11–20 of 146 posts
Yes, the answer is Nostr
I should say though, that upon first look, I wish it was built on top of some already existing standard (like rss), as it could get a great headstart in terms of content already circulating in the network that way.
Yes, the answer is Nostr
looks quite interesting, I wasn't aware of that. it seems like a nice hybrid solution to pull/push problem (relays can push if they choose to, clients just publish and pull). I should say though, that upon first look, I wish it was built on top of some already existing standard (like rss), as it could get a great headstart in terms of content already circulating in the network that way.
Also, it wouldn't be too hard too build bridges or bots that bring in other stuff (like RSS feeds or ActivityPub content) to Nostr. One already exists: https://mostr.pub
Is it though? There are dependencies on DNS and CDNs along the way. Can anything ever be distributed without a fully distributed protocol stack?
> This is in contrast to personal blogging, where every Bob can easily host their own (and they often do).
A key word in this sentence is "often". I would argue that hosting your own blog is exceptionally rare at the population level. Most people do not have the interest or skill to accomplish it, so they use services.
Similarly, this author proposes a system where every social interaction could be self-hosted. I fail to see who this benefits, beyond a vocal minority of smart technologists.
I've seen arguments that suggest the bar should be lowered to allow everyone to do more technical things if so desired (self-hosting, domain registration, etc). I just think this misses the point that for most people, these topics are utterly uninteresting and unimportant. Unless the suggestion is to build a decentralized network for a very select few who wish to participate, I don't feel like these types of ideas will ever be relevant.
I agree that pull is the best model for posts. For comments I still think the best model is to push them to the post author, and let the post author moderate. This way people who can behave civilly can get an initial audience by writing comments, and having a link to their blog in the profile, with no intermediaries involved. If someone doesn't like the moderation, they're always free to write a comment-as-post, wher…
What if someone posts a dangerous lie? The post author is going to delete any comments that expose the lie. How would comments-as-posts be sufficiently linked to the original post so the lie can properly be exposed to as much of the audience as possible?
A mute-only social media platform would be doable technically but it would likely involve tons of spammers replying to large accounts. Think about how unusable the replies to an American politician's tweets are on Twitter because the US courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional for politicians to block people on social media.
The best solution to this problem I've seen so far is Community Notes on Twitter where a crowdsourced fact check is directly pinned to the tweet allowing users to challenge liars without directly calling them out and getting blocked. More centralized approaches to fact checking don't work particularly well because you end up with biased fact checkers who clearly have an agenda and thus aren't trusted at all by the liar's audience.
" Distributed, i.e. no centers (e.g. personal blogging)" Is it though? There are dependencies on DNS and CDNs along the way. Can anything ever be distributed without a fully distributed protocol stack?
This article, and many others that promote a highly decentralized internet, consistently fail to address the vast majority of the population who are not developers or extremely tech savvy. > This is in contrast to personal blogging, where every Bob can easily host their own (and they often do). A key word in this sentence is "often". I would argue that hosting your own blog is exceptionally rare at the population lev…
the last part of the post, however, is dedicated to assessing whether such an idea would have any real bearing on, as you've put it, "the population", or not. I've tried to list potential benefits to the average user, if such a decentralised platform was ever built. since you are interested more in such evaluations rather than technical contemplations, I'd like to hear your feedback specifically on that part.
https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935...
Pull not being a good model of two way communications is going to be the major blocker here in my opinion. It's going to mean that people are only going to see comments and reactions on their posts or comments from people they already subscribe to, because their RSS reader would have no possible way of knowing if anyone outside of that list commented, since you can't get notified of content sources you don't already…
Yes it is a big hurdle. However, I think content discovery is generally a big part of any content platform, way broader than discovering "who have reacted to my content". Now if you want to solve the problem of content discovery in a broader sense, then you have already fixed this particular shortcoming of pull-model as well. If a service that can inform you about new posts with a particular hashtag, it most probably…
Right but I don't think as a general case finding all RSS feeds on the internet that satisfy a certain criteria, like publishing a hashtag or responding to a particular post, is a problem that can actually be solved in a principled way, because a fundamental limitation of the pull methodology is that you have to know the list of places you are checking beforehand, you can't get content from somewhere you didn't know about prior. The only way to solve this would be to have some kind of crawling and indexing system that regularly crawls the entire internet looking for these expanded RSS feeds and then categorized them according to various criteria in order to poll them. And that is both a very high technical investment and has a lot of limitations itself. So in the end it seems like you haven't really actually distributed the work of a social media system more equally after all, you've just inverted who is doing the work, going from a Federated set of servers that do all the work pushing content everywhere to a Federated set of servers that do all the work pulling content from places.