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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

#341

Post by buboard »

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…

at least with regards to identity management, twitter seems to favor a blockchain idea, which could actually simplify user management and make obsolete the need for home-server identifiers, 3rd party ids etc

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

#342

Post by x3haloed »

Arathorn wrote: post #304
x3haloed wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh okay, that's starting to make more sense. Thanks.

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

#343

Post by nine_k »

espadrine wrote: post #202
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…

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.

Yes, this is why HTML, CSS, HTTP are all dead as open standards, right?

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

#344

Post by JoshMandel »

This can also seen as Twitter getting out ahead of https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s2658/BILLS-116s2658is.pd... (press release at https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/10/senat...) -- which would call for NIST to define:

model technical standards by which to make interoperable popular classes of communications or information services, including—

(1) online messaging;

(2) multimedia sharing; and

(3) social networking

(And all within 180 days ;-) No small feat.)

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

#345

Post by vagab0nd »

mathgenius wrote: post #57

"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.

Yes. It creates another problem on a different level, which is that creators now try to hack the algorithm and generate contents that are more likely to be recommended.

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

#346

Post by mackrevinack »

treelovinhippie wrote: post #302
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.

or the Safe Network as well

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

#347

Post by swiley »

espadrine wrote: post #202
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…

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.

>The web? Bad for business, it contributes to competitors.

If that’s the case it’s just going to be dumb crap; it’s driven by business and not technology.

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

#348

Post by BlueTemplar »

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…

At some point, wouldn't that be like public servants blaming Gmail for people using e-mails to share pedopornography and terrorist plots?

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

#349

Post by BlueTemplar »

nine_k wrote: post #343
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.

Yes, this is why HTML, CSS, HTTP are all dead as open standards, right?

Google's power over those is becoming worrisome...
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