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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?

#121

Post by eitland »

ericyd wrote: post #92
eitland wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Apologies, I'm not tracking your argument. The first part of your posts seems to suggest that focusing on early adopters will lead to mass adoption. But I'm not following the last part where you indicate you've dumped popular services/software in exchange for relatively niche solutions

I was an early adopter and I still am.

I came to Firefox because it was extensible and customizable and it was a community project I could like.

I am leaving it because the only time Mozilla now think of us as a communicaty is when they have fundraisers.

I came to Ubuntu because it was stable, smart and good looking. Innovative while being usable.

I left because they copied a desktop paradigm I didn't like, breaking everything in the process.

I came to Google because they were nice and had the best search results.

I left because I feel they are somewhere between hilarious and criminal and their search results had been tragically bad for a decade already when I finally found a better option.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#122

Post by ttepasse »

egypturnash wrote: post #63
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…

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…

Thirdly there was the Salmon protocol, although with the Plussing of Google Buzz it never got traction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol)

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#123

Post by ttepasse »

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.

There is RFC 5005 - Feed Paging and Arching, but sadly the world of RSS Tools has never been very specification-forward, mostly, because the publishers of RSS feeds are even more desinterested.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005.html

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#124

Post by krapp »

bigiain wrote: post #103
egypturnash wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hmmmm. Now I'm wondering it Askimet are selling every blog comment they scan to OpenAI (and Palantir)?

I think it's safe to assume at this point that all public content and most private content on the internet is being fed to both AI and American intelligence services.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#125

Post by krapp »

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…

I see your negatives as mostly positive. Engagement and virality are inevitably cancerous to any social network, and comment velocity needs to be suppressed and controlled to reduce entropy and limit the degree to which that network can be used by people primarily interested in "getting a following." Any feature (or anti-feature) that makes a platform unattractive to capitalists and influencers and shitposting trolls is a good thing. Discouraging people from posting and commenting is a good thing. Making it difficult to network is a good thing. None of these things need to be impossible, but I do believe there needs to be enough friction to make low hanging fruit and opportunism not worth the effort.

Otherwise everything gets taken over by AI and bots and psychopaths and propagandists and turns to shit.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#126

Post by kkfx »

lorean_victor wrote: post #120
kkfx wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, and yes it is, but technically we have all the pieces since decades, so while it would be a revolution it's not really something new to be created with uncertain results... The real revolution is a paradigm shift form the actual development focused on big of IT interests toward a classic desktop centered development, the needed ground is there and battle tested, the rest is "just" to be done on scale. A simpl…

thats an interesting perspective. I am personally much in favour of reducing unnecessary interdependence in society, specifically to big corps: google can really screw me up just because they provide an email service for me. questions that come to mind though: - why would someone do that? its not hard, it can be made easier, but what would be the tangible, low-level gain for people to do that? I can think of examples…

IMVHO because of material and monetary interests: so far Google have not let down too many, but horror stories of people screwed by a Google ban are more and more common, "the cloud" start to be expensive not only for companies but also for individuals and for companies horror story about "economical dDOS" start to be real, Netlify have just paid 104.000 USD for a spike demand for a single mp3 file for instance, once such things became spread enough and that will happen soon, people start to look for alternatives. So far they feel to have no choice, but if the FLOSS world will came to rescue the choice would be there.

About emails, the shot is far longer: we start to have digital IDs, after decades finally the idea of a digital signature usable with a smart-card start to be the norm, at least in EU (eIDAS) but I think in the USA things are not much different, at maximum few years behind. With "family domain names" we start to "know each other" enough to filter safely our contacts and bayesian spam filters, mail aliases wisely used are more then sufficient for the 99% of usages.

Another VERY important thing such model can offer is automation, a thing 99% of users miss simply because there are no solutions designed for them. Now imaging a world with OFX/OpenBank mandatory available to all customers of any bank/financial institution, imaging a set of FLOSS clients to import all their feeds from different banks, cards, ... in a single place and auto-categorization of most transactions. This alone is a thing most users today do not ask for because they do not even know that's perfectly possible today. But with a resurgent desktop model such things would easily became common and at that point the big corp model would fail crushing on it's own technical limits.

To me the only point is "where to start", the classic answer was from universities labs where students start outlining and implementing their own world, due to the sorry state of unis these days that's can't happen, but in the FLOSS world it can. If enough "seasoned enough" devs start to say "dammit, I'm tired of the actual crap, instead of trying mimicking big corps platforms let's made something the classic desktop way" in few years such ideas and simple software would spread and following the same FLOSS spread "digital sustainability" where nowadays most devs works on *nix FLOSS environments even if many inside some proprietary walled gardens such comfy and simple solution would grow enough to be unstoppable. The only point so is having a not-so-small set of devs who want to start such change, the rest is already there...

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#128

Post by kornhole »

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…

All information can be considered propaganda as defined by Edward Bernays in his book Propaganda. Yes groups game social media to propagate information. Yes centralized algorithmically controlled platforms are easier to manipulate conversation. Yes you must weed through the chaf of useless opinions. Yes echo chambers are often reinforced.

If topics are openly discussed, untrue narratives generally dissolve. What better tool do we have?

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#129

Post by kornhole »

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…

A good discussion between two people can enhance their understandings. Size/MAU is irrelevant in this context. People in my network smash propaganda every day.

I can understand how you had this experience with the fediverse, but it has gotten better for me over the years. Many big instances are wokist with all kinds of rules such as banning hate speech, but you have many such as noauthority.social that are explicitly free speech. I have been running my own instance for years. People can block me, but nobody can kick me off.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#130

Post by bsder »

lorean_victor wrote: post #116
bsder wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 phon…

I am sorry I couldn't aptly understand you. did people migrate from twitter / reddit to discord / slack? That's an interesting phenomena if it has happened that I wasn't aware of, do you have sources I can read up on it more? anyways, my point was that "usability in general" is not the key (reddit has famously terrible interfaces, for example). it is being really usable on the core functionality it should provide (li…

> did people migrate from twitter / reddit to discord / slack?

Six technical reddit groups that I monitor regularly all migrated. I was kind of surprised as that was 100% of the technical groups I regularly track on reddit. 3 are now on Discord, 1 went to Slack, 2 set up a Discourse.

In terms of "number of people", it's probably not that much. However, in terms of adding "+reddit" to Google searches, it's going to be a massive hit.

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