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It's written in anger, but I'm optimistic that this will eventually get fixed, and documenting bad experiences like this will help.
by skybrian 9mo ago
It's written in anger, but I'm optimistic that this will eventually get fixed, and documenting bad experiences like this will help.
- echelon 9mo agoPeer to peer, not federation, is the way forward. We should only build peer to peer social protocols. Websites and communities should simply sample from the swarm and make it easy for non-technical users to post and consume. They should be optional and not central points of failure (or control). {Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord} should work like {Email, BitTorrent, PGP}. Bluesky and Mastodon are the wrong architecture. The web, fancy javascript UI/UX, and microservices shouldn't be the focus. The protocol should be the focus. A fully distributed protocol would dictate the solution to this exact problem.
- anon7000 9mo agoBluesky is designed the way it is because of scale. How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Bsky is designed so that the microservices themselves can be decentralized and so multiple different types of apps can be built on the same protocol/infra. Obviously, it’s early days, and hopefully there is even more experimentation in the p2p space. But atproto architecture is a very fair experiment in this space. I can store my data on my own server, use a client app I wrote, subscribe to a specific aggregation/feed service I prefer, use the moderation list I want… all while still being connected to the larger protocol & network. It’s pretty neat.
- cluckindan 9mo agoYou use routers as the beefy servers. Unicast, multicast, broadcast. Unfortunately that means the implementation needs to reach all the way into the network layer.
- direwolf20 9mo agoMulticast doesn't work on the global internet, and can't, due to problems of scalability and billing. It's sometimes possible to negotiate with specific ISPs to use multicast in specific ways on their network.
- walletdrainer 9mo ago> How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? You design it with those requirements in mind? There’s no fundamental technical limitation at play here.
- dboreham 9mo agoThere kind of is: the computers the "p" run don't allow incoming connections and don't allow long lived processes.
- somat 9mo agoYou invert the problem. People want to build store and forward systems because that is their mental model of the problem. store and forward system are fine, and there are many advantages to them, but direct request systems scale much better. basically have each user fetch their messages from the locations they want rather than delivering the messages to them. think how the web works vs how email works.
- direwolf20 9mo agoRSS! But you can't make a personalized timeline with a pull model, and that's where the money seems to be.
- azertify 9mo agoI think finding where the money _isn't_ is a fun way to find interesting projects.
- fc417fc802 9mo ago> How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Presumably by fusing the P2P and federated models together. There's no particular reason those two models can't coexist within the same protocol. It just hasn't been created yet. Similar to how a good mesh networking implementation will make use a high bandwidth backhaul such as the internet if it's available.
- bccdee 9mo agoATProto may be the closest we'll get to that. PDSes are granular enough to serve individual users, and you can (theoretically) pull from a relay and index only posts from users you're interested in for your appview, if you're hardware-limited. Relays are fungible and pretty lightweight themselves, so you're not depending too much on any central server. But people don't want to run an always-online server to send their stuff to peers, so they host it on the main bsky servers. The problem with p2p is UX; people don't want to DIY their server.
- jrm4 9mo agoSo I agree with you that they should work like email -- but I've always said that Mastodon is better because it is like email; aka the power is in the nodes. What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? Genuinely curious because I also am super skeptical that ATProto brings anything that we really need.
- mschuster91 9mo ago> What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? The same problems as always. Allow federation and you get... - federation wars and moderators conducting these wars using their own users as hostages - I left Mastodon years ago when some particularly dumb morons decided to do bitchfights regarding Israel / Palestine. No I'm not interested in your pointless squabble, but I do care when I suddenly don't see posts from a bunch of users without even getting a notification... - Mastodon-specific, when you move your account from one instance to another (e.g. as response to above-mentioned BS) your followings and followers migrate - but all your posts and media do not - spam, trolls and griefers abusing the system, up to and including sending around CSAM material that inevitably gets sucked in by your instance, making you liable in the eyes of the law - security issues. Mastodon has been full of these, no thanks I don't have the time to be constantly on guard lest I be exploited from above-mentioned griefers. - other instances not giving a flying fuck about moderation or abuse going out from their instances.
- Angostura 9mo agoSounds like you want to run your own private instance. That way you control your own moderation and federation policies
- azertify 9mo agoI think the problem is that it's too onerous to run your own instance, but being on anything but the "default" instance means dealing with volunteer moderators imposing their worldview on the available discourse. Creating a Mastodon account shouldn't mean supporting the particular political affiliation of the moderators, but I think it feels that way for many of the instances.
- direwolf20 9mo agoUnfortunately, the swarm is 99.99999% advertisements for penis enlargement pills. How can a P2P system filter them out? A federated system relies on each admin to filter them out. A centralised system does even better, relying on a single dictator to filter them out. A P2P system requires every user to filter every spam message, together consuming far more effort than the spammer needed to send it.
- robcohen 9mo agoThis isn't, and has never been a hard problem. Just pay for people's attention. People you follow don't have to pay, and make that transitive. Penalize people in your network who propagate spam by increasing the cost to get your attention.
- echelon 9mo agoThis is one of the most interesting properties of peer-to-peer networks. You can run your own ingestion algorithms, and one of the things you can do is set up inbound rules that incorporate micro transactions. We have to build a lot of infrastructure to make this work, but it seems ideal for a world full of agents and autonomous systems acting on our behalf.
- direwolf20 9mo agoDo the outbound rules of other participants include microtransactions? And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.
- echelon 9mo agoIf you've got great content, I would just follow you. Or someone I follow would follow you, and through the network it would lead to discovery. I want your content, so unless you charge for it, nobody's paying anyone. If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee. I'd be free to choose to set that up as a part of my ingestion algorithm. Or maybe my peers do it, and if they "upvote" the content, I see it. If my peers start acting poorly and sending spam, I can flag disinterest and my algorithm can naturally start deboosting that part of the network. With such systems-level control, we should be able to build really excellent tooling, optimization, and statistical monitoring. Also, since all publications are digitally signed, your content wouldn't have to be routed to me through your node at all. You could in fact never connect to the swarm and I could still read your content if you publish it to a peer that has distribution.
- hollow-moe 9mo agoEmail is the prime example of federated communication. From protocol inception to painful expansion and aging protocol all until corporate apropriaton. But I still think federation is the way forward, absolute centralisation is bad I'll let you figure why, but absolute decentralization is also bad, limitations due to its nature, unusual working for most users... Meanwhile federation is right in the middle, and users already use it with email without even noticing!
- BrenBarn 9mo agoPeople often mention email as an example of federated communication, but the way email works in practice doesn't entirely live up to that ideal. Good luck getting your own self-hosted email server to send emails that actually reach anyone using a major email provider; they'll just be blocked as spam. In practice, email is much less federated than it seems. A significant proportion of people are just using gmail. You probably don't have to include that many providers to cover a majority of people in the US. I think federation has promise, but federation in itself is not a solution. Technical approaches do not address the more fundamental issue that, regardless of the mechanics of the system, big players will have more influence on its operation and evolution. Thus we will always need sociopolitical mechanisms to restrict big players.
- patmorgan23 9mo agoFederation does at least give you the choice of providers, even a little bit of competition goes a long way to improving a company's behavior.
- BrenBarn 9mo agoBut in practice in doesn't always give you a choice, because the biggest providers will embrace and extend and start providing things other providers don't. Or they'll just make it difficult to export your data, etc.
- tsimionescu 9mo agoEmail is by far the least secure form of communication in common use right now. It's trivial to impersonate others over email, and every MTA that processes your email has access to the full contents, because they are never encrypted except in flight (and except by a few tiny disparate groups using PGP, and even these groups can't authenticate one another). And not for lack of trying, I should add.
- apitman 9mo agoWe don't need large scale social networks in the first place. The Discord model of small communities is the way forward. Keep groups small enough for natural human social rules to apply. Slows down global dissemination of information for sure, but that's what the news is for, and anything important will eventually travel between communities anyway.
- trinsic2 9mo agoYep. Once a system gets too large, its starts to break down and everything you do to make work ends up centralizing the process just like in real life. If you want things to work you keep it small and distributed.
- pythonaut_16 9mo agoI don't understand how you can seriously pose Discord as an alternative in this conversation as it's entirely centralized and full of all sorts of toxic behavior and failure modes. Like at least suggest old school forums, IRC, or usenet.
- lmm 9mo agoDiscord is technically centralised but in a way that mostly doesn't matter at the point of use, and its design avoids many of the failure modes of old school forums, IRC, or usenet where moderator cabals take control of any community and bully lowly users.
- zeratax 9mo agohow does it avoid that? i have experienced just as many power tripping mods on discord as i have on irc. the only difference to me is that i have never seen an irc channel with over 20 million users
- lmm 9mo agoBy making it very easy for every user to start their own server, rather than the multiple tiers of ircops/server admins/etc. where some users genuinely do have more power (and/or a level of technical ability that becomes a difference in power) than others.
- glenstein 9mo agoI don't disagree, but I'm baffled that, with P2P as your preferred outcome, your orientation toward federated infrastructure is one of opposition rather than support. It feels philosophically confused to me; they're your natural allies, they're a step in your preferred direction and they have an instance of real world success (well, to a degree) which is important. Whatever theory of change motivates this form of criticism of federated services can't be one that's, say, intentional or strategic about outcomes. It feels more first principles. One might also ask why P2P thesis statements only ever show up deep in the weeds in comment sections in response to the fediverse when logically speaking they would make just as much sense if not more in response to, say, any post about Facebook as a company or social media writ large, or business news about acquisitions, consolidation of web infrastructure into fewer hands, enshittification, or escalations of control over platforms. Again, I'm fully on board with the dream of P2P but it feels like Buzz Aldrin criticizing Neil Armstrong for not doing enough to bring humanity into the space age.
- account42 9mo agoThis is a flawed argument. If someone wants X they don't need to also support Y just because it's closer to X than other alternatives.
- glenstein 9mo agoIt's not a logical syllogism. And I would hope you have more to say about the coherence of a position than that it's merely not forbidden by logic, which is something less than an affirmative defense of its coherence and its motivations. It's about the perfect being the enemy of the good. "Well it's not forbidden by logic" is about as pathetically empty handed as it gets, in terms of accounting for which battles you're picking.
- mariusor 9mo agoI think supporters of P2P as "the one true way" perhaps don't realize that federation is just as peer to peer if your user count is 1. The fundamental distinction between a communication network that is p2p and one that is federated is the storage mechanism. For p2p the network itself is the storage, and as a participating node you connect and retrieve what is addressed to you while the amorphous data blob that contains said messages remains to float in the network. While for a federated network, the receiving node needs to be present on the network at all times to be able to access/receive the messages addressed to itself, after which the messages are absent from the network (to some degree or another). Personally the overhead of having the network having to bear the weight of all its nodes data is too large to make it viable.
- Dylan16807 9mo agoIf you mean the buggy and badly documented process, sure. But the complaint it builds up to is that instance-wide bans can ruin you when there are super big instances, and that's not something that can be fixed.
- direwolf20 9mo agoAny system that can ruin a spammer can also ruin someone who isn't a spammer, since the system can't tell the difference.
- skybrian 9mo agoI see this as a mistake caused by really poor docs that should explain what to do and warn not to do the thing this person did. It's also true that big instances have a lot of power and it's going to require a lot of growth of alternative instances to fix that, which will take time. At least it's possible, though. It's an intended outcome.
- davidgerard 9mo agoThere's a bug about it, and it's already marked WONTFIX https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/3143 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/3143