Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

platformer.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 361 posts

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

#341

Post by bardan »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #75
bardan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you initially "trust" all of your friends. If one friend blacklists a bad actor, all their friends automatically blacklist them as well. If it turns out the friend blacklisted an innocent person out of spite or something, word should eventually get around and people can manually revoke trust from that friend.

I myself block a ton of stuff, which isn't illegal not offensive, not ... but just boring for me. That list shouldn't spread to others. Also I don't want to have to think about personal vs. global block.

I'm talking about a big red button "spam/harmful" rather than a personal preference list.

To be a little clearer: you have your own private filters and a separate, distributed block list shared amongst your friends, which is for bad content. You use the big red button when you encounter spam or harmful content, and this bad content/user/node/etc is added to the shared block list.

You initially trust all of your friends to use this block list properly, but if you find one of your friends is misusing it you can revoke trust from them and ignore their contributions.

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

#342

Post by Dracophoenix »

drowsspa wrote: post #113
jonathanstrange wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're wrong and not the typical user. Personally, I would never use any social network without strong moderation and banning of toxic users, and I'm that many if not most people share this sentiment. Places without strong moderation turn into hellholes and are generally less interesting. Whether a network is decentralized or not is a completely different, purely technical question. I don't understand why two…

Case in point: we're discussing this on Hacker News, a very well moderated website. Libertarian tech bros love the idea of technical solutions for political problems. What they don't realize is the real service platforms offer is moderation.

> What they don't realize is the real service platforms offer is moderation.

I'd rephrase this as "the real service platforms offer is better signal-to-noise ratio in the information one seeks". Moderation is not in itself the selling point, but merely one lever or device operating in collusion with some methods to increase SNR and in contraposition to others.

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

#343

Post by jamilton »

suprjami wrote: post #337
tarotuser wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a significant worry. Embrace, extend, extinguish: is a standard playbook for monopolists and oligopolists everywhere in tech. 1. Make "cool corporate mastodon server" that all the cool kids play on. 2. Extend the masto code with proprietary extensions for better features, but DONT SHARE CODE 3. Convert people on other masto instances cause they don't have "cool feature". 4. Users flock to "cool masto…

People said the same thing when Tumblr added ActivityPub. The most likely situation is that the fediverse would spot this tactic and mass de-federate anyone who tried it, so that bad actor would be left making their own island and any investment in federation would be lost. It doesn't make business sense to try and EEE the fediverse.

Tumblr hasn't added ActivityPub support yet.

I think more likely is that few people would really migrate in the first place. What killer feature would do such a thing? People just make accounts where their friends and interests are. I guess Facebook might promote it heavily and network effects will get new people on it, but this wouldn't really affect other instances, I think.

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

#344

Post by rsolva »

usrbinbash wrote: post #17

> 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"?

It's just borrowing language that is hot right now, just like Discord telling you to "start your own server". Its not your own server and you do not own or control it.

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

#345

Post by chrisandchris »

rchaud wrote: post #145
yalogin wrote: post #133

Why is this obsession with decentralized? I don’t see the benefits of it at all. A central server is better if they have a good moderation plan built in. This whole decentralized idea is to wash their hands off moderation and not take a blame for the hellhole it will become. From a pure functional point of view, how can a decentralized network provide any performance guarantee? What am I missing?

> How can a decentralized network provide any performance guarantee? Why can't it just be like message boards like Xenforo and PHPbb? There are numerous sports-related boards created 10+ years ago on that old tech that are still handling thousands of users concurrently. They're also well moderated too; that's something that becomes impossible if you are trying to manage hundreds of thousands of users.

Yup, missing those days where sharing consistet of more than 160 characters, only pictures or videos, or then text sprinkled with useless GIFs.

Gotta go back to those 2k-years where the phpBB-era was in it's high.

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

#346

Post by taskforcegemini »

capableweb wrote: post #298
sangnoir wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* * What if it's going to be part of the Fediverse?

Then it's federated, so they're still using "decentralized" wrong, which would imply direct client client communication (decentralized), rather than client server client (federated) communication.

doesn't "federated" imply >serverserver< ?

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

#347

Post by thr717272 »

8note wrote: post #291
thr717272 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem: as far as I understand a number of high profile instances enforced a rule where they would block any instance that didn't block certain other instances. I'm all for blocking a good number of instances myself, but putting limits on others, that is a whole different thing.

That sounds like US secondary sanctions. A working system when your community is popular to deal with

It is understandable when it deals with Iran, a terrorist organization sitting on top of an oil field, terrorizing large parts of the Middle East (note that nowhere do I criticize the overthrowing of the old regime, I just criticize what they themselves is/became).

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

#348

Post by rsolva »

Since an increasing amount of people now has experienced what social media can be like without ads and algorithm-driven feeds in the Fediverse, monetizing these social networks this way will be increasingly difficult.

The ethos that has formed among people communicating on top of the open and free ActivityPub protocol is a strong stance against everything that has made Meta so much money. Any company wanting to introduce ads or user tracking/profiling into the Fediverse would most likely be blocked by a large majority of existing communities.

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

#349

Post by papito »

nonethewiser wrote: post #137
papito wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because over 10 million Americans believe that Tom Hanks violates, kills, and eats children - a widely held belief - does not mean that a private company can't tell those people to go suck a bug. A private company does moderation and it's the end of the world. Ron DeSantis bans books and he is just "anti-woke". The actual government.

I have never heard of this “widely held belief”.

There are many who are aware of QAnon. A portion of those are aware that it revolves around insane conspiracy theories, and only a fraction of those know the details of how deranged the conspiracy theories are.

Only a few journalists have ever ventured out to explore that world, as it's really not good for one's mental health.

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

#350

Post by capableweb »

taskforcegemini wrote: post #346
capableweb wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it's federated, so they're still using "decentralized" wrong, which would imply direct client client communication (decentralized), rather than client server client (federated) communication.

doesn't "federated" imply >server server< ?

Yeah, my comment was maybe too simplified.

More something like "N clients N servers N servers N clients".

Post reply on HN