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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

#291

Post by larnmar »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #50
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #46

I'm cautiously optimistic. Twitter has been been making some bad decisions with content moderation, and has abandoned the idea of being the "Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party". Decentralization should restore that... ...should. That notion could disappear really fast if Twitter gets to decide who can run an instance based on their belief systems. In the mean time, it's an interesting case study of what happen…

“Free speech” twitter alternatives exist, and invariably turn into cesspools (see gab.ai).

Is gab really a “cesspool”? I just looked at it for the first time. The way people talk about it I was expecting /pol/ squared, but the parts I could see without making an account seemed surprisingly normie, more reminiscent of instapundit than Stormfront.

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

#292

Post by softawre »

bduerst wrote: post #290
lucideer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like you have a billion dollar idea then that you can sell to Google.

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

#293

Post by buboard »

robobro wrote: post #285
buboard wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What do you actually gain by capping posts to 240 characters per message

brevity? it s a virtue

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

#294

Post by deusofnull »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #232
espadrine wrote: post #202

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.

i feel like the function of success would be pushed into other areas like the actual value of the feature being made available to competitors. or speed of competitors adoption of said feature. basically, sharing a foundational open standard could make everything thats distinct about a feature's implementation, or that companies policies / mission, the decider about what differentiates success.

now, current leaders probably wouldnt want to adopt a system like this because it would be a test of their value on all those metrics, but i wouldnt say that makes the notion doomed from the start. i get what you mean though.

i mean, where would be right now without the open standards of 30 years ago?

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

#295

Post by deusofnull »

RussianCow wrote: post #278
espadrine wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't buy this. Nothing is going to change from the user perspective, and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the pu…

well it would solve problems for all the people who really do want to use a different / better social network or chat app but cant get their friends to switch too, killing the idea on arrival. that would change perception of social media, because it'd allow every host-site could be distinct to their targeted users' qualities as a group, but maintain connections to everyone in their lives.

i mean, you arent really saying that you dont believe a massively-confederated social networking infrastructure would change the political perception of social media? i think it necessarily would, and change every individuals relationship to social media too. its like that marshall mcLuhan quote 'the medium is the message', ie the medium defines what it contains and what those contents mean.

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

#296

Post by K0SM0S »

miguelmota wrote: post #279
espadrine wrote: post #202

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.

Completely agree; commercial services prefer to use their own protocol over a common protocol for technical and commercial reasons. For example XMPP is a federated messaging protocol but Facebook Chat moved off XMPP, AOL AIM moved off XMPP, Google Talk moved of XMPP., even Twitter moved off XMPP at one point, because they all implemented custom features and eventually devolve from the base protocol.

I read this as a trivial 'truth' that I've internalized myself as well; but the way you worded it... makes me naively ask:

doesn't it speak to the limitations or choices of XMPP itself then, not the idea of a common protocol, if businesses can't reliably extend the protocol (only custom fork, and somehow barring eventual upstream contrib, whatever)?

I can think of an extensible protocol paradigm, with 'extensions' (really just libraries, packages, like those we fetch with `apt` or `npm` and optionally push to clients as well). Down to first principles, that's how we structured UNIX/Linux, most modern programming languages, the web itself (well, at least the Js and now wasm part of it).

(Thinking out loud...)

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

#297

Post by mistermann »

RussianCow wrote: post #278
espadrine wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't buy this. Nothing is going to change from the user perspective, and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the pu…

Maybe I misunderstand the scope of the technical details, but if the underlying flow of messages across social media was forcibly abstracted to a universal master hub, then could not individual clients (or sub-platforms) not then exert control over capabilities (filtering, censorship, etc) that is currently controlled entirely by the individual social media platforms who own the networks and userbase?

> and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.

I would argue this is a side-effect of the current state of affairs - obfuscation during studies and testimony (what little takes place), but mainly the inability to demonstrate superior implementations.

I'd rather we don't give up without having actually tried anything.

EDIT: Although, I could easily agree that this is simply a disingenuous smokescreen to buy time and mitigate legislative risks. In fact, I'd bet money on it.

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

#299

Post by mceoin »

staltz wrote: post #226
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

Specifically...? Small group vs Consensus building? Requirement for monetization mechanism and incentives?
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