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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

#221

Post by bilbo0s »

zmzrr wrote: post #216
masukomi wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Federated has some, perhaps different, individual or organization in charge of each server to which users are able to connect. There may be hundreds of different individuals and companies hosting and controlling different servers. All of which could either choose to communicate with each other, or not. Each of these servers would have, perhaps, millions of users who would then be beholden to the regulatory whims of the individual or organization controlling the server they join. An example would be Mastadon.

In a completely decentralized architecture, every client would also be a server. And every client could, potentially, connect to every other client. So every user is beholden only to himself. Other users would be free, of course, not to connect to that user, but the user could post whatever s/he wanted without fear of being cut off. There is no good example of this architecture out there right now.

Basically with Mastadon, you can be cut off. With a hypothetical completely distributed social network architecture, you can't. (Well, maybe your ISP could cut off your internet connection? But that's a whole other issue.)

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

#222

Post by Arathorn »

kick wrote: post #199
Arathorn wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

(Breaking out this sentence into blocks because it's very large.) The specification as-written is really, really bad (though I don't think this is a fault of the protocol), Synapse is kind of...and work on Dendrite seems to have mostly stalled, the billion people signed up on matrix.org has allowed for a sort of de facto centralization (not a huge problem, though in practice it sort of is, given how much the server b…

Thanks for answering.

> The specification as-written is really, really bad

We get a pretty wide range of feedback on the spec fwiw: some people seem to really like it. Others say that it’s “really, really bad” which doesn’t exactly give us much to go on...

> Synapse is kind of... and Dendrite is stalled

We have no choice but improve Synapse currently, and while it is still quite a resource hog it’s improved by at least 3-5x over the last year. Dendrite instead has become more of an R&D project for future homeserver shapes, but it’s not entirely stalled.

> The matrix.org server causes de-facto centralisation

The server has been less than 50% of the visible network for several years now - and ironically the datacenter perf issues (unrelated to Synapse) we had over the last few months have shifted that balance further - it’s about 35% and dropping. Ideally we will turn it off entirely once we have decentralised accounts.

> lack of e2ee by default is iffy

Our main project right now is to fix this. Cross-signing is mid flight; E2E search is done; Pantalaimon (E2E compat for dumb clients) is done; remaining key distribution bugs are in flight. We’re aiming to turn it in by default in Jan.

> “I couldn’t figure out how the state resolution works”

State resolution is the main technical novelty in Matrix, and yeah - it’s hard, much like git’s merge resolution is not exactly easy either. Unfortunately it comes with the territory; if you want to have consistent room state while replicating them over a byzantine network of servers to stop hijacks and other abuse, you have a relatively hard problem to solve. We got it wrong the first time; the current version gets it right (as far as we know).

The spec (which is deliberately formal and terse) is https://matrix.org/docs/spec/rooms/v2

However, there are supporting documents linked from the spec to help clarify: the original spec proposal at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/erikj/state_re... and the guide at https://matrix.uhoreg.ca/stateres/reloaded.html etc

Ironically I think that state res is one of the best documented and understood bits of Matrix now (which is just as well, given how important it is).

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

#223

Post by geofft »

kick wrote: post #60
mactavish88 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, I literally read the spec (and related specs) last week in detail. Secondly, there's a massive difference between decentralized and distributed systems (I build distributed systems for a living). Perhaps you're confused about that difference? Thirdly, if you're going to knock a collective effort like ActivityPub by calling it a "horrible protocol" without genuine technical substantiation, you're effecti…

Webber's trashed it (the initial author), 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 (look on their Pleroma profiles, there's a _bunch_ of bitching about AP). You're frankly uninformed on many levels, and while I'd normally refrain from replying to someone so obviously delusional, let's gi…

> You're frankly uninformed on many levels, and while I'd normally refrain from replying to someone so obviously delusional

This would be inappropriate even if you weren't factually wrong.

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

#224

Post by asymmetric »

hobofan wrote: post #185
Arathorn wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really glad you mentioned that! I was looking into building something on top of SecureScuttleButt, but didn't like some of the opinionated choices in it (same goes for ActivityPub). Looking at Matrix spec, the two seem to be somewhat conceptually similar, and Matrix seems to cover my needs. Never even thought to consider it before, but it might actually be a really good fit!

What were the choices you didn’t like about Scuttlebutt?

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

#225

Post by Arathorn »

x3haloed wrote: post #197
munfred wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed (I'm a matrix user myself). When I saw the thread I was confused about what exactly (if anything) he wanted to achieve that couldn't be done with matrix. I'd be surprised if he wasn't familiar with it already. Perhaps it's largely about branding/development control? I imagine it looks better to investors to say "we're making this new thing" rather than "we're gonna use this other thing that we don't own".

I stumbled upon Matrix the other day. The reason I passed it over was it sounds like all discussions happen in rooms, which made me think Matrix is basically chat room software. Is there a way to have a public discussion on Matrix with the entire user base like Twitter?

“Rooms” in Matrix are more a space in which you persist arbitrary data rather than a literal chatroom. They can absolutely be world visible and used to create per-user timeline or per-tag timelines as you need for microblogging.

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

#226

Post by staltz »

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…

Very relevant context for what they are looking for can be found not in Jack's thread but Parag's thread: https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1204766188074459136?s=19

This rules out a lot of existing projects. IMO rules out AP, SSB, Matrix, etc

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

#228

Post by cyphar »

zmzrr wrote: post #216
masukomi wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Email is federated (you pick a mail host and can communicate with people on different hosts), while BitTorrent is distributed (users send data to each other without needing a fixed set of servers to mediate).

Technically, decentralisation refers to anything that is not centralised (so both federated and distributed protocols would count) but in modern usage decentralisation refers more to distributed protocols.

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

#229

Post by tyrust »

mactavish88 wrote: post #30
phoe-krk wrote: post #21

Isn't this called ActivityPub and hasn't this been working well for the last couple of years?

Exactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization? Are there genuine technical shortcomings in the ActivityPub standard that Twitter's engineering team has identified? Why not talk about that and contribute improvements to the standard? Are there shortcomings to being part of the standardization process in the W3C? Then talk…

>I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub

Your doubts are correct. From the thread:

>@halcy: So, ActivityPub?

>@jack: Team will have charge to choose whatever is best, be that what exists today or start from scratch.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204807357294727168

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

#230

Post by asymmetric »

emacsen wrote: post #196
kick wrote: 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…

> Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, This is not true on multiple levels Webber has not trashed ActivtiyPub. I'd love if you could provide some evidence. And the updates, in the form of OcapPub, are not at all incompatible with the current AP. They're an optional add-on that has a good default behavior. Source: I worked…

What’s the podcast named?
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