7 ms·

RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized

35 points by baha_man 17y ago

mechanical_fish 17y ago
The problems we're trying to solve: Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time... The problems with the proposed "decentralized" solution: Most users wouldn't trust their laptops (much less their mobile devices) to store content and serve it up 24 hours a day, so they would need a cloud service... A backup service is also necessary... impersonation and unsolicited communications (spam) are hard to solve in decentralized systems... nobody can be banned from a decentralized social network... Has anybody asked a customer whether this tradeoff makes any sense? And, incidentally, the idea that "RSS never goes down" is preposterous. When the blog goes down, the RSS goes down. When the blog changes URLs, the RSS goes down forever, or until you track it down again by hand, whichever comes first. I have a tiny handful of RSS feeds compared to most people, but I still have to routinely garden the darned things. And when the RSS feed isn't full-text, or has a weird error [1], it's not exactly down, but it does kind of suck on a permanent basis. --- [1] For me, Roger Ebert's RSS feed can't be read properly in iPhone NetNewsWire. The first paragraph is full width, and then it tends to shrink like a crazy EE Cummings poem, until we're down to one word per line.. Only that one feed has this problem. I wonder whose bug that is -- NetNewsWire, or the blog software, or the configuration, or Ebert? I wonder why I would want to have to routinely deal with such bugs on a feed-by-feed basis?
- wmf 17y ago
  An RSS feed can go down, but RSS itself cannot go down.
  - tedunangst 17y ago
    That's about as helpful as saying Twitter can go down, but HTTP cannot go down.
    - hellotoby 17y ago
      But what he's trying to say is that when Twitter goes down, it takes everyone with it. When a blog goes down it only takes it's RSS feed down with it, not every RSS feed in existence.
      - Periodic 17y ago
        The whole point is that a single failure will not bring down the whole system. As it is right now, regularly no one will have twitter access. With a decentralized system you might lose specific people, or even a whole region or maybe even communication between regions, but never the whole system.
        mechanical_fish 17y ago
        Part of the whole point of Twitter is that either your posts are seen by all of your followers, or (in the increasingly rare cases when Twitter is down) by none of them. If you want a decentralized system where some of your recipients will get the message, but others won't, shouldn't you just send email?
        pyre 17y ago
        Decentralized doesn't mean client-side. Think about it this way: What if Twitter wasn't a centralized company, but a standard protocol for software running on servers to communicate with each other? Each user would run their own 'microblog' on a server somewhere. When someone 'followed' them, they would end up subscribing to an RSS/Atom but in a way that was more similar to rssCloud or PubSubHubBub (i.e. the user1 wants to follow user2 so user1's software registers a 'callback url' with user2's microblog; now when user2 publishes, an update is pushed out to user1's microblog software) Users wouldn't even necessarily have to fool around with 'hosting packages.' This opens up a market for companies to provide 'targeted hosting' (hosting of a particular software package) or to create their own software package that conforms to the basic tenets of the protocol while adding things onto the interface (like games/advertisements/quizzes/etc). So the 'average user' wouldn't necessarily have to get their hands 'dirty' trying to figure out the difference between Shared Hosting and a VPS. You can have servers in a decentralized setup. The whole point is that there isn't a single point of failure (in this case Twitter or Facebook). Not only that, people could (presumably) have better access/ownership of their own data and be able to back it up in case of disaster (in which case they could restore everything back to normal or migrate to a different server/service).
darkxanthos 17y ago
I see no reason why something like Twitter couldn't be decentralized. All it really is is a huge RSS aggregator. If every Twitter user had something like Opera or some other web exposed RSS server where they could publish their comments subscribing would be as easy as reading a blog. You would lose a couple of features however... * Size limitations would need to be maintained client side and thus would be inconsistent. * No way to make it so that only your followers can DM you. * It wouldn't be nearly as easy to ensure unique identifiers for each user. In short, I totally agree but I do wonder if this kind of network is fairly far off. Seems like we're trying to decentralize a lot of things right now (cpu processing, social networks, p2p downloading, etc) and so I'm sure problems like this will get tackled very hard in the coming years.
- wmf 17y ago
  It's already done: http://openmicroblogging.org/ http://openmicroblogging.org/ Twitter is centralized for business reasons, not technical.
- tesseract 17y ago
  Decentralized Twitter = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol
  - pyre 17y ago
    Not really. Maybe on a basic level. But something like Twitter being centralized is less important to most people. Twitter is rather simple in concept and (at least a basic implementation) could be made as a project for an undergraduate CS course. Something that provided a decentralized Facebook/MySpace network would be more useful/important. As long as it was easy enough to deploy, people wouldn't necessarily need to get their own hosting option for it to work... but on the other hand it could open up a market for hosting that caters to people that just want to run that web-software package.
halo 17y ago
Problem with decentralisation is that it vastly increases complexity while not getting the investment, marketing and branding needed to make make a product go mainstream.
- windsurfer 17y ago
  Tell that to HTTP.
  - halo 17y ago
    Sure, there are exceptions, and I'm not saying it's impossible, but making a decentralised network popular is going to be an uphill struggle, especially in an already crowded space full of popular centralised competitors which are already free-of-charge when the end-user benefit is marginal at best and the usefulness of the service is proportional to the amount of users.
    - jerf 17y ago
      But the long term trends are clear: Centralized players lose to decentralized services. If you think that's not true, you need to broaden your perspective and look at more history. All those centralized services you see today? Those aren't the trend, those are the remnants of the stacks upon stacks of corpses of centralized services destroyed by decentralization, the only things still standing. From email, through RSS, and through Twitters eventual decentralized replacement, the march has been relentless. What reason do you have to think that a pattern in place for decades is suddenly going to stop because Mighty Twitter is just so damned special? Think in historical terms, across the decades, and Twitter is little more than a blip in the trend. I'm sure Twitter is going to make some money before it goes, but I'm also sure there won't be a Twitter in ten years, but instead a protocol. Same for Facebook, incidentally. Centralization is O(n^4) to decentralization's O(1.1^n); sure, it looks like centralization is just awesome for a while, but it always ends up stomped flat in the end.
      - kristiandupont 17y ago

35 points by baha_man 17y ago

The problems we're trying to solve: Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time... The problems with the proposed "decentralized" solution: Most users wouldn't trust their laptops (much less their mobile devices) to store content and serve it up 24 hours a day, so they would need a cloud service... A backup service is also necessary... impersonation and unsolicited communications (spam) are hard to solve in decentralized systems... nobody can be banned from a decentralized social network... Has anybody asked a customer whether this tradeoff makes any sense? And, incidentally, the idea that "RSS never goes down" is preposterous. When the blog goes down, the RSS goes down. When the blog changes URLs, the RSS goes down forever, or until you track it down again by hand, whichever comes first. I have a tiny handful of RSS feeds compared to most people, but I still have to routinely garden the darned things. And when the RSS feed isn't full-text, or has a weird error [1], it's not exactly down, but it does kind of suck on a permanent basis. --- [1] For me, Roger Ebert's RSS feed can't be read properly in iPhone NetNewsWire. The first paragraph is full width, and then it tends to shrink like a crazy EE Cummings poem, until we're down to one word per line.. Only that one feed has this problem. I wonder whose bug that is -- NetNewsWire, or the blog software, or the configuration, or Ebert? I wonder why I would want to have to routinely deal with such bugs on a feed-by-feed basis?

wmf 17y ago
An RSS feed can go down, but RSS itself cannot go down.
- tedunangst 17y ago
  That's about as helpful as saying Twitter can go down, but HTTP cannot go down.
  - hellotoby 17y ago
    But what he's trying to say is that when Twitter goes down, it takes everyone with it. When a blog goes down it only takes it's RSS feed down with it, not every RSS feed in existence.
    - Periodic 17y ago
      The whole point is that a single failure will not bring down the whole system. As it is right now, regularly no one will have twitter access. With a decentralized system you might lose specific people, or even a whole region or maybe even communication between regions, but never the whole system.
      - mechanical_fish 17y ago
        Part of the whole point of Twitter is that either your posts are seen by all of your followers, or (in the increasingly rare cases when Twitter is down) by none of them. If you want a decentralized system where some of your recipients will get the message, but others won't, shouldn't you just send email?
        pyre 17y ago
        Decentralized doesn't mean client-side. Think about it this way: What if Twitter wasn't a centralized company, but a standard protocol for software running on servers to communicate with each other? Each user would run their own 'microblog' on a server somewhere. When someone 'followed' them, they would end up subscribing to an RSS/Atom but in a way that was more similar to rssCloud or PubSubHubBub (i.e. the user1 wants to follow user2 so user1's software registers a 'callback url' with user2's microblog; now when user2 publishes, an update is pushed out to user1's microblog software) Users wouldn't even necessarily have to fool around with 'hosting packages.' This opens up a market for companies to provide 'targeted hosting' (hosting of a particular software package) or to create their own software package that conforms to the basic tenets of the protocol while adding things onto the interface (like games/advertisements/quizzes/etc). So the 'average user' wouldn't necessarily have to get their hands 'dirty' trying to figure out the difference between Shared Hosting and a VPS. You can have servers in a decentralized setup. The whole point is that there isn't a single point of failure (in this case Twitter or Facebook). Not only that, people could (presumably) have better access/ownership of their own data and be able to back it up in case of disaster (in which case they could restore everything back to normal or migrate to a different server/service).

darkxanthos 17y ago

I see no reason why something like Twitter couldn't be decentralized. All it really is is a huge RSS aggregator. If every Twitter user had something like Opera or some other web exposed RSS server where they could publish their comments subscribing would be as easy as reading a blog. You would lose a couple of features however... * Size limitations would need to be maintained client side and thus would be inconsistent. * No way to make it so that only your followers can DM you. * It wouldn't be nearly as easy to ensure unique identifiers for each user. In short, I totally agree but I do wonder if this kind of network is fairly far off. Seems like we're trying to decentralize a lot of things right now (cpu processing, social networks, p2p downloading, etc) and so I'm sure problems like this will get tackled very hard in the coming years.

wmf 17y ago
It's already done: http://openmicroblogging.org/ http://openmicroblogging.org/ Twitter is centralized for business reasons, not technical.
tesseract 17y ago
Decentralized Twitter = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol
- pyre 17y ago
  Not really. Maybe on a basic level. But something like Twitter being centralized is less important to most people. Twitter is rather simple in concept and (at least a basic implementation) could be made as a project for an undergraduate CS course. Something that provided a decentralized Facebook/MySpace network would be more useful/important. As long as it was easy enough to deploy, people wouldn't necessarily need to get their own hosting option for it to work... but on the other hand it could open up a market for hosting that caters to people that just want to run that web-software package.

halo 17y ago

Problem with decentralisation is that it vastly increases complexity while not getting the investment, marketing and branding needed to make make a product go mainstream.

windsurfer 17y ago
Tell that to HTTP.
- halo 17y ago
  Sure, there are exceptions, and I'm not saying it's impossible, but making a decentralised network popular is going to be an uphill struggle, especially in an already crowded space full of popular centralised competitors which are already free-of-charge when the end-user benefit is marginal at best and the usefulness of the service is proportional to the amount of users.
  - jerf 17y ago
    But the long term trends are clear: Centralized players lose to decentralized services. If you think that's not true, you need to broaden your perspective and look at more history. All those centralized services you see today? Those aren't the trend, those are the remnants of the stacks upon stacks of corpses of centralized services destroyed by decentralization, the only things still standing. From email, through RSS, and through Twitters eventual decentralized replacement, the march has been relentless. What reason do you have to think that a pattern in place for decades is suddenly going to stop because Mighty Twitter is just so damned special? Think in historical terms, across the decades, and Twitter is little more than a blip in the trend. I'm sure Twitter is going to make some money before it goes, but I'm also sure there won't be a Twitter in ten years, but instead a protocol. Same for Facebook, incidentally. Centralization is O(n^4) to decentralization's O(1.1^n); sure, it looks like centralization is just awesome for a while, but it always ends up stomped flat in the end.
    - kristiandupont 17y ago