralized you could use radio waves outside of the Internet like LoRa to broadcast whatever you need to... maybe it could be combined with the Internet if it's available to increase distance.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Not having any LoRa hardware, I've been imaging just using Bluetooth to gossip updates with people in the same elevator, at the same stoplight... I'd love to build something useful that could tolerate a transport layer like that
  - s9df898r32h 3y ago
    One thing that pisses me off is that Google never implemented WiFi "Ad hoc" networking on Android (reducing the probably of decentralized networks taking off). But I would also love to see something like this going.
    - joeybiden 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      When I work on that project I often consider it as a weapon against the Googles of the world, so it's not surprising that they haven't made things easy. If we want to cut them out of the loop we're going to have to rebuild some of that loop.
rakoo 3y ago
They're slowly but surely reinventing OStatus (<https://indieweb.org/OStatus https://indieweb.org/OStatus>), which ended with ActivityPub. Surely if they go the same path they will end up with the same conclusions.

108 points by lorean_victor 3y ago

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Pull not being a good model of two way communications is going to be the major blocker here in my opinion. It's going to mean that people are only going to see comments and reactions on their posts or comments from people they already subscribe to, because their RSS reader would have no possible way of knowing if anyone outside of that list commented, since you can't get notified of content sources you don't already know about, only poll ones you already know. That's already bad enough (one of the big negative things people with large followings on the fediverse talk about is how they can't see what people are saying in the replies to their posts a lot of the time if the servers those people are on are blocked by their server, which means hate and harassment and one sided conversations can fester, and often many commenters can't even see each others' comments, leading to people saying the same things over and over exhaustingly). This also means that people who don't have any followers will literally be essentially muted by default: no one will see their comments or interactions, because no one polls their feed yet, which means that it's basically pointless for them to interact at all, which sounds dispiriting and would probably lead to no one wanting to use this type of social media — moreover, it also creates a catch-22 problem, because a major way to get followers in the first place is to directly interact with other people and bigger blog posts, to make people aware of you and maybe get some of them interested in hearing more of what you have to say, yet in this model, you can't really interact until you have a following already, so your main means of getting a following is gated behind needing a following to work!

lorean_victor 3y ago
Yes it is a big hurdle. However, I think content discovery is generally a big part of any content platform, way broader than discovering "who have reacted to my content". Now if you want to solve the problem of content discovery in a broader sense, then you have already fixed this particular shortcoming of pull-model as well. If a service that can inform you about new posts with a particular hashtag, it most probably can also tell you about reactions to a particular post. And yes, I do realise that such services will tend to not be really decentralised (similar to the relationship of websites and search engines). But that means the downside is not that you don't get such discovery, but that you'll be reliant on more centralised services for such discovery, whereas in the fediverse you would be less reliant on such services for finding out who has commented on your post (though it will, as you've mentioned still not be enough).
- logicprog 3y ago
  > Yes it is a big hurdle. However, I think content discovery is generally a big part of any content platform, way broader than discovering "who have reacted to my content". Now if you want to solve the problem of content discovery in a broader sense, then you have already fixed this particular shortcoming of pull-model as well. Right but I don't think as a general case finding all RSS feeds on the internet that satisfy a certain criteria, like publishing a hashtag or responding to a particular post, is a problem that can actually be solved in a principled way, because a fundamental limitation of the pull methodology is that you have to know the list of places you are checking beforehand, you can't get content from somewhere you didn't know about prior. The only way to solve this would be to have some kind of crawling and indexing system that regularly crawls the entire internet looking for these expanded RSS feeds and then categorized them according to various criteria in order to poll them. And that is both a very high technical investment and has a lot of limitations itself. So in the end it seems like you haven't really actually distributed the work of a social media system more equally after all, you've just inverted who is doing the work, going from a Federated set of servers that do all the work pushing content everywhere to a Federated set of servers that do all the work pulling content from places.
  - lorean_victor 3y ago
    I do recognise the fact that such "aggregators" would be hugely centralised (if not outright monopolised, like the search engine space). however, maybe I'm wrong but I don't see the federated model succeeding without such services either, so I think of "need for centralised content discovery" as an independent problem, honestly.
jdthedisciple 3y ago
Pro tip: Split your gigantic (and certainly thoughtful!) comment[s] into paragraphs. Makes it a ton easier to parse. Cheers!
- logicprog 3y ago
  Thanks for the advice and compliment! :D I usually write them out and then read them and use the edit function to insert paragraph breaks after the fact, but I forgot to do that this time lol
PaulHoule 3y ago
Note RSS is an ill-defined polling protocol. The server emits an RSS file which has the top N pieces of content. All you can do is poll it at a greater or less frequency and hope you don't underpoll or overpoll. (I can easily fetch the RSS feed for an independent blog 1000 times for every time I fetch an HTML page, but should I? What if I wanted to follow 1000 independent blogs?) With ActivityPub on the other hand you can ask for all updates since the last time you checked so there is a well-defined strategy to keep synced.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Oh wow, RSS really doesn't support pagination? I didn't know that. WebSub can help with solving the poll rate issue, but that presumably wouldn't solve the problem for consumers that are offline for a while.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    ActivityStreams could be seen as a viable extension of RSS (aside from ActivityPub being based off it already) and it does support some simple pagination via its "Collection" vocabulary. Since ActivityStreams is ultimately based on JSON+LD, one could also add seamless querying support to an ActivityStreams endpoint based on SPARQL, for more advanced uses.
  - ttepasse 3y ago
    There is RFC 5005 - Feed Paging and Arching, but sadly the world of RSS Tools has never been very specification-forward, mostly, because the publishers of RSS feeds are even more desinterested. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005.html
egypturnash 3y ago
In the olden days when bloggers walked the earth, emitting lengthy posts over RSS, they solved this problem in two ways: Firstly, by appending forms to the end of the post where someone could type out a reply that was more likely to be a few sentences or paragraph, rather than a full-blown essay. Secondly, by inventing "TrackBack", a standardized way for someone else's blog software to say "hey I wrote some stuff on my blog in response to this post of yours". Both of these would get appended to the end of the blog post's page as "comments". This very quickly enabled the new problem of "trackback/comment spam"; the enduring solution in the world of blogs to that has been "Wordpress' Askimet plugin", which is a very centralized piece of the otherwise mostly-distributed infrastructure of RSS-based blogs. I think it's like $15 a year on top of the $60 or so I pay for my Wordpress site on cheap hosting.
- bigiain 3y ago
  Hmmmm. Now I'm wondering it Askimet are selling every blog comment they scan to OpenAI (and Palantir)?
  - krapp 3y ago
    I think it's safe to assume at this point that all public content and most private content on the internet is being fed to both AI and American intelligence services.
    - bigiain 3y ago
      And China. And Mossad...
  - egypturnash 3y ago
    Askimet is completely owned by Automattic (the corporate entity attached to the main author of Wordpress). And Wikipedia says this of Automattic: In February of 2024, Automattic announced that it would begin selling user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com to Midjourney and OpenAI.[27] 27: https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/ https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-d... "Announced" may be too strong; the link is to an internal email leak discussing this possibility, but "Automattic may be experimenting with selling data to midjourney/openai" is still pretty close to "Automattic's selling user data". Hell, I can see the positive spin blog post announcing this: "They're also giving Automattic a bunch of free cycles on improving Askimet's spam/ham filters, in exchange for a look at every other comment anyone is sending through Askimet ever. We're aware this is a thorny ethical issue; click HERE for the archives of our mailing list dedicated to this project." As for Palantir, my inner paranoid says that if the FBI/NSA/etc wants this data, they have some way of getting whether or not a deal with a public front like Palantir is involved.
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krapp 3y ago
I see your negatives as mostly positive. Engagement and virality are inevitably cancerous to any social network, and comment velocity needs to be suppressed and controlled to reduce entropy and limit the degree to which that network can be used by people primarily interested in "getting a following." Any feature (or anti-feature) that makes a platform unattractive to capitalists and influencers and shitposting trolls is a good thing. Discouraging people from posting and commenting is a good thing. Making it difficult to network is a good thing. None of these things need to be impossible, but I do believe there needs to be enough friction to make low hanging fruit and opportunism not worth the effort. Otherwise everything gets taken over by AI and bots and psychopaths and propagandists and turns to shit.

cousin_it 3y ago

I agree that pull is the best model for posts. For comments I still think the best model is to push them to the post author, and let the post author moderate. This way people who can behave civilly can get an initial audience by writing comments, and having a link to their blog in the profile, with no intermediaries involved. If someone doesn't like the moderation, they're always free to write a comment-as-post, where they can write anything they want but have to take care of distribution themselves.

goda90 3y ago
What if someone posts a dangerous lie? The post author is going to delete any comments that expose the lie. How would comments-as-posts be sufficiently linked to the original post so the lie can properly be exposed to as much of the audience as possible?
- bdw5204 3y ago
  What if somebody posts a dangerous lie on a centralized platform and blocks everybody who criticizes it? Even if it doesn't allow deleting comments, you can effectively the same result with just block. A mute-only social media platform would be doable technically but it would likely involve tons of spammers replying to large accounts. Think about how unusable the replies to an American politician's tweets are on Twitter because the US courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional for politicians to block people on social media. The best solution to this problem I've seen so far is Community Notes on Twitter where a crowdsourced fact check is directly pinned to the tweet allowing users to challenge liars without directly calling them out and getting blocked. More centralized approaches to fact checking don't work particularly well because you end up with biased fact checkers who clearly have an agenda and thus aren't trusted at all by the liar's audience.
lorean_victor 3y ago
the thing is, with no intermediaries involved, more specifically, without any proper "search engines" (or "aggregators") involved, the network will suffer greatly from a content discovery problem regardless (as the fediverse currently is, IMO). with presence of such services, the problem of comments (and reactions in general) can be solved too. if a poster is ok with engaging with potentially hostile content, then they can get reactions to their posts from aggregators that aren't heavy handed on moderation. if they don't want to bother with such interactions, then they can choose safer aggregators. if they want, they can only pull reactions from feeds they are already subscribed to, similar to private posts on twitter.

Zm44 3y ago

Yes, the answer is Nostr

hugs 3y ago
I'm a recent convert to Nostr. Four things I love about it: - It's "just" JSON and WebSockets. From a developer's perspective, it's incredibly easy to get started and build interesting things with it. (Like the early days of Twitter.) Which leads to... - Nostr culture is tolerant of bots and other automated workflows. (Unlike current management of Twitter) - Nostr culture is tolerant of search engines. (Unlike fediverse, or at least the Mastodon part, though I appreciate the reasons for that distinction.) - Built-in micropayment infrastructure with "zaps" and Lightning Network integration enables a ton of interesting new startup idea possibilities. One thing I don't like about Nostr, the social network. (Not Nostr, the protocol. Those two things are very easily conflated right now): - Too many Bitcoin bros. (Although personally I don't mind Bitcoin, a thriving platform should have more than one thing to talk about.)
lorean_victor 3y ago
looks quite interesting, I wasn't aware of that. it seems like a nice hybrid solution to pull/push problem (relays can push if they choose to, clients just publish and pull). I should say though, that upon first look, I wish it was built on top of some already existing standard (like rss), as it could get a great headstart in terms of content already circulating in the network that way.
- hugs 3y ago
  Nostr can get complex, but at its core, it's deceptively simple. It's built on JSON, WebSockets, digital signatures, and sending a simple Event data structure over the wire. It can get complex, but its core is very small. Feels similar to how HTTP itself started. Also, it wouldn't be too hard too build bridges or bots that bring in other stuff (like RSS feeds or ActivityPub content) to Nostr. One already exists: https://mostr.pub https://mostr.pub
dariosalvi78 3y ago
the technology is cool, the people, not that much :)

deleted 3y ago

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Sporktacular 3y ago

" Distributed, i.e. no centers (e.g. personal blogging)" Is it though? There are dependencies on DNS and CDNs along the way. Can anything ever be distributed without a fully distributed protocol stack?

lorean_victor 3y ago
you don't need a CDN or even a DNS to host your blog (though most probably you'd use them). you will still be at the mercy of registries to have an IP address other people can find, but I think practically speaking it is not far fetched to consider this a "distributed system" (for most use-cases anyways).

simonpure 3y ago

PubSubHubbub aka WebSub [0] is an extension of RSS feeds to solve the push/pull issue by introducing hubs. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub

lorean_victor 3y ago
yes I think that'd be a great addition. any publisher can, optionally, introduce a hub for their feed, so people get realtime update of their content, and even a social hub, where other authors reacting to their content can use to notify them (and ease the aggregation of these "reactions"). I suspect that can lead to a situation where there are a few hubs and social hubs that anyone can use for their choosing.

ericyd 3y ago

This article, and many others that promote a highly decentralized internet, consistently fail to address the vast majority of the population who are not developers or extremely tech savvy. > This is in contrast to personal blogging, where every Bob can easily host their own (and they often do). A key word in this sentence is "often". I would argue that hosting your own blog is exceptionally rare at the population level. Most people do not have the interest or skill to accomplish it, so they use services. Similarly, this author proposes a system where every social interaction could be self-hosted. I fail to see who this benefits, beyond a vocal minority of smart technologists. I've seen arguments that suggest the bar should be lowered to allow everyone to do more technical things if so desired (self-hosting, domain registration, etc). I just think this misses the point that for most people, these topics are utterly uninteresting and unimportant. Unless the suggestion is to build a decentralized network for a very select few who wish to participate, I don't feel like these types of ideas will ever be relevant.

lorean_victor 3y ago
thanks for taking the time to read through it regardless. I wrote this as a brain dump, and shared it mostly with the intent of learning more about the topic (which thanks to this thread, I already have), so I feel it is ok if it doesn't change the life of billions of people. the last part of the post, however, is dedicated to assessing whether such an idea would have any real bearing on, as you've put it, "the population", or not. I've tried to list potential benefits to the average user, if such a decentralised platform was ever built. since you are interested more in such evaluations rather than technical contemplations, I'd like to hear your feedback specifically on that part. https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935bd7e96707#back-to-reality https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935...
- ericyd 3y ago
  I'm not sure I have strong feelings about it, but here are a few thoughts: 1. I think a more universal content aggregation / discovery tool would be beneficial for many people. Google might be the analog that comes to mind. This makes me wonder how such an aggregator/search tool would operate in a decentralized way. Would each user/node be responsible for maintaining its own index? My question to you is how does this differ from current centralized aggregators and search tools? 2. Regarding distribution vs. publication: its an interesting point that you could separate the two, but I personally believe this benefit would be moot for most people since they would be unlikely to self-publish content. My view is that most individuals will continue to use centralized services, regardless of the underlying protocol, due to a combination of convenience, ease, and cost. Like you identified, unless there is some critical mass of people self-publing and self-distributing, I'm not sure I see a tangible benefit here. Also, mea culpa, I sometimes forget that the author might read my response and perhaps my language in my initial post was too strong, I hope I did not offend.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.

kornhole 3y ago
Social media is the most important counter measure to propaganda. Before social media, we had a one way stream of information from the media outlets without much opportunity to question, discuss, and debunk. The fediverse resolves the problem of centrally controlled algorithms and censorship that manipulate people's speech depending on the moderation rules of individual instances.
- logicprog 3y ago
  This is a good point actually, despite my reservations about social media, if you want to get a big message out quickly there really is nothing better than something like twitter.
- speff 3y ago
  Your first sentence is the exact reason why propaganda thrives in social media. There's an understanding that fellow people are somehow more trustworthy than Big Media. The part that's not considered is that people on a whole are not able to understand every intricacy of problems out in the world - but they sure do love sharing opinions about every problem as if they do understand. Given this, easy-to-digest messages are easily amplified through social media and every complex detail is withered to nothing. This is why I stopped using Lemmy. The larger communities (read: the only ones that get any posts) ended up being a worse echo-chamber than every other platform due to people repeating the same simple concepts ad nauseam.
  - andoando 3y ago
    100% agree. I think Reddit is a huge propaganda machine in itself. The most ironic thread I’ve seen was a headline about how Republicans were more susceptible to propaganda, with every comment of course being 3-10 words amounting to “oh yeah so true, they’re terrible”. Anyone that actually read past the headline though could see the article was total nonsense. I suppose it may be harder to control since a central authority can’t publish anything they want.

lxgr 3y ago

> In the pull-based system, more work in the end is required (when should Alice query Bob? Also Bob needs to respond to the query, though thats super easy as it is static responses), but the work is better distributed, lowering the maximum amount of work someone has to do (in this case, Bob). I don't see how that follows. Yes, work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing), but the baseline load of these polls will in the end be larger than that of having to do the push fanout per post – at least for people posting less frequently than the average poll rate. Generally, the push-vs-pull discussion seems like a red herring: For every pull system, we'll want some push mechanism for efficiency reasons in the end anyway; for every push system, we'll need a pull way to catch up with posts potentially missed initially. To me, the practically relevant differences between Mastodon (push) and e.g. Bluesky (pull-ish, with aggregators) seem to revolve around the actual ease of self-hosting: As the author notes, setting up a Mastodon server seems roughly as complicated as self-hosting email (i.e. possible but practically almost nobody will do it), but I don't see this as a limitation of the protocol (Activitypub), but rather its implementation. Decoupling identity resolution from hosting an entire server would also be a smart move: Webfinger is way too complicated for this; DNS TXT records would be ideal.

lorean_victor 3y ago
yes it is a federated system by design. doesn't mean it is not a limitation though. to give you an example: in case of email, though it is not that difficult to host your own server (and even if you are a small startup you'll most probably do so without much effort), in the end basically Google decides on "who is an accepted participant in the network". If Google deems you spam, you are spam. If Google deems your authentication emails "promotion", for most intents and purposes, you are "promotion" and your users will miss your emails. that, I feel, is an inherent limitation of any federated system, specifically one whose design is really inspired by email. > I don't see how that follows. as you've mentioned right after. > work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing).
- lxgr 3y ago

CuriouslyC 3y ago

Sure. Instead of servers, you have friends, and you subscribe to your friends content, and discovery occurs through friend-of-a-friend network and "discovery hubs" like the old Yahoo, but for niches (i.e. Follow TechDude96 for hardware review aggregation, etc).

iteratethis 3y ago

I think world scale social networks as in an open "town square" are borderline impossible. Which is not that surprising as it's quite unnatural to talk and be seen by the entire world. However, if you do try it, I still believe a central network is superior. I would opt for baseline moderation (content should be legal) after which any further moderation should be in the hands of the user, not the network. Bluesky has interesting ideas in this area. For example, you can say to always block sexual content, show a warning, or just show it. To each their own. With that in place, a centralized network is superior as it tends to have excellent discovery, search, no weird syncing issues, it's centrally monetized, doesn't depend on lots of volunteer effort and the track record in keeping content online is far better compared to alternatives. That's a lot of benefits to consider. The only real downside is the algorithms that dictate reach and how they are gamed. Federated social media is a really bad idea. Having separate instances is fine if you want to carve out a community, it's the federation part that sucks. It's very resource hungry and still can't manage to properly sync up content, likes and replies. Discovery and search is very hard which beats the entire point of a social network, which is to find people and content. Reliability is low as any volunteer may quit on a whim, taking down your content. Instance moderation is very heavy-handed in that it not only dictates instance rules (which is fine) it also dictates federation. Which means you have no say in which outside content or people you can see. The solution is the dreaded "switch instance". Social media users don't know what an instance is, you're not getting it. The culture on the Fediverse is: connect nobody. Extreme safetyism. The lack of some type of ranked algorithm is a problem, not a solution. Reach is a problem. Bigger accounts, institutions, companies, news, sports...get no reach on the Fediverse. Bottom line: fully centralized social media or fully isolated ones. Federated is the worst of both worlds.

myaccountonhn 3y ago
I think there is a huge issue with centralized social media. Why are unelected tycoons in the US dictating what the rest of the world should be allowed to see? What happens when they neglect languages and regions? It can go horribly wrong: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb.... Decentralized social media gives us a chance to take back control.

patriciapatp 3y ago

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samatman 3y ago

Yes, we can easily get more decentralized that the Fediverse, and we have. Both Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit are peer-to-peer social networking, with rather different takes on what that means. There might be more, those are the ones I'm aware of.

theK 3y ago
Urbit choosing to artificially limit their "address space" with an NFT sale was a bit of a gut punch tbh and I don't see how this will work out positively for the project in the long run.
- samatman 3y ago
  Urbit's address space is 128 bits wide, so scarcity is physically impossible, unless there were a need for every atom in the observable universe to have many addresses. The decision to make the bottom 32 bits valuable was a clever one, but it's lead to some misunderstanding of how things actually work. Specifically, planets (a 32 bit address) only own an additional 2^32 addresses, called moons. That leaves 2^64 of the address space "wild", these are called comets. There are plenty. If you want a four-syllable address, they're loss leaders from hosting providers, currently. Two syllables you have to pay for, and one syllable is not usually on the market. A sixteen-syllable address is and will always be free. How this is handled socially, in a hypothetical future where there are more than 4 billion active Urbit users, is a problem for that future to address.
  - sureglymop 3y ago
    Why does it have to be so obscure? Why planets, moons, etc? It doesn't serve any purpose other than confusing anyone not familiar with it and making those familiar with it seem like the "all knowing" in group.
    - samatman 3y ago
      It depends on what you consider obscure, I guess. A planet is a /32, a star is a /16, a galaxy is an /8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing#IPv4_CIDR_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing... Moons are the /0 subdomain you get with a /32 aka planet, and comets are the 64 bits of free address space left over in the 128 bits of address width. To create a comet, you make a public-private keypair where the public key hash doesn't collide with owned address space. If you miss, you spin up another keypair and keep going until you get one. That's really the whole thing. These things need names, as evidence, I present the fact that in IPv4, they have names. To my taste "slash eight" is more obscure than "galaxy", your mileage may vary.

alkonaut 3y ago

Sure. But even slightly less decentralization has mostly proven clunky and unattractive when it comes to two-way communication social networking. I mean we all have accounts bluesky/mastodon/whatever the network du jour is, but it's on Twitter the posts are, despite its massive quality nosedive in recent time. The centralization of Twitter has massive benefits has almost zero downsides.

lorean_victor 3y ago
it has downsides though. I am constantly jumping between twitter, reddit, spotify (for podcasts) and youtube to see the content and latest updates from the same people. when I want to share something, I should think where should I post it, is it more technical? then reddit and HN maybe, though on twitter I do have some technical people following me too. is it social / political? then its twitter, so on. then I find myself reading and discussing political posts on reddit which are screenshots of posts on twitter or vice versa. I don't know how much pain this is truly, but the unnecessary walls between these communities is indeed a pain point, both as a consumer (I need to check people on multiple places) or as a publisher (I have to partition the discussion to say the least, if not the audience in total). as for mastodon / bluesky / whatever, the main issue to me seems to be lack of content and content discovery. which is weird, since every youtuber, podcaster, subreddit, all of HN and medium, etc. is technically on RSS, and even more can be easily put on RSS with cheap bridges. but instead of unifying and enhancing all this existing shared content streams, we've broken off with new protocols and created separated and isolated communities.

digdugdirk 3y ago

What happened to Content-Centric-Networking? That seems to be an ideal model for a fully decentralized network, p2p or otherwise. Are there specific technical hurdles preventing adoption? Or is the allure of large companies hoarding all the data too good to pass up?

lorean_victor 3y ago
what do you mean by "content-centric-networking"? perhaps I have some reading to do. the "allure of large companies hoarding all the data" might be a factor independently though. I personally believe a proper content discovery service is key to any form of decentralisation, and that is, as far as I can imagine, highly dependent on centralised entities amassing and then processing large amounts of data. I mean we sold our data to Google and in return got the current decentralised web where anyone can make a website and get traffic if the content is good enough (or SEO-hacky enough).
- digdugdirk 3y ago
  The wikipedia article is a decent high level overview: [1] "Content-Centric Networking (CCN) diverges from the IP-based, host-oriented Internet architecture by prioritizing content, making it directly addressable and routable. In CCN, endpoints communicate based on named data rather than IP addresses. This approach is a part of information-centric networking (ICN) architecture and involves the exchange of content request messages (termed "Interests") and content return messages (termed "Content Objects")." It seems well suited for a distributed p2p style network in my mind, but its definitely not anywhere near my area of expertise. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking
  - lorean_victor 3y ago
    thanks for the pointer!
wmf 3y ago
ISPs won't deploy IPv6 and CCNx is much more complex than IP. Getting ISPs to cache content for free also sounds like a fantasy.

davexunit 3y ago

Yes, we can. Christine Lemmer-Webber, coauthor of ActivityPub, cofounded the Spritely Institute to work on the next generation of decentralized online communities. https://spritely.institute https://spritely.institute

ianopolous 3y ago

Absolutely. We've pioneered portable identity (and links and data) in a decentralised social web in Peergos: https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media This is also pull based interestingly, but also has visibility controls being E2EE. I don't think society needs public, or at least public by default, social media. This is even more true now in the age of LLMs and mass data harvesting.

x3haloed 3y ago
> I don't think society needs public, or at least public by default, social media. This is even more true now in the age of LLMs and mass data harvesting. Depends on your definition of “social media.” Is a message board / forum considered social media? Because while they can be problematic, they’re still extremely useful. It would be interesting to think about decentralized Reddit and why lemmy is going nowhere.
- ianopolous 3y ago
  That's a good question. I don't think I'm including reddit here because those are moderated spaces on a fixed topic. I consider social media more people posting top level things that others can choose to follow directly. So social media is more like people meeting and talking, whereas reddit is more like an interest-based society meeting and talking.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

> Personal instances will be pretty rare Personal instances of the US Post Office are also pretty rare, my dude. You gonna go deliver your mail yourself? If so, why write a letter? You want total distributed decentralization? Use Gnutella. It's equivalent to giving your letter to your neighbor and asking them to deliver it, and they ask their neighbor, etc, until it reaches a back alley in Algeria, and then that Algerian calls you on the phone, and if you're home, you read the letter out loud live on the phone. Turns out that's a pretty crap way to deliver letters. But it's decentralized!! People: Stop being so fucking obsessed with decentralization. It's not that great. I'm sure you're all having lots of fun inventing crap technology to solve an already solved problem, but you're just codesturbating.

lorean_victor 3y ago
I wouldn't. I also wouldn't think about a decentralised email solution, or a decentralised messaging service. doesn't make sense. as for publishing my own blog though? nah I'd really rather a decentralised system where I can host my own blog wherever. and yes I do realise most people don't care about that, and yes I'm not sure if they'd care about other benefits of decentralisation as well or not, but its not like there is nothing there that would affect them.
sedatk 3y ago
People tend to forget that we had everything decentralized in the first place, then centralized them for the sake of convenience: Email -> GMail, IRC -> Slack, RSS -> Social Media, Blog -> Medium, Forums -> Reddit and so forth. And basically, convenience won big time. These are not mutually exclusive though. We need decentralized services to fight discrimination and censorship. But, I agree that there is also disproportionate obsession with decentralization at the moment.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  I wouldn't characterise the history of the internet as having started with "everything decentralised". if I'm not missing something, it was completely the other way around. introduction of general populous to the internet was through internet gatekeepers like aol or msn, with unimaginable convenience (and centralisation). that convenience lost, in the end, to the world wide web, where a ton of single individuals could set up a website and reach other people across the internet. some of the big central giants of today got born out of this transition (and some were instrumental to it, namely google). something similar happened to smartphones. ios was intended to be a closed off gatekeeper. people jailbroke it, and apple caved in and opened the system up, allowing anyone to provide services (apps) on it. similar to the www transition, we had a period were you could easily find popular apps made by a single programmer. this decentralisation also basically enabled most centralised social and messaging services of today. so I see it more as a cycle: in stable times, convenience causes a drift towards further centralisation. when there is a platform shift, established players lose their defensive power, some essential operational costs drop drastically, resulting in a sudden decentralisation: tons of small (mostly individual) players can now enter the market and gain prominence through it. the market then stabilises, thriving players shrink in number and grow in size, and become the convenient, centralised corps of the future, only to be similarly shaken by market forces that allowed them to exist in the first place. are we close to such a shift now? I think so. current version of the internet is clearly starting to rot and drown in noise, while we are the cusp of new heights of information processing and accessibility through LLMs, while also thriving to push the boundaries of the information we circulate (AR/VR). but who knows.

Dwedit 3y ago

For immutable content, there's still BitTorrent magnet links or IPFS.

x3haloed 3y ago

I’ve also been thinking about this problem for a while. The push model and account portability are definitely the most important dimensions of this issue. Can’t we just solve this problem with IPFS? And something like DHT tables for protocol-level awareness of state changes? Your client app would just be responsible for pushing and pinning content to IPFS, scanning state tables for interesting updates, and then sending you push notifications. Really simple to take your IPFS key with you can switch to a new app.

anacrolix 3y ago
There's nothing simple or reliable about IPFS.

kkfx 3y ago

IMVHO: - all distributed solutions show too much overhead to perform well for casual users, some (now abandoned) like ZeroNet was performant enough for some personal blog hosting, but barely and still no "indexing" solution stable enough; - classic decentralized social like Usenet seems to be abandoned by most people (except for commercial piracy) so well, most people do not really care enough to take this root if they do not feel something at hand immediately... Long story short: we "just" need IPv6 with a global per host AND a "family" domain name (with all relevant subdomains) per home, a homeserver (like common domestic "routers", just a bit more open/powerful in hw terms) and that's do the base to rebuild "the internet" with a connected desktop model where we no not need third parties or a VPS to traverse NAT, where we do not have to deal with strange long IDs instead of something like phone.bill.myfriendfamily.tld to make an IP2IP audio/video call and so on. All other approaches ESPECIALLY those who try to mimic big platforms will fails.

lorean_victor 3y ago
I admire this vision, and also appreciate the fact that you quoted "just" to underline a recognition of how much of a fundamental shift this is :D
- kkfx 3y ago
  Thanks, and yes it is, but technically we have all the pieces since decades, so while it would be a revolution it's not really something new to be created with uncertain results... The real revolution is a paradigm shift form the actual development focused on big of IT interests toward a classic desktop centered development, the needed ground is there and battle tested, the rest is "just" to be done on scale. A simple example: we have emails, almost any human on the planet have one, at least between those who use computers in a way or another. Today for 99% mail == webmail, something offered by some third party. We have some desktop MUAs but they are stuck in the '90s at best. However we have for instance OfflineIMAP, notmuch, storage normally big enough, so all we need to have emails on our iron is a MUAs friendly enough for end users, based on notmuch/mu like nomuch-emacs, mu4e, neomutt with notmuch backend and so on, that offer IMAP sync built in so and end user have only to enter relevant credentials and wait for the initial download time. The rest follow naturally. Similarly you buy an IoT sensor? Your homeserver speak MQTT, CoIoT etc all you need is connecting to the sensor via LAN or to the AP offered by the sensor and then configure your WLAN. You see the sensor pops up in HA or something similar, that's is. No need of a third party "cloud". And so on. The homeserver is simply a machine on 24/7/365 like most home "router", witch are actually embedded appliance, we only need them more powerful and open to be used by the end user, not only by the ISP. This "center point" offer "sync/services" to all families devices, that's is. The "cloud" became a simple backup/mirror of the homeserver for redundancy, availability, backup.

andoando 3y ago

Im confused. You can already set up your own fediverse server, just as you can host your own personal blog. Decentralization is just a parameter of how many people choose to join an existing server or create their own.

godelski 3y ago
The problem with fediverse style setups is that they tend to become highly centralized. Email being a great example. It's often pointed to as a perfect example of federation but naive because when highly centralized it only slightly reduces issues of full centralization. So the question is how you be federated while being highly decentralized. This of course isn't important for everything. Centralization can even be good at times. But an example might be like browsers. Technically anyone can run their own. But since the ecosystem is so Chrom{e,ium} based, Google can exert a lot of control over what standards are set on webpages and how to process data. You might have heard about them trying to destroy the cookie. Which in part I feel is great, but at the same time it's not like they aren't still tracking people. Either way, the point is that a singular (or even a few) compan{y,ies} shouldn't get to dictate critical infrastructure. This can actually even lead to fragmentation, especially when we consider that more than one country exists. So it has to be easy, near trivial, to run your own server, and must also be cheap, if you want a highly decentralized platform. If it isn't, there's always a strong pressure for centralization.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  exactly.
- andoando 3y ago
  Sure, whats fundamentally difficult about setting up a federated instance? Its just a db, and backend/frontend service. You can put in a docker container and run it in minutes. Things tend to get centralized because users want to be where users are. Developing another platform doesn't change that. Even if that platform just straight up does not allow centralization, it doesn't stop people from using centralized platforms.

thinkerswell 3y ago

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thrwwycbr 3y ago

For me, the peak of decentralization efforts were Beaker Browser [1] and Stealth [2]. But one project didn't make enough money and the author of the other one got doxxed into oblivion, so I guess we can't have nice things. A peer to peer browser has so much potential, I wish somebody else might give it a try. Imagine the possibilities when you can just share the content with others, without needing a web server. Does anybody know whether there's a decentralized (static/generated) blog for ipfs or similar? Maybe that would make a nice starting point. [1] https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker [2] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

theamk 3y ago
I actually can't imagine what are the possibilities the personal web server gives me, compared to github pages or cloudflare pages or tons of other super cheap web hosts. Ease of use / nice design tools? You don't need a new protocol for it, create your web editor and add plugins for common providers. Your website would be accessible from any browser, nicely solving chicken-and-egg problems. Free domain names? Plenty of existing systems exists, and many of them are actually compatible with existing browsers. Availability? Any real server will be way more reliable than your home machine that will go to sleep when unused, get updates, etc. And if you say "IPFS", then you still need to sign up with some centralized service to pin your site, so might as well sign up for webhost instead. Illegal content? P2P exposes your IP, so your local police has access to it. And if it's kind of the content that is not actually illegal, just heavily frowned upon, there would still be plenty of hosters willing to host you. Unlimited media storage? That could be a legitimate reason, but most people would want to store their video using dedicated system anyway (youtube / peertube), and modern storage is so cheap, the photos are not going to be a problem (Cloudflare free plan gives you up to 20,000 files up to 25 MB each for free for example)
- theK 3y ago
  > if you say "IPFS", then you still need to sign up with some centralized service Ipfs actually has some inbuilt cashing, so visitors to your site also take part of the load and can serve your assets when your PC/internet is down. All without pinning, purely based on GC timing. So as long as you are online reasonably often and your content has readers you will be fine. Another idea has been to make it so that bookmarking works a bit like pinning so by using the decentralized web you actually archive it (sort of)

theamk 3y ago

This schema relies on "third-party aggregators / crawlers / search services" for critical parts like comments and content discovery. They are going to be responsible for things like spam filtering, misinformation removal, and blocking accounts which violate TOS. And those crawlers _have_ to be expensive - after all, you need to check every participating server to see comments. So instead of everyone running mastodon instance on $10/month machine, it's only going to be a few centralized services doing all the work.

lorean_victor 3y ago
fair. but I'm assuming you need such expensive (and as a result, centralised) services regardless. a small part of content discovery is "who has reacted to my content", take the case of tiktok, in which a strong content discovery mechanism helped it soar through the ranks. I suspect without such a mechanism the system won't succeed either way (as the fediverse is suffering rn), so its a problem that we will have nevertheless (same as the problem we have with search engines).

s9df898r32h 3y ago

To be more decentralized you could use radio waves outside of the Internet like LoRa to broadcast whatever you need to... maybe it could be combined with the Internet if it's available to increase distance.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Not having any LoRa hardware, I've been imaging just using Bluetooth to gossip updates with people in the same elevator, at the same stoplight... I'd love to build something useful that could tolerate a transport layer like that
- s9df898r32h 3y ago
  One thing that pisses me off is that Google never implemented WiFi "Ad hoc" networking on Android (reducing the probably of decentralized networks taking off). But I would also love to see something like this going.
  - joeybiden 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    When I work on that project I often consider it as a weapon against the Googles of the world, so it's not surprising that they haven't made things easy. If we want to cut them out of the loop we're going to have to rebuild some of that loop.

rakoo 3y ago

They're slowly but surely reinventing OStatus (<https://indieweb.org/OStatus https://indieweb.org/OStatus>), which ended with ActivityPub. Surely if they go the same path they will end up with the same conclusions.