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Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

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Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#121

Post by djsumdog »

kick wrote: post #82

To those of you pushing for ActivityPub: Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (Pleroma). AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped cont…

I've contribute to Mastodon and run an instance. Yes, it's very silly to think you can use Activity Pub for non-public things .. but isn't that going to be true of ANY distributed social networking protocol?

Direct point-to-point we can make secure (relatively) yes. You can run your own e-mail server, setup up PGP keys, and once you make it through that usability nightmare, you now have secure e-mail (if you trust your hosting provider) that will probably get dropped as SPAM 1/3 of the time when e-mailing anyone on Google/MS/Yahoo.

There's an interesting case where Mastodon and Pleroma respect and forward delete requests. Say you have a thread started on BigInstanceA and I reply from PersonalInstanceB. Someone from IAC replies to the same thread and B sees it, but A can't because C is banned from A. The reply gets dropped. You now have two conversations not in sync.

Say A deletes the original. B gets the delete request, but C never does, since it's a banned instance from A's perspective and doesn't exist ... even though it has a full copy of the deleted thread.

Deletes are truly fucking silly in the AP world. As much criticism as Zuckerberge gets (and deserves), back in the day he just wanted everything public, and I'm kinda for that too. If I post something online, it's never personal. If I need to talk about something personal, I call a friend, or text them, or meet them in a bar or plan my next vacation to be in their city. Real conversations don't happen in this space.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#122

Post by toomuchtodo »

deweller wrote: post #117
edf13 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It costs ~$1500 for the Internet Archive to store a TB of data forever. Cut them a check or provide an ongoing endowment (along perhaps with some technical resources to scale up a distributed web instead of existing solely in SF) for them to be storage of last resort (everything else can be a tier of caching on your platform).

Let's Encrypt runs for around $3MM/year. Same budget for Internet Archive allows for adding storage for 2PB of content. Scale up accordingly. No blockchain! [1]

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Die5UdaX0AALEtL.jpg

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#123

Post by M2Ys4U »

banads wrote: post #78
deegles wrote: post #65

So now instead of a focused team of experts detecting and removing disinformation campaigns, each user will have to figure it out on their own or hire a service to do it.

Good, then people will be more inclined towards independent critical thinking

Good luck with that

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#124

Post by the8472 »

kick wrote: post #82

To those of you pushing for ActivityPub: Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (Pleroma). AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped cont…

> putting naive users' data at risk has never and will never be acceptable

That's a misrepresentation of history. Being responsible for your own data hygiene has been the norm in many online circles for a long time. I have often experienced pretend-stalking (e.g. via exif information not stripped from images) as a way of opening the eyes of community members about the data they leak.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#129

Post by Arathorn »

For what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes here - complete with relative reputation systems (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos...) and an open standard (https://matrix.org/docs/spec) and even an open governance process and foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation) - and with work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix.

Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some opportunity to join forces on this.

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