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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

#171

Post by ChristianBundy »

danShumway wrote: post #89
EGreg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federated means you’re part of a giant tree with some authority on the top (like DNS has with ICANN). Decentralized means there is no center I would add that Distributed to me seems there are no inherent “domains” you need to belong to, like for example email is federated but with scuttlebutt you’re identified by your public key and a hub is just a dumb relay and you can have many. Non-federated routing alternatives…

What's the authority at the top of Mastadon? You can have private instances that don't federate with anyone, and there's no coordinated authority that controls any other instance. For that matter, what is the authority at the top of email? You and I can set up an email server and start talking to each other right now without anyone's permission. We don't have to be connected to anyone else, and we don't have any auth…

If you're using Mastodon or email you need a server with a public IP address, which most people don't have. Distributed solutions like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) don't require that, so you can pass messages via any available relay server, LAN, or even a sneaker-net.

It's also worth mentioning that most people have to trust their Mastodon / email provider not to snoop in their private messages. Systems like SSB provide true end-to-end encryption that makes it safe to broadcast your private messages to the world.

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

#172

Post by ChristianBundy »

laksmanv wrote: post #90

Does 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

If you're interested in joining an existing group of folks who are already working on this: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

Feel free to email me if you'd like an invite to the network.

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

#173

Post by lucideer »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #152
kick wrote: post #139

Earlier 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). 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…

> Secure Scuttlebutt (not a fan, but it's much better than AP) If you have any specific feedback about which improvements are most important to you, I'd love to hear it. It's hard to see things with fresh eyes after you've been working on them for a bit.

Not op but would like to comment on this:

SSB is great; I'm not sure if others would agree, but while I think it has a lot of problems, none seem inherent (i.e. while they mightn't necessarily be easy to fix, they wouldn't involve any major architectural overhauls or scratch rethinks; what's there is conceptually sound).

The main issue for me is performance and resource usage, which is tricky since a lot of the traditional solutions to perf/resource challenges are cloud-based, which would erode ssb's value. Thinking about SSB on older recycled or embedded systems, etc. is hard.

The other is NIH; this is definitely something I feel the community is acutely aware of however; I recall seeing discussions of parallel implementations in Kafka, etc. years ago. I haven't kept up with recent development though.

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

#175

Post by javiermares »

thisisbrians wrote: post #125

Cool idea, sure. Maybe they should have had the marketing team look at the banner image before going live. Definitely undermines the perceived legitimacy of the effort in my opinion: https://twitter.com/bluesky

if anything, whimsical memery adds authenticity, sincerity, hacky feeling. i'd be suspicious of anything more packaged or polished

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

#176

Post by jp555 »

mathnmusic wrote: post #28

They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon. In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub cl…

I thought the W3C has been captured by corporations?

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

#177

Post by M2Ys4U »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #161
M2Ys4U wrote: post #127

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?

Sure:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-50343054

https://qz.com/india/1746734/angry-twitter-india-users-are-m...

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/mastodon-happening-in...

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/indians-leav...

https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/social-n...

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

#178

Post by throwaway_tech »

gkoberger wrote: post #99
OzzyB wrote: post #10

“There's an old saying on the Internet — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”

I know it seems like Bush forgot the quote, but in reality he likely realized halfway through he didn't want a soundbite of him saying "Shame on me".

>I know it seems like Bush forgot the quote

Of all people to give the benefit of the doubt to...you give it to a bumbling idiot who was known for misspeaking and tongue tying himself into knots?

Before he even messed up the saying, he messed up his own introduction to the saying:

>There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee...

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

#179

Post by VectorLock »

mathnmusic wrote: post #28

They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon. In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub cl…

>ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter could have been.

Twitter management actively and specifically decided to not be that.

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

#180

Post by kick »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #152
kick wrote: post #139

Earlier 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). 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…

> Secure Scuttlebutt (not a fan, but it's much better than AP) If you have any specific feedback about which improvements are most important to you, I'd love to hear it. It's hard to see things with fresh eyes after you've been working on them for a bit.

I actually think that the SSBC has done a fantastic job with it: the work that's been done is really impressive. I'm mostly just not a fan of the ground it's built on; the implementation itself is amazing, and the protocol is solid. I wish you good luck with it!

And to anyone unfamiliar, I recommend checking out the "Principles" section of the handbook; there's a lot of interesting stuff in it, and it proves that Scuttlebutt's really got the best culture/morality of any distributed network so far:

https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/principles/

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