"decentralized"?
Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
161–170 of 361 posts
Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
#162What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?
The ads aren't the problem of social networks. They are the problem of the Web. Usenets were the first social networks, but their monetization scheme didn't allow for mega international companies to exist: they were paid for to ISPs and ISPs only pay other ISPs for traffic, they don't pay for individual services. Email used to be the same way... sigh . Web became the platform that enabled for advertisement to be mixe…
This ignores the algorithmic ordering of social media feeds, which was unique to Facebook and then widely copied by all the other ad-ridden socials. There was no "connecting people" reason for them to do it, it was done because it made it easier to throw ads in to readers' feeds and make sure they'd be noticed.
Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
#163What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?
young people will always want a social network that connects them to their peers before they realize the damaging effects of it. Even if warned, guaranteed they won't care at first
Connecting people with their peers is most certainly not damaging-- any more than socializing in general.
Facebook started off GREAT! I singed up almost as soon as it was available to the general public (remember it was just open to university students at first).
At that time my timeline was basically text only and the content came from only my friends. It was like a fun online party -- not unlike online chat systems from the old days.
Then mysteriously all the people I enjoyed interacting with, disappeared from my timeline. Then I started getting content vaguely unrelated to my friends. Then meme photos I didn't want, ads and now basically just videos I hate and am bored of.
So the original concept is fine. It's just where we ended up that is mind numbing and alienating.
Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
#164What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?
young people will always want a social network that connects them to their peers before they realize the damaging effects of it. Even if warned, guaranteed they won't care at first
I wouldn't call myself young and I need/want a social network as well. It's not because a few people on HN don't see the utility or the positive aspects that they need to be banned. Jeez.
Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social networks are hotels, right. - First they are new and cool. The young, hip and rich stay often. - New becomes old. Shoddy carpet, old fixtures, bad music in the lobby but older people stay until they die. - New hotels sprout up with cool carpet, music and fixtures. The cycle repeats. The only way we can ditch them is to ban them and then they’ll go underground :( What is dead may never die.
Hotels where you don't pay rent, but everything is sponsored ad placement. I wish I could run a hotel like that in real life, just ads everywhere.
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Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a good moderation plan ^ This is the reason decentralized is better for everyone, including Meta. At a certain scale, content moderation goes from "hard" to "actually impossible." With enough users, you will eventually have an Kurdish knitting group that meets in Turkey, who uses ethnic slurs ironically as a commentary on the government's treatment of immigrants, and you'll have to unravel the whole thing when some…
There is ideal and there is practical, most people will not just switch from twitter because it allows someone to by pass govt. It will be difficult if no content is there.
People will follow people—we've already seen that with the tech community and Mastodon. Within niches like the iOS dev community, virtually everyone has jumped from Twitter to Mastodon. If a good centralized alternative comes along, other communities may jump to that. But so far, there are no centralized contenders on the Twitter front.
Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
#167Why is this obsession with decentralized? I don’t see the benefits of it at all. A central server is better if they have a good moderation plan built in. This whole decentralized idea is to wash their hands off moderation and not take a blame for the hellhole it will become. From a pure functional point of view, how can a decentralized network provide any performance guarantee? What am I missing?
> Why is this obsession with decentralized? I don’t see the benefits of it at all
To me this is the angle: we want to be available in China, this is the way to be available in China.
Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
#168> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work. This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences. As another commenter put it [1], the pr…
That's roughly how Mastodon works. Each instance is responsible for moderation of their own users. If an instance does not meet arbitrary standards of moderation, other instances may choose not to federate with them, but nothing can stop willing instances from federating.
One problem: as far as I understand a number of high profile instances enforced a rule where they would block any instance that didn't block certain other instances.
I'm all for blocking a good number of instances myself, but putting limits on others, that is a whole different thing.
Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
#169This is a tangent, but it's so cute that Meta copied Apple's naming scheme for secret projects. Mark really thinks he can be Steve.
Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
#170Curious that the article speaks plenty about Dorsey and ommits the fact that he has been very active on the Nostr platform. Nostr is so far the only platform where I see a decentralized future. Mastodon does not provide portable identities that you can easily move to other servers, nor helps you to preserve your post from previous years. Nostr solved both obstacles. One private key, zero email addresses needed. Move…
You're conflating the limitations of Mastodon with the limitations of ActivityPub.
ActivityPub does not require "email addresses" for identity - that's a Mastodon idiosyncrasy. Identities in ActivityPub are URLs, so as long as you own your domain you can preserve your identity. That's not too different than your identity being a public key, with the benefit of human readability.
Mastodon doesn't offer you export/import of your activities because - again due to its idiosyncrasies - it does not care about past activities. What a user "sees" when they visit another account is only what that account has posted and has already been disseminated to the current account's Mastodon server. A sane approach to past activities would be to load them in response to the user interaction, instead of serving stale data from the db. For this case exporting activities from one service to another would allow for continuity.
This could probably be achieved even at protocol level, ActivityPub in its simplest form has enough vocabulary to allow loading a collection and adding its elements to a another one.
Some of these things exist in one form or another in other clients than Mastodon.