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Fediverse

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Re: Fediverse

#111

Post by layer8 »

moron4hire wrote: post #94
layer8 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gives me the thought that the focus should be on federating communities (boards/subreddits/forums/newsgroups/whatever you want to call it), and user identities only as a secondary aspect. The instances would choose which boards they want to host, and the contents of the boards would be synchronized between instances. The contents of the boards would be controlled by the community (board owners/moderators). Insta…

I think we really need to get over the idea of trying to get our content perpetually propagated out to the population, or trying to not miss out on consuming every single bit of content in a category. It's okay to live in a small community. Hell, it's okay to live in an enclave of a small community. There were whole sections of various topic boards I never visited, with active members there that I would not have reco…

I’m not sure how that relates to my parent comment. What I outlined can apply both to private boards and public boards.

Nevertheless, for the purpose of discoverability, I’m a fan of public forums. However that’s still more a pull model than a push model, and very different from “microblogging” platforms (e.g. Twitter).

Re: Fediverse

#112

Post by giantrobot »

deltarholamda wrote: post #92
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ActivityPub is a generalization of Email. Email gives you a cloud-hosted inbox that others can put stuff in. ActivityPub gives you both an online inbox AND a "outbox" that YOU can put stuff in that others can check out. Check out this diagram: https://activitypub.rocks/static/images/ActivityPub-tutorial... The stuff here is called an "Activity" around "Objects". Follow request is a "Follow" activity with the "Actor"…

>ActivityPub gives you both an online inbox AND a "outbox" that YOU can put stuff in that others can check out. It's djb's Internet Mail 2000!

That's a term I haven't heard in forever. For those that don't know the reference: https://cr.yp.to/im2000.html

Re: Fediverse

#113

Post by dash2 »

deltarholamda wrote: post #91
riffic wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace. Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will b…

> I've been pitching this idea for years and no one's ever given a serious critique of the idea. It would dilute the Twitter brand and divide internal resources. That's the main critique I can think of. Would never happen while Twitter was a publicly traded corporation. Under private ownership, it very well might happen. I think the Fediverse idea is great, but people are dumb. @somebody is about as far as most peopl…

It's strange to argue that people are stupid because they don't want to deal with irrelevant technicalities. Are they also stupid because they prefer domain names to IP addresses?

Re: Fediverse

#114

Post by thriftwy »

JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

Platforms should not own content and subscribers graph. Users should own content and subscribers graph, preferably by reliance on public key cryptography. Then you will be notified of your peers' contents on any platform.

Imagine a popular but controversial blogger deplatforming attempt, followed by his 300k subscribers getting an 'Your contact has just uploaded their first video on NextTube' notification in five minutes. You don't need many platforms when platform understands they only have power to de-content themselves.

You also no longer need those rows of social icons since you only need to subscribe to a creator once.

Content should reside in P2P/DHT mesh and platforms would only present, curate, decorate and discover it. But it should also be discoverable via PKI+DHT.

Re: Fediverse

#115

Post by myself248 »

andreyk wrote: post #107
JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

For 2, I wonder if there could be a 'wrapper' service (website) around Fediverse that makes it as easy to set up an instance as Slack or Discord. It would still be decentralized, except the service could abstract away the technical bits entirely.

Bingo. Send payment here, choose a name, your instance spins up, and stays up as long as you've paid for hosting.

When payment runs out, it emails you a download link to export your data which you can take to another provider, or just start paying again and it starts working again.

I'd send a few bucks to such a site, sure.

Re: Fediverse

#116

Post by ianopolous »

Ambolia wrote: post #3

Which are the platforms that let you own your data cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly for yourself and your followers? Basically the network should be in the data and the servers should be replaceable. I think those are very obvious bottlenecks that affect most of these alternative networks. On the other side, censorship is also very important, nobody wants to have to dwell into spam an…

You might be interested in Peergos - https://peergos.org (co-founder here)

Properties: * fully self-authenticating protocol independent of DNS and the TLS certificate authorities * self sovereign identity * you can migrate to a different host and keep all your data, and social graph, and old links continue to work. * You can authorize and run live mirrors of your data which help provide bandwidth * you only see things from or via people you follow

Re: Fediverse

#117

Post by kixiQu »

JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

https://runyourown.social/#keep-it-small <-- Something like 50, where only 1 or 2 have to have the technical skills, seems reasonable to amortize the admin time. I don't totally know why we're saying that kind of middle number is infeasible.

Re: Fediverse

#118

Post by krinchan »

As someone whose primary social media is in the Fediverse, the discussion in this thread is ... confusing? It's so disconnected from my experienced reality of the Fediverse I don't even know where to begin.

Functionally, my experience within the Fediverse is it's literally just Twitter but with moderation fully broken up between instances and not agreed on. An instance's administrator(s) can decide what instances users are allowed to interact with. This is done either via whitelisting or blacklisting, though almost all instances work via blacklisting. Furthermore, administrators have total control over moderation.

Users pick the instances that closely align with their own ideals. If they don't like the moderation, they can move instances.

The software that backs the Fediverse and the software that consumes it is quite varied. Users are unusually adept at navigating all this.

We had the same sort of frontend diversity in Twitter for many years. This isn't much more than that, honestly. Now you just can match any client with any set of moderation rules you like best. It's very much a free market approach to the question of moderation of user generated content by Big Tech.

When it's so easy to move between instances and you have a large selection of moderation rules to select from for your account's "residence", you no longer really have a legal leg to stand on for "censorship" because you can just move next door where explicit adult gifs are totes cool and your followers will be updated with your new home. There's literally a network of instances that can be as moderated as your most loathsome ban happy video game board to as unmoderated as your favorite anonymous image board. And you get to pick. Not Musk. Not wall street. And certainly not Congress.

Re: Fediverse

#119

Post by rglullis »

riffic wrote: post #80
JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace. Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will b…

I've been waiting for you to join communick, as this has been my plan from the start. ;)

I started with the simple "managed" hosting, now I am hearing things up to do custom hosting and the whitelabel.

Re: Fediverse

#120

Post by msoucy »

myself248 wrote: post #115
andreyk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 2, I wonder if there could be a 'wrapper' service (website) around Fediverse that makes it as easy to set up an instance as Slack or Discord. It would still be decentralized, except the service could abstract away the technical bits entirely.

Bingo. Send payment here, choose a name, your instance spins up, and stays up as long as you've paid for hosting. When payment runs out, it emails you a download link to export your data which you can take to another provider, or just start paying again and it starts working again. I'd send a few bucks to such a site, sure.

There is such a thing in masto.host, though I haven't used it personally.
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