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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

#241

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…

I doubt that matrix could scale even remotely enough to handle twitter-size amount of messages

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, it's Facebook. Because there has to be one giant tech company that everyone hates and Microsoft lost interest in the position over 5 years ago.

From this thread the only conclusion I can draw is that Twitter is in the bottom five . Which is bad enough.

But it looks like a ranking where one can only rank at the bottom. Who is the company most loved by developers? GitHub? Stripe? Atlassian? SalesForce? Each of them has done something wrong at some point, and it may even be the sign of management’s ability to get rid of cruft, even if those choices don’t make us happy.

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

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmmm. So Twitter would basically be a room, and users could pretty much ignore the rest of the Matrix network?

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

#244
post #115
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship. Dorsey wants a decentralized system exactly because he won't be held liable for not censoring people. It makes sense business-wise and it's a win-win for humanity. Twitter has become a trigger-happy-people-fest because each group knows they can weaponize censorship against each other. With systems that are uncensored , nobody complaint…

It's stupid to be 100% against censorship. Some things should be censored. Like child abuse imagery, for example. The questions are where do you draw the line, and who gets to decide where the line is drawn?

This seems more like an appeal to emotion to justify the creation of censorship infrastructure than an actual solution to a problem.

I haven't heard of unsolicited CP being a common spam issue. And those who exchange CP intentionally can and do use encryption which makes such filters pointless.

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

#245

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…

Can someone explain in 3 short phrases or less how ActivityPub or another standard actually solves the problems that centralized social media creates?

Best to think about it like email. You can send and receive email to anyone at any domain, if their server is set up for email. We all just happened to centralize ourselves onto Gmail and Google's servers.

Replace email with "social media content" and you have ActivityPub.

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

#246
What does that mean in terms of responsibility to take bad content content down? Seems like this would allow them to argue fake news is not their problem anymore. They are just a nice interface to visualise stuff that is stored in a decentralised way, outside of their direct control. Also I guess it means you can cut this AWS bill by like a lot. And it feels like it gives a very clear path to direct monetisation.

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

#247

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…

> 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.

I would guess it's based on the fact that when most people hear "access control" they think of "access control lists", but it's possible to do decentralized access control. That's what ocaps are.

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

#248
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google is in the email business tons of businesses send promotional emails , even though they know the protocol is also used for sending porjn

And the only reason businesses still use email is Google's development of advanced and almost effective content moderation.

The difference between Google's moderation and Twitter's moderation is, in the Google case, that the user is in control of what is "spam" and what is not (and can still consult the "spam" if any).

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

#249
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…

Thank you for saying this. ActivityPub is so wrong in so many ways, and still people keep pushing it as if it was a silver bullet. I think people who talk about it and think it's very good never tried to understand it or write something with it.

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

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three reasons why not: operational, business, and technical. Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen as embrace-extend-extinguish. Business: it would contribute work to their competitors. Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.

This is doomed from the start, then. There’s no way for them to work on an open standard without leaking features or contributing work to their competitors.

It depends on what goal you see being defined.

I see one public and one private:

Publicly, organize social engagement. As long as they are at the helm, and at the forefront of tech innovation, they won't have issues on that goal.

Privately, diffuse regulatory pressure. If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter. It is the whack-a-mole approach, similar to BitTorrent vs. Napster.

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