6 ms·

A want a P2P social networking construct where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms, and leave the

A want a P2P social networking construct where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms, and leave the rest of the web/platforms to rot. We should have gone P2P in 200X, but Facebook and Google took us down a different path. Bittorrent was good. Semantic Web kind of understood the task, but it was academic and not leveraged. Now we understand the assignment and have all the experience necessary to build the thing. Mastodon and ActivityPub are not the solution. Bittorrent was.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Bittorrent is a great way to download big files. Heck, if Docker used Bittorrent to download files it might even work on my DSL connection but I guess reliability is an "enterprise" feature. Bittorrent is not a good way to download small bits of data like status updates. What do you think is so bad about ActivityPub? Should we fall back on RSS and just settle for stale data sometimes and excessive polling other times?
- sircastor 3y ago
  I think the implication here is that ActivityPub is still server to server. Is better distributed than one closed-monolith to another, but BitTorrent was really good client to client. Protocol wise it’s probably not perfect for small updates, but imagine if you just had a magnet link to your friends’ “website” which, instead of being hosted somewhere is available when they update it and gets distributed around peers.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Sounds like Bitcoin to me. Bitcoin took so long to get invented because if you went to a computer science conference and said you'd give a talk about how you built a node network 20,000 computers in it that does as much work as 1 computer did people would just laugh at you. Now if you had a system with 20,000 computers where there are 20 copies of your content in the system that might be interesting, but peer-to-peer networks can easily be a way to make Amazon Web Services look cheap the same way that Bitcoin makes Visa and Mastercard look fast and inexpensive.
    - echelon 3y ago
      You don't need durability or even reliability. It can be completely ephemeral. It's social commentary, and that doesn't need to live more than a day. There isn't even a need for an SLA. A simple in-memory object store with basic signing for authorship would work. This isn't even a hard problem. It's a UI/UX problem. Let individual clients / implementers worry about customer specific asks, like video, media, voting, and persistence. The core protocol should just be about exchanging messages in a swarm and clients keeping track of the nodes that they like. The big win here is that everyone gets to decide upon their own algorithm and curation. You could compose your own Hacker News and suppress stories about Bitcoin. The next big win is that it's censorship resistant (you can opt into whatever personal censorship or automatic curation you want). There are no misaligned incentives between the platform and the consumer, so you can do whatever you want with the product. Finally, since the data and protocol are first class, you can meld it into whatever you'd like.
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        As someone who builds recommendation, filtering and moderation systems I think most of the discussion on the topic is naive. About a billion pieces of content are posted to social media a day, maybe you can look at 100 of those, so no matter how you look at it content is being winnowed down by a ratio of 1-to-10,000,000. Maybe I can afford to show you one comment that was inspired by Fox News's ceaseless agenda spamming on certain issues. Trouble is, some people like to keep repeating things that other people repeat and they're going to cry censorship if I am not showing you 99/100 pieces of content. Trouble is all that spam displaces real content that somebody put blood, sweat and tears into plus it also poisons the well and drives consumers away. (You never hear complaints about "censorship" in the West when it is a book or an investigative journalism project that takes person-years, it is always in the context of low-effort imitation, spam, etc.) This 1971 book is head and shoulders better than anything I've seen written recently https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Media/dp/B001IOS2FW https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med... about the problem of personalized news media. I find it quite interesting that the book predicted we were going to have something like the WWW almost 15 years before we actually did. (Technologically we did, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel. The trouble was the lack of a business model to make it a sustainable business outside France. Technology had to progress so far that it was so cheap that we didn't have to think about it as a business when we were deploying to people...) Most notably Bagdikian points out the severity of the filtering problem, that the editor of a small town paper looking at the AP feed in 1971 could spend at most 6 seconds deciding what article to run. In recent years we've had an epidemic of aquired situational narcissism where someone whose life was just work, sleep, eat, repeat suddenly discovers that the government did something really bad with respect to COVID-19 and now they wake up and their computer is now a command center and they are trying to organize everybody. I will hear what they have to say but I am not going to stand for them repeating and this person has another 999 just like them and, sorry, I listened to the first person once and just don't have time for the other 999. That's how I see it.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  While BitTorrent itself isn't great for small messages, P2P as a model is fine. The issue of P2P vs something like RSS is you have to be "platformed" to host RSS or even ActivityPub. You need some sort of publicly available server, a TLS cert that doesn't trigger scary warnings, and some ability to deal with inevitable abuse from assholes (DDoS etc). These are doable things for me but impractical for many. A fully P2P status update network would really only need Internet connectivity to participate.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    To host RSS you just need a domain name and a server. It's pretty hard to stop somebody from getting those. Or does the new USA constitution of 2024 state that "free" speech is not as in speech as we used to understand it but more in the sense of free beer? Maybe we can trade the possibility for people to put a lot of effort into having meaningful to say for the "free" ability for people to express their membership in a tribe.
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      > To host RSS you just need a domain name and a server. It's pretty hard to stop somebody from getting those. The word "just" is doing some heavy lifting here. Even cheapo web hosting (that automatically handles TLS) and a domain name still costs more than the "free" of Facebook/Twitter/etc. That's besides the non-zero technical competence to set it up and then actually update the RSS. Then you're at the mercy of the host's AUP/EULA. You can have your account terminated for a number of reasons, like getting DDoSed because someone doesn't like what you said or your account is hacked and is used to host malware. Most people, even the technically inclined, don't necessarily want to be their own system administrator. It's an order of magnitude more effort than signing up for a centralized platform and pressing a button. RSS might be fined for a certain demographic but it's completely untenable for the majority. That is besides the ergonomics of RSS. Because RSS readers want to display item titles because they treat all items like more formal news articles they de facto require posts to have titles. Common blogging platforms also want titles on posts. Short form content is attractive to many people because it doesn't require formalities like titles or subjects. Short form platforms even understand inline tags (hashtags etc) so posts have even less friction then the typical blog software. RSS, because of common patterns of readers and generators, sucks for carrying short form content. To make it work you'd need not just generators to make items without titles but also add a "short form" mode to feed readers that don't try to make every feed item look like a long form blog post. Both sides of the equation would also need to capture things like references to posts to display posts as replies to others. It's all doable but requires agreement on what changes need to be made to the format/schema then implement those in feed readers and generating software. The Atom format tried some of this but too few bits of software really leveraged the format. I say all this as someone that loves the idea of RSS. The lack of affordance to short form message-like content is a major limitation of the format and a design oversight. I think social media would be very different today if RSS (as an ecosystem) handled informal short form content better.
eropple 3y ago
> A want a P2P social networking construct where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms, and leave the rest of the web/platforms to rot. With the obvious caveat that it's not done, ATProto is pushing towards this. Pick your personal server (your PDS), pick an aggregator (or multiple) to get a firehose from, delegate moderation and feed creation to other systems, view it through a mostly-standardized appview.
doublepg23 3y ago
Secure Scuttlebutt is probably close to what you want but it seems dead (all the main implementations seem abandoned).
harkinian 3y ago
Make a website where each user has an RSS feed and posts/reposts stuff to that, mainly links to things they've found interesting. "Following" someone means subscribing to their RSS feed. That'd be federated out of the box.
- thinkingemote 3y ago
  That was the secret of Google reader. Being able to subscribe to friends feeds. Social networking based on RSS.
  - harkinian 3y ago
    I was thinking, someone must've tried this before. Didn't know Google Reader was that someone.
  - mos_basik 3y ago
    Wow. Didn't know it could do that. I showed up to the internet party around 2011, a little late for my age, so I was still getting my legs and kind of missed "being there" for a few events, like Megaupload going down and Google Reader getting killed. I'm honestly starting to get a little stunned at the number of number of times I see people say "yeah, Google Reader could do [this-or-that]".
    - harkinian 3y ago
      I was around then. Never knew anyone who used Google Reader, though. Megaupload going down, now that was a big event.
kps 3y ago
> where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms It's not P2P, but that seems to be what Bluesky is aiming for. Whereas Reddit fights end up with /r/MyTopic, /r/MyTopic2, /r/BetterMyTopic, etc., you could have competing curators for #MyTopic and choose to view any one or any union or intersection of them.
fwip 3y ago
You may enjoy Scuttlebutt and other gossip-based protocols.

PaulHoule 3y ago

Bittorrent is a great way to download big files. Heck, if Docker used Bittorrent to download files it might even work on my DSL connection but I guess reliability is an "enterprise" feature. Bittorrent is not a good way to download small bits of data like status updates. What do you think is so bad about ActivityPub? Should we fall back on RSS and just settle for stale data sometimes and excessive polling other times?

sircastor 3y ago
I think the implication here is that ActivityPub is still server to server. Is better distributed than one closed-monolith to another, but BitTorrent was really good client to client. Protocol wise it’s probably not perfect for small updates, but imagine if you just had a magnet link to your friends’ “website” which, instead of being hosted somewhere is available when they update it and gets distributed around peers.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Sounds like Bitcoin to me. Bitcoin took so long to get invented because if you went to a computer science conference and said you'd give a talk about how you built a node network 20,000 computers in it that does as much work as 1 computer did people would just laugh at you. Now if you had a system with 20,000 computers where there are 20 copies of your content in the system that might be interesting, but peer-to-peer networks can easily be a way to make Amazon Web Services look cheap the same way that Bitcoin makes Visa and Mastercard look fast and inexpensive.
  - echelon 3y ago
    You don't need durability or even reliability. It can be completely ephemeral. It's social commentary, and that doesn't need to live more than a day. There isn't even a need for an SLA. A simple in-memory object store with basic signing for authorship would work. This isn't even a hard problem. It's a UI/UX problem. Let individual clients / implementers worry about customer specific asks, like video, media, voting, and persistence. The core protocol should just be about exchanging messages in a swarm and clients keeping track of the nodes that they like. The big win here is that everyone gets to decide upon their own algorithm and curation. You could compose your own Hacker News and suppress stories about Bitcoin. The next big win is that it's censorship resistant (you can opt into whatever personal censorship or automatic curation you want). There are no misaligned incentives between the platform and the consumer, so you can do whatever you want with the product. Finally, since the data and protocol are first class, you can meld it into whatever you'd like.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      As someone who builds recommendation, filtering and moderation systems I think most of the discussion on the topic is naive. About a billion pieces of content are posted to social media a day, maybe you can look at 100 of those, so no matter how you look at it content is being winnowed down by a ratio of 1-to-10,000,000. Maybe I can afford to show you one comment that was inspired by Fox News's ceaseless agenda spamming on certain issues. Trouble is, some people like to keep repeating things that other people repeat and they're going to cry censorship if I am not showing you 99/100 pieces of content. Trouble is all that spam displaces real content that somebody put blood, sweat and tears into plus it also poisons the well and drives consumers away. (You never hear complaints about "censorship" in the West when it is a book or an investigative journalism project that takes person-years, it is always in the context of low-effort imitation, spam, etc.) This 1971 book is head and shoulders better than anything I've seen written recently https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Media/dp/B001IOS2FW https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med... about the problem of personalized news media. I find it quite interesting that the book predicted we were going to have something like the WWW almost 15 years before we actually did. (Technologically we did, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel. The trouble was the lack of a business model to make it a sustainable business outside France. Technology had to progress so far that it was so cheap that we didn't have to think about it as a business when we were deploying to people...) Most notably Bagdikian points out the severity of the filtering problem, that the editor of a small town paper looking at the AP feed in 1971 could spend at most 6 seconds deciding what article to run. In recent years we've had an epidemic of aquired situational narcissism where someone whose life was just work, sleep, eat, repeat suddenly discovers that the government did something really bad with respect to COVID-19 and now they wake up and their computer is now a command center and they are trying to organize everybody. I will hear what they have to say but I am not going to stand for them repeating and this person has another 999 just like them and, sorry, I listened to the first person once and just don't have time for the other 999. That's how I see it.
giantrobot 3y ago
While BitTorrent itself isn't great for small messages, P2P as a model is fine. The issue of P2P vs something like RSS is you have to be "platformed" to host RSS or even ActivityPub. You need some sort of publicly available server, a TLS cert that doesn't trigger scary warnings, and some ability to deal with inevitable abuse from assholes (DDoS etc). These are doable things for me but impractical for many. A fully P2P status update network would really only need Internet connectivity to participate.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  To host RSS you just need a domain name and a server. It's pretty hard to stop somebody from getting those. Or does the new USA constitution of 2024 state that "free" speech is not as in speech as we used to understand it but more in the sense of free beer? Maybe we can trade the possibility for people to put a lot of effort into having meaningful to say for the "free" ability for people to express their membership in a tribe.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    > To host RSS you just need a domain name and a server. It's pretty hard to stop somebody from getting those. The word "just" is doing some heavy lifting here. Even cheapo web hosting (that automatically handles TLS) and a domain name still costs more than the "free" of Facebook/Twitter/etc. That's besides the non-zero technical competence to set it up and then actually update the RSS. Then you're at the mercy of the host's AUP/EULA. You can have your account terminated for a number of reasons, like getting DDoSed because someone doesn't like what you said or your account is hacked and is used to host malware. Most people, even the technically inclined, don't necessarily want to be their own system administrator. It's an order of magnitude more effort than signing up for a centralized platform and pressing a button. RSS might be fined for a certain demographic but it's completely untenable for the majority. That is besides the ergonomics of RSS. Because RSS readers want to display item titles because they treat all items like more formal news articles they de facto require posts to have titles. Common blogging platforms also want titles on posts. Short form content is attractive to many people because it doesn't require formalities like titles or subjects. Short form platforms even understand inline tags (hashtags etc) so posts have even less friction then the typical blog software. RSS, because of common patterns of readers and generators, sucks for carrying short form content. To make it work you'd need not just generators to make items without titles but also add a "short form" mode to feed readers that don't try to make every feed item look like a long form blog post. Both sides of the equation would also need to capture things like references to posts to display posts as replies to others. It's all doable but requires agreement on what changes need to be made to the format/schema then implement those in feed readers and generating software. The Atom format tried some of this but too few bits of software really leveraged the format. I say all this as someone that loves the idea of RSS. The lack of affordance to short form message-like content is a major limitation of the format and a design oversight. I think social media would be very different today if RSS (as an ecosystem) handled informal short form content better.

eropple 3y ago

> A want a P2P social networking construct where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms, and leave the rest of the web/platforms to rot. With the obvious caveat that it's not done, ATProto is pushing towards this. Pick your personal server (your PDS), pick an aggregator (or multiple) to get a firehose from, delegate moderation and feed creation to other systems, view it through a mostly-standardized appview.

doublepg23 3y ago

Secure Scuttlebutt is probably close to what you want but it seems dead (all the main implementations seem abandoned).

harkinian 3y ago

Make a website where each user has an RSS feed and posts/reposts stuff to that, mainly links to things they've found interesting. "Following" someone means subscribing to their RSS feed. That'd be federated out of the box.

thinkingemote 3y ago
That was the secret of Google reader. Being able to subscribe to friends feeds. Social networking based on RSS.
- harkinian 3y ago
  I was thinking, someone must've tried this before. Didn't know Google Reader was that someone.
- mos_basik 3y ago
  Wow. Didn't know it could do that. I showed up to the internet party around 2011, a little late for my age, so I was still getting my legs and kind of missed "being there" for a few events, like Megaupload going down and Google Reader getting killed. I'm honestly starting to get a little stunned at the number of number of times I see people say "yeah, Google Reader could do [this-or-that]".
  - harkinian 3y ago
    I was around then. Never knew anyone who used Google Reader, though. Megaupload going down, now that was a big event.

kps 3y ago

> where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms It's not P2P, but that seems to be what Bluesky is aiming for. Whereas Reddit fights end up with /r/MyTopic, /r/MyTopic2, /r/BetterMyTopic, etc., you could have competing curators for #MyTopic and choose to view any one or any union or intersection of them.

fwip 3y ago

You may enjoy Scuttlebutt and other gossip-based protocols.