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Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

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Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#331

Post by danaris »

leesalminen wrote: post #307
323 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can implement search on top of crypto hashes. This is how decentralized P2P file networks like Kad worked. The discovery doesn't need to be at protocol level. You can have some servers following large number of accounts, analyze the feed, create a "trending" list and publish that under their own account that you follow. Then you can have second level "trending" servers which aggregate over first level ones if you…

It makes sense to me to take content discovery out of the protocol. This allows different apps on the same network to create different mechanisms for discovery. Some may want a pure chronological view of posts from people the follow with no algorithm, some may want pure algos a la TikTok. It seems like the nostr protocol allows for all of this. Users can decide their experience by downloading different client apps.

If you take content discovery out of the protocol, I would say it then behooves you to put at least an example of content discovery into the reference implementation.

There's a big difference between creating a protocol that's intended for fully-content-agnostic communication over the Internet (eg, HTTP) and creating a protocol that's specifically intended to be used to build a social network. The latter type needs various features that enable the type of behavior we know people on social networks desire from them. It does not, as you say, necessarily need to encode strong opinions about how content discovery should be done into the protocol at a fundamental level, but it at least needs to acknowledge that that is a thing that will be necessary for any social network to succeed.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#333

Post by guerrilla »

matwood wrote: post #327
guerrilla wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk comically overpaid for Twitter and can do anything he wants with it. No, he can't violate anti-trust (or any other) laws.

Obviously he can’t violate the laws, but as owner of a private company he has a very wide berth with what he can do. Not linking to a competitor is not violating anti-trust here.

> Not linking to a competitor is not violating anti-trust here.

Of course it is and regulators will come down that way as it's even more blatant anti-competitive behavior than many other cases in the past.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#334

Post by danaris »

drexlspivey wrote: post #235
yardie wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that sucks. But commercially businesses fail all the time. Sometimes you get a heads up and can plan accordingly. And other times it’s like FTX and the site is down the next day, after a major scandal. The only thing you can do is own your data, running on servers you own, at a domain you own. The internet owes you nothing.

> The only thing you can do is own your data, running on servers you own, at a domain you own. No, that’s a failure of the specific protocol. Your identity could simply be a public key. This way it’s: 1) Tamperproof 2) Not dependant on any specific server

If your identity is "simply" a public key, then...how does anyone actually refer to you? By a handle? That's not part of a public key. An avatar? I guess you could generate one à la Gravatar from a public key, but those aren't going to be very memorable.

A public key is a way to securely and uniquely say "this is me". It says nothing about who you are, anything about you, what you like or do, your links to other people, or anything like that.

All that information has to be stored somewhere.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#335

Post by kornhole »

hk__2 wrote: post #222
323 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic Jack linked to nostr which tries to solve some of these problems: https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768 > The problem with Mastodon and similar programs: - User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties; - Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Se…

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr > How do I find people to follow? > > First, you must know them and get their public key somehow And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follo…

You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. There are many discovery options but they are all pull rather than pushed into your feed. They are under development. Feditrends.com fedi.directory trunk...

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#336

Post by gr__or »

hk__2 wrote: post #222
323 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic Jack linked to nostr which tries to solve some of these problems: https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768 > The problem with Mastodon and similar programs: - User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties; - Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Se…

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr > How do I find people to follow? > > First, you must know them and get their public key somehow And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follo…

You can follow hashtags on Mastodon, it's been added ~3 weeks ago:

https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-follow-a-hashtag-on-mastodon/

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#337

Post by Dma54rhs »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #324
Dma54rhs wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no one buys into the transwomem are women over here. On social issues euros are more conservative, more ethnocentral and more racist. If you're an immigrant you can become an American but you will never become a German, just doesn't work like that.

Where in Europe do you live? I was born and raised (and still live) in the Netherlands, and our experiences are clearly very different. Of course, there exist racists in any country; I don't deny that. However, racism certainly isn't generally accepted here. This is supported by the fact that the alt-right occupies less than 20% of seats in Parliament (10% in Germany).

A lot of the interactions what immigrants like me in western europe have to go through are considered racist in america, that was my point. Ask anyone who has been an immigrant in EU and US. America is far more welcoming.

Also in Spain where I live is welcoming to lgbt in general, the feminists are all what Americans would consider terf and it's mainstream, actually in power right now - women are women, no prostitution, no to surrogacy, no to porn production.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#338

Post by rchaud »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #286
beowulfey wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a little younger than the days of decentralized social media, but I caught the tail end of it. To me, Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media. I think a lot of people are so used to centralized platforms that it seems crazy to have it be decentralized again. I suspect as Mastodon grows, there will be more servers that become popular and will likely host the bulk of people, in much the same way th…

> Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media And it’s waiting for its AOL and Gmail.

which is why email is a bad analogy.

email adoption was fast because it was a gamechanger compared to faxes and telegraphs. ISPs offered inboxes, as did universities and offices, years before Hotmail arrived.

Additionally, people got email because they wanted to communicate with friends. People get on social media mostly to escape boredom, not intentionally communicate with stranngers.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#339

Post by vidarh »

pxoe wrote: post #329
codeflo wrote: post #39

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates…

lack of algorithmic feed (and the whole anti-algo slant) and lack of openly viewable likes on people's profiles are actually gonna backfire. mastodon is gonna get lonely and boring, because it's kinda hard to do content discovery, particularly the kind where you get recommendations based on people you follow or interested in, so that those recs would be in closer proximity to you, rather than just getting random post…

When you follow someone, you can mute just boosts from them if you like.

Other than that, all of these things are things people can build using the API. I agree they're needed, and I think enough others do that things will get built.

I certainly want to build my own algorithmic feed, because reverse chronology is already a nuisance to me.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#340

Post by danaris »

guerrilla wrote: post #296
matwood wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk comically overpaid for Twitter and can do anything he wants with it. My (and I think most peoples) problem is the hypocrisy displayed by Musk and his sycophants. I would respect Musk a bit if he dropped the free speech charade and simply said it's his playground and he'll do whatever he wants. I don't think YouTube has ever claimed to be a public town square or a desire for free speech absolutism.

> Musk comically overpaid for Twitter and can do anything he wants with it. No, he can't violate anti-trust (or any other) laws.

I mean, that's the thing: He can. He just shouldn't. And he doesn't have enough people (or, most likely, anyone that he'll actually listen to) telling him what he shouldn't do.
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