Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 426 posts

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

#301

Post by Arathorn »

mr__y wrote: post #241
Arathorn wrote: post #129

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

I suspect you're confusing the protocol (which can scale fine) with the Synapse implementation (which was never written for performance in mind). The protocol itself should be fine for twitter-size amount of messages however, and there are more performant implementations in the works.

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

#302

Post by treelovinhippie »

sonofgod wrote: post #48

yay, blockchain. :( https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766085037248512 "Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there."

All blockchains fundamentally do not scale. Global universal consensus and a global centralized datastore (ledger) is an anti-pattern found nowhere in nature.

If the Twitter team go for a blockchain stack, they're doing so for the mass surveillance and control feature.

P2P is the way: see Holochain, Scuttlebutt etc.

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

#303

Post by Arathorn »

stevenicr wrote: post #253
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.

I'm considering launching a couple matrix instances this month, any chance there are ways for me to dub a few users as moderators and give them the ability to silence / kick / ban users by ip, hostname, ip subnets and cidr? I'll be looking into whatever bridge things there are for combining matrix with some microblogging, that would be a really perfect fit for 2 of the projects I've had on the idea shelf this year. I…

I should emphasise that microblogging in Matrix is pretty early, but we built the protocol to be able to scale for it. There are some very basic bridges to Wordpress and Mastodon etc but they could be way more sophisticated.

Moderation has improved loads though - https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ has the details. You can't ban users via IP though (unless they're on your server), as otherwise it's a massive privacy leak to expose IPs.

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

#304

Post by Arathorn »

x3haloed wrote: post #243
Arathorn wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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?

There are lots of different ways of skinning it. One we've thought of in the past is to have a room per sending user, and have the members of the room be that user's followers. The rooms are of course publicly visible to allow everyone else to follow along too. You the need some mechanism to index the messages based on hashtag etc, but that could just be a search engine - or possibly copying/referencing the messages from per-hashtag etc rooms.

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

#305

Post by sectiondetail »

kick wrote: post #289
sectiondetail wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do apologize; you seem to have mistaken me as someone who actually cares about your weird axe-to-grind obsession on the subject. I'm sorry if this mistaken impression has come across.

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

#306

Post by Arathorn »

kick wrote: post #263
Arathorn wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lea…

It looks like you guys are on the right path for most things, and I wish you luck! Why do you have no choice but improve Synapse? One of the reasons you seem to only get negative opinions along the lines of "really, really bad" is because "The way it's written is stylistically bad/unapproachable and an entirely different approach should probably be taken" is something that takes a few hours to diffuse into something…

> It looks like you guys are on the right path for most things, and I wish you luck!

thanks :)

> Why do you have no choice but improve Synapse?

There are quite a lot of Synapses out there right now, and Synapse's featureset is pretty mature. Given we have pretty high profile people running Synapse (e.g. all of the French government) we have no choice but to invest the time to polish it and make it more efficient and stable. In an ideal world we'd have paused on Synapse ages ago and focused purely on a next-gen server, but we can't leave Synapse users in the lurch. Dendrite will be getting some attention in the coming months though, but not as a direct Synapse-replacement, but more of a playground for more experimental stuff.

> It takes a lot more effort to give truly constructive, workable criticism than expressing any sort of opinion, negative or positive.

True. fwiw, my guess is that kaniini was trying to implement state resolution before we published the first stable Server-Server API back in Feb - where it most certainly was the weakest part of the spec (and had design flaws too, which is why we hadn't bothered speccing it in detail).

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

#307

Post by sectiondetail »

buboard wrote: post #69
d--b wrote: post #13

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

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…

>I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship.

I'm sadly not surprised. While HN does attract hobbyists like me interested in technology and how it affects society, it also attracts a lot of those who dream of building and controlling the next big data silo for personal profit. Permanently liberating an entire mode of communication into an uncensorable distributed system that can't be easily replaced due to the network effect (such as your example of email) precludes that path to profit.

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

#308

Post by jakelazaroff »

espadrine wrote: post #250
jakelazaroff wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s fair, but then why are they receiving any sort of praise for this? Neither of those goals benefit anyone who doesn’t work for or own stock in Twitter.

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

#309

Post by jakelazaroff »

nielsbot wrote: post #266
jakelazaroff wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question is, is that really a problem?

It’s not a problem per se, but then there’s no reason for anyone outside of Twitter to care about this.

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

#310

Post by banads »

jstanley wrote: post #40
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.

I like this idea. Another feature that could be helpful for users who are eary of group think thought bubbles is to have some kind of analytics on the most common types of words, phrases, and topics that the moderator censors.
Post reply on HN