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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

#371

Post by zanny »

munfred wrote: post #182
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…

Agreed (I'm a matrix user myself). When I saw the thread I was confused about what exactly (if anything) he wanted to achieve that couldn't be done with matrix. I'd be surprised if he wasn't familiar with it already. Perhaps it's largely about branding/development control? I imagine it looks better to investors to say "we're making this new thing" rather than "we're gonna use this other thing that we don't own".

I highly doubt that Twitter approaches the Matrix Foundation with a "we have demands, you kneel to our will for our blessing / funding" and gets anything less than resounding applause.

The developers behind Matrix are currently funded from cryptocurrency money to the best of my knowledge.

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

#372

Post by stevenicr »

Arathorn wrote: post #303
stevenicr wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Very impressive progress on the moderation additions and the documentation is excellent (compared to my expectations for open source stuff especially!) - I can tell there is forward thinking and flexibility is being baked in.

Really glad to see this, I've been searching hard for a chat system replacement, and now it seems this might be it. With the ip addy api thing, if I can get someone who knows the code enough to help me use that to ban / block (on our own server) or bridge it to iptables, access.watch or something similar - this may be our future.

As far as a bridge to WP being basic at the moment, that is just fine, all I need is a way to port conversations from a certain room to posts, pages or whatever into WP and the rest can be handled from there later.

Really glad to see the progress with this!

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

#373

Post by sneak »

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…

ActivityPub lacks cryptographic signing/identity (table stakes for 2020) and anti-censorship features. It is more of an MVP/example than a mature, forward-looking protocol design.

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

#374

Post by berkes »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #348
RussianCow wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You actually describe yet another benefit of decentralisation.

Because this would certainly happen when the current movement of email into two major silo's (Gmail, Outlook) goes forward. When those two (or three, or four) have a majority of email-users on board, governments will start discouraging or forbidding usage of other mailservers. And will start making demands of those few leftover mailserver monopolists.

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

#375

Post by jokoon »

The core problem will be privacy.

I think it will not be difficult for anybody to siphon that data, and I don't know how one could prevent it, and it would be nice to see it done without complicated solutions. I think twitter could be biased.

I don't know if a law like GDPR would prevent it. If it doesn't, there should be law forbidding entities to gather data.

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

#376

Post by znpy »

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.

They should learn from the beautiful JMAP story (jmap.io)

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

#377

Post by blurbleblurble »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #138
thisisbrians wrote: post #125

Cool idea, sure. Maybe they should have had the marketing team look at the banner image before going live. Definitely undermines the perceived legitimacy of the effort in my opinion: https://twitter.com/bluesky

My feeling is that they're hackers who are already working in dweb/crypto

Should say "targeting hackers"

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

#378

Post by dgellow »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #357

I'm curious about their motives here. One of the massive "troubles" that social media has been having to deal with in recent years is the whole fake news problem. (in quotes, because it also has driven social media engagement, and thus revenue from ad impressions up, so from a business perspective it's a boon with the right narrative) Admittedly, it isn't a new problem, it just it's perceived impact has grown to the…

> Twitter's response is that they're banning political speech entirely, to try and get out of the fake news domains that people care the most about.

Twitter doesn't ban political speech, what they will stop accepting are political ads.

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

#379

Post by 80386 »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #308
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…

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.

Lessening regulatory pressure benefits everyone who doesn't want those regulators stepping in on behalf of politicians and causes they support.

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

#380

Post by sectiondetail »

fiatjaf wrote: post #317
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.

People are pushing AP as a silver bullet. Look at this thread! Twitter is funding work to be done in more than an year and people are saying that should just use AP. And that analogy doesn't make any sense.

I disagree. I think most of the people in this thread are promoting Activitypub merely as a starting point. Sure, it could use some tweaks and improvements, but it's a good foundation to build on.
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