10 ms·

Why the open social web matters now

225 points by benwerd 1y ago

johnnyanmac 1y ago
Maybe this was more of an intro/pitch to something I already support, so I wasn't quite the audience here. But I feel that talking about the open social web without addressing the reasons current ones aren't popular/get blocked doesn't lead to much progress. Ultimately, big problems with an open social web include: - moderation - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl - good faith verification - posting transparency These are all hard problems and it seems to make me believe the future of a proper community lies more in charging a small premium. Even charging one dollar for life takes out 99% of spam and gives a cost to bad faith actors should they be banned and need another dollar to re-enter. Thus, easing moderation needs. But charging money for anything online these days can cause a lot of friction.
- echelon 1y ago
  It'd be cool if you had to pay a certain amount of money to publish any message. And then if you could verify you'd paid it in a completely P2P decentralized fashion. I'm not a crypto fan, but I'd appreciate a message graph where high signal messages "burned" or "donated money" to be flagged for attention. I'd also like it if my attention were paid for by those wishing to have it, but that's a separate problem.
  - Groxx 1y ago
    it's pure waste-generation, but hashcash is a fairly old strategy for this, and it's one of the foundations of Bitcoin. there's no "proof of payment to any beneficial recipient", sadly, but it does throttle high-volume spammers pretty effectively.
    - echelon 1y ago
      Maybe if you could prove you sent a payment to a charity node and then signed your message in the receipt for verification...
      - Terr_ 1y ago
        Imagine a world where every City Hall has a vending machine you can use to donate a couple bucks to to a charity of your choice, and receive an anonymous one-time use "some real human physically present donated real money to make this" token. You could then spend the token with a forum, to gain and basic trust for an otherwise anonymous account.
        echelon 1y ago
        I like that idea a lot.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    The people willing to pay money to post messages are not a desirable demographic. It is one that includes people like spammers.
- numpy-thagoras 1y ago
  "- moderation - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl - good faith verification - posting transparency" And we have to think about how to hit these targets while: - respecting individual sovereignty - respecting privacy - meeting any other obligations or responsibilities within reason and of course, it must be EASY and dead simple to use. It's doable, we've done far more impossible-seeming things just in the last 30 years, so it's just a matter of willpower now.
- emseetech 1y ago
  Having worked on the problem for years, decentralized social networking is such as tar pit of privacy and security and social problems that I can't find myself excited by it anymore. We are clear what the problems with mainstream social networking at scale are now, and decentralization only seems to make them worse and more intractable. I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.
  - krapp 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - emseetech 1y ago
      I'm a consultant that builds for startups. I'm not an entrepreneur myself. If I were to build something like this, I'd use a services non-profit model. Ad-supported apps result in way too many perverse economic incentives in social media, as we've seen time and time again. I worked on open source decentralized social networking for 12 years, starting before Facebook even launched. Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.
      - krapp 1y ago
        >Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult. I disagree that federation is "specifically political decentralization" but how so? You claim that decentralization makes all of the problems of mainstream social networking worse and more intractable, but I think most of those problems come from the centralized nature of mainstream social media. There is only one Facebook, and only one Twitter, and if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad. If you don't like the way moderation works with an instance, you don't have to federate with it, you can create your own instance and moderate however you see fit. This seems like a better solution than everyone being subject to the whims of a centralized service.
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  Those are important reasons, but there are other reasons as well, such as concentration of market power in a few companies, which allows those companies to erect barriers to entry and shape law in ways that benefit themselves, as well as simply creating network effects that make it hard for new social-web projects to establish a foothold.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    That's an even harder problem to solve. I do agree we should make sure that policy isn't manipulated by vested powers and make things even harder to compete with. But network effects seems to be a natural phenomenon of people wanting to establish a familiar routine. I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. But it still creates a strong network effect nonetheless. I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. You need to focus instead on getting above a certain critical mass, where you keep a healthy stream of posting and participation that can sustain itself. Social media should ultimately be about establishing a space for a community to flourish, and small communities are just as valid.
    - BrenBarn 1y ago
      > I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. For now. Google's motto was "don't be evil" until it wasn't. > I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. I'm not so sure. I mean, yes, you can create a "good" community on a small scale. But when the system is geared towards larger entities, those communities are always at risk because they don't have a seat at the table, so to speak. An example that's relevant recently is these laws about age verification. For small communities, things like age verification requirements can be an existential threat. One crazy person with a vendetta can sue them into oblivion for some technical violation, and unlike the big players, they don't have the resources to fight back. They also don't have the resources to lobby for verification mechanisms that are realistic at a small scale. When the rules of the game are set by the big players, small players are always at risk of being declared in violation, or just having the rules changed in a way that ensures they can't win. I'm coming to think that small communities are not safe unless large networks are either destroyed or severely restricted in a way that involves ongoing monitoring and enforcement. (I hesitate to use the word "community" for these large networks because I don't think something like Facebook is really a community, although there are communities within it.)
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > Ultimately, big problems with an open social web include: These two seem like the same problem: > moderation > spam You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts. But we kind of already have that. Make likes public (what else are they even for?). Then show people posts from the people they follow or that the people they follow liked. Have a dislike button so that if you follow someone but always dislike the things they like, your client learns you don't want to see the things they like. Now you don't see trash unless you follow people who like trash, and then whose fault is that? > which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl This is a completely independent problem from spam. It's also something decentralized networks are actually good at. If more devices are requesting some data then there are more sources of it. Let the bots get the data from each other. Track share ratios so high traffic nodes with bad ratios get banned for leeching and it's cheaper for them to get a cloud node somewhere with cheap bandwidth and actually upload than to buy residential proxies to fight bans. > good faith verification > posting transparency It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again and in particular they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see instead of a bunch of spam from anons that nobody they follow likes.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    >You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts. Yes. But I see curation more as a 2nd order problems to solve once the bases are taken care of. Moderation focuses on addressing the low quality, while curation makes sure tye high quality posts receive focus. The tools needed for curation, stuff like filtering, finding similar posts/comments, popularity, following, are different from those needed to moderate, or self moderate (ignore, down voting, reporting). The latter poisons a site before it can really start to curate to its users. >This is a completely independent problem from spam. Yeah, thinking more about it, it probably is a distinct category. It simply has a similar result of making a site unable to function. >It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again I can clarify. In short, posting transparency focused more on the user and good faith verification focuses more on the content. (I'm also horrible with naming, so I welcome better terms to describe these) - Posting transparency at this point has one big goal: ensure you know when a human or a bot is posting. But it extends to ensuring there's no impersonation, that there's no abuse of alt accounts, and no voting manipulation. It can even extend in some domains to making sure e.g. That a person who says they worked at Google actually worked at Google. But this is definitely a step that can overstep privacies. - good faith verification refers more towards a duty to properly vet and fact check information that is posted. It may include addressing misinformation and hate, or removing non-transparent intimate advice like legal/medical claims without sources or proper licensing. It essentially boils down to making ensuring that "bad but popular" advice doesn't proliferate, as it it ought to do. >they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see Yes, they are. I think we've seen enough examples of how dangerous "showing people what they actually want to see" can be if left unchecked. And the incentives to keep them up are equally dangerous in an ad-driven platform. Being able to address that naturally requires some more authorian approaches. That's why "good faith" is an important factor here. Any authoritarian act you introduce can only work on trust, and is easily broken by abuse. If we want incentives to change from "maximizing engagement" to "maximizing quality and community", we need to cull out malicious information. We already give some authoritarianism by having moderators we trust to remove spam and illegal content, so I don't see it as a giant overstep to make sure they can also do this.
- Seattle3503 1y ago
  A lot of tech folks hate government ID schemes, but I think MDL with some sort of pairwise pseudonyms could help with spam and verification. It would let you identify users uniquely, but without revealing too much sensitive information. It would let you verify things like "This user has a Michigan driver's license, and they have an ID 1234, which is unique to my system and not linkable to any other place they use that ID." If you ban that user, they wouldn't be able to use that ID again with you. The alternative is that we continue to let unelected private operators like Cloudflare "solve" this problem.
  - isodev 1y ago
    The EU’s eIDAS 2.0 specification for their digital wallet identity explicitly supports the use of pseudonyms for this exact purpose of “Anonymous authentication”.
    - Seattle3503 1y ago
      That's awesome. Hopefully the US can get something similar.
    - DrScientist 1y ago
      I tend to agree that linking content to real people is a key mechanism that will help fight spam, hidden ads and influencing campaigns. However, if everything is linked to your ID - those that control that will be able to cancel you all at once. A bit like the consequences of being de-banked in an cash-less society. So if you bring in laws that require digital ID"s they have to be implemented with a very robust set of safeguards in my view.
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    Telegram added a feature where if someone cold dms you, it shows their phone number country and account age. When I see a 2 month old account with a Nigeria phone number I know it's a bot and I can ignore it.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  In my opinion, both spam and moderation are only really a problem when content is curated (usually algorithmically). I don't need a moderator and don't worry about spam in my RSS reader, for example. A simple chronological feed of content from feeds I chose to follow is enough. I do have to take on the challenge of finding new content sources, but at least fore that's a worthwhile tradeoff to not be inundated with spam and to not feel dependent on someone else to moderate what I see.
  - kimixa 1y ago
    That's just means you're effectively acting as a moderator yourself, only with a whitelist. It's just your own direct curation of sources. And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones? I know people have tried to have a relatively closed mesh-of-trust, but you still need people to moderate new applicants, otherwise you'll never get any new idea of fresh discussion. And if it keeps growing, scale means that group will slowly gather bad actors. Maybe directly by putting up whatever front they need to get into the mesh or existing in-mesh accounts. Maybe existing accounts get hacked. Maybe previously-'good' account-owning people have changed, be it in opinion or situation, to take advantage of their in-mesh position. It feels like a speedrun of the internet itself growing.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      > That's just means you're effectively acting as a moderator yourself, only with a whitelist Agreed, though when you are your own moderator that really is more about informed consent or free will than moderation. Moderation, at least in my opinion, implies a third party. > And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones? The same way I make new friends. Recommendations from those I already trust, or "friend of a friend" type situations. I don't need an outside matchmaker to introduce me to people they think I would be friends with.
      - jryle70 1y ago
        Well, then the risk is that you build your own bubbles of likeminded people. Maybe that's all you need, may be not.
- AaronAPU 1y ago
  It is interesting how it became a norm to just blindly assume the more decentralized something is the better it is. There isn’t any evidence this is true. Reality isn’t so reducible.
  - byryan 1y ago
    I haven’t really seen anyone make that assumption. I don’t think the article blindly assumes anything, they provided some pretty concrete examples of why a decentralized platform may solve some of the issues with centralized social media.
- koolala 1y ago
  #1 problem is server hosting
- guerrilla 1y ago
  Why are none of these a problem with Mastodon then? Some instabces do charge but most don't.
- isodev 1y ago
  I think moderation only works when individuals have the agency to choose for themselves what content/posts they see. Mastodon/fediverse sets a good example here - there is “general safety and theme” guards at instance level but whether you see “uspol” in your timeline or just posts of cat pics is entirely up to you. Contrast this to the “medias” like Threads, Bluesky, etc - moderation becomes impossible just because of the sheer scale of it all. Somehow everyone feels compelled to “correct someone who is wrong” or voice an opinion even when the context does not invite one. This is just a recipe for “perpetual engagement”, not actual platform for social interaction (networking).
  - liotier 1y ago
    > Contrast this to the “medias” like Threads, Bluesky, etc - moderation becomes impossible just because of the sheer scale of it all. Wut ? Moderation at Bluesky is fantastic: users build their block lists and share them for others to subscribe to - moderation à la carte... Power to the users !
    - immibis 1y ago
      I had two accounts banned from BlueSky and they didn't say why. One was parodying Donald Trump so fair enough if they don't want content like that, and they told me it was banned for impersonating Donald Trump. The other, no idea at all because I don't think I even tweeted anything very controversial, and the email was just a very generic "you violated terms of service". My third account was not banned, but I don't use BlueSky any more. It's not a ban-evasion ban, since they're logged in together in the same web browser, with the menu to switch accounts active, and yet my third account was not banned. My point of sharing this info is that BlueSky is not a user-driven moderation system. It arbitrarily and centrally bans accounts, just like Twitter.
      - johnecheck 1y ago
        You're right, Bluesky moderation is centralized. Unless content is served p2p, some moderation has to be centralized. At the end of the day, there's a server serving content and that server operator is legally obligated to remove illegal material. Hopefully, atproto + community will provide alternatives for moderation services. Work is being done on this, we'll see what we end up getting. I feel that a competitive ecosystem of moderation services is probably the best answer we can hope for to that inherently messy problem.
- Moru 1y ago
  A small cost to enter just means the capital still controls the narrative. As long as we can't even stop bullying physically in schools, we will not be able to have a civil social media. Start in the kindergarten and fix the problems with next generation or it will just get worse.
- XorNot 1y ago
  Charging money I suspect feels like more of a solution to people who would otherwise prefer something be free, then an actual solution though. The one principle benefit it has is it provides a resource stream to fund other things - but that's kind of it, because the other assumptions essentially assume there are no monetary thresholds in the system - i.e that spammers and botnets rely on volume and thus can be priced out of the market. And to an extent it's true - but there's a threshold problem. How many accounts do you need to pay for in order to seize narrative control of a space, or to effect a takeover by seizing positions of power like moderation positions? People I think like to think "hundreds or thousands" - but at least temporally this is well within reach of motivated threat actors (i.e. consider bot farms which are literally just racks of stripped down actual smart phones being puppeted - that is not a trivial investment), but the other side of it is - it's probably closer to like, 10 relatively active personalities.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  > - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl What do you mean with "now"? If you've ever been in a competitive industry before, you're already used to the random DDoS, and if you've published a moderately successful website, you've dealt with misbehaving scrapers/user-agents too, like the ones that get stuck and get requesting random 100 URLs per second for weeks. I'm guessing you're alluding to AI scrapers, but are they really that different from what we've already learnt to deal with on the public internet?
marshfram 1y ago
Social media relies on our dead. arbitrary signaling system, language, which once it's accelerated becomes a cybernetic/cog-sci control network, no matter how it's operated. Language is about control, status and bias before it's an attempt to communicate information. It's doomed as an external system in arbitrary symbols.
JuniperMesos 1y ago
> What specific pain point are you solving that keeps people on WhatsApp despite the surveillance risk, or on X despite the white supremacy? Why wouldn't a genuinely open social web allow people to communicate content that Ben Werdmuller thinks constitutes white supremacy, just as one can on X? Ideas and opinions that Ben Werdmuller (and people with similar activist politics to him) think constitute white supremacy are very popular among huge segments of the English-speaking public, and if it's even possible for some moderator with politics like Werdmuller to prevent these messages from being promulgated (as was the case at Twitter until Musk bought it in 2022 and fired all the Trust and Safety people with politics similar to Werdmuller's), then it is not meaningfully open. If this is not possible, then would people with Werdmuller's politics still want to use an open social web, rather than a closed social web that lets moderators attempt to suppress content they deem white supremacist? > As I was writing this talk, an entire apartment building in Chicago was raided. Adults were separated into trucks based on race, regardless of their citizenship status. Children were zip tied to each other. > And we are at the foothills of this. Every week, it ratchets up. Every week, there’s something new. Every week, there’s a new restrictive social media policy or a news outlet disappears, removing our ability to accurately learn about what’s happening around us. The reaction to the raid of that apartment building in Chicago on many social media platforms was the specific meme-phrase "this is what I voted for", and indeed Donald Trump openly ran on doing this, and won the US presidential election. What prevents someone from using open social media tech to call for going harder on deportations, or to spread news stories about violent crimes and fraud committed by immigrants? If anything can prevent this, how can the platform be said to be actually open?
hn-ifs 1y ago
I've never really got social media in any of its forms. I use messaging apps to stay in contact with people I like, but that's about it. I skimmed this article, I still don't get it. I think group chats cover most of what the author is taking about, public and private ones. But this might be my lack of imagination. I feel there article, and by extension, the talk could have been a lot shorter.
- noman-land 1y ago
  Group chats are lowercase S social media but they still benefit from being open.
  - hn-ifs 1y ago
    By open do you mean not centralised? I don't get the significance of big S social media. Functionally how would big S improve on group chats?
    - warkdarrior 1y ago
      > By open do you mean not centralised? I don't get the significance of big S social media. Functionally how would big S improve on group chats? Social media has two functions: chat (within groups/topics/...) and discovery (of groups/topics/...). So unless we rely only on IRL discovery, we need a way to do discovery online.
      - Gigachad 1y ago
        Discovery is probably the main problem social media creates. Almost all of these problems solve themselves when you remove discovery. If someone in your friends group chat is spamming porn you just remove them. There's no need for the platform to intervene here, small groups of people can moderate their own friend groups. Once you start algorithmically shoving content to people you have to start worrying about spam, trolling, politics, copyright, and all kinds of issues. The best discovery system is friends sharing chat invite links to other friends who are interested.
marshfram 1y ago
Social media is simply an extension from cybernetics to the principles of cog-sci as a "protocol" network where status and control are the primary forces mediated. This is irrefutable - the web was built as an extension of the cog-sci parameters of information as control. Social media can't be saved, it can only be revolutionary as a development arena for a new form of language. "The subject of integration was socialization; the subject of coordination was communication. Both were part of the theme of control...Cybernetics dispensed with the need for biological organisms, it as the parent to cognitive science, where the social is theorized strictly in terms of the exchange of information. Receivers, senses of signs need to be known in terms of channels, capacities, error rates, frequencies and so forth." Haraway Primate Visions. I don't understand how technologists and coders can be this naive to the ramifications of electronically externalizing signals which start as arbitrary in person, and then clearly spiral out of control once accelerated and cut-off from the initial conditions.
- dash2 1y ago
  This really reads to me like an example of pseudo-profound bullshit, and yet I'm sure you do mean something - could you explain what?
  - marshfram 1y ago
    The technology of language is designed to fool the receiver. That's its primary goal. Read any substantial text on language post western functional linguistics like Deacon's The Symbolic Species. In his view "language is a virus or a parasite" Once language became a strategy of cybernetic and then cog-sci regimes (which is what all computer science is modeled from), the basic principle of control-deception in language became electronic through its perceptions of socialization, which comp sci totally mistakes as information (see above) and then control, accelerated and now automated. The entire point of computer science operating socialization is completely off the rails mindblowingly simple-minded and damaging to us. Algorithms a/b tested to succeed are in essence, suicidal to the survival of our species. We're not optimized to horizontalize communication of this type: arbitrary metaphors and symbols. Language wasn't built for speed, horizontalization or decentralization. Now read the above again. To call Donna Haraway the great theorist/historian of cyborg studies and the development of science into cog science pseudo in any way reveals you have never grasped anything deep and resonant about human computer interaction.
zahirbmirza 1y ago
I believe that the more populist layer of the www became social media apps. Hosted LLMs (claude, chatGPT etc) are going to become the popular source of information and therefore narrative. What we must remember is that we should retain control of our thoughts, and be aware of how we can share them without financially interested parties claiming rights to their use or abuse. I am trying to solve some of these problems with NoteSub App - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 - but have yet to overcome the real issue of how we can stop the middleman keeping the loop closed with him in between.
VonGuard 1y ago
Spritely is the solution. Been baking for a few years now. Just pushed an update last week, in fact: https://spritely.institute/ https://spritely.institute/
jernst 1y ago
To check out other FediForum keynotes, many demos showing off innovative open social web software, and notes from the FediForum unconference sessions, go to https://fediforum.org https://fediforum.org (disclaimer: FediForum co-organizer here)
next_xibalba 1y ago
While I tend to support there being open social alternatives, I haven’t really seen the people behind them talk about the most important aspect: how will you attract and retain users? There has to be more to the value proposition than “it’s open”. The vast majority of users simply do not care about this. They want to be where their friends, family, and favorite content creators are. They want innovation in both content and format. Until the well intentioned people behind these various open web platforms and non-platforms internalize and act on these realities, the whole enterprise is doomed to be a niche movement that will eventually go out with a whimper.
brcmthrowaway 1y ago
Whatever happened to Diaspora?
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  The name killed it. If you know what it means, it doesn't bear any relevance to social media. If you don't know what it means, it sounds like a gastric disorder.
  - brcmthrowaway 1y ago
    So does Mastodon
charcircuit 1y ago
Why was this chosen to be a keynote? This talk seems to not care about open social media, but rather that existing social media sites don't follow the author's political agenda. Having a keynote trying to rally people into building sites that support a niche political agenda that the general public doesn't agree with doesn't accomplish the goals of making open social media more viable. This along with equating things with "Nazis" just further alienates people.
- stormbeard 1y ago
  I read this comment, went back to the article, and then came back to this comment. I have no idea what niche political agenda you're talking about- the message of the article is basically "solve problems your users are actually facing, not problems you think they have". You can apply the concepts the author talks about to _literally_ any group that would make use of social media.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    >solve problems your users are actually facing, not problems you think they have >You can apply the concepts the author talks about to _literally_ any group The presentation could have been modified to avoid alienating people if the author had focused on champinioning how open social media allows for the ability to solve these problems. >I have no idea what niche political agenda you're talking about Search the page for "Why should anyone care?", and you'll see it. Thos section of the talk he complains that the political situation of America doesn't match his views. Then in the next section, "The capitulation of social media", he complains about how other social media sites don't match his politics. Then in the next section, "The decline of journalism", the talker tries to argue his political opinion that journalists are a good thing. Then in the next section, "The problem is global", he explains that more places than just America don't share his political view. I'll stop here, but it goes on further, even to the very last sentence. I thought this was supposed to be a technology keynote, but this talker turned it into a place for him to complain about the political situation of the world.
- saubeidl 1y ago
asim 1y ago
--- We all know about Twitter acquirer Elon Musk, who bent the platform to fit his political worldview. But he’s not alone. Here’s Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, owner of LinkedIn, who contributed a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund. Here’s Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Threads, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, who said that he feels optimistic about the new administration’s agenda. And here’s Larry Ellison, who will control TikTok in the US, who was a major investor in Trump, and who one advisor called, in a WIRED interview, the shadow President of the United States. Social media is very quickly becoming aligned with a state that in itself is becoming increasingly authoritarian. --- This was the real why. When control amasses to the few we end up in a place where there is a dissonance between what we perceive to be true and what is actually true. The voice of the dictator will say one thing but the people's lived experience will say something else. I don't think mastodon or Bluesky or even Jack Dorsey's new project Bitchat solves any of this. It goes much deeper. It is ideological. It is values driven. The outcome is ultimately decided by the motives of the people who start it or run it. I just don't think any western driven values can be the basis of a new platform because a large majority of the world are not from the west. For better or worse, you have the platforms of the west. They are US centric and they will dominate. Anything grassroots and fundamentally opposed to that will not come from the west. It must come authentically from those who need it.
Animats 1y ago
"The 19th reports at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy - a much-needed inclusive newsroom..." This isn't a problem with the distribution technology. This is a problem with the message, and its narrow niche. The site's marketing is geared towards collecting donations in the US$20,000 and up range. That doesn't scale. They don't have viewer counts big enough to make it on payments in the $10/year range. So that doesn't scale either. The back-end technology of this thing has zero bearing on those problems. [1] https://19thnews.org/sponsorship/ https://19thnews.org/sponsorship/
Thlom 1y ago
80% of the time social media is just increasingly bad slop created to generate clicks/views/engagement. 10% is people screaming into the void, the last 10% might be valuable content. The Internet was better when we all hanged around in big and small web forums and group chats. To this day the most interesting conversations I see and participate in happens in forums and on group chats.
- immibis 1y ago
  I notice that on Discord, even in "servers" (which aren't servers) that are allegedly about technical topics, it seems like at least 3 out of every 4 messages are slop - low effort irrelevant memes etc. For example there's a cat gif labeled "repost this cat after a substantial delay" and people just post that for no reason, then other people reply with the same gif. And there's no algorithm in Discord - it's an IRC-style chatroom platform - it's real humans posting and engaging with slop because it triggers dopamine or something, somehow.
shortrounddev2 1y ago
I believe the corporation for public broadcasting should provide funding for local member stations who run their own nodes on fediverse sites, and then federate those nodes together
mactavish88 1y ago
The open social web's decentralization is just as dependent on relevant protocols and communities as it is on the hosting services on which they depend. It's way easier to censor a decentralized social network if the majority of its nodes run on AWS, GCP and Azure, for instance. What'd be great is if we could run these networks primarily from our personal devices (i.e. true edge computing), but the more the computing's pushed to the edge the harder it becomes to implement technically and socially.
- jasonvorhe 1y ago
  nostr can do this. relays are lightweight enough to run on Android devices, Citrine ships one with a nice UI even. It's not p2p or anything but it works well enough to preserve your own note history and there a plans to extend its functionality beyond that. https://github.com/greenart7c3/Citrine https://github.com/greenart7c3/Citrine
  - mactavish88 1y ago
    Neat! For this to be long-term sustainable though, it needs to be implemented in such a way that non-tech-savvy folks can also participate very easily, without needing to learn anything about P2P, relays, decentralized or edge computing, etc.
redbell 1y ago
I'd like to add that, the need for an open phone OS matters now more than ever before.
periodjet 1y ago
> Social media is very quickly becoming aligned with a state that in itself is becoming increasingly authoritarian. Did this guy complain back when pre-Musk Twitter was fully in bed with the state? Or was he okay with it because that authoritarian relationship was on the right side of history?
- kuschkufan 1y ago
  1) periodjet guy seems to think "social media" is only twitter. 2) he also has no understanding of what "authoritarian" means. it's not just a word to be dismissive of things one doesn't like. cue links to the nothing burger that is "Twitter Files" lol
xitss 1y ago
Interesting discussion and article. My work is mostly in the decentralized model of thinking. Many of the arguments assume that some degree of control is necessary at the scale we deal with. The difficulty of true decentralization reminds me of what the founders of our republic wrestled with: avoiding both the over-control of old hierarchies and governing structures (centralized power) and the chaos of anarchy (decentralized power). Their answer was a framework that limited power but preserved individual freedom. Perfection? no. But it is a very interesting experiment to be a part of. We seem to be facing a similar balance today, only in digital context and on a global scale. Human nature being what it is, no system will ever be perfect. What we can do is build safeguards (structures that empower users and raise the cost of abuse) so that bad actors must find diminishing returns for bad behavior.
vinceleo 1y ago
>We always wanted Elgg to federate. That was the plan from day one. It was an obvious need. There was no ActivityPub yet. Elgg has ActivityPub plugin now https://elgg.org/plugins/3330966 https://elgg.org/plugins/3330966

225 points by benwerd 1y ago

Maybe this was more of an intro/pitch to something I already support, so I wasn't quite the audience here. But I feel that talking about the open social web without addressing the reasons current ones aren't popular/get blocked doesn't lead to much progress. Ultimately, big problems with an open social web include: - moderation - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl - good faith verification - posting transparency These are all hard problems and it seems to make me believe the future of a proper community lies more in charging a small premium. Even charging one dollar for life takes out 99% of spam and gives a cost to bad faith actors should they be banned and need another dollar to re-enter. Thus, easing moderation needs. But charging money for anything online these days can cause a lot of friction.

echelon 1y ago
It'd be cool if you had to pay a certain amount of money to publish any message. And then if you could verify you'd paid it in a completely P2P decentralized fashion. I'm not a crypto fan, but I'd appreciate a message graph where high signal messages "burned" or "donated money" to be flagged for attention. I'd also like it if my attention were paid for by those wishing to have it, but that's a separate problem.
- Groxx 1y ago
  it's pure waste-generation, but hashcash is a fairly old strategy for this, and it's one of the foundations of Bitcoin. there's no "proof of payment to any beneficial recipient", sadly, but it does throttle high-volume spammers pretty effectively.
  - echelon 1y ago
    Maybe if you could prove you sent a payment to a charity node and then signed your message in the receipt for verification...
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      Imagine a world where every City Hall has a vending machine you can use to donate a couple bucks to to a charity of your choice, and receive an anonymous one-time use "some real human physically present donated real money to make this" token. You could then spend the token with a forum, to gain and basic trust for an otherwise anonymous account.
      - echelon 1y ago
        I like that idea a lot.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  The people willing to pay money to post messages are not a desirable demographic. It is one that includes people like spammers.
numpy-thagoras 1y ago
"- moderation - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl - good faith verification - posting transparency" And we have to think about how to hit these targets while: - respecting individual sovereignty - respecting privacy - meeting any other obligations or responsibilities within reason and of course, it must be EASY and dead simple to use. It's doable, we've done far more impossible-seeming things just in the last 30 years, so it's just a matter of willpower now.
emseetech 1y ago
Having worked on the problem for years, decentralized social networking is such as tar pit of privacy and security and social problems that I can't find myself excited by it anymore. We are clear what the problems with mainstream social networking at scale are now, and decentralization only seems to make them worse and more intractable. I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.
- krapp 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - emseetech 1y ago
    I'm a consultant that builds for startups. I'm not an entrepreneur myself. If I were to build something like this, I'd use a services non-profit model. Ad-supported apps result in way too many perverse economic incentives in social media, as we've seen time and time again. I worked on open source decentralized social networking for 12 years, starting before Facebook even launched. Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.
    - krapp 1y ago
      >Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult. I disagree that federation is "specifically political decentralization" but how so? You claim that decentralization makes all of the problems of mainstream social networking worse and more intractable, but I think most of those problems come from the centralized nature of mainstream social media. There is only one Facebook, and only one Twitter, and if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad. If you don't like the way moderation works with an instance, you don't have to federate with it, you can create your own instance and moderate however you see fit. This seems like a better solution than everyone being subject to the whims of a centralized service.
BrenBarn 1y ago
Those are important reasons, but there are other reasons as well, such as concentration of market power in a few companies, which allows those companies to erect barriers to entry and shape law in ways that benefit themselves, as well as simply creating network effects that make it hard for new social-web projects to establish a foothold.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  That's an even harder problem to solve. I do agree we should make sure that policy isn't manipulated by vested powers and make things even harder to compete with. But network effects seems to be a natural phenomenon of people wanting to establish a familiar routine. I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. But it still creates a strong network effect nonetheless. I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. You need to focus instead on getting above a certain critical mass, where you keep a healthy stream of posting and participation that can sustain itself. Social media should ultimately be about establishing a space for a community to flourish, and small communities are just as valid.
  - BrenBarn 1y ago
    > I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. For now. Google's motto was "don't be evil" until it wasn't. > I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. I'm not so sure. I mean, yes, you can create a "good" community on a small scale. But when the system is geared towards larger entities, those communities are always at risk because they don't have a seat at the table, so to speak. An example that's relevant recently is these laws about age verification. For small communities, things like age verification requirements can be an existential threat. One crazy person with a vendetta can sue them into oblivion for some technical violation, and unlike the big players, they don't have the resources to fight back. They also don't have the resources to lobby for verification mechanisms that are realistic at a small scale. When the rules of the game are set by the big players, small players are always at risk of being declared in violation, or just having the rules changed in a way that ensures they can't win. I'm coming to think that small communities are not safe unless large networks are either destroyed or severely restricted in a way that involves ongoing monitoring and enforcement. (I hesitate to use the word "community" for these large networks because I don't think something like Facebook is really a community, although there are communities within it.)
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> Ultimately, big problems with an open social web include: These two seem like the same problem: > moderation > spam You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts. But we kind of already have that. Make likes public (what else are they even for?). Then show people posts from the people they follow or that the people they follow liked. Have a dislike button so that if you follow someone but always dislike the things they like, your client learns you don't want to see the things they like. Now you don't see trash unless you follow people who like trash, and then whose fault is that? > which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl This is a completely independent problem from spam. It's also something decentralized networks are actually good at. If more devices are requesting some data then there are more sources of it. Let the bots get the data from each other. Track share ratios so high traffic nodes with bad ratios get banned for leeching and it's cheaper for them to get a cloud node somewhere with cheap bandwidth and actually upload than to buy residential proxies to fight bans. > good faith verification > posting transparency It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again and in particular they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see instead of a bunch of spam from anons that nobody they follow likes.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts. Yes. But I see curation more as a 2nd order problems to solve once the bases are taken care of. Moderation focuses on addressing the low quality, while curation makes sure tye high quality posts receive focus. The tools needed for curation, stuff like filtering, finding similar posts/comments, popularity, following, are different from those needed to moderate, or self moderate (ignore, down voting, reporting). The latter poisons a site before it can really start to curate to its users. >This is a completely independent problem from spam. Yeah, thinking more about it, it probably is a distinct category. It simply has a similar result of making a site unable to function. >It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again I can clarify. In short, posting transparency focused more on the user and good faith verification focuses more on the content. (I'm also horrible with naming, so I welcome better terms to describe these) - Posting transparency at this point has one big goal: ensure you know when a human or a bot is posting. But it extends to ensuring there's no impersonation, that there's no abuse of alt accounts, and no voting manipulation. It can even extend in some domains to making sure e.g. That a person who says they worked at Google actually worked at Google. But this is definitely a step that can overstep privacies. - good faith verification refers more towards a duty to properly vet and fact check information that is posted. It may include addressing misinformation and hate, or removing non-transparent intimate advice like legal/medical claims without sources or proper licensing. It essentially boils down to making ensuring that "bad but popular" advice doesn't proliferate, as it it ought to do. >they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see Yes, they are. I think we've seen enough examples of how dangerous "showing people what they actually want to see" can be if left unchecked. And the incentives to keep them up are equally dangerous in an ad-driven platform. Being able to address that naturally requires some more authorian approaches. That's why "good faith" is an important factor here. Any authoritarian act you introduce can only work on trust, and is easily broken by abuse. If we want incentives to change from "maximizing engagement" to "maximizing quality and community", we need to cull out malicious information. We already give some authoritarianism by having moderators we trust to remove spam and illegal content, so I don't see it as a giant overstep to make sure they can also do this.
Seattle3503 1y ago
A lot of tech folks hate government ID schemes, but I think MDL with some sort of pairwise pseudonyms could help with spam and verification. It would let you identify users uniquely, but without revealing too much sensitive information. It would let you verify things like "This user has a Michigan driver's license, and they have an ID 1234, which is unique to my system and not linkable to any other place they use that ID." If you ban that user, they wouldn't be able to use that ID again with you. The alternative is that we continue to let unelected private operators like Cloudflare "solve" this problem.
- isodev 1y ago
  The EU’s eIDAS 2.0 specification for their digital wallet identity explicitly supports the use of pseudonyms for this exact purpose of “Anonymous authentication”.
  - Seattle3503 1y ago
    That's awesome. Hopefully the US can get something similar.
  - DrScientist 1y ago
    I tend to agree that linking content to real people is a key mechanism that will help fight spam, hidden ads and influencing campaigns. However, if everything is linked to your ID - those that control that will be able to cancel you all at once. A bit like the consequences of being de-banked in an cash-less society. So if you bring in laws that require digital ID"s they have to be implemented with a very robust set of safeguards in my view.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  Telegram added a feature where if someone cold dms you, it shows their phone number country and account age. When I see a 2 month old account with a Nigeria phone number I know it's a bot and I can ignore it.
_heimdall 1y ago
In my opinion, both spam and moderation are only really a problem when content is curated (usually algorithmically). I don't need a moderator and don't worry about spam in my RSS reader, for example. A simple chronological feed of content from feeds I chose to follow is enough. I do have to take on the challenge of finding new content sources, but at least fore that's a worthwhile tradeoff to not be inundated with spam and to not feel dependent on someone else to moderate what I see.
- kimixa 1y ago
  That's just means you're effectively acting as a moderator yourself, only with a whitelist. It's just your own direct curation of sources. And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones? I know people have tried to have a relatively closed mesh-of-trust, but you still need people to moderate new applicants, otherwise you'll never get any new idea of fresh discussion. And if it keeps growing, scale means that group will slowly gather bad actors. Maybe directly by putting up whatever front they need to get into the mesh or existing in-mesh accounts. Maybe existing accounts get hacked. Maybe previously-'good' account-owning people have changed, be it in opinion or situation, to take advantage of their in-mesh position. It feels like a speedrun of the internet itself growing.
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    > That's just means you're effectively acting as a moderator yourself, only with a whitelist Agreed, though when you are your own moderator that really is more about informed consent or free will than moderation. Moderation, at least in my opinion, implies a third party. > And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones? The same way I make new friends. Recommendations from those I already trust, or "friend of a friend" type situations. I don't need an outside matchmaker to introduce me to people they think I would be friends with.
    - jryle70 1y ago
      Well, then the risk is that you build your own bubbles of likeminded people. Maybe that's all you need, may be not.
AaronAPU 1y ago
It is interesting how it became a norm to just blindly assume the more decentralized something is the better it is. There isn’t any evidence this is true. Reality isn’t so reducible.
- byryan 1y ago
  I haven’t really seen anyone make that assumption. I don’t think the article blindly assumes anything, they provided some pretty concrete examples of why a decentralized platform may solve some of the issues with centralized social media.
koolala 1y ago
#1 problem is server hosting
guerrilla 1y ago
Why are none of these a problem with Mastodon then? Some instabces do charge but most don't.
isodev 1y ago
I think moderation only works when individuals have the agency to choose for themselves what content/posts they see. Mastodon/fediverse sets a good example here - there is “general safety and theme” guards at instance level but whether you see “uspol” in your timeline or just posts of cat pics is entirely up to you. Contrast this to the “medias” like Threads, Bluesky, etc - moderation becomes impossible just because of the sheer scale of it all. Somehow everyone feels compelled to “correct someone who is wrong” or voice an opinion even when the context does not invite one. This is just a recipe for “perpetual engagement”, not actual platform for social interaction (networking).
- liotier 1y ago
  > Contrast this to the “medias” like Threads, Bluesky, etc - moderation becomes impossible just because of the sheer scale of it all. Wut ? Moderation at Bluesky is fantastic: users build their block lists and share them for others to subscribe to - moderation à la carte... Power to the users !
  - immibis 1y ago
    I had two accounts banned from BlueSky and they didn't say why. One was parodying Donald Trump so fair enough if they don't want content like that, and they told me it was banned for impersonating Donald Trump. The other, no idea at all because I don't think I even tweeted anything very controversial, and the email was just a very generic "you violated terms of service". My third account was not banned, but I don't use BlueSky any more. It's not a ban-evasion ban, since they're logged in together in the same web browser, with the menu to switch accounts active, and yet my third account was not banned. My point of sharing this info is that BlueSky is not a user-driven moderation system. It arbitrarily and centrally bans accounts, just like Twitter.
    - johnecheck 1y ago
      You're right, Bluesky moderation is centralized. Unless content is served p2p, some moderation has to be centralized. At the end of the day, there's a server serving content and that server operator is legally obligated to remove illegal material. Hopefully, atproto + community will provide alternatives for moderation services. Work is being done on this, we'll see what we end up getting. I feel that a competitive ecosystem of moderation services is probably the best answer we can hope for to that inherently messy problem.
Moru 1y ago
A small cost to enter just means the capital still controls the narrative. As long as we can't even stop bullying physically in schools, we will not be able to have a civil social media. Start in the kindergarten and fix the problems with next generation or it will just get worse.
XorNot 1y ago
Charging money I suspect feels like more of a solution to people who would otherwise prefer something be free, then an actual solution though. The one principle benefit it has is it provides a resource stream to fund other things - but that's kind of it, because the other assumptions essentially assume there are no monetary thresholds in the system - i.e that spammers and botnets rely on volume and thus can be priced out of the market. And to an extent it's true - but there's a threshold problem. How many accounts do you need to pay for in order to seize narrative control of a space, or to effect a takeover by seizing positions of power like moderation positions? People I think like to think "hundreds or thousands" - but at least temporally this is well within reach of motivated threat actors (i.e. consider bot farms which are literally just racks of stripped down actual smart phones being puppeted - that is not a trivial investment), but the other side of it is - it's probably closer to like, 10 relatively active personalities.
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
> - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl What do you mean with "now"? If you've ever been in a competitive industry before, you're already used to the random DDoS, and if you've published a moderately successful website, you've dealt with misbehaving scrapers/user-agents too, like the ones that get stuck and get requesting random 100 URLs per second for weeks. I'm guessing you're alluding to AI scrapers, but are they really that different from what we've already learnt to deal with on the public internet?

marshfram 1y ago

Social media relies on our dead. arbitrary signaling system, language, which once it's accelerated becomes a cybernetic/cog-sci control network, no matter how it's operated. Language is about control, status and bias before it's an attempt to communicate information. It's doomed as an external system in arbitrary symbols.

JuniperMesos 1y ago

> What specific pain point are you solving that keeps people on WhatsApp despite the surveillance risk, or on X despite the white supremacy? Why wouldn't a genuinely open social web allow people to communicate content that Ben Werdmuller thinks constitutes white supremacy, just as one can on X? Ideas and opinions that Ben Werdmuller (and people with similar activist politics to him) think constitute white supremacy are very popular among huge segments of the English-speaking public, and if it's even possible for some moderator with politics like Werdmuller to prevent these messages from being promulgated (as was the case at Twitter until Musk bought it in 2022 and fired all the Trust and Safety people with politics similar to Werdmuller's), then it is not meaningfully open. If this is not possible, then would people with Werdmuller's politics still want to use an open social web, rather than a closed social web that lets moderators attempt to suppress content they deem white supremacist? > As I was writing this talk, an entire apartment building in Chicago was raided. Adults were separated into trucks based on race, regardless of their citizenship status. Children were zip tied to each other. > And we are at the foothills of this. Every week, it ratchets up. Every week, there’s something new. Every week, there’s a new restrictive social media policy or a news outlet disappears, removing our ability to accurately learn about what’s happening around us. The reaction to the raid of that apartment building in Chicago on many social media platforms was the specific meme-phrase "this is what I voted for", and indeed Donald Trump openly ran on doing this, and won the US presidential election. What prevents someone from using open social media tech to call for going harder on deportations, or to spread news stories about violent crimes and fraud committed by immigrants? If anything can prevent this, how can the platform be said to be actually open?

hn-ifs 1y ago

I've never really got social media in any of its forms. I use messaging apps to stay in contact with people I like, but that's about it. I skimmed this article, I still don't get it. I think group chats cover most of what the author is taking about, public and private ones. But this might be my lack of imagination. I feel there article, and by extension, the talk could have been a lot shorter.

noman-land 1y ago
Group chats are lowercase S social media but they still benefit from being open.
- hn-ifs 1y ago
  By open do you mean not centralised? I don't get the significance of big S social media. Functionally how would big S improve on group chats?
  - warkdarrior 1y ago
    > By open do you mean not centralised? I don't get the significance of big S social media. Functionally how would big S improve on group chats? Social media has two functions: chat (within groups/topics/...) and discovery (of groups/topics/...). So unless we rely only on IRL discovery, we need a way to do discovery online.
    - Gigachad 1y ago
      Discovery is probably the main problem social media creates. Almost all of these problems solve themselves when you remove discovery. If someone in your friends group chat is spamming porn you just remove them. There's no need for the platform to intervene here, small groups of people can moderate their own friend groups. Once you start algorithmically shoving content to people you have to start worrying about spam, trolling, politics, copyright, and all kinds of issues. The best discovery system is friends sharing chat invite links to other friends who are interested.

marshfram 1y ago

Social media is simply an extension from cybernetics to the principles of cog-sci as a "protocol" network where status and control are the primary forces mediated. This is irrefutable - the web was built as an extension of the cog-sci parameters of information as control. Social media can't be saved, it can only be revolutionary as a development arena for a new form of language. "The subject of integration was socialization; the subject of coordination was communication. Both were part of the theme of control...Cybernetics dispensed with the need for biological organisms, it as the parent to cognitive science, where the social is theorized strictly in terms of the exchange of information. Receivers, senses of signs need to be known in terms of channels, capacities, error rates, frequencies and so forth." Haraway Primate Visions. I don't understand how technologists and coders can be this naive to the ramifications of electronically externalizing signals which start as arbitrary in person, and then clearly spiral out of control once accelerated and cut-off from the initial conditions.

dash2 1y ago
This really reads to me like an example of pseudo-profound bullshit, and yet I'm sure you do mean something - could you explain what?
- marshfram 1y ago
  The technology of language is designed to fool the receiver. That's its primary goal. Read any substantial text on language post western functional linguistics like Deacon's The Symbolic Species. In his view "language is a virus or a parasite" Once language became a strategy of cybernetic and then cog-sci regimes (which is what all computer science is modeled from), the basic principle of control-deception in language became electronic through its perceptions of socialization, which comp sci totally mistakes as information (see above) and then control, accelerated and now automated. The entire point of computer science operating socialization is completely off the rails mindblowingly simple-minded and damaging to us. Algorithms a/b tested to succeed are in essence, suicidal to the survival of our species. We're not optimized to horizontalize communication of this type: arbitrary metaphors and symbols. Language wasn't built for speed, horizontalization or decentralization. Now read the above again. To call Donna Haraway the great theorist/historian of cyborg studies and the development of science into cog science pseudo in any way reveals you have never grasped anything deep and resonant about human computer interaction.

zahirbmirza 1y ago

I believe that the more populist layer of the www became social media apps. Hosted LLMs (claude, chatGPT etc) are going to become the popular source of information and therefore narrative. What we must remember is that we should retain control of our thoughts, and be aware of how we can share them without financially interested parties claiming rights to their use or abuse. I am trying to solve some of these problems with NoteSub App - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 - but have yet to overcome the real issue of how we can stop the middleman keeping the loop closed with him in between.

VonGuard 1y ago

Spritely is the solution. Been baking for a few years now. Just pushed an update last week, in fact: https://spritely.institute/ https://spritely.institute/

jernst 1y ago

To check out other FediForum keynotes, many demos showing off innovative open social web software, and notes from the FediForum unconference sessions, go to https://fediforum.org https://fediforum.org (disclaimer: FediForum co-organizer here)

next_xibalba 1y ago

While I tend to support there being open social alternatives, I haven’t really seen the people behind them talk about the most important aspect: how will you attract and retain users? There has to be more to the value proposition than “it’s open”. The vast majority of users simply do not care about this. They want to be where their friends, family, and favorite content creators are. They want innovation in both content and format. Until the well intentioned people behind these various open web platforms and non-platforms internalize and act on these realities, the whole enterprise is doomed to be a niche movement that will eventually go out with a whimper.

brcmthrowaway 1y ago

Whatever happened to Diaspora?

SoftTalker 1y ago
The name killed it. If you know what it means, it doesn't bear any relevance to social media. If you don't know what it means, it sounds like a gastric disorder.
- brcmthrowaway 1y ago
  So does Mastodon

charcircuit 1y ago

Why was this chosen to be a keynote? This talk seems to not care about open social media, but rather that existing social media sites don't follow the author's political agenda. Having a keynote trying to rally people into building sites that support a niche political agenda that the general public doesn't agree with doesn't accomplish the goals of making open social media more viable. This along with equating things with "Nazis" just further alienates people.

stormbeard 1y ago
I read this comment, went back to the article, and then came back to this comment. I have no idea what niche political agenda you're talking about- the message of the article is basically "solve problems your users are actually facing, not problems you think they have". You can apply the concepts the author talks about to _literally_ any group that would make use of social media.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  >solve problems your users are actually facing, not problems you think they have >You can apply the concepts the author talks about to _literally_ any group The presentation could have been modified to avoid alienating people if the author had focused on champinioning how open social media allows for the ability to solve these problems. >I have no idea what niche political agenda you're talking about Search the page for "Why should anyone care?", and you'll see it. Thos section of the talk he complains that the political situation of America doesn't match his views. Then in the next section, "The capitulation of social media", he complains about how other social media sites don't match his politics. Then in the next section, "The decline of journalism", the talker tries to argue his political opinion that journalists are a good thing. Then in the next section, "The problem is global", he explains that more places than just America don't share his political view. I'll stop here, but it goes on further, even to the very last sentence. I thought this was supposed to be a technology keynote, but this talker turned it into a place for him to complain about the political situation of the world.
saubeidl 1y ago

asim 1y ago

--- We all know about Twitter acquirer Elon Musk, who bent the platform to fit his political worldview. But he’s not alone. Here’s Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, owner of LinkedIn, who contributed a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund. Here’s Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Threads, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, who said that he feels optimistic about the new administration’s agenda. And here’s Larry Ellison, who will control TikTok in the US, who was a major investor in Trump, and who one advisor called, in a WIRED interview, the shadow President of the United States. Social media is very quickly becoming aligned with a state that in itself is becoming increasingly authoritarian. --- This was the real why. When control amasses to the few we end up in a place where there is a dissonance between what we perceive to be true and what is actually true. The voice of the dictator will say one thing but the people's lived experience will say something else. I don't think mastodon or Bluesky or even Jack Dorsey's new project Bitchat solves any of this. It goes much deeper. It is ideological. It is values driven. The outcome is ultimately decided by the motives of the people who start it or run it. I just don't think any western driven values can be the basis of a new platform because a large majority of the world are not from the west. For better or worse, you have the platforms of the west. They are US centric and they will dominate. Anything grassroots and fundamentally opposed to that will not come from the west. It must come authentically from those who need it.

Animats 1y ago

"The 19th reports at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy - a much-needed inclusive newsroom..." This isn't a problem with the distribution technology. This is a problem with the message, and its narrow niche. The site's marketing is geared towards collecting donations in the US$20,000 and up range. That doesn't scale. They don't have viewer counts big enough to make it on payments in the $10/year range. So that doesn't scale either. The back-end technology of this thing has zero bearing on those problems. [1] https://19thnews.org/sponsorship/ https://19thnews.org/sponsorship/

Thlom 1y ago

80% of the time social media is just increasingly bad slop created to generate clicks/views/engagement. 10% is people screaming into the void, the last 10% might be valuable content. The Internet was better when we all hanged around in big and small web forums and group chats. To this day the most interesting conversations I see and participate in happens in forums and on group chats.

immibis 1y ago
I notice that on Discord, even in "servers" (which aren't servers) that are allegedly about technical topics, it seems like at least 3 out of every 4 messages are slop - low effort irrelevant memes etc. For example there's a cat gif labeled "repost this cat after a substantial delay" and people just post that for no reason, then other people reply with the same gif. And there's no algorithm in Discord - it's an IRC-style chatroom platform - it's real humans posting and engaging with slop because it triggers dopamine or something, somehow.

shortrounddev2 1y ago

I believe the corporation for public broadcasting should provide funding for local member stations who run their own nodes on fediverse sites, and then federate those nodes together

mactavish88 1y ago

The open social web's decentralization is just as dependent on relevant protocols and communities as it is on the hosting services on which they depend. It's way easier to censor a decentralized social network if the majority of its nodes run on AWS, GCP and Azure, for instance. What'd be great is if we could run these networks primarily from our personal devices (i.e. true edge computing), but the more the computing's pushed to the edge the harder it becomes to implement technically and socially.

jasonvorhe 1y ago
nostr can do this. relays are lightweight enough to run on Android devices, Citrine ships one with a nice UI even. It's not p2p or anything but it works well enough to preserve your own note history and there a plans to extend its functionality beyond that. https://github.com/greenart7c3/Citrine https://github.com/greenart7c3/Citrine
- mactavish88 1y ago
  Neat! For this to be long-term sustainable though, it needs to be implemented in such a way that non-tech-savvy folks can also participate very easily, without needing to learn anything about P2P, relays, decentralized or edge computing, etc.

redbell 1y ago

I'd like to add that, the need for an open phone OS matters now more than ever before.

periodjet 1y ago

> Social media is very quickly becoming aligned with a state that in itself is becoming increasingly authoritarian. Did this guy complain back when pre-Musk Twitter was fully in bed with the state? Or was he okay with it because that authoritarian relationship was on the right side of history?

kuschkufan 1y ago
1) periodjet guy seems to think "social media" is only twitter. 2) he also has no understanding of what "authoritarian" means. it's not just a word to be dismissive of things one doesn't like. cue links to the nothing burger that is "Twitter Files" lol

xitss 1y ago

Interesting discussion and article. My work is mostly in the decentralized model of thinking. Many of the arguments assume that some degree of control is necessary at the scale we deal with. The difficulty of true decentralization reminds me of what the founders of our republic wrestled with: avoiding both the over-control of old hierarchies and governing structures (centralized power) and the chaos of anarchy (decentralized power). Their answer was a framework that limited power but preserved individual freedom. Perfection? no. But it is a very interesting experiment to be a part of. We seem to be facing a similar balance today, only in digital context and on a global scale. Human nature being what it is, no system will ever be perfect. What we can do is build safeguards (structures that empower users and raise the cost of abuse) so that bad actors must find diminishing returns for bad behavior.

vinceleo 1y ago

>We always wanted Elgg to federate. That was the plan from day one. It was an obvious need. There was no ActivityPub yet. Elgg has ActivityPub plugin now https://elgg.org/plugins/3330966 https://elgg.org/plugins/3330966