Does anyone on HN have an interest in building a decentralized social network together? I've been thinking about doing this for a while now. Feel free to shoot me an email laksman [at] stanford [dot] edu
Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
111–120 of 426 posts
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#112It's RSS. Twitter invented RSS.
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#113I'm cautiously optimistic. Twitter has been been making some bad decisions with content moderation, and has abandoned the idea of being the "Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party". Decentralization should restore that... ...should. That notion could disappear really fast if Twitter gets to decide who can run an instance based on their belief systems. In the mean time, it's an interesting case study of what happen…
“Free speech” twitter alternatives exist, and invariably turn into cesspools (see gab.ai).
Free speech includes things people may not want to hear, plus the definition of hate speech is a constantly moving target.
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#114While it's probably just an extension of Jack's obsession over blockchain, it's a bit interesting that you'd have to use Twitter to apply: there are a few truly-decentralized/or federated solutions that have been proposed and have an active userbase, and the authors of the good stuff don't tend to be on Twitter. For example, one of the people working on one of the most prominent pieces of software implementing the Ac…
I'm glad they're planning on using ocaps. Not so optimistic that twitter understands ocaps though. They should hire Mark S. Miller to consult for them or something.
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#115How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation? It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.
I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship. Dorsey wants a decentralized system exactly because he won't be held liable for not censoring people. It makes sense business-wise and it's a win-win for humanity. Twitter has become a trigger-happy-people-fest because each group knows they can weaponize censorship against each other. With systems that are uncensored , nobody complaint…
It's stupid to be 100% against censorship. Some things should be censored. Like child abuse imagery, for example.
The questions are where do you draw the line, and who gets to decide where the line is drawn?
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization? Are there genuine technical shortcomings in the ActivityPub standard that Twitter's engineering team has identified? Why not talk about that and contribute improvements to the standard? Are there shortcomings to being part of the standardization process in the W3C? Then talk…
ActivityPub is a horrible protocol, and not decentralized. Neither of you know what you're talking about, and not even the people working on AP like AP!
From my viewpoint the problem with ActivityPub and Mastodon is that they copied twitters flaws: public by default.
There's a reason why people stick with Facebook, go to WhatsApp, Telegram and what not: most of us don't want to communicate publicly all the time.
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think its mostly about egos but rather about money. Something like Ethereum offers a potential profit model which ActivityPub does not. Also ActivityPub relies on servers/federated rather than p2p.
It's been tried before on Eth... can't recall the name now but the biggest issue is the Gas price/cost to post any update. As with all(Most) Blockchains ~ it simply is too expensive to store data. Especially at any scale.
A typical solution to this is to store the data outside of the blockchain and then checkpoint a hash of the data snapshot into the blockchain at regular intervals.
This provides tamper resistance to the data.
Incentivizing users or organizations to store large amounts of data is still a problem of course.
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).
The terminology I've most commonly seen used is this: Centralized = One central system runs everything (i.e. Twitter, Facebook) Decentralized = Multiple central systems run everything, but they talk to each other and you can build your own (i.e. email, Mastodon/ActivityPub) Distributed = No central system at all (i.e. Bitcoin)
Decentralised implies distributed (although the inverse is not true - one can have a distributed yet centralised model).