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Are we decentralized yet?

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Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#151

Post by shadowgovt »

dom96 wrote: post #114
d4mi3n wrote: post #2

Neat! I'm not surprised at the findings here. BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization like we've seen in the AT-Proto ecosystem. I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon…

> BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to. I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.

There are also significant practical user experience differences.

Doing a search on Twitter searches Twitter, the whole thing. A search on Mastodon only knows about the servers you're connected to (unless you're searching for a specific user, then it'll micro-target their server to get their account info, but you have to know their name through some side-channel. Similarly, if you chance across a Mastodon post and want to follow that user, unless you happen to be on the same node as them you have to enter your own node data to get redirected to do the follow because of the domain-based nature of web security.

These aren't deal-breakers but we have the hard numbers from other web UX to know that every time you put a friction point like these in the flow, you immediately lose some x% of users. Relative to services that are centralized, these things will slow Mastodon adoption.

(This may not be the worst thing. There are other goals besides maximizing the adoption numbers.)

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#152

Post by shadowgovt »

N_Lens wrote: post #134
dom96 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to. I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.

Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.

I'm curious if you could expand on this observation? I've heard this from other Mastodon users but I haven't seen it myself; I wonder if it varies heavily from server to server or if I've just gotten lucky.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#153

Post by shadowgovt »

danabramov wrote: post #137
alethic wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not very interested in arguing over the ins and outs of "user expectations" and Mastodon vs. Bluesky, sorry. I would suggest you try it yourself and come to your own conclusion about whether this is a usable system :^)

I'm arguing that "not really consistent" from the grandparent post still applies, and therefore your "this isn't correct" isn't correct. For realtime discussions (like this one), I don't think we can call it consistent if it takes multiple minutes for each back-and-forth reply to propagate across instances in the best case (and potentially longer through multiple hops?) because you'll see different things depending o…

In practice, this is rarely an issue due to the nature of human attention. Beyond a couple dozen speakers in a conversation, it's noise.

At least to my observation; I haven't pulled apart the protocol to know why: if you're in a conversation in Mastodon it's real good about keeping you in it. The threading of posts seems to route them properly to the host servers the conversing accounts live on.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#154

Post by shadowgovt »

maxbond wrote: post #10
Animats wrote: post #8

Keep the needle pointing north. Towards the center of that dial. Too decentralized, and you can't find anything. Nobody uses it. Too centralized, and censorship takes over. Nobody can speak freely.

I don't disagree but I do wonder if a.) discoverability is really so intractable in a decentralized environment if you're willing to throw a lot of resources towards indexing and b.) if that middle ground isn't like balancing a pendulum upside down - a very fragile equilibrium. A bunch of decentralized units might join together, or a large centralized unit might fail, pushing the pendulum to either side. You can thin…

Fediverse makes the indexing question interesting because some people don't want it deeply indexed: they point to the practice of dredging up old opinions on Twitter as an anti-pattern that the tooling should not support. Indexing without permission is met with hostility / defederation over there, and both individuals and server owners have tools to switch fine-grained indexing on and off.

(It is, of course, fundamentally impossible to keep people from indexing a default-open network, but if one does it, one does not advertise doing it outside the service-supported mechanisms).

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#157

Post by nout »

immibis wrote: post #103
fsflover wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. Until the platform enshittifies like Reddit and Twitter did.

Still no one cares. They just hop to the next centralized platform that hasn't enshittified yet. As we are seeing now with Bluesky. Perhaps the idea of decentralization was incorrect to begin with, an NI hallucination - perhaps it should be all about centralization-hopping instead. I believe this is what Nostr aims for, though I've never used it.

Nostr is a bit different - you own a private key that signs any message (and action, but it's all JSON blobs) locally in your app and then you just broadcast these signed messages to servers ("relays") that cache and relay these to other relays or users. Other users can use your public key to cryptographically verify that the message is from you. The benefit is that you fully own your data, you can later decide to rebroadcast it to any other set of relays. It's common to have e.g. 20 relays connected from your app.

There is a group of people that care and use it and it works well.

One argument could be made here that decentralization also means that there will be variety of different protocols and solutions and that's ok.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#158

Post by danabramov »

shadowgovt wrote: post #153
danabramov wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm arguing that "not really consistent" from the grandparent post still applies, and therefore your "this isn't correct" isn't correct. For realtime discussions (like this one), I don't think we can call it consistent if it takes multiple minutes for each back-and-forth reply to propagate across instances in the best case (and potentially longer through multiple hops?) because you'll see different things depending o…

In practice, this is rarely an issue due to the nature of human attention. Beyond a couple dozen speakers in a conversation, it's noise. At least to my observation; I haven't pulled apart the protocol to know why: if you're in a conversation in Mastodon it's real good about keeping you in it. The threading of posts seems to route them properly to the host servers the conversing accounts live on.

And yet I could have a realtime public threaded conversation on Twitter, and am having one on Bluesky (regardless of which PDSs or AppViews other people are using), but cannot in principle have on Mastodon (unless everyone I talk to shares my instance). Does this say anything about relative ability of ATProto vs ActivityPub to meaningfully compete with centralized services?

I hear your point that slower conversation can be better. That’s a product decision though. Would you intentionally slow down HN so that our comments don’t appear immediately? You could certainly justify it as a product decision but there’s a fine line between saying you should be able to make such decisions in your product, and your technology forcing you to make such decisions due to its inability to provide a distributed-but-global-and-realtime view of the network.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#159

Post by maxbond »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #92
hklgny wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fediverse folks are violently against any efforts for discoverability. They like the high bar for discovering and joining. Any attempt gets brigaded and shut down quickly

They're against opt-out discovery, not discovery in general.

Given how toxic big tent communities like Twitter can get, I think that makes perfect sense for some communities. Some plants thrive in full sun, some plants thrive in the shade. Some social interactions happen in the town square and some happen at more intimate functions.

Re: Are we decentralized yet?

#160

Post by neltnerb »

shadowgovt wrote: post #152
N_Lens wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.

I'm curious if you could expand on this observation? I've heard this from other Mastodon users but I haven't seen it myself; I wonder if it varies heavily from server to server or if I've just gotten lucky.

Moderation (the intent and success) varies to such a huge extent that it's practically silly to talk about moderation on Mastodon unless you mean moderation on a specific mastodon server (like mastodon.social). But moderation (the process) is intense and servers are usually community run on the change found in a spare couch (i.e. they're volunteers).

I think they do quite well considering the disparate resource levels, but some servers are effectively unmoderated while others are very comfortable; plenty are racist or other types of bigot friendly, but the infrastructure for server-level blocks is ad-hoc. Yet it still seems to work better than you'd guess.

Decentralization means whomever runs the server could be great, could just not be good at running a server, could be a religious fundamentalist, a literal cop, a literal communist, a literal nazi, etc etc. And all have different ideas of what needs moderating. There is no mechanism to enforce that "fediverse wide" other than ad-hoc efforts on top of the system.

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