3 ms·

What will be very cool will be making it feasible for non-technical folks to easily stand up servers and make federation much more of a dark forest model. I was

by laurex 3y ago

What will be very cool will be making it feasible for non-technical folks to easily stand up servers and make federation much more of a dark forest model. I was hoping this was the direction Mozilla would take when they invested in building with Mastadon. Essentially, it should be possible to have social tooling in a Wordpress-like ecosystem where developers can create different modules and plug-ins, where people can charge for hosting, building out instances, etc but the code itself is FOSS, and where we can use decentralized experiments to learn what we actually want as far as social tech goes, not just emulate existing platforms with feeds and vanity metrics.

0xEF 3y ago
I keep seeing people use "dark forest" and I think I may have a different understanding which leaves me wondering "why would you want this to happen?" My take on the dark forest comes from game theory, where nobody is working with complete information (in extreme summary) which sounds like a bad idea if we use it as a social goal. I've always felt like we are currently in the dark forest stage, but the goal should be to get out of it. Perhaps my understanding is flawed? What is your take or how did you intend to use the phrase?
- derbOac 3y ago
  Not the OP, but their comment and your question got me thinking. Sometimes I get the sense that true decentralization could get people to 90% of how they actually use things like Twitter/X, and federation (including major hubs) gets you to the remaining 10%. What I often see is people following a certain number of people, often those they "know", either in real life or online, supplemented by a smaller number of bigger, more distant sources. Along these lines, what I could see working is something that's like Matrix, but where explicit groups/rooms aren't there, and defined implicitly by social networks. A bridge between something like bluesky and matrix. I think the "dark forest" part comes in with the idea that maybe a certain lack of knowledge is ok, or inevitable, just like the real world, and therefore is an acceptable cost to allow even more truly decentralized systems? I'm just thinking out loud, so maybe I am really off. But I often feel real world social dynamics are some kind of decentralized peer to peer and federated hybrid, and a platform with those characteristics could be successful if it got key elements right.
  - jghn 3y ago
    Would this model support true global search? As in searching across all posts? On twitter that was straightforward as there is a single server. For federated models it requires the search engine to be able to discover everything, not just to what it is connected
    - derbOac 3y ago
      That's a good question. I'm not sure it could support true global search but I don't know... my guess is there'd probably be some probabilistic guarantee but not much beyond that?
- crq-yml 3y ago
  The dark forest is usually applied as the converse of a panopticon: a society where things are illegible and private as a normal way of conducting one's business, versus one which is maximally surveilled and made legible to a state. There's a very palpable tension and oscillation between these two extremes in everyday life: school is designed in the mode of a panopticon - a place where you are watched and examined for your benefit - while a dimly lot nightclub is more of a forest, a place where you can stay lost in the crowd and it's not clear how attractive you are. Applying the wrong degree of legibility to the situation is not beneficial - for example, schools in many countries have moved away from publicly posting everyone's exam scores to avoid the negative effects of humiliation, while drinking establishments know that they have to kick out creeps that make other customers uncomfortable, so they do monitor things discreetly. Socially speaking, we just did the panopticon online, that was 2010's social media - a moment where you were encouraged to post with your legal name, photograph, job title, age, etc. The dark forest was the thing we had in little niches of the Internet before that, and the thing we might be looking towards again.
  - 0xEF 3y ago
    This is a great comparison to make. I hadn't really considered this before from the privacy standpoint, so this gives me something to chew on. Appreciate it!

by laurex 3y ago

0xEF 3y ago

I keep seeing people use "dark forest" and I think I may have a different understanding which leaves me wondering "why would you want this to happen?" My take on the dark forest comes from game theory, where nobody is working with complete information (in extreme summary) which sounds like a bad idea if we use it as a social goal. I've always felt like we are currently in the dark forest stage, but the goal should be to get out of it. Perhaps my understanding is flawed? What is your take or how did you intend to use the phrase?

derbOac 3y ago
Not the OP, but their comment and your question got me thinking. Sometimes I get the sense that true decentralization could get people to 90% of how they actually use things like Twitter/X, and federation (including major hubs) gets you to the remaining 10%. What I often see is people following a certain number of people, often those they "know", either in real life or online, supplemented by a smaller number of bigger, more distant sources. Along these lines, what I could see working is something that's like Matrix, but where explicit groups/rooms aren't there, and defined implicitly by social networks. A bridge between something like bluesky and matrix. I think the "dark forest" part comes in with the idea that maybe a certain lack of knowledge is ok, or inevitable, just like the real world, and therefore is an acceptable cost to allow even more truly decentralized systems? I'm just thinking out loud, so maybe I am really off. But I often feel real world social dynamics are some kind of decentralized peer to peer and federated hybrid, and a platform with those characteristics could be successful if it got key elements right.
- jghn 3y ago
  Would this model support true global search? As in searching across all posts? On twitter that was straightforward as there is a single server. For federated models it requires the search engine to be able to discover everything, not just to what it is connected
  - derbOac 3y ago
    That's a good question. I'm not sure it could support true global search but I don't know... my guess is there'd probably be some probabilistic guarantee but not much beyond that?
crq-yml 3y ago
The dark forest is usually applied as the converse of a panopticon: a society where things are illegible and private as a normal way of conducting one's business, versus one which is maximally surveilled and made legible to a state. There's a very palpable tension and oscillation between these two extremes in everyday life: school is designed in the mode of a panopticon - a place where you are watched and examined for your benefit - while a dimly lot nightclub is more of a forest, a place where you can stay lost in the crowd and it's not clear how attractive you are. Applying the wrong degree of legibility to the situation is not beneficial - for example, schools in many countries have moved away from publicly posting everyone's exam scores to avoid the negative effects of humiliation, while drinking establishments know that they have to kick out creeps that make other customers uncomfortable, so they do monitor things discreetly. Socially speaking, we just did the panopticon online, that was 2010's social media - a moment where you were encouraged to post with your legal name, photograph, job title, age, etc. The dark forest was the thing we had in little niches of the Internet before that, and the thing we might be looking towards again.
- 0xEF 3y ago
  This is a great comparison to make. I hadn't really considered this before from the privacy standpoint, so this gives me something to chew on. Appreciate it!