71–80 of 128 posts
Decentralized means complicated and no regular people will use it.
You can have decentralisation or you can have sub-second responses to whole-network search queries, but you cannot have both. Twitter has two killer features: the people who use it, and search functionality that allows you to get near-instant results. Mastodon (and I assume Bluesky) cannot compete on either.
Privately accessible content tends to be much smaller so local caching works. And if communication is not meant to be instant, email proves that a decentralized system works.
What gets a little more difficult is content that is widely available but behind login. Facebook has this but twitter and mastodon tend to not be this way.
In fact mastodon is a workable system for decentralized social networking, so I think the skepticism is unwarranted.
The only question in my mind is whether a popular social network can be effectively bootstrapped without a core capital incentive.
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Like no regular people use e-mail nor phones/SMS.
Indeed less and less people are using those. And when they do use email, they are using its centralized version, gmail.
(EDIT: No it's not) This is the scuttlebutt protocol to anyone wondering. First mentioned on HN many years ago. I'm very into this stuff. I was into scuttlebutt long before bluesky was announced even. But the problem I see is that with ActivityPub I already have a whole ecosystem of software and libraries, while with ssbc I have no idea where to even start. When ssbc was first announced I tried using it briefly but i…
1) you can move your identity from the gitgo. Yeah, sure, AP allegedly allows this, but your are at the mercy of the server owners to cooperate. Assuming, of course, the server even is still reachable. And even then, recent (last 5 months) there are numerous examples of transfers failing badly.
2) This protocol doesn't force you to trust that the server admins aren't reading your messages. This is not the case with AP.
3) The relay system, whereby to get notices from other communities, is wildly broken, and the two largest Mastodon servers don't even support them.
I'm as skeptical of Mr. Dorsey as anyone, and the community absolutely deserves the right to see deep into this protocol. That said, implying that Activity Pub meets or beats everything this new protocol offers is not correct.
I was hoping since identity is such a corner stone of this project that there would be a more fleshed out auth system (OIDC?).
Other than that it seems like a reasonable implementation, but I don’t like the addressing scheme.
They are using identifiers that look like emails: bluesky@bluesky.app
But they are not actually emails so they can collide with real emails.
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Spam is 100% legal in all jurisdictions, so your legal free speech plan sounds like a total hellscape.
No it certainly is not. Here's the Canadian jurisdiction against SPAM: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/E-1.6/index.html > An Act to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy by regulating certain activities that discourage reliance on electronic means of carrying out commercial activities, and to amend the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Act, the Competition…
I feel like he should have taken a long holiday. Not being rude or anything, but a new social network needs thorough thinking. For instance everywhere i read about the topic on casual forums, someone mentions myspace. Maybe it is time that such a network is built - fun customisations and neutral content.
My grandparents also talk about how wonderful the past was, but that doesn't mean a lick of it was true. Was MySpace better? In some ways yes, but that's because we were better as social media users, and such massive bot farms, and financial interests in corrupting said social media didn't exist.
If you turn on MySpace today it would immediately become foul shithole. The first thing some spammer would do is start creating profiles based on every identity they could find and the site would have to deal with that. Massive amounts of time would be used in getting rid of scams and spam on the sites. User content would not be neutral because peoples internet identities are no longer neutral, we've weaponized and politicized them. In order to maintain the neutrality you'd spend untold amounts of time banning content and polarizing a large amount of the user base against you turning them adversarial.
Social media is a garbage fire these days. Most of the time I try to avoid talking about it on HN in order to stay in this sites guidelines.
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Indeed less and less people are using those. And when they do use email, they are using its centralized version, gmail.
But they aren't using gmail because it is centralized. The centralization in your example is due to convenience. Unlike social networks where centralization is somewhat core to the system working.
I would also say that phones are a bad example because while the phone companies are decentralized, the call routing systems have written law behind them to ensure ATT and Verizon actually route calls to each other (and all other companies like CLEC/ILECs).
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Like no regular people use e-mail nor phones/SMS.
Indeed less and less people are using those. And when they do use email, they are using its centralized version, gmail.
Your endpoint might be popular and heavy used or you could be self hosting and be the only person using your endpoint. It's decentralized and works for the average person
This is not a new Twitter. This is a new phpBB or something. Absent centralization you don't get the "town square" factor. In marketing parlance, you don't get "reach". And you avoid controversial moderation tactics by making it not your problem. Dorsey just cut bait and declared moderation and profitability to be impossible while watching Google pull off both. Even Zuckerberg is looking like a genius next to this gu…
I guess you've been ignoring watching Google squirm for years about moderation, they left China because of this. They've been fined for years in the EU for violating laws around this and privacy and this is only expected to get worse and more expensive for them. Moreso Google has deleted plenty of individuals/entities from the Googlesphere for questionable reasons that's leading to increased resentment over the years. Google hangouts/+ epically failed.
Google hasn't pulled off anything in the social media market other than losing money