Lots of talk about federated services in this thread. Anyone have a link to a good YouTube video running through the fundamentals + any principles required to build the "hello world" version of a federated service?
Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
131–140 of 239 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
#132PMs: Email. Posts: Blog. [XML-RPC if you wanna email from your phone to your blog. Different post-type or tag for 'like' vs 'post' (heck, invent any 'like' 'like' you like).] Follow: RSS. It's all there and decentralised for years, just not in a polished package of a 140 character comment, and likely requires more than 15 seconds of thinking. Actually really straightforward. Only tricky thing would be SMS but that's.…
With RSS you have to follow explicitely. I like the non-linear composition of the suggested tweets.
Re: Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
#133Mastodon, GNU Social, and the Fediverse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse The two software systems are compatible (both comply with the OStatus standard) so you can interact with content on servers that use the system. Diaspora also exists, but it's arguably more like Facebook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(soc…
GNU Social is exactly how I imagined it to be.
Sadly, it seems to be dead.
Re: Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
#134Part of the genius of Twitter is the name and its brand. Twitter, tweet, tweeting, tweeted, etc. Even if Twitter had no goodwill, it's an excellent name for such a service. None of the options presented here have that. "Hey dude, did you see that mastodon post?" "I'll add you on GNU Social" "Fediverse is getting popular, wanna fediverse?" "Nmd'ed you!" "Totally Aaether that!" "Breaking News: The Prime Minister of Aus…
Speaking of GNU social, I have always thought that GNU was quite possibly the worst name to use for the project, simply because nobody knows how to pronounce it, and maybe if you do know how to pronounce it, someone else might pronounce it completely differently, so it you end up pronouncing it in two (or more!) ways until the person you're talking to knows what you're talking about. Is it 'new'? Or 'nyew'? I've also…
Visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU
Click on the listen link in the first paragraph and you'll understand how to pronounce it.
Re: Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
#135While somewhat offtopic, an important question is why would you want one ? IMHO the main issue of Twitter is not even the way how it's now a walled garden (and since recently, effectively outside of the Web). It's how the combination of a ~~140~~ 280† character limit, personal walls, hashtags, likes and an horribly hard to navigate comment system has resulted in a medium where constructive debate is almost impossible…
1. Twitter bans people based on their political beliefs
2. Twitter provides a platform for cancel culture
3. I don’t like Jack Dorsey
Re: Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's like me telling you that you can't be talking to 'tgsovlerkhgsel, or I'll start petitioning everyone you know to stop talking to you, giving each of them the same ultimatum to ensure maximum compliance. The toxic part here isn't someone banning/defederating you, but someone who didn't ban/defederate you getting threatened by others that they'd better do that or else everyone else will defederate them.
The point is that this isn't a characteristic of the platform but of the users. The users don't want to be federated with someone who is federated with someone they don't like. How do you fix that, just force everyone to federate with each other? How do you stop people from forking their own clients to remove the forced federation?
Right, it's users, not tech (it's always people, not tech - Twitter is a problem not because it's centralized, but because of decisions made by people at the helm).
What both 'tgsovlerkhgsel and I are trying to say is that there is this kind of realpolitik going on at Mastodon, of which you should be aware before considering to join. You start going against the "party line", you risk getting defederated or, if you're an user on someone else's instance, having your instance's admins pressured to ban you on the threat of the whole instance getting defederated by others. And it's a significant threat, because as much as Mastodon is distributed, people still want to stay connected to the major instances.
I myself moved from Twitter to Mastodon a while ago and very much enjoy it, but I also try to not say anything there that would attract interest of the defederationists.
Re: Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> tweet with i "Hello World!" t, native vim keymap support vim is not GNU, emacs is. That means it would actually be Hello World! , and the documentation would have a lengthy section on what the "Meta" key is and why not just call it "Alt".
Neither actually :-) EMACS dates back to 1976 (David Moon & Guy Steele); vi also dates back to 1976 (Bill Joy). GNU Project dates back "only" to 1983, with GNU Emacs soon after: 1984.
It's maintained by GNU. GNU Emacs is the modern Emacs.
Re: Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
#138There are federated networks which don't allow for centralised access restrictions as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, et al, are evidencing today. But projects such as Mastodon put control in the hands of site or node administrators, and at least on Mastodon, there's an exceedingly healthy culture of blocking sites which themselves advocate oppressive practices. So those looking for an uncensored microphone may be somewha…
> there's an exceedingly healthy culture of blocking sites which themselves advocate oppressive practices
That's an issue, not a feature.
Re: Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
#139Most of the decentralized Twitter alternative systems required AGPL to join. Are there any MIT licensed social protocols?