Live data from Hacker News

Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

platformer.news

11–20 of 361 posts

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#11
"Is the Twitter replacement we've been waiting for?"

...by Meta. No. No sir, it is not.

ActivityPub (Mastodon variety) has been a breath of fresh air for me. That's my Twitter replacement, though that's bad wording, because I don't want what Twitter has been for years.

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#12
What's in it for them? ActivityPub is a lot like e-mail and that is now basically controlled by the large centralized players like Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft.

It was just a matter of time before one of those large actors got into ActivityPub. People who want to communicate with their instances will have to conform.

Yes many in the fediverse are very distrusting of the large corporations and will instantly block Meta. But many others just love the technology, the ability to communicate across platforms, and will try hard to be part of it.

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#16

What's in it for them? ActivityPub is a lot like e-mail and that is now basically controlled by the large centralized players like Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft. It was just a matter of time before one of those large actors got into ActivityPub. People who want to communicate with their instances will have to conform. Yes many in the fediverse are very distrusting of the large corporations and will instantly block Meta. Bu…

>What's in it for them?

Commoditize your complement.

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#18

> The app is codenamed P92 and will allow users to log in through their existing Instagram credentials So if it relies on the servers of one centralized entity for authentication, how exactly is this thing "decentralized"?

The same way gmail is but with ActivityPub instead of email. You sign in with your Google account, but you can send emails to an email server run by anyone.

For an example of decentralized servers + centralized authentication just look at video games. It's common to have a common identity, but be able to join a server hosted by anyone.

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#19

> decentralized, text-based social network We had that. It was called Usenet, and it was great. Google destroyed it, so Facebook is going to own the next one from the get-go? Doesn't sound good.

You have to really be rewriting history to blame google for the downfall of usenet.

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#20
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid of the same outcome too. However I think many admins in the Fediverse are aware and I expected most servers to block any instance from Meta.

Why should they be blocked?

Having an instance with a x million users is impossible to moderate. Instances have been blocked for not being able to moderate low thousands of users due to incompetent/unresponsive mods. Having a poorly moderated instance federate with yours is seen as a threat to your users and a proactive admin would not allow federation. Also most admins are aware of EEE tactics and we all know we cannot expect anything even remotely resembling ethical behavior from big corporate instances, they are a threat to the network by default.
Post reply on HN