Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by Porthos9K » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

d--b wrote: post #13

How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation? It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.

Moderation's easy in a decentralized model: run your own server, and refuse to federate with servers that are run by (or used by) people you consider to be assholes. Server admins can easily band together to contain (or isolate) "bad" servers as most of the Fediverse has done with Gab.

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

#32

Post by rvrabec » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

d--b wrote: post #13

How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation? It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.

Same concern - I'm working on getting some info removed from mastodon. it's terrifying how hard it is to get someone (volunteer mods) to actually remove something...

This sort of case makes me an advocate for centralized access to moderate/regulate/also be accountable... but then if there's this magic backdoor to data access and removal...?

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

#33

Post by kick » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

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…

ActivityPub is a horrible protocol, and not decentralized. Neither of you know what you're talking about, and not even the people working on AP like AP!

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

#34

Post by kick » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

rvense wrote: post #22

Why build anything? Just[0] make Twitter a Mastodon instance. [0] Haha

Mastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).

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

#35

Post by kick » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #25

Mastodon, anyone? https://joinmastodon.org

Mastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).

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

#36

Post by rmtech » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

d--b wrote: post #13

How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation? It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.

> How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation?

There will be a space where different people and organizations can build filters that rate information for veracity and other traits. Over time these filters will develop a track record. People will be able to filter their feed through such filters.

Centralized orgs can already do this, but they make a central and opaque choice about it. This means that there is a lot of pressure from various interest groups to make sure that the hidden filter is biased towards their favored viewpoint, and the users cannot really see what the result of this fight is.

It's like how it probably wouldn't be a good idea to have just one news organization that served the whole US.

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

#37

Post by kick » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

faitswulff wrote: post #23

Is there anything wrong with targeting GNU Social and/or ActivityPub for Twitter's use case?

Mastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).

Further, GNU Social still doesn't implement AP. This is largely because AP is very annoying to implement, but also because GNU Social sucks.

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

#38

Post by EGreg » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:18 PM UTC

To be fair, Twitter did pioneer oAuth back in the day, and now everyone uses it... worked better than Meebo’s xAuth

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

#39

Post by david_draco » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:19 PM UTC

rvense wrote: post #22

Why build anything? Just[0] make Twitter a Mastodon instance. [0] Haha

Would Mastodon be able to handle the load of Twitter?

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

#40

Post by jstanley » Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 3:19 PM UTC

d--b wrote: post #13

How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation? It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.

I'd like to see moderation work like adblocking. You subscribe to whatever moderation feed you like, and it blocks tweets that the moderators decide to block.

If you don't like what the moderators are doing, you can select a different moderation feed, or start your own.

This way we decouple the moderation from the platform.