Yeah. Meta is hiring, Meta is firing, Meta is about to publish their first coloring book, ML models available, discount mattresses, the boss-lost-his-mind-everything-has-to-go, Meta is taking VR to the next level, Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network. Sure, sure. Good luck, Meta!
Then it's federated, so they're still using "decentralized" wrong, which would imply direct client<>client communication (decentralized), rather than client<>server<>client (federated) communication.
Embrace, extend, extinguish: is a standard playbook for monopolists and oligopolists everywhere in tech.
1. Make "cool corporate mastodon server" that all the cool kids play on.
2. Extend the masto code with proprietary extensions for better features, but DONT SHARE CODE
3. Convert people on other masto instances cause they don't have "cool feature".
4. Users flock to "cool masto server", and mastobook is created.
5. Other servers either try to play catch-up or close. A few holdouts straggle on.
6. Shitty company successfully proprietizes a federated system.
Email, another federated system, has nearly gone this route. Sure, you can make your own mail server and do all the right things WRT spf/dkim/dmarc. But when most email is through gmail and outlook.com and they decide you're bad, you're not 'running' email.
People said the same thing when Tumblr added ActivityPub.
The most likely situation is that the fediverse would spot this tactic and mass de-federate anyone who tried it, so that bad actor would be left making their own island and any investment in federation would be lost.
It doesn't make business sense to try and EEE the fediverse.
I think more likely is that few people would really migrate in the first place. What killer feature would do such a thing? People just make accounts where their friends and interests are. I guess Facebook might promote it heavily and network effects will get new people on it, but this wouldn't really affect other instances, I think.
XMPP is a better example. XMPP is decentralized IM, and was gaining some popularity amongst techies (e.g.: people like those reading this website) about 10-15 years ago. It's well documented, an actual standard, and plenty of extensions for extra functionality. Video calls worked okay around 2010/2011.
Google Talk federated to XMPP, and it worked well for quite some time. I had my own XMPP server but could talk to people who were using Google Talk, just like I could email people from my email server to their gmail account. It was wonderful! I had some friends on legacy networks like MSN and they shifted to Google Talk which I found great.
My enthusiasm for their migration turns out to be very naive.
Google one day said they'd de-federate Google Talk. People on GT could talk to people on GT, everyone else could screw themselves. My roster shrunk from "most people I talk to" to "two or three people I rarely every talk with".
I didn't continue XMPP much after that, though it's still a thing and continues evolving pretty well. My interest has re-sparked this year since I'm looking into using is as a gateway for other crap networks where friends insist on staying.
It's not hard to imagine Facebook (ehem, "Meta") federating with Mastodon and giving out a lot of "oh, they're actually not that bad" vibe. Many would come to use Mastodon but rely on Meta's federation. Until they decide it's time for Masto to die, just like Google decided it was time for XMPP to collapse.
Bastardizing terms works really well to destroy an idea. If enough crap is thrown over the wall with the label "descentralized" then eventually eventually, the word "descentralized" brings this crap to mind.
When someone comes around talking about REAL descentralization, they'll be shun off for asking more of that crap.
Its like the time meta did with "Libra", like you take a concept that's flying right now in the community and you say "oh. How can we exploit this by shoving ourselves in the middle"
> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work.
This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences.
As another commenter put it [1], the property that makes a decentralized social network desirable is actually that it's non-excludeable. There's no outside entity that can exclude people from the network. This is very similar to the core of what censorship is: there is a speaker and a listener who both want to communicate, but some third party prevents them.
What I would like from a social network is opt-in filtering, where you can choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists. But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view. If this new social network Meta is building puts users in control, it could be great.
I think you're wrong and not the typical user. Personally, I would never use any social network without strong moderation and banning of toxic users, and I'm that many if not most people share this sentiment. Places without strong moderation turn into hellholes and are generally less interesting.
Whether a network is decentralized or not is a completely different, purely technical question. I don't understand why two issues get mixed up so often. The design of a community should never be based on technical considerations.
The GP comment’s proposal is not incompatible with what you (and typical users) want.
Moderation is very different from censorship.
I want strong moderation and “banning” for myself. I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so.
On the other hand, I don’t believe that I have any kind of entitlement to prevent other people from seeing content once it’s been permanently hidden from my own view. I don’t really care if other people are able to see content that I don’t wish to see.
>I want strong moderation and “banning” for myself. I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so.
This is fine for you perhaps, but I don't want to be a moderator. I prefer social networks like, say, Hacker News where moderation is handled for me.
>Email works this way today and most people are perfectly fine with that.
Most people only use email for work and don't particularly enjoy it. They prefer to spend their free time on other social networks.
> but I don't want to be a moderator. I prefer social networks like, say, Hacker News where moderation is handled for me.
I don't think we're disagreeing on that. Per my comment:
"I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so."
The implication of that statement is that Hacker News (or in this case, Facebook) handles moderation, but under the framework laid out by the GP commenter, one can opt out of that, or perhaps even opt into different moderation regimes. Political news outlets, for example, might be motivated to create their own moderation regimes if they feel that Facebook (or whomever else) is too biased against XYZ political group in their moderation.
> Most people only use email for work and don't particularly enjoy it. They prefer to spend their free time on other social networks.
I would be careful about speaking for other people. Perhaps this is true for you, but I (for one) love subscribing to email newsletters, and those are a part of my daily information diet. I'm free to subscribe and unsubscribe as I please, and others are unable to prevent me from doing so. As we can see with the continued existence of platforms like Substack, there's clearly a demand for that. Also, insofar as one might not "particularly enjoy" email, it's not particularly clear that the root cause of that is email's censorship resistance. It could also be because the email protocol is missing features that one might desire in the kind of decentralized protocol Facebook might create.
i'm on board with this. Just a big "ignore" button where i never see the person's content or any interactions with it again would work just fine for me. I think to provide feedback the other way a counter on your view of the number of people that have you on ignore would be good too.
IMHO that's not a solution at all. It merely creates information bubbles. I don't want diverging opinions to go into a killfile, I want mechanisms that force all users to deal with each other in civil and minimally polite ways, just like the vast majority of them already they do under normal circumstances in face to face communication.
I think your glasses are a little rose colored for in-person communication. The rule older than my grandparents is just don’t talk about anything controversial, and only see “those” family members once a year at Thanksgiving.
You already do this today with email for anything that isn't already swept away by your spam filter, i.e. by clicking "Mark as Spam". Over time, you end up having to do that less because the filter learns your preferences. You can also always go back into your spam folder and teach the system to unlearn something it shouldn't have in case it overcorrected.
It's not perfect, and there's a very real concern that spam filters are becoming increasingly biased, but (to my knowledge) the level of outrage around spam filters is much MUCH lower than that around platform "censorship". It's a stable equilibrium.
Correct, and with blocklists / opt-in moderation, whatever system that is would do a similarly great job.
With email, you can manually block wherever anything falls through the cracks, and that's effectively what your parent commenter is proposing. I don't think anyone thinks that having to manually block every single person from scratch is a sustainable equilibrium.
Oh I read it as "I only want to block people manually". For sure if there are existing "moderation" tools in place to clear spam and wildly offensive material then yeah manually blocking the rest seems... mostly fine?
I guess the problem arises when we talk about what "wildly offensive" means. Deadnaming people and trying to claim there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system are two "wildly offensive" concepts to me that may not be to others, for example.
I like your examples a lot, because they illustrate the challenges well.
“there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system” is not particularly offensive to me; even if I may disagree, I’m still interested in commentary. Ditto deadnaming, it isn’t a dealbreaker for me, especially if it’s done within a post that is making some greater point that I find to be insightful.
In an ideal setup, there would be an off the shelf moderation blacklist that caters to your needs, and another off the shelf moderation blacklist that caters to mine (both updated on an ongoing basis), and neither of us have to do anything manually to get the experience we both separately desire. Pluggable spam filter algorithms, if you will.
Case in point: we're discussing this on Hacker News, a very well moderated website.
Libertarian tech bros love the idea of technical solutions for political problems. What they don't realize is the real service platforms offer is moderation.
If you think this place is well moderated, try having a civil discussion on DNI initiatives or anything at all that gets the tech-bro SV hate culture engine fired up.
You will be downvoted, flagged and throttled before the hour is up.
I see many comments here every day that would get anyone instantly banned from most of the biggest subreddits. However, I think that most people would agree that this place is a lot less toxic than reddit. Smaller subreddits are somewhat better, but at this point this behavior has become pervasive in site, and users are expected to respond aggressively to any disagreement. As a result, any discussion becomes impossible and most comment sections are filled with users mindlessly agreeing with each other. Moderation is important but the way it is implemented in reddit has only managed to turn the site into an extremely toxic echochamber.
Reddit admins only set some very basic guardrails, typically around things like hate speech. Everything else is controlled by the mods. There are subs that are toxic and many that are not. Which you subscribe to is up to you and will determine your experience. The example often used here is /r/AskHistorians.
> What they don't realize is the real service platforms offer is moderation.
I'd rephrase this as "the real service platforms offer is better signal-to-noise ratio in the information one seeks". Moderation is not in itself the selling point, but merely one lever or device operating in collusion with some methods to increase SNR and in contraposition to others.
That's roughly how Mastodon works. Each instance is responsible for moderation of their own users. If an instance does not meet arbitrary standards of moderation, other instances may choose not to federate with them, but nothing can stop willing instances from federating.
One problem: as far as I understand a number of high profile instances enforced a rule where they would block any instance that didn't block certain other instances.
I'm all for blocking a good number of instances myself, but putting limits on others, that is a whole different thing.
It is understandable when it deals with Iran, a terrorist organization sitting on top of an oil field, terrorizing large parts of the Middle East (note that nowhere do I criticize the overthrowing of the old regime, I just criticize what they themselves is/became).
Unfortunately that's ended up with a netsplit between covenanted and free servers, some servers will even de-federate you for federating with the "wrong" servers. So the only way to access the whole fediverse is either have multiple accounts, or run your own server.
You say all that like it's a problem. If I run a gay furry porn instance, like wall to wall kitsune dicks, why should anyone federate with me? If you want fox dicks you come to my server. If you don't you avoid my server.
You shouldn't have to see a bunch of raunchy furry gifs at work to decide you don't want to see those and block me manually. Federation should be a totally voluntary thing between servers. Only instances with compatible policies should federate.
Accessing the whole fediverse should only ever be a client problem in logging into multiple instances. Instances shouldn't be expected to just federate with everyone.
Problem is people have no idea what Facism and Nazism is.
You find people here in the west who hate Jews claiming to be anti-facists and people starting a massive invasion of a very peaceful central European country - all while repeating much of Hitlers playbook - while claiming they do it to crush the "Nazis" there.
You see mods on reddit go on ego trip ban spree's all the time. It's classic 90's mod meltdown stuff. I don't think subscribing to a benevolent master is a good model. What happens if their gaze turns to you?
Moderation is really hard. And it's especially hard because a lot of people have very para-social relationships between themselves and rando's they talk to online.
Whilst I know that sometimes those rando's turn into real friends in the real world. For the most part people are strangers, and the better form of moderation is getting off social media for a while.
If meta wanted to do something amazing. It'd enforce one reality tunnel on the networks. Rather than have a base set of rules. Have a base set of news and facts that everyone shares in. Bubbles are generally bad. And everything goes to shit, even on HN, when we start getting into politics.
> If meta wanted to do something amazing. It'd enforce one reality tunnel on the networks. Rather than have a base set of rules. Have a base set of news and facts that everyone shares in.
Just no. I don't want any large corporation to determine what the "news and facts" are -- and particularly not Facebook.
There is an open music making forum. It is completely toxic. Even if I set to ignore garbage users they influence the discussions and most threads. A relevant music making subreddit deleted my music on an open to all feedback request thread without giving me any reason, yet I still prefer that subreddit because it's not just pure toxic negativity. We need a mix of both with people free to choose their model.
> You see mods on reddit go on ego trip ban spree's all the time. It's classic 90's mod meltdown stuff. I don't think subscribing to a benevolent master is a good model. What happens if their gaze turns to you?
This is why free speech is so hard to maintain. There are so many cases where you want to ban or censor something obviously repugnant, but once the power is created to do so, it will be abused, probably as soon as someone you don't like is now in charge.
"Permitted" is a strong word for activity enabled by a protocol. It implies some moral acceptance from the ones who designed the tool. I think a better word would be "possible". Similar to how e-mail makes it possible to send all kinds of content.
This doesn't really work because it doesn't allow a moderator to set the tenor of a community. People can filter out individual messages, but a dedicated set of bad actors can turn a community into swiss cheese or undermine discussion just by spamming, baiting and trolling and taking advantage of the variance in the level of tolerance for the bad behavior.
Communities function when there is a standard to which the community members adhere and when bad behavior is uniformly moderated away. Making each individual have their own moderation bubble is a recipe for incoherence, even with the improvements you suggest. Its also a lot of work.
You're describing the exact thing people do when logging onto a Mastodon instance. They're choosing to accept the moderation/federation policies of that instance.
FWIW I think it's a sign of intellectual dishonesty to complain vaguely about censorship of "widely held beliefs" without stating what those beliefs are. All social networks have "ground rules", they're just not always the same. For any social network that somehow can be pinned to someone's physical identity, those rules will at least include the laws of that person's jurisdiction.
"Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing. Even people who'll proudly tell you "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it" will have limits if you keep pushing them on it. "Free speech" just means "I want to be able to say things I'm not allowed to say" and the first response should always be "what and for what purpose".
> FWIW I think it's a sign of intellectual dishonesty to complain vaguely about censorship of "widely held beliefs" without stating what those beliefs are.
I would hazard a guess that don't think those beliefs need to be stated because most people know that widely held beliefs are censored, and because it would make the discussion about something else. The Twitterfiles are available, as are all the discussions about censorship including by those running the social networks. They don't deny censorship, they attempt to justify it.
> "Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing.
Free speech is not a rallying call, and it most definitely is a principle, just as "democracy" is not a rallying call.
> Even people who'll proudly tell you "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it" will have limits if you keep pushing them on it.
And like democracy, different people will define it and (if they get the chance) implement it differently. However, they're all talking about democracy (maybe with the exception of North Korea's government).
> "Free speech" just means "I want to be able to say things I'm not allowed to say"
It most definitely does not mean that which means your following questions are moot. I would suggest that you find out what those supporting freedom of speech actually think.
I can provide two specific examples of "widely held beliefs" that have been mass-banned on Reddit. I also want to note I don't endorse or subscribe to either of these beliefs but I felt neither were deserving of a ban and I was open-minded to hear arguments in their direction.
1) Reddit banned /r/NoNewNormal and "Covid misinformation" after activist moderators started shutting off subreddits. I personally got a Covid vaccine and complied with mask regulations, but I was interested in hearing coherent arguments related to lockdown / mask / vaccine skepticism. Obviously these skeptic views were very widely held beliefs, and some of them like the "lab leak theory" went from "misinformation" to "possibly true"
2) Reddit banned /r/GenderCritical which was a subreddit representing feminists who expressed skepticism over modern transgender ideology in the spirit of JK Rowling. Again, JK Rowling has millions of followers so this qualifies as a widely held belief. While I want to be inclusive and supportive of transgender people, I'm interested in hearing skeptical arguments related to things like whether it's really a good idea to give puberty blocker to teenagers .
I believe both of these bans happened not for good reasons but because of ideological crusades from Reddit power-moderators who skew heavily on certain political and ideological topics.
I'm not trying to start a flamewar or debate on either of these topics, I'm not endorsing either of those subreddits, I'm addressing your critique that specific examples were not provided of "widely held beliefs" that have been unfairly censored.
I'm not familiar with the reasons behind those particular subs being banned, but in my experience "toxic communities" are a more common reason for a ban than the subject matter. If a sub wants to discuss gender identity and politics that's one thing. If that same sub then becomes a rallying place for those who brigade and harass other users or subs and the mods don't respond to admin requests to stop it then the sub gets banned. It's not true of all cases, of course, but it is common and something that most users of those subs will probably never be made aware of as the content is controlled by the mods who may or may not support the behavior that got the sub banned.
In the case of both of the topics you listed, there are still plenty of places online you can go to entertain your curiosity about those views. What I don't understand is the assumption that a corporate product should be compelled to host discussions it deems inappropriate in either topic, tone or corresponding action by users.
Through what mechanism do you believe website owners should be forced to allow users to operate by their own terms? Should anyone who hosts a comment section on a personal website be forced to keep all posted comments in perpetuity?
How about you initially "trust" all of your friends. If one friend blacklists a bad actor, all their friends automatically blacklist them as well. If it turns out the friend blacklisted an innocent person out of spite or something, word should eventually get around and people can manually revoke trust from that friend.
I myself block a ton of stuff, which isn't illegal not offensive, not ... but just boring for me. That list shouldn't spread to others. Also I don't want to have to think about personal vs. global block.
I'm talking about a big red button "spam/harmful" rather than a personal preference list.
To be a little clearer: you have your own private filters and a separate, distributed block list shared amongst your friends, which is for bad content. You use the big red button when you encounter spam or harmful content, and this bad content/user/node/etc is added to the shared block list.
You initially trust all of your friends to use this block list properly, but if you find one of your friends is misusing it you can revoke trust from them and ignore their contributions.
would be an easy option, to autoblock with your friends or not. or even with individual friends - I value the opinions of lots of people who filter out people I'd want to hear from.
Just because over 10 million Americans believe that Tom Hanks violates, kills, and eats children - a widely held belief - does not mean that a private company can't tell those people to go suck a bug.
A private company does moderation and it's the end of the world. Ron DeSantis bans books and he is just "anti-woke". The actual government.
Dont you think there are some books that shouldn’t be in schools? Surely you can grant that it’s correct not to disseminate certain information to children.
I don’t think you have a problem with that, I think you agree with what critics call wokeism.
There are many who are aware of QAnon. A portion of those are aware that it revolves around insane conspiracy theories, and only a fraction of those know the details of how deranged the conspiracy theories are.
Only a few journalists have ever ventured out to explore that world, as it's really not good for one's mental health.
So, you have no problem, I assume, with the "woke" governors banning or revising classic children's books to remove anything offensive? Right?
You know, to prevent "government employees and licensed child educators from providing certain books to children, in the context of government mandated education."
In parent's defense, banning kids from reading certain books is not the same as "woke" governors banning or revising classic books for _everyone_, not just kids.
If people are banning books at school because the content can be bad for kids (debatable on what "bad" means obviously) then the parents can go get the book from elsewhere and have their kids read it at home. Whatever. But changing books for everyone is stupid.
I don't get your reasoning, sorry. Desantis banned certain books from being taught. Anyone can go out and buy those books.
You specifically say "woke" governors banning or revising classic children's books" which is not the same thing. While I'm not familiar with this idiotic part of american politics, that does sound like the governors are actually banning these books or changing them?
That's NOT what Desantis did.
And as far as I'm concerned, yes, any publisher as a private company should have the power to change a book if they want, but then don't be upset about the blowback. You can do whatever you want as a private company, but don't expect your customer to just take it. Eventually it might hurt your profits, at which point your shareholders might have a case for a lawsuit too.
This seems like a great case against public education, since the mechanism to address this "whoever is in power decides" situation is of course competition and free choice.
Indoctrination of children is just natural a natural consequence of everyone having their biases. Parents are the ones who should choose, because that is how we have diversity. Home schooling gives parents the most choice, private school a step down, but public school is where the parent matters the least and we end up in perpetual holy wars like this.
I agree with this strongly except indoctrination is not inevitable. It’s not synonymous with teaching/learning.
But it absolutely points to the problem of government in education. I don’t think most people realize how recently the schools came under the thumb of the federal government. Department of Education only started in 1980 and it hasn’t exactly raised the bar in that time.
It places constraints on educators (the experts) which make it easy to administer but harder for the educators to educate.
Exactly, and its actually generally blue states that have centralised education, and places like florida that allow chartered schools and similar ones.
So if you want to setup a private school in florida with LGBTQ+ education, I'm pretty sure you can just do that.
Are you talking about a hypothetical place where schools are self-funded or something, or are you talking about Florida still? It's not that much of a free market if conservative-friendly charter schools get subsidized by the state but LGBTQ friendly schools don't.
Because local government has the power to collect taxes. If it chooses to selectively hand them out only to favored political institutions, then in practice this means many students won't be able to afford to attend their favored schools, and some schools will be financially non-viable. It may be the case that such schools will still exist in this environment (with a smaller student body), but that doesn't make the issue less problematic.
No that’s the point. He’s just doing what those people have been doing since I was a kid and only once it goes the other way is it some horrible censorship. This is why he’s liked by so many, he’s effective at beating them at their own game.
It’s a bit amusing that your comment is making fun of Americans for widely holding an untrue belief, and then you conveniently make an example of yourself doing the exact same thing.
I usually find it’s about three comments deep that Americans find a way to start taking potshots at the other team whenever the concepts of “censorship” or “freedoms” arise. Canadians and Europeans are usually able to discuss these things without referencing Trump or Biden or Clinton or whomever is on the American mind these days. It’s as if one can’t imagine a world where censorship is anything but a tool the evil Red/Blue team will use to steal the next election.
I fail to see any value in trying to compare hugely diverse populations of hundreds of millions of people against each other and their ability to discuss nuanced political topics. It feels like you're just hashing out some intuitions based on what's come across your twitter feed or something? It's your prerogative to do so, but don't convince yourself it's a meaningful insight.
"whatever is on the American mind these days" lol.
> Ron DeSantis bans books and he is just "anti-woke"
Although I don't necessarily disagree with you in principal here, it's worth noting that the precedent that allows him to ban LGBT books is the original banning of prayer in schools. The fact that school attendance is actually compulsory takes a little of the bite off of your argument, though - social media participation is entirely voluntary.
The huge problem is scaling, the bigger the social network gets the more moderators you would need to subscribe because the ones you already subscribed to are not cutting enough noise anymore, so it's almost inevitable that there would be a scarcity of moderators, at some point the only useful moderators would be paid ones or more likely bots, the bots with the most success at banning "toxic people" using AI or whatever would quickly win that race... and then you just would have created Facebook again.
Can you elaborate on these "Widely held beliefs"? You appear to have done some research into the topic so I think it would be beneficial to your point if you gave examples of the beliefs.
Because of Bandwagon fallacy, because we know just because something is widely-held doesn't necessarily make it valid, so these popular beliefs, I'd like to see what they are.
You will get banned on Reddit if you say trans women aren’t real women. They call it promoting hate towards a marginalized group. You may be sympathetic towards that so think twice before moving the goalpost.
The goalpost is always moving—it's called the Overton window. And whether you like it or not, the window is not moving in your direction on this issue.
> Can you elaborate on these "Widely held beliefs"
My reddit account was permanently banned for _upvoting_ vaccine hesitancy - i.e. that people shouldn't be forced to take a vaccine they don't want to take.
That's good to hear. This ban very likely has prevented some deaths. If people in the US had taken public health measures more seriously, hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been prevented in the last epidemic alone.
That same property of inviolable non-excludable makes a social network inaccessible to those who are frequently harassed. The right to shun some participants is a necessary function of social spaces, to mitigate known and documented human tendencies over the past couple thousand years to drown out, abuse, and in general commit conversational warfare upon others.
“Just block them” doesn’t scale when each harasser is harassing thousands of people. “Just block scripts” is no more effective than blocking adblockers. “Opt-in moderators” is no more legally viable than “No moderators”.
If you want to moderate a space, then set up and run a space of your own. If you want to federate with others, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your federations. If you want your space to stay online, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your hosting and transit providers. If you want your federation to stay online, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your organization’s laws. This is true today for all social sites, whether solo or distributed.
Facebook thinks they can opt out of expensive and difficult moderation duties by transferring the legal requirements for moderation to their users. They may succeed briefly, but the EU will not look kindly upon their attempt to circumvent the law.
Suppose I create a bot and create millions of accounts. post in each article, now you're spending a huge, myriad of time just filtering/ignoring users.
> But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view.
The difficulty there is the end users are not hosting or distributing content. Some server(s) need to host content. No one can be forced to host content. A host is always going to be the final arbiter of what content is ultimately available.
Even if someone wants to run a Mastodon (or whatever) instance filled with Nazi content no one else is obligated to federate with them.
What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?
Next, people think “we need AirBnB! Not stodgy old hotels, but cool, real homes owned by real people, where individuals can provide hospitality to each other and everyone wins.”
Consequence: independent operators take on the soulless characteristics of hotels but without the accountability or reliability.
I can see us entering the AirBnB era of social networks soon…
Seriously though, your comment gave me a great laugh this morning and made me think about how much of our communication is built off shared pop culture.
To me the difference is that 1) you pay for hotels and you know exactly what the cost is 2) hotels provide a tangible benefit, mostly being the bed to sleep in.
Social media often has this idea that it is “free” and so people don’t think about the massive amounts of time and privacy that is given up as the hours whizz by.
Hotels where you don't pay rent, in exchange for the hotel recording everything you do in the room, in the lobby, and if you aren't careful, putting a GPS tracker on your person.
I've done extensive research into providing free services (of many kinds)
It is not at all problematic to extract enough value from a conventional hotel visitor to pay for their room. The real puzzle is that a free room doesn't attract that kind of people. You get people who feel obligated to draw penises on the wall, shit in the sink and stab holes in your mattress. The normal audience you get, after making the reservations and/or picking up the key mostly wont be in the room because they don't need it.
Whatever plot one was to come up with to realize it it is almost guaranteed that it would work better if you charged extra for a room with such creative original features all this wonderful product information as the deeper the pockets the more valuable and less annoying the promotional circus.
I'm sorry what? This is absurd take, to think of hotels as a recent invention where they have been "new and cool", like social media. Hotels are just a formalized way to provide temporary accommodation for money, which has existed as a class of business since trade has existed. The wayside tavern in ancient villages is an exact 1:1 analog with your travel inn motel today.
Civilization is fast becoming a casino. Housing is increasingly expensive, most offers are some money-for-dopamine deal. Social media is a never ending row of slot machines. We keep betting small chunks of attention that we will have a mythical pay-off (fame, love, glory), and most just waste away pressing the buttons and looking at the colors change for ever.
In what way does something becoming expensive (in this case housing) make it like a casino? And what would be a flip-side for that metaphor ("housing prices are remaining where they are, which is like {{thing}}")?
Not disagreeing you, just unable to follow the connection you are making.
Housing used to be about acquiring acceptable shelter. Now it's more like paying high fees for temporary arrangements... Civilization should be about diverse spaces people can build together but lately it's more like living in a planet size casino with a dumpster fire out back...
Yeah social networks seem to be 'generationally sticky'. This is probably just network effect shit. You and all your friends are on instagram and use instagram together as your 'main channel'. Tik Tok comes along, some join but some don't. But the next generation they join Tik Tok as their 'main channel' .. the process repeats.
> Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?
And 'proposition' is the right word to use, since its really just the promise of social networks that people like. In practice it has not worked as a means of connecting people to each other. Certainly not better than the alternatives it replaced. We should call the experiment a failure.
I'm all for getting rid of social networks, especially general-purpose ones. I don't see it happening though. Most people see them as a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes. If you're younger than 30, you probably don't have an intuitive feeling for what the world is like without them. I guess this is understandable, if sad.
> since its really just the promise of social networks that people like. In practice it has not worked as a means of connecting people to each other.
I went off FB for a year or two, only to come back on when the pandemic started. I definitely missed the connections and conversations I had with family and friends across the world while I was gone. If I could have that without feeling like I was contributing to all the shenanigans, I would do it.
For work I created a Mastodon account, and so far it seems very nice. There are lots of cool people posting interesting stuff, and no ads. Unfortunately I'm not interested in the "public-only microblog" experience for my personal life, and fine-graned access control in a federated system is a tricky problem; and my experience with the systems that are attempting to address that issue haven't been very positive.
The ad experience will come, because that's really the best option for a lot of platforms to monetize...and no one is running a charity. By that point a lot of users have been locked in and essentially just going with it.
Loads of organizations have been running core infrastructure from donations for decades now. If you don't need to write new code, and don't have a pressure to actually turn a profit, and have people with enough investment in the community to donate time doing moderation / sysadmin tasks, then it should be easy to get enough donations to keep a server up and running.
In any case, one of the core functionalities of most federated software is the ability to migrate your profile somewhere else.
I’m over 30 and this rings false for me. Social networks introduced problems at a scale that they hadn’t really been seen before, and it has awful downsides. That being said, the basic concept is nice.
My parents, for example, are much more connected to their relatives overseas. More so than they’re relatives, they’re connected to their relatives’ friend groups. The conversations that take place now when they visit are better. They’re more in touch with more lives.
The ads, the fomo, the general fakeness of it all is awful. But the benefits still outweigh the negatives.
The crazy thing is that I can find people right now on the other side of the world and probably make some great connections and share stories, learn about cultures, etc...
> What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general?
Good luck with that. Social networks is an idea that is as old as the Internet. MySpace and Facebook were merely a step in a progression that included IRC, Usenet, email. Arguably hypertext itself. If you're not connecting people, what is the point of the Internet?
Don't forget CompuServe and Prodigy, which predates the consumer internet. Back in the late '80s my parents subscribed to these, and I would read and post on their comic book forums, arguing about which super hero could beat who.
I do, I realize that the most important decision to opt out is on me. There is also no denying that this process is a difficult one and it is not made easier by the platforms themselves.
They are optional in the same way how postal service is optional. Sure, you may just drive / sail / fly to whoever you want your package delivered... chances are you'd rebel against this seeing how everyone else simply drops their package by the nearest collection point.
Social networks today provide service beyond simply catching up with friends and family. They serve as front desks of companies' customer support, they provide easy means of feedback to important political figures... they became a public good and need to be recognized by the state as such.
Indeed, I think you could actually argue that social networks produce a lot of hot air but very little actual action. People seem to burn themselves out on political discussion and ripping on each other for having different opinions, but then they seem to do very little actual participating in the political process. Places like Facebook and NextDoor suck all the air out of the room for a lot of peoples' political ambitions.
In contrast I'm finding that elected officials, aside from some gaffes here and there, are mostly receptive at the local level to the things we're asking for. If people spent the time they spend ripping on each other on social media instead navigating the bureaucracy and talking to the people that work there they could probably effect some meaningful change.
A lot of people think that social media activity is their significant contribution to a cause. Post or like or share something pertaining to social issue of the day and their little soul can now go feel great about the change they've made in the world!
Specifically, the mechanism by which customer support is communicating with customers on social networks provides a lot of value to the customers because companies cannot gaslight individual customers. This works a lot better than even if you had a lawyer on your side, willing to work for you w/o compensation because the company might just hire a better lawyer.
I've literally been in this situation before: I had intermittent connection problems and had to call ISP to look into the cabling. Once the technician finally came, he found that a squatter took over the entrance to the breaker room on the roof, so he could no longer get access to the switch the company installed there. Because he wasn't able to do anything w/o police intervening and breaking into squatter's illegal construction, he just left... I still had no Internet connection, so I decided to terminate my subscription early.
Well, the ISP wouldn't have it. I had to jump through a lot of hoops, including closing and opening a bank account just to prevent the ISP from charging me for service they did not provide. I did it on principle, even though it would've been cheaper to just pay them few months. Come the end of my contract period, I get a summons to a court because the ISP hired a lawyer to go over cases like mine and try to intimidate individual customers into settling the arguments by paying the ISP (of course, by that time they tried to scare me with a fine that was about ten times the money I'd owe them on the contract).
So, I had to search for lawyer organization which volunteered to provide customer protection, but due to them being an NGO, they had a requirement that they would only provide their services if I could show that my yearly income was below X, which, unfortunately, it wasn't, and so I had to pay a lawyer from my own money to deal with this case. In the end, the ISP backed off, but nobody compensated me even for the lawyer I had to hire. Needless to say that it's not possible to compensate the time spent on this.
This was before social networks were popular enough to do this:
----
I had a very similar situation, which was simply due to me moving into another apartment which didn't have a coaxial outlet, so, I couldn't continue my contract with the ISP. They decided to pull the same trick. It was a single post on their Facebook page describing the situation that got me a phone call from their customer support department and my contract was terminated. Without charge.
Going back to the OP, if people are voluntarily using social networks because they make it easier to catch up with friends and family, why should we "ditch the concept in general"? Should we go back to the days of communicating to each other via letters?
I think the concept in general has been proven to be terrible on pretty much every count, so yes, I advocate ditching the idea.
> Should we go back to the days of communicating to each other via letters?
Or email, or phone, etc. There is no lack of other communications channels.
That said, I'm not in favor of banning these services. I just think society in general, and people in particular, would be better off if they stopped using them.
I haven't used social media for several years, and my life is in no way poorer for it. I miss out on nothing.
Communicating with individuals is only a small fraction of what social network provides.
How are you going to communicate with a group of peers who all need to know everyone's responses to your messages... by mail? Do you realize how long this will take and how cumbersome it will be?
How would you make it possible for others, who weren't part of the conversation to come later and rediscover your entire conversation letter by letter?
Letters aren't a good replacement to social networks if you are thinking about a pre-digital age. Newspapers that publish paid advertisements are probably a better replacement... but they also don't quite fit because they lack the function of private messaging...
I don't think we have an equivalent to social networks in pre-digital world.
It would be nice if at a minimum we could demand a social network that caters to making meaningful connection points with friends/family/strangers rather than ad serving algos. I know... the people have spoken and they want free stuff and are willing to sell their data/soul for it. I just wish it wasn't so! If a company built a product that was primarily designed to make me love it and find it valuable enough to pay for it I would be all in. But if the rest of my friends/family aren't in... then its pretty meaningless. I'll just have to keep relying on more manual methods of social media like texting, calls etc.
> Should we go back to the days of communicating to each other via letters?
I'd argue so. People put more thought into letters, since producing and sending them involved expense of time and effort. Laziness was its own spam filter.
Although you can get along perfectly fine without having a social media account at all. You can still reach customer service, you can still interact with political figures, you can still do all of the things you want and need in your life.
> "Technically so are roads and mail and electricity and water!"
so... are you saying we should ditch roads and mail and electricity and water? Your response is one of the sillier non sequiturs I've seen in a while, and I browse Reddit.
Obviously the utilization of social networks is fundamental to social engagement in modern life. It's not silly whatsoever, it's a natural response when someone quips that a that a thing that's essentially needed but not absolutely required isn't worth complaining about.
That doesn't support the thesis that it's "fundamental to social engagement". I understand that it actually may be in some places, but I haven't seen a reason to think that's the most common case.
How is it obvious? I (and most of my friends) don't use social networks at all. They're not "absolutely required" for absolutely anything (unless your country is significantly different from mine). You'll only "miss out" on things that are only happening on social networks, but that's the point, right?
I literally said they were not "absolutely required" and I don't know why you'd go out of your way to misquote my 2 sentence statement.
My mom didn't have a telephone, she had other friends without telephones, but having a telephone when she was a kid was fundamental to building robust social relationships. The reduction of social bandwidth generally results in fewer opportunities for social advancement, and most people would like to experience social advancement of some type.
Social networks changed the world, and are now predominant in the world we live in. It's like when someone pollutes water. Our society and culture are water, and social networks are... pollutants. It's fine and normal and good to want to look at the superfund site that is our global culture and want to push social networks out of the very-toxic pollutant it happens to be, and into something we can all abide, even for those who only drink beer or use charcoal filters. Plus, you never know what the kids next door are doing with the water...
Is there really a "natural" progression of society? Especially in an age of computers and advanced communication, it is difficult to know what is natural anymore.
I didn’t mean natural in that sense. Smart-phone-social-media would be unnatural in the same sense that the wheel is unnatural. (In that it wasn’t present for most 99% of our evolution.)
Humans didn’t evolve with access to semiconductors, but the social dynamics in social networks have always been there. They’ve just been augmented by semiconductors.
I doubt anyone here would disagree with me that it’s better having more ways to communicate with relatives overseas. That’s all I’m really saying. These new methods of communication come with serious baggage, but they’re still inherently positive I think.
They bring way too much value for this. They’ve introduced a slew of “new” problems, and these problems are bad. The problems are still outweighed by the benefits. I enjoy the connection social media gives me to people outside of geographical area and outside the sphere of who I’m comfortable phone calling.
I hear arguments like this all the time, and it bothers me that such arguments miss that there is something that people like about social media - connecting with people. It clearly is worth it and that's been around since the beginning of the internet in some shape or form be it IRC, forums, usenet, whatever. There's innovations that constitute as modern "social media," like the feed or social search, but the core notion of using the internet to try to connect people is going to be a demand as long as there are people and there is an internet. The best we can possibly do is identify maladaptive innovations and try to provide some alternative, until one is dominant enough that "social media" is as dated as "forums."
There is something people like about cocaine as well, but it doesn't mean it should be prevalent in society. You know what a good way to connect with people is? To go out and talk to them. Join a club, chat with a coworker about something more than the morning standup, text or call a friend you haven't talked to in a while. I would be incredibly surprised if the majority of users see dramatic upticks in connectedness while engaging with FB/IG/Twitter.
I love the concept of forums and little communities here and there, hell even the little post count and quirky username colors based on seniority meant something to me in those days. But as soon as those things are turned into mega money making machines, the incentives are no longer with the users.
The ads aren't the problem of social networks. They are the problem of the Web.
Usenets were the first social networks, but their monetization scheme didn't allow for mega international companies to exist: they were paid for to ISPs and ISPs only pay other ISPs for traffic, they don't pay for individual services.
Email used to be the same way... sigh.
Web became the platform that enabled for advertisement to be mixed into the product. I cannot tell if Hotmail or similar saw the promise of ads on the Web, or did they "accidentally" succeed -- whichever the case, it's the Web that took over other Internet applications because it made it possible to monetize it in a different and a more scalable way.
Ideally, we'd have an Internet application for social networks, instead of it being a Web application. So that we pay our ISP for usage. We just really don't have that kind of application (yet?) And, I'm not sure ISPs are thrilled about this (will the effort be worth the revenues?). Definitely, companies like Meta aren't interested in that, as that would undermine their core business.
But then, who knows... ad spam seems to be able to find its way no matter the technology. You can think about SMS as being similar to an Internet application, and you do get spam ads over SMS too.
Another problem of social network as Internet application would be the search. Search works better when it's governed by a single entity which cares about indexing the data in various ways. If it's distributed, that'd be very challenging to implement, especially because it wouldn't be clear who's responsible for storing the indices and who pays whom in the end.
Another challenge would be the connection between user's identity and their ISP... well, there are a lot of things that would need work, but I don't think it's not possible overall. In legislative terms, we'd need to recognize social networks as a service similar to postal service, and regulate it accordingly...
This ignores the algorithmic ordering of social media feeds, which was unique to Facebook and then widely copied by all the other ad-ridden socials. There was no "connecting people" reason for them to do it, it was done because it made it easier to throw ads in to readers' feeds and make sure they'd be noticed.
There's nothing exclusive about social media in this regard. Any Web application that could do that, tried to do that. Web search engines? -- didn't they try to tailor search results to your profile (or paid advertisement)? Retailers? -- didn't they try to suggest related goods based on your profile (or paid advertisement)?
Everyone on the Web who used ads wanted to know your profile and wanted to manipulate the contents they provided to you based on it (and the wishes of those who pay for the ads).
Again, the problem is not the social media. The problem is the Web.
>There was no "connecting people" reason for them to do it
Not all posts are equally important. If someone only has time to read 5 posts then they should see important life updates from their friends and what they are interested in and not just show you 5 posts from them same person about how much they enjoyed their dinner and how good it looked.
Absolutely nothing about FB is optimized for the "I only have 5 minutes" user. The whole point is to be constantly scrolling because FB intentionally doesn't tell you what you may have missed.
I disagree and would say that it optimizes for both. I have no issue in seeing the most important pests at the top of my feed. Of course I can keep scrolling and find interesting posts, but were those posts actually important for me to see? Not really.
I think an argument can be made that social networks have been a net negative on society, despite (or because of) being very good ad delivery mechanisms and making some people and some companies very rich.
Facebook is not building things 'because they want to'...that is not a business reason. They are buildings things because there are billion and billions to extract.
I think you could literally take Twitter's code base from 10 years ago and set up a server and people would flock to it. Building something new is really not what is required, the bigger question is what people, what community.
This puts the cart before the horse. Otherwise, you seem to be assuming that all people on social networks were somehow tricked into being there.
They're there for a reason. It just so happens that this current implementation of entertainment is particularly popular. Is that because they lack other options or because this is actually prime entertainment? Or is it because it's essentially free and mildly fulfilling and socially useful for people?
Either way I doubt a "solution" is to essentially "make it illegal."
Making it illegal would be silly, society would need to come to the conclusion on its own, which is why social media will probably not ever go away.
The trap is exactly what you just said: "it's essentially free". Which of course it is not. Time is one's most valuable resource, I guess it is up to you what you value it. Mental well being has value. Privacy has value. I really don't know that many people that walk away from FB or IG or Twitter and say "that was fulfilling". Maybe I am really off base there.
young people will always want a social network that connects them to their peers before they realize the damaging effects of it. Even if warned, guaranteed they won't care at first
Connecting people with their peers is most certainly not damaging-- any more than socializing in general.
Facebook started off GREAT! I singed up almost as soon as it was available to the general public (remember it was just open to university students at first).
At that time my timeline was basically text only and the content came from only my friends. It was like a fun online party -- not unlike online chat systems from the old days.
Then mysteriously all the people I enjoyed interacting with, disappeared from my timeline. Then I started getting content vaguely unrelated to my friends. Then meme photos I didn't want, ads and now basically just videos I hate and am bored of.
So the original concept is fine. It's just where we ended up that is mind numbing and alienating.
It certainly is quite damaging because that connection isn't an accurate representation of a real-world connection. When you see someone in the real world you see them sneeze, you see them cry, you see their successes and their failures. When you are 'friends' with someone on social media you see a carefully curated window into a reality that doesn't exist. This gives young people unrealistic expectations for themselves and others that I would certainly call damaging. It takes all the healthy parts of human interaction, processes them , and spits out a refined version coated in advertisements.
It's not new (we've been doing that to young people since media was invented) but the level of pervasiveness is.
I'm glad early fb was a good experience for you, but studies have found that when fb was just opening to universities, lower grades and higher demand for mental health services would follow.
So I just spent 20 minutes of my life going down this rabbit hole, including the google doc.
Full disclosure: one of my research areas in university was adolescents, and working exactly with these types of studies.
Anyways, the main theme which keeps coming back in this material is that the actual change begain in the EARLY 2010s, which is exactly what I'm saying. My assumption is that basically as social media started to focus more on visual content (photos and videos), people started getting weird feedback about how awesome everyone ELSE was, but you were not. Etc.
Keep in mind that teens are notoriously hard to study, and alot of this material is self reported. Many teens are basically always depressed and suicidal, and or become so for some small reasons such as the results of a report card or other such factor. This is why they are a higher risk group for this sort of stuff than say the average adult. At the same time you can't really shelter them too much, because it's the experiences they gain in adolescence that allow them to build their life toolkit.
Also keep in mind this is just US teens. The rest of the world is -- well -- the rest of the world, so the data cannot really be extrapolated to more than this country.
I wouldn't call myself young and I need/want a social network as well. It's not because a few people on HN don't see the utility or the positive aspects that they need to be banned. Jeez.
an imessage group chat is the best social network there is. I have a handful each with a different circle of friends and topics. No ads, no algorithm, it works perfectly.
No he wasn't. Most of the people I have connected to via social networks do not appear in my phone contacts. And the social networks themselves do not have my phone number.
> And the social networks themselves do not have my phone number.
Yeah, they probably do…
Back in the before times people would keep up with their “Social Networks” by running into them at parties or whatever and “Update their Status”. Sometimes people would even “PM” each other over dinner and drinks outside of these “Group Chats”.
Hard to believe, I know, but somehow the human race managed to keep going.
If so then they got it from some one else outside the network because it never appears in my conversations and I use the networks exclusively via a web browser.
Phone numbers became a “bigger deal” when they started being abused.
People just started using instagram as a first means of contact because it felt less personal. It allowed for more “escape hatches” if it turns out that you don’t like the person so much.
If phone numbers allowed for varying levels of trust like instagram, it would work as a social network today like it once did in the past
I think facebook realizes that their uptake among younger audiences is way down and their userbase is aging. They've buttressed themselves so far via instagram, but I imagine they are maybe seeing a bit of the same trend. A generation seems to, more or less, engage with some social network and it becomes pretty sticky for them. So maybe this is just their 'next wave' play.
This isn't at all true. If it were, WeWork and Uber and Doordash would all be profitable and wouldn't need eye-watering levels of subsidies. Companies build whatever the purse strings holder is comfortable with them building.
AFAIK uber/doordash are profitable on a per unit basis in most developed markets, it's just a combination of marketing spend in new markets and extravagant developer salaries that make them lose money.
I get they both are "addictive" given the broad sense of the term. Yes, your brain gets a little reward with each refresh. But I don't think it's fair to compare the addictive nature of social media to heroin. (Let alone their impact on people's lives. But even putting that aside.)
Do you really think social media and heroin should be regulated at all similarly?
Yeah social media is more like alcohol. Feels good in the moment, leaves a hangover if you stay away for any meaningful amount of time, is completely legal and generates a lot of profits and tax revenue. We all know it's bad for us and society at large, yet most of us can't stop using it. Can lubricate social relations but also potentiates abuse.
"Is the Twitter replacement we've been waiting for?"
...by Meta. No. No sir, it is not.
ActivityPub (Mastodon variety) has been a breath of fresh air for me. That's my Twitter replacement, though that's bad wording, because I don't want what Twitter has been for years.
They’re using the language of Discord/Slack were rather than one massive firehose where you curate who you follow you instead create “servers” for your friends, family, and different online communities.
Social networks got supermassive scale, it ended up being kinda awful unless you’re a public figure, and now all the “good” communities are on Reddit and Discord.
The same way gmail is but with ActivityPub instead of email. You sign in with your Google account, but you can send emails to an email server run by anyone.
For an example of decentralized servers + centralized authentication just look at video games. It's common to have a common identity, but be able to join a server hosted by anyone.
...are not decentralized. De-centralized infrastructure doesn't have single authorities able to act as gatekeepers to basic functionality (such as authentication) of the infrastructure, period.
It's just borrowing language that is hot right now, just like Discord telling you to "start your own server". Its not your own server and you do not own or control it.
> Building a decentralized network could also give Meta the opportunity for its new app to interoperate with other social products — a previously unheard-of gesture from a company known for building some of the most lucrative walled gardens in the industry’s history.
It’s called embrace, extend, extinguish for a reason. Is ActivityPub next? Though given Meta‘s recent lack of output I seriously doubt anything tangible will emerge out of this.
Also don't see how it's possible. EEE relies on permissive licensing, which lets you make a better, proprietary version that everybody switches to. Mastodon is AGPL. I suppose if Meta built a competitor that was so great it killed all the Mastodon servers... But thats not going to happen. Perhaps if they built an activityPub platform, then disabled federation when they got enough users? Doubt that would work either.
Seems like they're taking aim at Discord. The "decentralized" is probably just them latching onto a buzzword, I wouldn't count on that part making it into the resulting app.
We had that. It was called Usenet, and it was great. Google destroyed it, so Facebook is going to own the next one from the get-go? Doesn't sound good.
The Google graveyard is expansive but they most certainly didn't kill Usenet. Spam put Usenet on life support and ISPs dropping NNTP hosting pulled the plug.
By the late 90s spam killed actual conversations on Usenet. Eternal September had already raised the noise floor but spam just got out of control.
First ISPs dropped retention of even text-only hierarchies and then by the early 2000s dropped NNTP hosting entirely. So even people willing to wade through the spam had to go hunting for independent Usenet hosting.
Google didn't have anything to do with either of those things.
Even if you set up your client to have your groups clean, for any new arrival without guidance it was a horrible experience that required a lot of effort in bringing signal out of the noise.
What killed it was not having a distributed spam filtering as it became popular.
Usenet had spam filtering that was at least somewhat decentralized and that worked, though maybe not fully distributed. Some alt groups that didn't use it became unusable, and a few groups (sci.crypt) were intentionally destroyed by sporgery that was hard to stop by filters. There were also moderated groups that were hard to spam because of cryptographic signatures in the moderation approval. IIRC the signatures were 512 bit RSA, so maybe the keys can be cracked by now.
I think spam may have been less of an issue than the exploding size of binary newsgroups used for distributing warez and pr0n. That is a big reason ISP's gave up on it. Plus politicians like NY Gov Cuomo (not sure which Gov Cuomo, there were two that I know of) crusaded against it since OMG people could post anonymously.
I think Usenet with a few adjustments for velocity control is still a perfectly viable scheme. Every time I look at BBS software and think about how to do it better, the answer turns out to be Usenet.
If you read the novel "A Fire Upon The Deep" you might be amused to find that in it, Usenet still exists in an era of interstellar travel.
BBS networks (eg FidoNet, PC-Relay) were pretty great too.
FWIW, I believe, but cannot prove, that content moderation on Internet accessible "open" messaging systems (aka store & forward, decentralized) is not feasible.
Back in the day, I was hub for a small BBS network as well as moderated a forum on CompuServe. It was manageable, but a lot of work, esp for volunteers like me. These days, there's no way I could do a reasonable job.
I guess we'll see if I'm correct with the Mastodon experiment.
Curious that the article speaks plenty about Dorsey and ommits the fact that he has been very active on the Nostr platform.
Nostr is so far the only platform where I see a decentralized future. Mastodon does not provide portable identities that you can easily move to other servers, nor helps you to preserve your post from previous years.
Nostr solved both obstacles. One private key, zero email addresses needed. Move your texts to wherever you want, your identity is always verified (as long as you don't leak your private key) and fully private when you wish to remain so.
There are even built-in payments over there now. Basically everything that these larger groups have been talking about for years has been implemented with success in a few months independently from them.
You're conflating the limitations of Mastodon with the limitations of ActivityPub.
ActivityPub does not require "email addresses" for identity - that's a Mastodon idiosyncrasy. Identities in ActivityPub are URLs, so as long as you own your domain you can preserve your identity. That's not too different than your identity being a public key, with the benefit of human readability.
Mastodon doesn't offer you export/import of your activities because - again due to its idiosyncrasies - it does not care about past activities. What a user "sees" when they visit another account is only what that account has posted and has already been disseminated to the current account's Mastodon server. A sane approach to past activities would be to load them in response to the user interaction, instead of serving stale data from the db. For this case exporting activities from one service to another would allow for continuity.
This could probably be achieved even at protocol level, ActivityPub in its simplest form has enough vocabulary to allow loading a collection and adding its elements to a another one.
Some of these things exist in one form or another in other clients than Mastodon.
My previous text just mentions Mastodon limitations. Quite frankly couldn't really care less about ActivityPub or what it could do similar to Nostr (not even doing so today is already a bad thing in itself).
You yourself repeat the same castrating limitations "so long as you own your domain".
And that's the point. Most people:
+ don't own domains
+ don't want to own domains
+ don't need to own domains for the sake of identity
Nostr solved all that for free with private/public keys, a simple and battle-proven approach available since decades.
I'm not sure what I said to warrant the attitude from you but probably you can frame your arguments in a better way if you want to continue the discussion.
Basically that, or intentionally that. Kind of strange to mention Dorsey so often and some other project rather than the one where he is very active at the moment.
Why is this obsession with decentralized? I don’t see the benefits of it at all. A central server is better if they have a good moderation plan built in. This whole decentralized idea is to wash their hands off moderation and not take a blame for the hellhole it will become. From a pure functional point of view, how can a decentralized network provide any performance guarantee? What am I missing?
> How can a decentralized network provide any performance guarantee?
Why can't it just be like message boards like Xenforo and PHPbb? There are numerous sports-related boards created 10+ years ago on that old tech that are still handling thousands of users concurrently.
They're also well moderated too; that's something that becomes impossible if you are trying to manage hundreds of thousands of users.
One reason could be that decentralization reduces the liability on the company. They could save huge costs in letting users self-moderate and in not being responsible for illegal content.
^ This is the reason decentralized is better for everyone, including Meta. At a certain scale, content moderation goes from "hard" to "actually impossible."
With enough users, you will eventually have an Kurdish knitting group that meets in Turkey, who uses ethnic slurs ironically as a commentary on the government's treatment of immigrants, and you'll have to unravel the whole thing when someone complains. And the whole conversation is happening in Kurdish.
There is ideal and there is practical, most people will not just switch from twitter because it allows someone to by pass govt. It will be difficult if no content is there.
People will follow people—we've already seen that with the tech community and Mastodon. Within niches like the iOS dev community, virtually everyone has jumped from Twitter to Mastodon. If a good centralized alternative comes along, other communities may jump to that. But so far, there are no centralized contenders on the Twitter front.
A central authority that has total control over the conversation is considered by many to be a bad thing. Some think that a more democratic approach is preferable.
From a business perspective: absolution from liability. If it's decentralized then you can conveniently say you can't control it and you can't shut it down. All you can do is make money from it.
Decentralized implies smaller scale than centralized. Smaller scale means less burden on moderation. Smaller scale means less resources required. Smaller scale means a better community.
Call it what you want but yes, having strong empowered opinionated leadership has proven over and over to make products people prefer. This site is one of them.
It’s why freedom as in anarchy social media sites keep becoming far right nazi cesspools. Nobody who isn’t one of them wants to be around them.
I don’t have to worry all that much on here because when the insane green accounts come around replying to me with death threats they’re immediately deleted.
I absolutely disagree. Far-right forums also has a strong empowered leadership and it doesn't make them pleasant for you or I to go. It's also a product some people prefer, just not us.
Absence of hierarchy and ruler is also the norm in Usenet, and the community as put processes for everyone to manage lunatics without the need of a central authority.
"Freedom", or rather control, allows a community to choose for themselves. I don't agree with everything here, for example, and I don't have the power to change things, but that's alright because I can live with that. On the other hand I have my own Fediverse instance which means I can choose what I see and what I don't see. I still believe it's important.
If they go so far as to be partition tolerant then you get a lot of resiliency wins. i.e. if a solar flare knocks out anything attached to a long enough cable to induce circuit-damaging current, you can still gossip messages between colocated devices, some of which might be en route to someplace distant. Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol works in this mode for example.
In such a scenario, being able to piggyback messages on travellers you don't know (even if it takes a few days to propagate) could be lifesaving.
There's also something to be said re: censorship. If you can facilitate comms between otherwise firewalled groups of people by simply sneaking a SD card across the border from time to time, that's right in line with Meta's mission statement.
I doubt that Meta is going to make it this decentralized. Whatever they build is going to be decentralized™. But it would be pretty cool to see this design space explored.
I don't care what facebook is selling, I am not buying. Like every other big tech company they have been "building" all kinds of things, but haven't actually BUILT anything for years. The only two things they seem to be able to do at this point are stagnate or buy something someone else built.
IMO decentralization should never be a key selling "feature" that users should experience.
Similar to the philosophy behind the "right to bear arms" it's best as a self-imposed framework of checks and balance on the centralized system. The majority of people are better off in a centralized system.
Decentralization is the solution to the "who will guard the guards" problem of power & corruption. I don't currently have a desire to become a gun-prepper-hoarder but living in a country where this is a potential-possibility model of life gives a sense of freedom even as I overly-specialize in typing alphanumeric letters in a specific format and rely on the System to transmute this effort into tokens-of-worth to trade for things like toilet paper and housing rights.
Where Meta and other companies fail here is that they're trying to ride the hype w/o understanding that it's not a feature in of itself but a "meta"-feature to allow for better features.
Decentralization forces the leader to actually lead through leadership qualities. Not through owning 51% of voting rights, not through golden handcuffs, not through implicit H1B or EB1-C visa and greencard threats.
The failure mode for decentralization is when it enforces a meritocracy that no one single human is capable of living up to. The leaders are ceremonial or non-existent.
The desire for decentralized technologies is a frustration with how fallible and incompetent the current set of leaders feel and a desire to shorten or outright eliminate the complexity of the brittle chain of value transformations necessary to maintain a living.
It's a desire to ascend technology into a force of nature like the sun or the wind. This goes against every company's reason-for-being because nature is free while a company is a system that harvests nature and makes a profit by selling customers concentrated forms of it.
The whole benefit of centralized social media is that a large corporation has the resources to maintain it and the control that gives them. I don’t understand what’s in this for them. Maybe there will still be forced ads embedded into the instances.
My guess is it’ll be a lot easier to self host than other existing ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon. That’s the sales pitch at the price of an augmented proprietary service. And who knows what restrictions that’s entailed to.
There’s not a lot known, but who’s this for? Anyone conscious about this enough to even think about hosting expects freedom to use their own algorithms, moderation, etc.
I could only imagine it serving for commercial use. But no customer wants to install MyHomeDepotLife and upload a profile pic just to return a belt sander, I’m at loss for words.
I'm afraid of the same outcome too. However I think many admins in the Fediverse are aware and I expected most servers to block any instance from Meta.
Having an instance with a x million users is impossible to moderate. Instances have been blocked for not being able to moderate low thousands of users due to incompetent/unresponsive mods. Having a poorly moderated instance federate with yours is seen as a threat to your users and a proactive admin would not allow federation. Also most admins are aware of EEE tactics and we all know we cannot expect anything even remotely resembling ethical behavior from big corporate instances, they are a threat to the network by default.
I was just going to reply with EEE, but the situation you're describing presents a problem.
Suppose the network wants to be able to handle billions of users, but you want to keep each instance "small," i.e. thousands of users.
Then you'll have millions of instances.
Having each instance manually curate a list of others it federates with isn't going to work, but neither is instances not federating with the large majority of other instances.
You all need to figure out a way to get rid of this instance-level whitelisting or blacklisting, because that ends with either Meta or an intractable scalability problem.
Humans demand connectedness. There's something to be said for participating in seven independent communities with seven independent accounts, but when you see something from Community A and want to share it with Community B, a system that doesn't allow either account to make that connection is going to frustrate people, and get outcompeted at the system level by something that does.
If my memory serves me well, their Messenger was once XMPP-based (perhaps still is somewhere beneath) and you could use it without a fuss in any Jabber client. But then smartphones bloomed and the possibilities having a mobile app arrived.
So, I'd expect same scenario here: open at the beginning and walled later - once they capture enough people within. That is, if this thing ever manages to gain attention.
What's in it for them? ActivityPub is a lot like e-mail and that is now basically controlled by the large centralized players like Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft.
It was just a matter of time before one of those large actors got into ActivityPub. People who want to communicate with their instances will have to conform.
Yes many in the fediverse are very distrusting of the large corporations and will instantly block Meta. But many others just love the technology, the ability to communicate across platforms, and will try hard to be part of it.
using Instagram login is not decentralized, a text-based social network prototype doesn't sounds a lot of work, are they dusting off one project in past hackathon to make the news?
Meta do have some good cryptography work and talent in FB msg / Whatsapp, that may lead them to build a somewhat ATP/Bluesky competitor. With that said, they are really behind in this game.
My main concern is these new product from social OG will still be likely ad driven model, which made Facebook/Twitter what they are today.
What we need is a single distributed protocol for both file sharing, chat and "posts" tied to a verified human identity, with the concept of trust baked in. I want to search my social graph for content rather than google. If your social graph has people shitting out spam or bad content, you could just revoke the trust of the people in the graph that enabled that content.
Just curious. Has anyone experienced this claim: "Twitter’s revenue collapsing and the site itself going down for hours now on a regular basis,"
I don't spend much time on Twitter, but every time I've fired it up, I was met with a bunch of current tweets. Is it really going down "on a regular basis"?
I use Twitter as a read-only way to follow a handful of interesting people in tech, science, journalism etc. All of them, regardless of their political leaning, are still posting the same as ever. If anything I see more activity than before.
It does seem like there is a slight trend with some of the Twitter-exodus leading to users going to specific Mastodon communities, which seem closer to subreddits than Twitter. Takes me back to my early internet days of growing up on phpbb forums.
But then of course you have the flip side of companies trying to copy the Tiktok model, one feed with the algo ruling all. I think I prefer the former though!
Since an increasing amount of people now has experienced what social media can be like without ads and algorithm-driven feeds in the Fediverse, monetizing these social networks this way will be increasingly difficult.
The ethos that has formed among people communicating on top of the open and free ActivityPub protocol is a strong stance against everything that has made Meta so much money. Any company wanting to introduce ads or user tracking/profiling into the Fediverse would most likely be blocked by a large majority of existing communities.
For what it's worth, Urbit is this sort of thing. At least right now, and in a de facto way, for it has untapped functionality that might soon enable a wide variety of additional use cases. The barriers to entry are now pretty low, as anybody can sign up via tlon.network
Yep, Urbit is incredible. It does require some technical know-how, and has a sign-up fee (unless you can get a planet for free from someone). I think that has really maintained quality of discussion. It has also come a long way in the last 3 years. I was given a free planet in early 2020.
It's so annoying reading --comments-- that use "Luddite" in the purely pejorative usage when this is a forum of people who stroke their egos with how much smarter they are than redditors. The concern was that the looms would be used by owners of capital to pay their workers less and hoard more wealth, and they were right.
Social networks and "apps" to the great unwashed masses are akin to giving a shiny new rock to a chimp. No think just use look nice better way tell people more bout me.
This sounds like they want to take the spot of Twitter and have no images or video. At the same time an opportunity to harvest data from other connected social media platforms.
Work for them? Quit.
Considering it? Don't.
Using them? Don't.
Few companies members of this site convince themselves it's OK to work for, have done and continue to do more harm to our society, psyches, and body politic.
It's remarkable to me that Meta is still pushing Reels so hard despite the fact that most of the popular ones are literally advertising their competitor. The TikTok logo splattered all over Facebook and Instagram is a branding disaster.
Meta tolerates them because content is reproduced verbatim and because they view Tiktok as Musical.ly. Thus they probably steal revenue to Instagram but generates it nonetheless by allowing Meta users to consume that same (mostly dull) content on Meta apps.
Decentralized doesn't capture what you want it to mean anyways. When crypto people say decentralized, they don't mean AWS edge locations or The Federal Reserve Central Bank which are both decentralized. How about we start saying exactly what we mean?
"Non-excludable" captures the important aspect. It doesn't matter if your network is decentralized if it can't maintain this feature. Bitcoin being non-excludable implies that it is secure in terms of consensus control - even if a powerful agent is out to exclude you from the network, they would fail. That is the core property and it leaves no room to hide behind as a buzzword; it means exactly what it means.
Pier to pier is what we always called it, or shortly, P2P. It's how the internet was designed. Now, all piers are equal, but some piers are more equal than others.
On a side note, the Napster model was almost perfect, its downfall was centralized indexing. I wonder if a blockchain could be used for distributed indexing using the same P2P communication model of Napster.
