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Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

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Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#481

Post by inamberclad »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #300
ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please. What Reddit and similar sites bring to the table is a single pool of authenticated users. Once a user is logged into Reddit, posting on different subreddits is frictionless. Even with oauth and the like, it is hard to replicate that with a distributed set of sites.

Maybe a federation of blogs is needed? Everyone has their user pool so that a user on `blog-a` named `user` can post on `blog-b.com` as `user@blog-a.com`.

Users would be free to explore a huge network while admins and creators would truly own their own little domain.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#482

Post by fortran77 »

What I want is a decentralized Reddit with the same type of interaction that we have with our beloved Google search engine.

So you are right, if Reddit is so central to our lives, why do we have such a hard time taking it down? Is it because we are so used to having it there that it's just not something we can imagine not having?

No. I know a lot of us want to take it down. But the good thing about reddit is that it can be taken down. That's why it is one of the most interesting internet communities. It doesn't really have a "community" in the true sense of the word. But in reality, it has communities. And it doesn't matter how big or small those communities are; that's how the site functions. Reddit can be taken down and Reddit will be back with a new identity and a new identity will be created. We don't have to worry about it.

So we have a choice.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#483

Post by unityByFreedom »

rolleiflex wrote: post #480
unityByFreedom wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you install it on linux? I'm getting the error, error: cannot find signatures with metadata for snap "Aether-2.0.0-dev.14+1909192130.00bf3c3.snap" SO [1] suggests this can be forced with `sudo snap install --dangerous` but that doesn't sound right. [1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/822765/snap-install-failure-...

Yep, the flag is right. Unfortunately the way snap is designed is that they really don’t want you to distribute binaries outside their special snap store, to the point that if you try, they try to scare your users off by naming ‘install outside snap store’ flag as ‘--dangerous’.

Interesting, okay. I like your stance on moderation transparency. At this point I'm not sure how many people recognize how important that is.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#484

Post by pckhoi »

ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

You are misguided in thinking that Reddit is a good source of information. Reddit is heavily biased, very left leaning on any political matters. Most subreddits are echo chambers where anyone who voice a different viewpoint could be down-voted to smithereens. The toxicity there is also too high, some are so eager to use insult to drown out any argument.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#485

Post by unityByFreedom »

weavie wrote: post #306
ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

What about Aether : https://getaether.net/ ?

I just tried this. It's got some cool concepts (moderation transparency, commitment to privacy) but I'm not sure it will become as popular as HN/reddit because it isn't a website. You won't stumble across it in a google search. It's been around for 5 years and the forums don't have much activity.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#486

Post by tprice7 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #475
tprice7 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The question is whether or not you can determine the interconnectedness.” I’m not sure what you mean by this. The algorithm I'm describing doesn't require any data beyond what is already used by PageRank. I have a feeling that you think the electrical potential must be defined by some ad-hoc method before applying an electrical algorithm, and this requires fancy techniques like cluster analysis and the like? This is…

Thanks. I need to think about this. The source and sink are arbitrary? Or do they need to correspond to some actual reality?

Hacker News starts to severely rate-limit replies in deeply nested threads so if you want to continue discussing this you can email me (email in profile).

In regards to the question, the latter. The source corresponds roughly to the E vector of the pagerank whitepaper. It's a set of websites that's axiomatically good. The pagerank paper suggested the Netscape home page and John McCarthy's homepage as examples, or alternatively making every website a source, although the last option is more prone to abuse. The sink is harder to find a good analogy for. I think a reasonable choice would be to add a new node to the graph representing the sink, and then connect every website via a directed resistor. Then websites could be ranked by how much current flows through the resistor to the sink.

Edit: By the way, upon thinking about this more, I've just realized that I'm not sure about the exact mechanism by which link farms boost pagerank. As far as I can tell there are two possibilities:

A. The original "stuck in a loop" explanation, by which you can illegitimately magnify legitimately earned rank.

B. With the every-page-as-source strategy, you can boost the rank of a website by creating a new website and linking to it, even if nothing links to the new website. Then the other extra links in the link farm just exist to avoid detection of this sort of thing. So you are illegitimately creating rank from scratch, rather than magnifying existing rank.

Admittedly the electrical circuit thing only addresses mechanism A. Mechanism B can be addressed by being more discriminating about which websites are in the source. That applies whether you use pagerank or the electrical thing.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#487

Post by erulabs »

rollcat wrote: post #89
erulabs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s essentially what a Mastadon instance is. If it’s hosted at home or on someone’s cloud account - the difference is only in connectivity speed. I’m extremely hopefully, perhaps naively, that a new internet isn’t going to be based on blockchain or owning data or any foundational change - it will be based on the ability for people to host their own server-side software again. The App Stores democratized client sid…

> What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center... one that encourages and assists with cloud native design and aims to reduce load rather than hope you architect incorrectly and happily charge for the waste. Sandstorm tried this, and they got very very far. I think it was ingenious, but the sysadmin in me was very skeptical abo…

KubeSail is the company, yes - and developer oriented only in the sense that it’s not “Enterprise” - the idea is to make cloud native accessible to everyone - to make hosting your own apps fun and easy and cheap again! We have a long way to go and haven’t launched anywhere yet, but you can join the mailing list or just signup now for a free cluster namespace :)

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#488

Post by moosey »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #452
ZainRiz wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. What Reddit brings to the table is: 1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it 2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the vario…

You missed the most important point: 3. Discussions Try discussing anything on a random website. Discussions, just like on HN, are usually better than the linked content.

Honestly, I have a strong interest in US, Chinese, European, and now Russian politics, and how they relate to the future of the humanity and all life on earth. It is clear that most real innovation happens much more quickly and decisively if centralized under a government that decides to spend a lot of money on research, so those are discussions and reading materials that I have to find on places like reddit. Ultimately, many of the decisions and things occurring today, while political, have deep personal philosophical roots. Discussions in particular spaces regarding that simply can't happen here due to the rules; rules that differ on different subreddits and for each community I agree with.

Reddit is the best place to find those, IMO.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#489

Post by rolleiflex »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #483
rolleiflex wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the flag is right. Unfortunately the way snap is designed is that they really don’t want you to distribute binaries outside their special snap store, to the point that if you try, they try to scare your users off by naming ‘install outside snap store’ flag as ‘--dangerous’.

Interesting, okay. I like your stance on moderation transparency. At this point I'm not sure how many people recognize how important that is.

Moderation transparency is the building block to what comes next: mod elections. That’s the one piece still in the works, after that is done, I’m going to consider it stable.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#490

Post by screenbeard »

4ntonius8lock wrote: post #460
Someone1234 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how the US Government defines it. If you want a US Visa you need to tell them your HK account.

What the US government really wants is all your public online accounts. They used the broad and not fully defined definition of the word to their advantage. What a social media site is, is something I think we are all collectively defining. It's too new to be really set in stone. Also, even though words have broad meanings, it doesn't make it right to use it that way, since social customs would make the person using…

So would you say that Reddit isn't a social network? I would have agreed at inception, but not anymore. I'd say the lines have blurred enough to look at any site where commenting is one of the primary functions as "social".
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