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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?

#51

Post by alexisread »

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?

I'd suggest it's more of a journey, with convenience and usability at the start. Witness many youtube creatives trying to jump ship wrt to cut of the monetization, changes in monetization eg. longform videos, shadowbanning, and so on.

These are secondary, perhaps more subtle, considerations that come to the fore after a while, and illustrate the dichotomy between platform reach and endorsing that platform.

Fundamentally I think we are still dealing with hard decentralised problems - Small world networks are better understood from a tech perspective. AT-protocol, zksnarks, DIDs, lattice types and the like are fertile ground for exploration that MAY yield new advantages in this problem space. UX can follow the function.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#52

Post by lxgr »

PaulHoule wrote: post #44
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…

Note RSS is an ill-defined polling protocol. The server emits an RSS file which has the top N pieces of content. All you can do is poll it at a greater or less frequency and hope you don't underpoll or overpoll. (I can easily fetch the RSS feed for an independent blog 1000 times for every time I fetch an HTML page, but should I? What if I wanted to follow 1000 independent blogs?) With ActivityPub on the other hand yo…

Oh wow, RSS really doesn't support pagination? I didn't know that.

WebSub can help with solving the poll rate issue, but that presumably wouldn't solve the problem for consumers that are offline for a while.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#53

Post by lxgr »

lorean_victor wrote: post #50
lxgr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, what's the benefit of that? If peak load is a concern, a push-based system can stagger out individual post deliveries just as well, and push gives the producer much more control over load management. If that's not enough, several posts can be combined too. In a pull system, you are at the mercy of your consumers' refresh rate setting, and for infrequent producers, you'll have lots of wasted cycles fetching not…

the system doesn't need to be completely pull-based though. I don't even think most modern RSS readers are fully pull-based, don't they support WebSub? the main point is to separate publishing and distribution, making publishing far more accessible and decentralised. for that to happen, I guess, from a publisher's point of view, the system should be pull based. of course we can have hubs and relays to add pull-based…

> the main point is to separate publishing and distribution, making publishing far more accessible and decentralised. for that to happen, I guess, from a publisher's point of view, the system should be pull based.

Oh, I completely agree with that assertion: Static content hosting is much easier than stateful subscription management, knowing which aggregators to post to etc.

I just think that this does inherently put more work on the subscribers, and there's no real way to do it efficiently in a relatively flat architecture (with subscribers directly polling publishers). WebSub helps with pure distribution, but not with aggregation (e.g. to allow keyword/hashtag search), for example.

That doesn't mean it's not worth still designing a system like that (in my view, the benefits are significant!), but I wouldn't call it a performance win.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#54

Post by lorean_victor »

lxgr wrote: post #53
lorean_victor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the system doesn't need to be completely pull-based though. I don't even think most modern RSS readers are fully pull-based, don't they support WebSub? the main point is to separate publishing and distribution, making publishing far more accessible and decentralised. for that to happen, I guess, from a publisher's point of view, the system should be pull based. of course we can have hubs and relays to add pull-based…

> the main point is to separate publishing and distribution, making publishing far more accessible and decentralised. for that to happen, I guess, from a publisher's point of view, the system should be pull based. Oh, I completely agree with that assertion: Static content hosting is much easier than stateful subscription management, knowing which aggregators to post to etc. I just think that this does inherently put…

agreed. it won't be a performance gain at all.

but I suspect aggregating / indexing / etc. still is going to be the most resource consuming part of a push-based system if you want your content discovery to not be limited to two-way interactions, which means the gains of a push-based system, in terms of performance, shouldn't be that much (I suspect the main gains will be in realtimeyness instead).

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#55

Post by logicprog »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #36
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!

Thanks for the advice and compliment! :D I usually write them out and then read them and use the edit function to insert paragraph breaks after the fact, but I forgot to do that this time lol

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#56

Post by vouaobrasil »

lorean_victor wrote: post #27
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 s…

> 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).

It was very easy to publish things on the internet before modern social media.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#57

Post by ericyd »

lorean_victor wrote: post #19
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…

thanks for taking the time to read through it regardless. I wrote this as a brain dump, and shared it mostly with the intent of learning more about the topic (which thanks to this thread, I already have), so I feel it is ok if it doesn't change the life of billions of people. 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 popul…

I'm not sure I have strong feelings about it, but here are a few thoughts:

1. I think a more universal content aggregation / discovery tool would be beneficial for many people. Google might be the analog that comes to mind. This makes me wonder how such an aggregator/search tool would operate in a decentralized way. Would each user/node be responsible for maintaining its own index? My question to you is how does this differ from current centralized aggregators and search tools?

2. Regarding distribution vs. publication: its an interesting point that you could separate the two, but I personally believe this benefit would be moot for most people since they would be unlikely to self-publish content. My view is that most individuals will continue to use centralized services, regardless of the underlying protocol, due to a combination of convenience, ease, and cost. Like you identified, unless there is some critical mass of people self-publing and self-distributing, I'm not sure I see a tangible benefit here.

Also, mea culpa, I sometimes forget that the author might read my response and perhaps my language in my initial post was too strong, I hope I did not offend.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#58

Post by andoando »

speff wrote: post #39
kornhole wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

100% agree. I think Reddit is a huge propaganda machine in itself. The most ironic thread I’ve seen was a headline about how Republicans were more susceptible to propaganda, with every comment of course being 3-10 words amounting to “oh yeah so true, they’re terrible”. Anyone that actually read past the headline though could see the article was total nonsense.

I suppose it may be harder to control since a central authority can’t publish anything they want.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#60

Post by bee_rider »

iteratethis wrote: post #45
kornhole wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really. First, nobody cares what anybody on the Fediverse says. It's tiny. It's pinnacle "app", Mastodon, is losing lots of MAU every single day and is now below 1M MAU. Besides being tiny, it's scattered and discovery and search do not work. How can this mess possibly counter propaganda? Second, whilst the Fediverse may not have sophisticated algorithms, it very much has censorship and typically way more than tr…

Has anybody written this up? I think it could be interesting to see how things are going.
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