Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

211–220 of 426 posts

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

#211
post #17

The Mastodon project Twitter helpfully provided a list of existing projects that are robust and already fairly popular. https://twitter.com/MastodonProject/status/12047748080153272... Mastodon has a number of instance and user-level boundary controls, like image muting for porn and sex work instances, that let people still federate with instances that could be trouble without that boundary. It would keep a hypothetic…

Here is a long list of AP projects in various stages of development:

https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/watch...

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

#212
post #88

How could they avoid mentioning ActivityPub? This already exists! This goal is full of double-think.

ActivityPub isn't decentralized. It's federated. There's a big difference. That being said, solutions like Scuttlebutt, DAT, & IPFS are decentralized, do work, and do have social networks.

Jack mentioned SMTP as a similar standard for email, so I think by decentralized they do mean federated.

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

#213
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 yo…

> Yes, it's very silly to think you can use Activity Pub for non-public things

What do you base your statement on? I've heard this take before, but I haven't seen anyone provide a good explanation for it.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Perhaps ActivityPub is struggling because it tries to be too much. If it does well at being Twitter, why must it also be Signal messenger? I don't use DM's much at Twitter, if that feature wasn't a part of AP/Mastodon, I wouldn't cry! That comes across in delete requests. There's no way to guarantee that a server would honor that request. I don't think a blockchain style solution is needed -- just don't try to offer…

The protocol itself is aimed at being universal, so it's inherent to the protocol.

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

#215

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 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.

Once you strip the perceptive differences from the UI isn't twitter just a bunch of chat rooms and private conversations that update less 'live' than you'd expect a chat room to do.

I wrote a toy twitter clone using a discord server as a data source and it worked pretty coherently

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

#216
post #88

How could they avoid mentioning ActivityPub? This already exists! This goal is full of double-think.

ActivityPub isn't decentralized. It's federated. There's a big difference. That being said, solutions like Scuttlebutt, DAT, & IPFS are decentralized, do work, and do have social networks.

What's the difference between decentralised and federated?

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

#217
This is huge. The problem for any federated initiative is that most of the users are already on established social media platforms. If Twitter adopts an existing protocol (or creates a new one that others can join on), then new services can be compatible with Twitter's massive user base.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

This retconned history of the mistake that's popped up in the last few years is bizarre. No one thought this at the time. Bush tripped over his words all the time. It's much more likely that than a calculated move (that backfired btw, it's been his most famous quote since the day he said it.)

> No one thought this at the time.

I remember hearing people suggest this is why he misspoke shortly after it happened.

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

#219

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…

They got rid of RSS to force everyone to have to engage with their timeline. I doubt they would be nice enough to do this

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

#220

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…

They got rid of RSS to force everyone to have to engage with their timeline. I doubt they would be nice enough to do this

I hope they will be.

About Twitter RSS: I recently discovered nitter.net. It's a Twitter front-end without all that tracking and with the addition of RSS. Jack's at https://nitter.net/jack and the RSS is https://nitter.net/jack/rss

Post reply on HN