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

81–90 of 146 posts

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#81

Post by lorean_victor »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #78

> Personal instances will be pretty rare Personal instances of the US Post Office are also pretty rare, my dude. You gonna go deliver your mail yourself? If so, why write a letter? You want total distributed decentralization? Use Gnutella. It's equivalent to giving your letter to your neighbor and asking them to deliver it, and they ask their neighbor, etc, until it reaches a back alley in Algeria, and then that Alge…

I wouldn't. I also wouldn't think about a decentralised email solution, or a decentralised messaging service. doesn't make sense.

as for publishing my own blog though? nah I'd really rather a decentralised system where I can host my own blog wherever.

and yes I do realise most people don't care about that, and yes I'm not sure if they'd care about other benefits of decentralisation as well or not, but its not like there is nothing there that would affect them.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#82

Post by zozbot234 »

lxgr wrote: post #52
PaulHoule wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ActivityStreams could be seen as a viable extension of RSS (aside from ActivityPub being based off it already) and it does support some simple pagination via its "Collection" vocabulary. Since ActivityStreams is ultimately based on JSON+LD, one could also add seamless querying support to an ActivityStreams endpoint based on SPARQL, for more advanced uses.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#83

Post by lorean_victor »

digdugdirk wrote: post #74
lorean_victor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you mean by "content-centric-networking"? perhaps I have some reading to do. the "allure of large companies hoarding all the data" might be a factor independently though. I personally believe a proper content discovery service is key to any form of decentralisation, and that is, as far as I can imagine, highly dependent on centralised entities amassing and then processing large amounts of data. I mean we sold…

The wikipedia article is a decent high level overview: [1] "Content-Centric Networking (CCN) diverges from the IP-based, host-oriented Internet architecture by prioritizing content, making it directly addressable and routable. In CCN, endpoints communicate based on named data rather than IP addresses. This approach is a part of information-centric networking (ICN) architecture and involves the exchange of content req…

thanks for the pointer!

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#84

Post by dingdingdang »

echelon wrote: post #66
samatman wrote: post #61

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.

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, algorit…

I echo your sentiment about bittorrent and p2p swarm protocols. Seeing the current fediverse emerge has felt almost anachronistic to me - the tech put to use is, at baseline, older and less resilient than the p2p protocols from the late 1990s and early 2000s. There may or may not be milage in the Matrix protocol...

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#85

Post by x3haloed »

I’ve also been thinking about this problem for a while. The push model and account portability are definitely the most important dimensions of this issue.

Can’t we just solve this problem with IPFS? And something like DHT tables for protocol-level awareness of state changes?

Your client app would just be responsible for pushing and pinning content to IPFS, scanning state tables for interesting updates, and then sending you push notifications.

Really simple to take your IPFS key with you can switch to a new app.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#86

Post by kkfx »

IMVHO:

- all distributed solutions show too much overhead to perform well for casual users, some (now abandoned) like ZeroNet was performant enough for some personal blog hosting, but barely and still no "indexing" solution stable enough;

- classic decentralized social like Usenet seems to be abandoned by most people (except for commercial piracy) so well, most people do not really care enough to take this root if they do not feel something at hand immediately...

Long story short: we "just" need IPv6 with a global per host AND a "family" domain name (with all relevant subdomains) per home, a homeserver (like common domestic "routers", just a bit more open/powerful in hw terms) and that's do the base to rebuild "the internet" with a connected desktop model where we no not need third parties or a VPS to traverse NAT, where we do not have to deal with strange long IDs instead of something like phone.bill.myfriendfamily.tld to make an IP2IP audio/video call and so on.

All other approaches ESPECIALLY those who try to mimic big platforms will fails.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#87

Post by x3haloed »

ianopolous wrote: post #77

Absolutely. We've pioneered portable identity (and links and data) in a decentralised social web in Peergos: https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media This is also pull based interestingly, but also has visibility controls being E2EE. I don't think society needs public, or at least public by default, social media. This is even more true now in the age of LLMs and mass data harvesting.

> I don't think society needs public, or at least public by default, social media. This is even more true now in the age of LLMs and mass data harvesting. Depends on your definition of “social media.” Is a message board / forum considered social media? Because while they can be problematic, they’re still extremely useful. It would be interesting to think about decentralized Reddit and why lemmy is going nowhere.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#88

Post by lorean_victor »

kkfx wrote: post #86

IMVHO: - all distributed solutions show too much overhead to perform well for casual users, some (now abandoned) like ZeroNet was performant enough for some personal blog hosting, but barely and still no "indexing" solution stable enough; - classic decentralized social like Usenet seems to be abandoned by most people (except for commercial piracy) so well, most people do not really care enough to take this root if th…

I admire this vision, and also appreciate the fact that you quoted "just" to underline a recognition of how much of a fundamental shift this is :D

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#89

Post by bsder »

lorean_victor wrote: post #79
TulliusCicero wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized social media sounds better in theory, but in practice is less effective. People are voting with their feet. Or phones, I suppose. It's like all the FOSS types who yelled about how IRC is superior as millions migrated to Slack and Discord. Your bullet point list is nothing in the face of usability.

its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable? as a content consumer I would love to be somewhere where there is engaging content and content discovery. I go to mastodon, my feed is empty and the search doesn't work. I bounce. as a content publisher, I would go wherever the audience is. I go to mastodon, users have a hard time finding me, no one gets my stuff. I bounce. now I (per…

> its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable?

Um, apparently, yes?

Google searches were doing "+reddit" before reddit melted down. The content was super discoverable and searchable. Everything (including discord, slack, and the fediverse) is laughably bad on that front.

People switched from twitter and reddit to ... discord and slack. Mostly beause they handle identity and phone apps--apparently searchability and discoverability isn't that important. I'm one of the olds, so don't get why the fuck people want phone apps to pester them all the time, but apparently the youngs want this very, very badly.

So, yeah, apparently twitter and reddit were really quite usable for the vast majority of users.

I'm a big fan of the fact that reddit's meltdown caused a bunch of people to set up forums again. However, that's a lot of duplicated work for every single forum administrator.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#90

Post by Minor49er »

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.

On the contrary, social media is a huge target for propaganda

Special interest groups have been around forever (see Cryptome's article "The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies" which outlines some useful tactics). These groups still exist (eg: the JIDF, or ShareBlue in whatever name it's calling itself these days, to name a couple)

Platforms themselves also engage in tactics such as shadowbanning its users (Reddit and Twitter were both in the news for this at least a few times), or using a curation algorithm to show you what it thinks is relevant (Facebook's wall, or YouTube comments/chat being shuffled rather than showing activity chronologically to discourage discussion and to more easily hide censored comments). The idea that social media platforms are not one-way is an illusion

In short, the people who you're talking to are not always real people. Some of the discussions you're trying to have might be getting silenced without you knowing. And the facts you read from a given source could have been invented. The Fediverse isn't exempt from these problems

Post reply on HN