Yes, we can easily get more decentralized that the Fediverse, and we have. Both Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit are peer-to-peer social networking, with rather different takes on what that means. There might be more, those are the ones I'm aware of.
Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
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Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#62Sure. But even slightly less decentralization has mostly proven clunky and unattractive when it comes to two-way communication social networking. I mean we all have accounts bluesky/mastodon/whatever the network du jour is, but it's on Twitter the posts are, despite its massive quality nosedive in recent time. The centralization of Twitter has massive benefits has almost zero downsides.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#63Pull 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…
In the olden days when bloggers walked the earth, emitting lengthy posts over RSS, they solved this problem in two ways:
Firstly, by appending forms to the end of the post where someone could type out a reply that was more likely to be a few sentences or paragraph, rather than a full-blown essay.
Secondly, by inventing "TrackBack", a standardized way for someone else's blog software to say "hey I wrote some stuff on my blog in response to this post of yours".
Both of these would get appended to the end of the blog post's page as "comments".
This very quickly enabled the new problem of "trackback/comment spam"; the enduring solution in the world of blogs to that has been "Wordpress' Askimet plugin", which is a very centralized piece of the otherwise mostly-distributed infrastructure of RSS-based blogs. I think it's like $15 a year on top of the $60 or so I pay for my Wordpress site on cheap hosting.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#64This 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…
> consistently fail to address the vast majority of the population who are not developers or extremely tech savvy.
My feeling after a number of years in the field us we massively underestimate users.
We have read all these blog posts about what Amazon and Google does to make people click and we think the same applies to us.
But we aren't trying to get the last few percents of the worlds population fall into our dark patterns.
We should be optimizing for the ones who actually use it. Enthusiast. Early adopters. The already then 50 year old electrical engineer who showed me Ubuntu 15 years or so ago.
Firefox, Ubuntu, even Google used to have a massive unpaid sales force. I know. I was part of it.
They all decided to take existing users for granted and focus on new users. Firefox "polishing" ux and forgetting that the best UX is the one that we chose ourselves.
Ubuntu going all in on copying Mac: trashing the existing alt-tab solution, moving the window controls for no good reason.
Google prioritizing "intelligent results" and the number of results at the expense of relevancy at every point until not even the double quote and verbatim operator together can prevent them from second guessing what I really meant to search for.
I am tired. And I am voting with my wallet. It is Orion and LibreWolf for browsing, KDE for Linux distro and Kagi for search.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#65Yes, we can easily get more decentralized that the Fediverse, and we have. Both Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit are peer-to-peer social networking, with rather different takes on what that means. There might be more, those are the ones I'm aware of.
Urbit choosing to artificially limit their "address space" with an NFT sale was a bit of a gut punch tbh and I don't see how this will work out positively for the project in the long run.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#66Yes, we can easily get more decentralized that the Fediverse, and we have. Both Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit are peer-to-peer social networking, with rather different takes on what that means. There might be more, those are the ones I'm aware of.
We need better-than-bittorrent p2p social swarms that are fast, efficient, and massive.
I want for when someones posts an article, to have my local custom filters flag it for interest, schedule it for reading, grab the photos and videos, pull in relevant comments (again filtered, perhaps to my interest graph peers and highly-ranked dissenting opinions), and never have to step foot on the corrupted, ad-ridden, algorithmically boosted web again.
News websites are trash. Reddit and socials are trash. I want complete unfettered control over the inbound stream. Everything first class from engineering principles. The protocol, the data structures, the ranking, the visualization, etc.
I want data I can easily copy into my notebook, easily bookmark, easily remix and respond to.
The web doesn't cut it, and it never has.
P2P social should be article and media centric. Sharing news, blogs, videos, etc. with first class threaded comments built atop it.
Everything is ephemeral and immutable unless you want to save it or publish a correction.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#67Sure. But even slightly less decentralization has mostly proven clunky and unattractive when it comes to two-way communication social networking. I mean we all have accounts bluesky/mastodon/whatever the network du jour is, but it's on Twitter the posts are, despite its massive quality nosedive in recent time. The centralization of Twitter has massive benefits has almost zero downsides.
it has downsides though. I am constantly jumping between twitter, reddit, spotify (for podcasts) and youtube to see the content and latest updates from the same people. when I want to share something, I should think where should I post it, is it more technical? then reddit and HN maybe, though on twitter I do have some technical people following me too. is it social / political? then its twitter, so on. then I find myself reading and discussing political posts on reddit which are screenshots of posts on twitter or vice versa. I don't know how much pain this is truly, but the unnecessary walls between these communities is indeed a pain point, both as a consumer (I need to check people on multiple places) or as a publisher (I have to partition the discussion to say the least, if not the audience in total).
as for mastodon / bluesky / whatever, the main issue to me seems to be lack of content and content discovery. which is weird, since every youtuber, podcaster, subreddit, all of HN and medium, etc. is technically on RSS, and even more can be easily put on RSS with cheap bridges. but instead of unifying and enhancing all this existing shared content streams, we've broken off with new protocols and created separated and isolated communities.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
how, though? I doubt we had an easier method than opening your phone and just typing a few sentences in a text box, or just "liking" or "reposting" something.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#69Yes, we can easily get more decentralized that the Fediverse, and we have. Both Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit are peer-to-peer social networking, with rather different takes on what that means. There might be more, those are the ones I'm aware of.
Urbit choosing to artificially limit their "address space" with an NFT sale was a bit of a gut punch tbh and I don't see how this will work out positively for the project in the long run.
Urbit's address space is 128 bits wide, so scarcity is physically impossible, unless there were a need for every atom in the observable universe to have many addresses.
The decision to make the bottom 32 bits valuable was a clever one, but it's lead to some misunderstanding of how things actually work. Specifically, planets (a 32 bit address) only own an additional 2^32 addresses, called moons. That leaves 2^64 of the address space "wild", these are called comets. There are plenty.
If you want a four-syllable address, they're loss leaders from hosting providers, currently. Two syllables you have to pay for, and one syllable is not usually on the market. A sixteen-syllable address is and will always be free.
How this is handled socially, in a hypothetical future where there are more than 4 billion active Urbit users, is a problem for that future to address.
Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?
#70What happened to Content-Centric-Networking? That seems to be an ideal model for a fully decentralized network, p2p or otherwise.
Are there specific technical hurdles preventing adoption? Or is the allure of large companies hoarding all the data too good to pass up?