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

Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 146 posts

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#31

Post by pembrook »

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.

Somehow amusing you’re posting this on a pseudo-anonymous social network with an upvote based algorithm.

Although I’d probably agree. Even tightly moderated communities who fancy themselves as “intellectual” and “rational” like this one are prone to bizarre group-think and emotional manipulation.

But that’s also just humans in general. What you might call bringing out “the worst” in people, might actually be the best we can do given our biology.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#32

Post by PaulHoule »

logicprog wrote: post #24
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 o…

Chronological feed + boosting is an algorithm and it's about as toxic of an algorithm as you could get without making a data set of toxic vs toxic posts.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#33

Post by lorean_victor »

lxgr wrote: post #28

> 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 randomi…

yes it is a federated system by design. doesn't mean it is not a limitation though.

to give you an example: in case of email, though it is not that difficult to host your own server (and even if you are a small startup you'll most probably do so without much effort), in the end basically Google decides on "who is an accepted participant in the network". If Google deems you spam, you are spam. If Google deems your authentication emails "promotion", for most intents and purposes, you are "promotion" and your users will miss your emails.

that, I feel, is an inherent limitation of any federated system, specifically one whose design is really inspired by email.

> I don't see how that follows.

as you've mentioned right after.

> work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing).

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#34

Post by shrimp_emoji »

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.

Good. The "worst" in people is a part of people. To pretend it doesn't exist and suppress it forever is an insane social engineering experiment.

And the Dionysian night of the Internet is a way better and safer place for it than the Appolonian day of real life.

If you're willing to surrender that outlet and the game theoretic ground of pseudo/anonymity because your feelings are too hurt, I sorely hope whatever totalitarian government is in your future punishes you for your weakness.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#35

Post by lorean_victor »

cousin_it wrote: post #30
lorean_victor wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moder…

I think that's an issue of tools at your disposal to create content (including comments) rather than their distribution model (e.g. pull vs push). If your main method of saying stuff is through a blogpost, ofc you'll end up in the situation you've described. If the tools at everyone's disposal are textboxes that just work, people will use that.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#36

Post by jdthedisciple »

logicprog wrote: post #3

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…

Pro tip: Split your gigantic (and certainly thoughtful!) comment[s] into paragraphs.

Makes it a ton easier to parse. Cheers!

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#37

Post by jdthedisciple »

ericyd wrote: post #15

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…

Agreed. I've never understood this cry for "decentralization for everything" coming from this tiny bubble of nerds.

Nobody in the real world cares about it even one bit.

The only thing people out there actually want is CONVENIENCE and USABILITY.

When will the nerds understand?

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#38

Post by lorean_victor »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #37
ericyd wrote: post #15

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…

Agreed. I've never understood this cry for "decentralization for everything" coming from this tiny bubble of nerds. Nobody in the real world cares about it even one bit. The only thing people out there actually want is CONVENIENCE and USABILITY . When will the nerds understand?

You are right I'm sorry. I wasn't notified that anything discussed on these forums should be exclusively about whatever "the real world" cares about at least one bit (preferably 8 bits or more I guess?).

Ah the nerds, when will we understand, indeed.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#39

Post by speff »

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.

Your first sentence is the exact reason why propaganda thrives in social media. There's an understanding that fellow people are somehow more trustworthy than Big Media. The part that's not considered is that people on a whole are not able to understand every intricacy of problems out in the world - but they sure do love sharing opinions about every problem as if they do understand.

Given this, easy-to-digest messages are easily amplified through social media and every complex detail is withered to nothing. This is why I stopped using Lemmy. The larger communities (read: the only ones that get any posts) ended up being a worse echo-chamber than every other platform due to people repeating the same simple concepts ad nauseam.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#40

Post by CuriouslyC »

Sure. Instead of servers, you have friends, and you subscribe to your friends content, and discovery occurs through friend-of-a-friend network and "discovery hubs" like the old Yahoo, but for niches (i.e. Follow TechDude96 for hardware review aggregation, etc).
Post reply on HN