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Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

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Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#21

Post by logicprog »

cousin_it wrote: post #5

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…

Yeah, this is precisely what I said as well, being able to comment on anything and have that seen even without a follower count is important for making initial connections on a social network.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#22

Post by kornhole »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.

Social media is the most important counter measure to propaganda. Before social media, we had a one way stream of information from the media outlets without much opportunity to question, discuss, and debunk. The fediverse resolves the problem of centrally controlled algorithms and censorship that manipulate people's speech depending on the moderation rules of individual instances.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#23

Post by lorean_victor »

logicprog wrote: post #20
lorean_victor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Right but I don't think as a general case finding all RSS feeds on the internet that satis…

I do recognise the fact that such "aggregators" would be hugely centralised (if not outright monopolised, like the search engine space). however, maybe I'm wrong but I don't see the federated model succeeding without such services either, so I think of "need for centralised content discovery" as an independent problem, honestly.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#24

Post by logicprog »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.

I tend to agree with this sort of. In my opinion, stuff that's more real time, ephemeral, one to one, and focused on closed groups below a certain size, like IRC or Discord, or stuff that is one to many like modern social media but much less highly visible and networked, like the classic blogosphere, tends to be much more healthy and in the long run rewarding then microblogging social media like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or whatever.

I don't think it's necessarily the anonymity though. Or even the algorithms — the fediverse has no algorithms and yet in my experience (having been a minor player in some big drama there before I left) it's getting just as toxic and judgy as Twitter, maybe even more. I think it's more that in micro blogging social media, because interactions and posts are automatically broadcast to this huge audience that doesnt necessarily share any values or social norms, and are immediately highly discoverable and visible to everyone even outside the people who initially saw it, and these interactions can sort of stay around in the zeitgeist a bit more permanently than an instant message, instead of being ephemeral, in the moment, and directed at one or two or a few people within a closed form community, every post you make and every interaction with people takes on a sort of grandstanding, performing for the crowd, dare I say it virtue signaling (I say this as a leftist lol so you know I'm serious) tenor. It becomes automatically a lot more adversarial and fake and just weird and distorted. And then if you add on top of that the fact that posts and responses are highly asynchronous, so it's actually difficult to feel like you're really having a dialogue with a person, instead of just combatting disembodied words on a screen, and difficult to engage in compassion and quickly correct misunderstandings and respond to feelings in the moment, it means that all of the grandstanding and performing for the crowd and virtue signaling will be that much more dysfunctional and detached from actual human social interaction.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#25

Post by api »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.

It's difficult to impossible to implement bulk level social media algorithms on decentralized networks because no single node has all the data and views/interactions are largely private.

This is a feature and is perhaps an even more compelling reason to go federated or decentralized than the other autonomy and privacy related reasons. Social media algorithms are cultural lobotomy machines.

A great example of technological limitations improving content is podcasts. Podcasts are one-way, still fairly simple in their distribution methods (RSS and a few major apps but no clear monopoly), and mostly non-interactive. This limits the ability of platforms and advertisers to ruin them, which is why podcasting is still a bastion of quality media online.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#26

Post by logicprog »

kornhole wrote: post #22
vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.

Social media is the most important counter measure to propaganda. Before social media, we had a one way stream of information from the media outlets without much opportunity to question, discuss, and debunk. The fediverse resolves the problem of centrally controlled algorithms and censorship that manipulate people's speech depending on the moderation rules of individual instances.

This is a good point actually, despite my reservations about social media, if you want to get a big message out quickly there really is nothing better than something like twitter.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#27

Post by lorean_victor »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.

I've got to disagree on this point. I am a firm believer in "democratisation" of anything, including "publishing content that many other people will see".

this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc).

of course, that means posting and spreading "worst in people" is also easier (as is spreading spam, etc). this aspect I feel has nothing to do with the "social" part of these platforms, any form of lowering the entry barrier would have caused more terrible things to be published and spread (maybe with different extents, but not essentially different).

p.s. you might find this interesting if you haven't seen it already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#28

Post by lxgr »

> In the pull-based system, more work in the end is required (when should Alice query Bob? Also Bob needs to respond to the query, though thats super easy as it is static responses), but the work is better distributed, lowering the maximum amount of work someone has to do (in this case, Bob).

I don't see how that follows. Yes, work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing), but the baseline load of these polls will in the end be larger than that of having to do the push fanout per post – at least for people posting less frequently than the average poll rate.

Generally, the push-vs-pull discussion seems like a red herring: For every pull system, we'll want some push mechanism for efficiency reasons in the end anyway; for every push system, we'll need a pull way to catch up with posts potentially missed initially.

To me, the practically relevant differences between Mastodon (push) and e.g. Bluesky (pull-ish, with aggregators) seem to revolve around the actual ease of self-hosting: As the author notes, setting up a Mastodon server seems roughly as complicated as self-hosting email (i.e. possible but practically almost nobody will do it), but I don't see this as a limitation of the protocol (Activitypub), but rather its implementation.

Decoupling identity resolution from hosting an entire server would also be a smart move: Webfinger is way too complicated for this; DNS TXT records would be ideal.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#29

Post by lorean_victor »

api wrote: post #25
vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.

It's difficult to impossible to implement bulk level social media algorithms on decentralized networks because no single node has all the data and views/interactions are largely private. This is a feature and is perhaps an even more compelling reason to go federated or decentralized than the other autonomy and privacy related reasons. Social media algorithms are cultural lobotomy machines. A great example of technolo…

it was quite easy for a small team to crawl and index a good portion of the internet, enough to become the de facto gateway (talking about Google).

it was similarly possible for a relatively small team to crawl a good chunk of the available internet and train some of the most sophisticated "algorithms" we've seen on them (talking about Open AI).

if there is an incentive, this problem can be solved. if this was actually a hard problem, most current social media companies wouldn't put so much effort in restricting crawling to force everyone through restricted API access (look at Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or Facebook, as examples).

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#30

Post by cousin_it »

lorean_victor wrote: post #7
cousin_it wrote: post #5

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…

the thing is, with no intermediaries involved, more specifically, without any proper "search engines" (or "aggregators") involved, the network will suffer greatly from a content discovery problem regardless (as the fediverse currently is, IMO). with presence of such services, the problem of comments (and reactions in general) can be solved too. if a poster is ok with engaging with potentially hostile content, then th…

I'm more thinking about the social side of things. When comments follow the pull model, you get the pingback problem of old: most "comments" will be links to blog posts, themselves stuffed with more promotional links and so on. The only way to avoid it and have comments look like a somewhat nice garden is to allow post authors to say: please write text comments and don't stuff them with links, or you won't pass moderation on my blog. In other words, the push model. In my experience that's the best solution to this particular problem.
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