Fediverse • Hacker News Board

Re: Fediverse

#91

Post by deltarholamda » Tue, May 03, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

riffic wrote: post #80

JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace. Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will b…

> I've been pitching this idea for years and no one's ever given a serious critique of the idea.

It would dilute the Twitter brand and divide internal resources. That's the main critique I can think of. Would never happen while Twitter was a publicly traded corporation. Under private ownership, it very well might happen.

I think the Fediverse idea is great, but people are dumb. @somebody is about as far as most people can handle. @somebody@domain.with.dots is confusing, and nobody will understand. Imagine having to explain bang paths to Fred in accounting so he can send an electronic mail.

Never underestimate how obtuse the average computer user is. They can be taught, but it takes many, many years before it becomes common enough that people grok it without trouble.

(I like your idea, btw.)

Re: Fediverse

#92

Post by deltarholamda » Tue, May 03, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #81

taurusnoises wrote: post #22

I have tried to wrap my head around how this works as a total outsider noob, and I just can not get it! But, I want to. I get the email comparison (different platforms can all speak, so why not have social media be the same?). But, then the white sheets are just all php and python and all this stuff that doesn't make any sense (I know what they are, just not what to do with that info), and for better or worse doesn't…

ActivityPub is a generalization of Email. Email gives you a cloud-hosted inbox that others can put stuff in. ActivityPub gives you both an online inbox AND a "outbox" that YOU can put stuff in that others can check out. Check out this diagram: https://activitypub.rocks/static/images/ActivityPub-tutorial... The stuff here is called an "Activity" around "Objects". Follow request is a "Follow" activity with the "Actor"…

>ActivityPub gives you both an online inbox AND a "outbox" that YOU can put stuff in that others can check out.

It's djb's Internet Mail 2000!

Re: Fediverse

#93

Post by k101 » Tue, May 03, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

proactivesvcs wrote: post #71

k101 wrote: post #31

It seems to me that the main reason for unpopularity, in addition to the lack of advertising, is monetization. How can I recoup my production of content that can be expensive? It seems to me that a competent symbiosis of fediverse and cryptocurrency is the real web3.

The Fediverse is not for your target market. We hate Internet advertising: it serves to use and abuse us, and is a security risk to our devices. It exists in opposition of monetising people and what they do and say, because we're sick of being retreated like we're worth a ton of beans. We don't live to be a part of profit.

And how can fediverse survive, and how can it pay for servers? Who among the professionals will do this? If you leave this system only for enthusiasts, then you can leave everything as it is and improve only the code. And if you want to overthrow the monopoly without violence, then the authors will need monetization tools and not necessarily advertising . Linux would not have become so popular without redhat and other commercial companies. P. S I myself really like everything free and use only open source software, give donates periodically to the authors.

Re: Fediverse

#94

Post by moron4hire » Tue, May 03, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #58

moron4hire wrote: post #36

General purpose social media will be considered the greatest mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented discussion boards. When you have no common topic around which to organize, then people have to search each other's personalities for commonality. And in doing so, they stratify along political lines. This isn't enough, so then they micro-stratify into various, rabid subgroups within those politica…

This gives me the thought that the focus should be on federating communities (boards/subreddits/forums/newsgroups/whatever you want to call it), and user identities only as a secondary aspect. The instances would choose which boards they want to host, and the contents of the boards would be synchronized between instances. The contents of the boards would be controlled by the community (board owners/moderators). Insta…

I think we really need to get over the idea of trying to get our content perpetually propagated out to the population, or trying to not miss out on consuming every single bit of content in a category.

It's okay to live in a small community. Hell, it's okay to live in an enclave of a small community. There were whole sections of various topic boards I never visited, with active members there that I would not have recognized because they didn't visit the sections I frequented.

It's okay to miss out on things. It's okay to not know about the latest JavaScript framework because it was developed in a community of stamp enthusiasts instead of your community of train enthusiasts. It's okay that fashion in Milan takes time to propagate to NYC and then to the country. It's okay to not hear about every single humanitarian crisis in the world when we can't reasonably do anything about it and we have our own to handle here at home.

So much energy is put into pushing content, pushing pushing pushing. Boredom is okay! All this hyper optimization of content dissemination has started to feel like a system of control. Keep people preoccupied, overwhelmed with the enormity of the world. Then they won't question the coal plant in their back yard.

Re: Fediverse

#95

Post by riffic » Tue, May 03, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

deltarholamda wrote: post #91

riffic wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace. Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will b…

> I've been pitching this idea for years and no one's ever given a serious critique of the idea. It would dilute the Twitter brand and divide internal resources. That's the main critique I can think of. Would never happen while Twitter was a publicly traded corporation. Under private ownership, it very well might happen. I think the Fediverse idea is great, but people are dumb. @somebody is about as far as most peopl…

fair critique and absolutely reasonable considering why they've never done it. It just seems like a more ethical business model than selling ads and data licensing (https://octodon.social/@jalefkowit/108216691483123862).

Re: Fediverse

#96

Post by glenstein » Tue, May 03, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

I agree with your points on B and C, but the vast majority of people don't have to know or care about A.

Re: Fediverse

#97

Post by dotnet00 » Tue, May 03, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

riffic wrote: post #80

JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace. Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will b…

Don't hosted services defeat the point of federation in the first place? That's how we've ended up with email being as difficult as it is to self-host.

Same issue with Discord, it's a centralized service where you and your content are at the mercy of the owner of the service, which I think is one of the big things that federated alternatives (like Matrix) are meant to solve, so any single entity can't unilaterally revoke your participation in the entire network.

Re: Fediverse

#98

Post by zzo38computer » Tue, May 03, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

I think that the ActivityPub protocol is better than Twitter, Facebook, etc, but is still too many problematic and is more complicated than it should be. I can see many problems, one of which is that it seems to default to HTML and some services seem to require it, and that it probably requires Unicode too, and that auth services may also need a web browser to work, which is also no good.

There is NNTP, email, IRC, etc, that you can use, which I think can work better. (I invented "Unusenet" to avoid namespace collision, if needed; there are a few different ways to define names in Unusenet, one of which is reverse domain names)

An implementation should not need a web browser or something as complicated as it, and should be independent of the programming language to be used (you could use C, JavaScript, etc), with optional TLS.

Of course you will need to be able to block messages, or to not block them if that is what you wish, but that will be possible easily enough. ActivityPub does this too, but so does NNTP, email, IRC, etc; you can define your own filter criteria, and NNTP can have moderated or unmoderated newsgroups. Many clients can have scoring files, and a few support global scoring files (which the user can install or not at their choice, but unfortunately these do not seem to be portable across different implementations, as far as I can tell).

Mailing lists are still sometimes used, but NNTP would be better, I think.

Re: Fediverse

#99

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 03, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

[deleted]

Re: Fediverse

#100

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, May 03, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

dotnet00 wrote: post #97

riffic wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace. Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will b…

Don't hosted services defeat the point of federation in the first place? That's how we've ended up with email being as difficult as it is to self-host. Same issue with Discord, it's a centralized service where you and your content are at the mercy of the owner of the service, which I think is one of the big things that federated alternatives (like Matrix) are meant to solve, so any single entity can't unilaterally re…

I don't think so.

Being able to switch what provider hosts your social media without losing your network is valuable (and has pro-social effects) without needing to self-host.

> That's how we've ended up with email being as difficult as it is to self-host.

I'm not sure what you mean, what's the "that", what do you think led to the situation where email is hard to self-host?

Even if hard to self-host, email succeeds in avoiding vendor lock-in if you have your own domain. Which most people don't, because of cost and because _that_ can be hard to manage for a normal person. But if fediverse succeeds at giving a typical person the lack of vendor lock-in that email-with-your-own-custom-domain does, I'd consider that a success on the criteria of what federation is meant to achieve.