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

Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

blog.paulbohm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 109 posts

Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

#41

Post by boyter »

bohm wrote: post #17
polygamous_bat wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine Twitter server admins can also read your private messages if they really wanted to since Twitter doesn't use E2E encryption. Am I unaware of something/Is there a reason to believe differently?

Yes, another reason to move away. Although Elon has also stated that he's tasked Twitter engineers with working on implementing E2E encrypted DMs.

I'm not sure how they actually go about doing that though. Unless of course you enter your key and decrypt client side, which I suspect the majority of users won't like.

There is nothing stopping this from being implemented in ActivityPub too, and in fact there are already pub/pri keys there to do this. However you still need to trust that the instance you are on and the one your are communicating with play by the rules.

Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

#42

Post by [deleted] »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #27
jacobreg wrote: post #6

There's a lot of consideration of if we could, and previous little of if we should. Unmoderated sites inevitably become breading grounds for harassment and worse, especially as more mainstream platforms get better at driving this content away. I would be terrified to live in a world where kiwifarms and its ilk cannot be shut down

Have you considered that maybe de-plaforming people on the fringe and forcing them into their own private silos actually ends up boosting their message? When you try to be the goody two-shoes and block anything and everything that could potentially be offensive to someone you just make controversial opinions more intriguing. At least I want to see what the big fuss was about and determine myself it such banishment wa…

[deleted]

Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

#43

Post by nextlevelwizard »

dewey wrote: post #36
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon needs to at very least change its terminology if it ever wants to be taken seriously. As funny as it is for people to be "tooting" out whatever happens to be in their head in that very moment no one wants to be known as a "tooter" who "toots" frequently.

This was already changed two years ago: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

>In this PR, the publish button still says "Toot!" but it's worth thinking about as well.

Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

#44

Post by dewey »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #43
dewey wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was already changed two years ago: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

>In this PR, the publish button still says "Toot!" but it's worth thinking about as well.

This is one of many PRs that removed the references to "toot" over the years.

Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

#45

Post by omeid2 »

1attice wrote: post #10

The comparison to email (SMTP) is telling. I'm old enough to remember how SMTP almost collapsed beneath the first wave of spam in the nineties. These days, it's effectively centralized by an ogliopoly consisting of Gmail, Outlook, AWS, and whatever Apple calls its iCloud offering. If, like me, you run your own `maild`, you basically have to work incredibly hard to keep the ogliopols happy. You are always one bad DKIM…

It is not that bad, there is many "mid-size" players like FastMail, ProtonMail, Yandex, Baidu, Zoho, GMX, Gandi, and heaps more.

Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

#46

Post by rsynnott »

esskay wrote: post #33
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon needs to at very least change its terminology if it ever wants to be taken seriously. As funny as it is for people to be "tooting" out whatever happens to be in their head in that very moment no one wants to be known as a "tooter" who "toots" frequently.

Tooting aside (it's a silly enough term as it is) Mastedons never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person. "It's a decentralized social platform where you sign up to individual..." Yeah they're already asleep. The average person doesn't give a damn about that, and they sure as hell aren…

The average person uses _email_, bear in mind. They don't know or care how it works, but they use it.

Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

#47

Post by rsynnott »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #27
jacobreg wrote: post #6

There's a lot of consideration of if we could, and previous little of if we should. Unmoderated sites inevitably become breading grounds for harassment and worse, especially as more mainstream platforms get better at driving this content away. I would be terrified to live in a world where kiwifarms and its ilk cannot be shut down

Have you considered that maybe de-plaforming people on the fringe and forcing them into their own private silos actually ends up boosting their message? When you try to be the goody two-shoes and block anything and everything that could potentially be offensive to someone you just make controversial opinions more intriguing. At least I want to see what the big fuss was about and determine myself it such banishment wa…

I mean, it's worth _considering_, but it does not appear to be true. See reddit; reddit has gone through a number of waves of banning abominable subreddits. In general the result is that the most extreme members create a nightmarish reddit clone which no-one else cares about, the rest disperse.

Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

#48

Post by 1attice »

omeid2 wrote: post #45
1attice wrote: post #10

The comparison to email (SMTP) is telling. I'm old enough to remember how SMTP almost collapsed beneath the first wave of spam in the nineties. These days, it's effectively centralized by an ogliopoly consisting of Gmail, Outlook, AWS, and whatever Apple calls its iCloud offering. If, like me, you run your own `maild`, you basically have to work incredibly hard to keep the ogliopols happy. You are always one bad DKIM…

It is not that bad, there is many "mid-size" players like FastMail, ProtonMail, Yandex, Baidu, Zoho, GMX, Gandi, and heaps more.

It's not that bad at all - that's my point. I use protonmail and for some other addresses, I self host.

But it's the self hosting that showed me how much I live and die by the Big Ones. And yes, they set and drive policy for the whole system.

You better believe I pay attention to my Gmail bounce rate.

Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

#49

Post by giraffe_lady »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #27
jacobreg wrote: post #6

There's a lot of consideration of if we could, and previous little of if we should. Unmoderated sites inevitably become breading grounds for harassment and worse, especially as more mainstream platforms get better at driving this content away. I would be terrified to live in a world where kiwifarms and its ilk cannot be shut down

Have you considered that maybe de-plaforming people on the fringe and forcing them into their own private silos actually ends up boosting their message? When you try to be the goody two-shoes and block anything and everything that could potentially be offensive to someone you just make controversial opinions more intriguing. At least I want to see what the big fuss was about and determine myself it such banishment wa…

> When you try to be the goody two-shoes and block anything and everything that could potentially be offensive to someone

This is intentionally trivializing the actual approach and making it seem as arbitrary and low impact as possible. I certainly wouldn't support a ban on "everything that could potentially be offensive" and I haven't seen a proposal for one. I do support a ban on violent far right extremist movements on social media platforms though, because they coherently use these platforms as a venue for harassment, recruitment, and messaging.

The "marketplace of ideas" ideology or "don't feed the trolls" tactic don't actually work in practice. It's the sartre quote. Having a public policy debate with, for example, an ethnonationalist is a victory for the ethnonationalist in itself. They don't have to "win" the debate, they've won by getting you to have it in the first place.

Bans do work. Reddits used to have a serious problem with extremist antifeminists and literally, self-identified neonazis brigading semi-related posts in other subreddits. Banning the extremist subs had a huge impact in reducing it! You don't have to give people a forum to self-organize against your other users.

Or like, what is milo yiannopoulos up to these days? His influence and reach shriveled into insignificance after he got banned from everything a few years ago. The idea that the best way to combat extremism is by discussing it with extremists is a particular ideology. It is not a pragmatic goal- or result-based approach to moderation, or an abstinence from making ideological decisions about moderation.

Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

#50

Post by jrm4 »

thrashh wrote: post #37

I don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this. A server can’t really charge its users. I and most people would probably not pay to help support a server. Twitter works because most people who actually interact on it don’t pay. And the source of Twitter’s woes is honestly because the company has never been profitable (unlike Facebook, Google and so on which did). Also, req…

Um, ever heard of email?
Post reply on HN