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

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281–290 of 426 posts

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

#281
I operate an open source standard called Shareable Tweets http://2fb.me

A service designed to get tweets to a larger audience. But Twitter banned the account that was working to put this standard into practice @shareU

Ironically Twitter has been, historically; the most restrictive force in social media.

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

#282
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.

I don't think people are pushing ActivityPub as a silver bullet, so much as they're using it as "the currently-available and less-awful alternative to closed silos". If someone is starving, they're not going to hold out for a gourmet cheesecake that's a year away from being made. They'll happily take an immediately-available baked potato instead.

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

#283

Gosh I hope they buy pleroma. Compared to mastodon and gab it's objectively the best decentralized Twitter.

Pleroma is light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi; its primary web interface is inspired by Twitter but it also includes the classic Mastodon interface at https://host/web endpoint. It's very easy to set up and run. It's also compatible with anything that works with Mastodon via MastodonAPI (bots, desktop clients, mobile clients such as FediLab).

Definitely the best ActivityPub software on the market!

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

#284
post #7

Why not ActivityPub?

because it's not built on crypto, and Jack wants to control a new coin a la Libra

why does Twitter need to be built on crypto? Ugh.

This brings to mind the (truthfully) quite useless Minds.com social network. Twitter doesn't NEED a blockchain. Just look at Pleroma, Mastodon, or Gab to see p2p twitter replacements that are blockchain-free.

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

#285
post #71
post #64

I wonder if he realizes how terrible Twitter is for long form writing and publishing like this when he does it. It’s always baffled me why they haven’t removed the character limit entirely and instantly become the largest networked publishing platform that’s ever existed over night.

i like the character limit. Twitter is a telegraph office, not a magazine. he kinda has to use these threads himself, because it's his company. Hopefully his new system will suppport dual "excerpt/full text" publishing, because i 'd hate my feed to be full of 3 page articles instead of TL-DRs

it made more sense when mobile phones operated via SMS rather than 3g/4g/wifi, but it doesn't make a lot of sense now to have the character limit. What do you actually gain by capping posts to 240 characters per message? People seem to primarily use Twitter to communicate and forcing people to break a thought into multiple posts adds nothing to the experience.

"Twitter is a telegraph office" -- but should it be?

Look at ATOM/RSS, they are telegraph offices too, yet they don't have character limits. ActivityPub services like Pleroma also are "telegraph offices" without strict character limits yet they don't seem to suffer for it. In fact it's much more pleasant to use Pleroma for this reason, you have the freedom to express complete thoughts.

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

#287
post #52

While it's probably just an extension of Jack's obsession over blockchain, it's a bit interesting that you'd have to use Twitter to apply: there are a few truly-decentralized/or federated solutions that have been proposed and have an active userbase, and the authors of the good stuff don't tend to be on Twitter. For example, one of the people working on one of the most prominent pieces of software implementing the Ac…

OCAP is such a needed feature. One of my concerns with Twitter is that it's essentially unsafe -- while safety is a tricky thing to guarantee in decentralized networks, OCAP makes serious steps towards addressing the problem.

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

#288

"the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention" I really wish I could hack on the youtube recommendation algorithm. It seems to be tuned for zombie viewing pleasure, and totally not for finding surprising new content. Even just having several "personas" would be a big help.

Totally agree. The lack of configurability around recommendations is really frustrating. So often, the next video that plays is something tangentially related to what I'm watching, but still not what I want to watch.

I'd love a feature that defaults the next video to the newest unwatched video in a given channel or something like that, but we all know why it won't be built.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think people are pushing ActivityPub as a silver bullet, so much as they're using it as "the currently-available and less-awful alternative to closed silos". If someone is starving, they're not going to hold out for a gourmet cheesecake that's a year away from being made. They'll happily take an immediately-available baked potato instead.

Diaspora's been here for years and works better than AP; AP is purely hype.

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

#290

"the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention" I really wish I could hack on the youtube recommendation algorithm. It seems to be tuned for zombie viewing pleasure, and totally not for finding surprising new content. Even just having several "personas" would be a big help.

The problem is the revenue model. Zombie viewing is more profitable than surprising new content. If you were asked to hack on YouTube's algorithm, any modifications you'd produce, no matter their merit, would be tested against the status quo for their ability to generate revenue.

Not really. Surprising new content has more active engagement which is crucial for acquisition ads. Revenue for pay-per-click is always better than display.
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