The case for the decentralization of online forums
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Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums
#2Not to say there should be only centralized solutions, but there are tradeoffs. The case against decentralization is that moderation and resisting network attacks can be non-trivial amounts of work. Many newspapers shut down their forums for lack of being able to form a quality level of conversation forum without a massive amount of work. In the case of reddit, a subreddit could share the work of building common moderation strategies and tools, increasing the quality accessible. Ironically, reddit killing their third-party api, kills some of their centralization advantages in this respect.
Sharing common work is possible in decentralized forums, but only with somewhat standardized interfaces. Of which activity-pub and mastodon et al are sort of just on the starting path. Every forum choosing among a myriad of forum interfaces makes other subdomains of the same solution harder to coordinate and mature vs centralized.
Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums
#3Flarum got a grant to make it federated like Mastodon.
https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2...
Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums
#4[deleted]
Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums
#5Sorry, I don't buy it:
1. Regarding the monetization scheme, nobody has ever gotten anything to really significantly work beyond advertising. Yes, there are some niche solutions that can support a dev team of maybe 1, but at the end of the day most people aren't willing to pay with anything except their time.
2. Social networks that don't have at least some level of top-down moderation always seem to turn into complete cesspools that fail. You could say reddit relies on their volunteer moderators, and that's totally true, but even these moderators must abide by rules, reddit has terminated numerous subreddits in the past for breaking the rules, etc.
I think people should fundamentally accept that humans can't "self organize" at a very large scale on the Internet. I think the reason for this is that anonymity (and I obviously see the irony in me posting about this) completely breaks our normal human systems of "checks and balances". I honestly think Mike Tyson said it best: "Social media made you all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." There are just too few downsides to being a complete asshole or troll online, where in the real world there are natural consequences for acting that way.
Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums
#6Couldn't ActivityPub be used to as the protocol for this without any modifications? I don't see a logical difference between the structure of Pleroma/Mastodon conversations and a message forum aside from how the UI is presented. If someone took the UI of phpBB but used ActivityPub as the data source it should Just Work(tm).
Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums
#7On that article, decentralization only means going back to early 2000's with small hosted forum sites or something still centralized like Mastodon.
Technology truly moved far in the meanwhile. At the moment the only protocol that goes beyond expectations is Nostr.
Over there it doesn't matter where your data is hosted and there are zero blochains. The only thing that matters is your private key (identity) and with that you can always write wherever someone is willing to accept your writings.
Quite a novelty paradigm, worthy of a true sucessor to Usenet.
Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums
#8Not to say there should be only centralized solutions, but there are tradeoffs. The case against decentralization is that moderation and resisting network attacks can be non-trivial amounts of work. Many newspapers shut down their forums for lack of being able to form a quality level of conversation forum without a massive amount of work. In the case of reddit, a subreddit could share the work of building common mode…
(author here)
this is a great point, thank you for posting it.
i've been researching this problem for a year now, and came across some interesting technical and social povs on moderation and network attacks.
- moderation: my pov is that large companies with teams of moderators (such as twitter or facebook) wont and cant scale to varied moderation policies across the world. so the task of moderation has to be boiled down to the communities themselves. the question then is - a) how do you prevent a moderator from getting power hungry, b) how do you incentivize them to do the work and c) how do you make this auditable and provide recourse mechanisms? for all of this, open access to an API to build the right tools is super important as you said. and having this done on a protocol is the only real way to scale it imo.
- network attacks: we've done a lot of work in approximate solutions for sybil attacks. using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) as a way to order messages, and having them stored on multiple locations (eg arweave) in append only ways gives a lot more resilience / provides a way towards solutions here.
Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums
#9Couldn't ActivityPub be used to as the protocol for this without any modifications? I don't see a logical difference between the structure of Pleroma/Mastodon conversations and a message forum aside from how the UI is presented. If someone took the UI of phpBB but used ActivityPub as the data source it should Just Work(tm).
great point. IMO, there are a few things that are needed at the technical level for a system like this to work.
- identity - a common id system across the whole system that supports all existing means (think oauth based)
- a mechanism to sign your messages to prove that you truly were the poster (since there is no longer a central authority to validate that)
- a mechanism to store these messages and get them in real time (this is where activitypub can be super handy)
- a way to search / index these messages for retrieval
- a way to create a feed of activity that uses some algorithm for ranking
- a way to discover other forums / communities
so while activity pub serves well for one aspect, the other ones aren't quite there yet to be used in a decentralized fashion.
Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums
#10Flarum got a grant to make it federated like Mastodon. https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2...
this is a really interesting point, thanks for pointing to it. Flarium to me competes with discourse in many ways, vs say, Reddit.
one of the biggest challenges to this model (IMO) has been that there is no "subreddit" or "stack exchange" model for discovery, or for communities to build their own "spaces".
my post comes at this from the perspective of - what would it take to create a decentralized "reddit", complete with subreddits etc. your comment makes me realize that I can do better in addressing this point! ty!