I'm willing to bet this is a reaction to a the Indian exodus from Twitter to the fediverse
could you elaborate? or provide a link?
Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
161–170 of 426 posts
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, Mastodon doesn't implement the full ActivityPub spec [0]. They're still very much behind the effort though, it seems [1] (or at least they were in 2018). I'm not a Mastodon developer, nor have I developed with it, but surely there are learnings there that could potentially be contributed back to the W3C to make ActivityPub better (including making it more rigorously spec'd). The people at the W3C are not gods -…
Sure, Mastodon doesn't implement the full ActivityPub spec [0]. They're still very much behind the effort though, it seems [1] (or at least they were in 2018). Not only this, but they go against it in multiple places. How they've implemented 'summary' and the bizarre things they've done to create compatibility with Misskey (but not in an actually-compatible way, Misskey's had to patch their own solution every time) h…
> W3C is not neutral, and not only are they not neutral, but the RIAA and MPAA are people with enough sway to have messed up the entire web multiple times (see: making EME a standard).
> A neutral party sounds great! The W3C should not get to be involved, however.
Perhaps I got lost along the way, but... we're still talking about Twitter here right?
Are you seriously calling out the W3C, an open but obviously flawed organisation, for finally capitulating on DRM, after huge public drama and well-documented opposition from within the W3C. DRM is something entities such as Twitter use as a matter of course; there is no public discourse, nor documentation.
This isn't even as basic as pots calling kettles black, any reservations one could have about W3C as an org are positively laughable when the alternative is a standard stewarded by a corporation with the size and influence of Twitter.
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#163> Instead he pointed to the principle of decentralization, and key technologies, such as blockchain, as the solution. Ah... so that's how he's going to get the funding: https://external-preview.redd.it/CypLdP3MLDVm15Lwm1f-M98gyMh... Why else would you need to insert a blockchain into the solution? Scuttlebutt ( https://scuttlebutt.nz/ ) is already one possible solution and they wouldn't have to reinvent some new prot…
It's worth mentioning that Secure Scuttlebutt uses a signature chain, which provides many benefits of conventional blockchains without forcing a consensus (which is the part that requires "mining"). My experience with SSB has been very positive.
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#164A team of "up to five" - is this actually a serious effort? I get that five strong minds can do quite a lot but from a corporate strategic point of view this is a minnow, surely?
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#165For 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 buildin…
But Matrix is mostly built around chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter. I would assume any new system would take some parts of Matrix and some parts of ActivityPub but not the entire thing.
We built Matrix to synchronise any kind of comms data - we just call the primitive a “room” rather than (say) a “pubsub topic” or whatever more general term. You can absolutely build microblogging on top of Matrix; there are already a few toy examples already.
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#166Twitter has repeatedly demonstrated that they are not a developer friendly company and that you should never build anything on their APIs. Since day one, they've done nothing but crack down on 3rd party development and peel away access. They are the last company that should be trusted to develop an open standard.
I've been banned for many years and can no longer get access to even my own data
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#167To 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 think this is a mischaracterization. I've read Webber's writing on OcapPub[0], and his more recent writing on ActivityPub[1]. I'm not getting the impression that Webber thinks ActivityPub is broken, or that he's stopped advocating for it, or that he's trying to replace it.
In his own words:
> "OcapPub" sounds like a new protocol, whereas it's really just a way-to-use ActivityPub mostly as it already exists. Maybe time for a new name for that?
Even if Webber does think ActivityPub has fundamental problems, he doesn't seem to be discouraging anyone from pushing it. I mean, go ahead and watch his most recent talk and decide whether or not Webber is "trashing" ActivityPub.[2]
> "It was 3 years of really hard work, and it wasn't clear in the process if it was going to pay off. And it has. We now have this as a standard that we can all use to be able to speak to each other, and I think this is really exciting."
[0]: https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org
[1]: https://dustycloud.org/blog/2019-10-01-updates/
[2]: https://conf.tube/videos/watch/2b9a985b-ccdd-49ce-a81b-ed00d...
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#168dear mod, this is a dup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#169Does 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
What's the problem with existing ones? And why do social networks draw so much attention relative to other social platform patterns, like forums?
I've been thinking for a while that there should be something like a decentralized omni-Reddit. I liked forums, but people don't want to use them anymore, because there are too many different signups and too many different notification streams/etc. on too many different sites to bother with - so if you had something like Mastodon for forums, that could mitigate that.
But it seems like a consensus has set in that Facebook/Twitter-like social networks are the One True Model, and very few people are interested in things like forums anymore.
Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather see interest in Matrix than ActivityPub.
Matrix has a lot of problems, too, but at least it's not fundamentally flawed, which is a good thing.
(matrix proj lead here): ooi what sort of problems are you thinking of here? just to check they are on our radar at the right priority.