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Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

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Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#341

Post by strypey »

roadbeats wrote: post #115
codingdave wrote: post #3

It isn't an alternative to Facebook unless my grandma can use it, and she couldn't set this up for herself. The idea that centralized storage is the problem masks the actual concern. There is nothing inherently wrong with centrally stored data. There is a problem is when it is locked down by a 3rd party, and/or you don't control how it is used.

Why do we even want to be in a creepy digital relationship with our grandma? I used to think like you, then one day I realized that the real life is outside, I began calling my aunties, visiting them, and also created a Whatsapp group so the big family can have fun & share updates.

You do realize Whatsapp is owned by FB, right? so it's a "creepy digital relationship with our grandma" in exactly the same way messaging Grandma on FB is. The key issue here is not whether we use digital comms channels (or telephones, or carrier pidgeons), but whether those comms channels lead us towards getting together in person with our families and friends, or whether they lead us towards spending more ticking clicking around the comms channels. Check out Joe Edelman's videos on Vimeo about human-centred design for a more detailed discussion of this and related issues.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#342

Post by strypey »

ThurmaUman wrote: post #82
guelo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet billions of people use email. Goes to show the grandma argument is not very useful.

Most of them using an interface like gmail, which unsurprisingly looks a lot like (facebook) messaging.

Sure, thinking about user experience and designing user-friendly UI is important. But multi-million dollar UI and the ability to scale without losing performance (due to deep pockets) are the only reasons to use FB, goOgle or any of The Stacks. Once more UX people and graphic designers start working on decentralized, free code apps, and organic growth via community-hosting (userOps) allows them to scale as well as corporate server farms, where does that leave The Stacks?

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#343

Post by strypey »

nasredin wrote: post #271
mr_sturd wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can always hope. But, we all know where "this is the year of..." gets us in the software industry.

Some day The Year of The Linux Desktop is gonna prove all the skeptics and doubters wrong.

The Year of The Linux Desktop is certainly coming sooner than the Year of the Windows Mobile ;P

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#344

Post by tzakrajs »

notemaker wrote: post #327
tzakrajs wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I chip away at that final assertion even more? If the data is easily discovered through crawling the network, and nodes on the network are less resilient than Facebook's sprawling infrastructure, you've potentially given a single attacker control over reading and denying access* to data. There will need to be protocol to mitigate attacks on the network by sharing information between nodes. *if they can determine…

How would the attacker be able to deny access to data?

DDOS the limited nodes that are known to have the shards of data you care about

i.e. Iranians ddos shard nodes that contain dissident communications

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#345

Post by profalseidol »

no_u wrote: post #231
carapace wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software" by Richard Stallman https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Visible source proprietary code is not libre and not necessarily free. Potayto potahto.

https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/blob/master/LICENSE

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#346

Post by fwn »

strypey wrote: post #336
fwn wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just a problem of offering good filters. Every bubble other than the own is unpleasant. Social networks need to reproduce the filters we create in real life (social, territorial, etc.) to represent human interaction. Facebook is sometimes famously called out for creating those filters. ... although I often struggle to unfollow unpleasant (stupid/hateful/hivemind/low effort) content fast enough.

> That is just a problem of offering good filters. True, and this is a solved problem in the fediverse. Mastodon dev team have been particularly good at implementing filtering tools at both the user and instance level (like the email filters that block whole domains used only for spam or other abuse). We've had a couple of waves of folks banned from the birdsite turn up, get asked to set up their own instances, and a…

There is no universalizable qualitative difference between filters that create a bubble/echo chamber and filters that do not. The word echo chamber and bubble are just meant to transport a value judgement against their existence. Which is why people often talk about other people's echo chamber and their own legitimate anti-abuse filters.

If you hold a non mainstream position you would probably want to teach your feeds to stop bombarding you with the respective mainstream position. A hundred years ago you did that through selecting a fitting club or reading a specific newspaper over another. Today you adjust filters.

What's creating a "dangerous level of false consciousness" is IMO just ignorance and media illiteracy. If people think their media diet is also everyone's media diet, they just weren't properly prepared for sophisticated media.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#347

Post by strypey »

Kalium wrote: post #310
fabianhjr wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. ... For distributed systems there are more ways to exploit the APIs and gather data on users. However there is no global state, users only push-pull feeds of friends and friends of friends. (In part for privacy and in part for performance, you don't need to carry all the data for a social network to be useful) > 3. GDPR compliance about deleting data is almost impossible in a distributed system. However that doe…

> There are no instances, only peers. (Pubs are sort of easy to connect to peers and there is work being done on peer discovery to outdate most pubs; they could still be used to connect communits around topics, hobbies, etc as a way to reduce the distance between peers) Why do you draw this distinction between "instances" and "peers"? A conventional understanding of the word "instance" would suggest it means "a runni…

> Why do you draw this distinction between "instances" and "peers"

I understand why you ask this, but the word "instance" has come to mean the server running something like MediaGoblin or Mastodon (the server in a server/client model), while a "peer" is an end-user device running a P2P app like BitTorrent or ScuttleButt (that is both client and server). P2P networks have their cons, but the major pro for a network not backed by large wads of capital is that they scale as they add users. Server-to-server federated networks using OStatus, Diaspora protocol, Zot, or ActivityPub have to scale by convincing people with scarce sysadmin skills to set up more servers, and figure out how to sustain them (both organizationally and financially).

> My experience is that users really like [retweeting/sharing] features.

Sure, but that doesn't mean every piece of network software needs to have them. They are one of the key tools for abusing The Stacks; post something you want to trend (spam, fake news), get a botnet of zombie users to boost it. Given the way Scuttlebutt transports and stores posts, they would create a lot of extra overhead, and potential for abuse, for no major benefit (people can always cut'n'paste if they really want to reshare).

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#348

Post by strypey »

rock_hard wrote: post #314
gregknicholson wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for people to be engaged because their friends are interesting; rather than because the service is designed to grab attention.

But how the tool they use to do so is designed matters! If there is too much friction then people simply won't adopt it

Yes, UX matters, especially when you are a new platform trying to establish your initial user base. But nothing matters in social software as much as network effect; people want to be where their friends are (and/or where people they want to follow or be noticed by are). Like any social network, Scuttlebutt will grow from the edges, as people already using it onboard their friends and family members.

(I had more to say about this but I posted the longer version on Diaspora instead.)

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#349

Post by strypey »

rock_hard wrote: post #315
Bizarro wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you gonna prevent anarchy? Cats and dogs living together...oh my. Let me clue you in on something. In free societies there's risks and individuals make bad decisions, and we live with it. We don't need someone policing everything.

we certainly don't need to police everything...but there is a middle ground between that and no policing at all! And that will be hard to do in decentralized networks.

I agree there is a middle ground between policing everything and no guidelines or accountability at all. Every decentralized social networks that's pulled in a user base beyond the friends of the devs has had to deal with how to find consensus around guidelines, and how to deal with Bad Actors. Fortunately, in free code tech, everything we do revolves about rough consensus and running code.

So within a project like Mastodon, they define goals; eg a spam-free network). Then, they theorize mechanisms to implement those goals; eg give users the ability to mute/ block spammers, and give instances the ability to boot spammers, and mute/ block instances infested with spammers. Then they code those features, roll them out, and see if they achieve the goal. Rinse, repeat. Pretty much the same process a centralized open source site like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Minds, or Yours would use.

Things get a bit more complex when Mastodon wants to federate with instances of software other than Mastodon (eg GNU Social). Fortunately in tech, we have other names for consensus and guidelines about inter-operation between different programs implementing similar features; protocols and standards. For example, the W3C Social Web EG got a bunch of folks together from projects that want to federate, and standardized a set of protocols under the name ActivityPub. Because this standard is written by people with experience dealing with Bad Actors in federated networks of their own software, they can share this knowledge, and follow a similar set of steps to those laid out above.

In contrast, FB at al are the worst of both worlds. They have total power to police anything, and the only way to hold them accountable is to abandon your data and your contacts on their platform and opt-out (thus #deletefacebook). They accrue more power and wealth the more users they have spending time on the site (abusively or otherwise), so they do the absolute minimum to hold Bad Actor users accountable, just enough to other users getting driven off the site. See how centralization doesn't really help here?

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#350

Post by strypey »

Terr_ wrote: post #239
Bizarro wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How that should work in practice is still being worked out--in the halls of tech companies and legislatures all over the world. You finally got to the crux of your argument after contorting around a bad analogy. Only tech companies and legislatures should be figuring out what services we should have. Let me tell you something. That position is the complete opposite of what Hacker News is all about.

You know, I'm pretty sure when they said "legislatures" they were implying the imperfect-but-normal ongoing political process. The one which stretches across dozens of different countries and with some influence by the billions of non-legislator citizens. Instead you seem to be a hurry to travel down a road that sometimes ends with the word "Statist" getting thrown around as an epithet against heretical outsiders. >…

> Do you believe it is fundamentally wrong for a government -- even with significant public support -- to interfere with one anonymous man's Galtian quest to sell radium toothpaste by mail?

Government? Maybe. Private corporations exploiting the hell out of a natural monopoly? Hell no. Genuinely democratic government (which implies opt-in, or at least the ability to opt-out) sure. That's what standards bodies are for.

Unlike some here, I can see value in user protection laws like the GDPR, for the same reason I see the value in governments creating heavy disincentives for kidnapping or murder. Such laws can, if necessary, be enforced on groups running instances of federated social network software. We saw what happened when the US Congress tried to regulate a major centralized provider; a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTv0MZBCQCs

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