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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

#401

Post by Cakez0r »

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…

Could hashtags just be rooms too?

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

#402

Post by specialist »

floatingatoll wrote: post #398
specialist wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good question. Moderation is the only known effective solution. Some times. FAANGs and others abandoned human moderation because it "doesn't scale". So what? When did we decide that scale was more important than civility? -- I also have questions. What is the feedback loop? For every medium, every style of communication? How do we break those loops into discrete steps? Then where can we add friction? To slow dow…

Google decided scale was more important than civility when they positioned text search - Pagerank - as a competitor to curation, rather than as a beneficiary of curation. We used to have curated content indexes with human moderators guiding them - in print, Yahoo/DMOZ, AOL keywords, web rings, LiveJournal. Those required significant human labor compared to algorithmic text searching, and were not able to scale as rap…

Amen.

Recommenders, like bureaucracies, are misanthropic (anti-human).

The rules are meant to remove human judgement. While denying the baked in bias and dysfunction of the imposed ruleset.

Per Goodhart's Law, they arbitrarily state some things are worthwhile & meaningful, and everything else are not.

Black boxes which thwart inspection, transparency, accountability, explanation.

--

Forgive me for flogging this horse; I do have a point.

Also missing from online social networks are the concepts of fair and impartial adjudication.

Curation, adjudication, transparency, accountability... I'm sure we're omitting many other missing features. Because we're too close to the problem.

Going meta meta here: the common trait of all these "regulation arbitrage" unicorns is they profit by the destruction of our society's laws, checks & balances, social norms, and so forth.

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

#403

Post by sectiondetail »

fiatjaf wrote: post #385
sectiondetail wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your previous comment came closer to the truth: ActivityPub may work today _as a workaround_, a half-baked alternative to closed silos; but it doesn't have a solid foundation, its problems can't be solved by tweaks and improvements, and that's what every of its critics say.

I think this is going to be an "agree to disagree" situation. Frankly, I think Activitypub is just fine as the basis for building Twitter alternatives. Most complaints I've read about it are from people who dislike its lack of privacy and of the necessity of trusting servers with regards to private messages. I think those people are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I'm actually building an Activitypub implementation myself. I quite like the protocol and the philosophy of "twitter without Twitter Inc.", but I'm thoroughly sick and tired of the rube goldberg "framework on top of framework on top of framework on top of obscure language for the backend" insanity that comes with the usual implementations. So I decided to do something about it. I'm working on an Activitypub server in Go, sqlite, and a pure vanilla javascript frontend. My goal is to have this be dead simple to install and maintain on a barebones VPS for anyone with a modicum of Linux commandline experience. One static binary, one small config file, one folder with a handful of javascript/css resources and html templates. And that's it. No bloody vue, react, angular, ember, or rails. And definitely no f---ing node.

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

#404

Post by jasonzemos »

Arathorn wrote: post #399
jasonzemos wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just pick one. Matrix is resource-heavy, even in the best of times. There is a confluence of smaller contributing factors, and several effects on both its usability and developer/platform friendliness. Consider this anecdote of the overhead of sending the message "hi" as a baseline: in Matrix, this takes about 1KiB on average after all is said and done in JSON (and varies, unfavorably). So to over-simplify, that…

So i think the summary is that the SS API needs to support alternative encodings (and thus signings) than JSON. Totally agreed; as you know we've already been experimenting with compact representations including CBOR ( https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100-bps-barr... etc) which applied both to CS & SS API, which took the ratio down massively. However, we fudged it there by disabling the hashes entirely…

I selected some examples because I don't want to be lost in abstraction, but please, I am asking kindly that you not focus on my examples (unless it's pressing) because the issue here is systemic. I'm not giving these examples for you to just retreat back with your head down and address them. The locus is more fundamental: the etiology for why these errors even exist and why there continue to be new ones all the time; all at great cost, perhaps even existential cost. You should be concerned with that bigger picture, surely.

Scores of other issues could have been cited, but I included the representation example having confidence you'd probably tout those exact experiments and respond with that blog post. Your conclusion at the time was that CBOR and JSON had negligible differences. The company then proceeded to de-prioritize any serious work in that direction while simultaneously ramping up efforts for end-to-end encryption by default. This was a flawed conclusion and it has demonstrably added to your tower of debt. Even my "hi" example is already passé because now that too is another giant base64 string adding to this jumble. You can't bolt Ferrari body panels on a Honda and call it a Ferrari.

I can spend all day citing issues just as poignant, and you might even be kind enough to elevate them against the ~10,000 other [github] issues they're contending with. I can spend all day unpacking the string of missteps leading to all of your engineering disasters. It's not going to have any returns- not for either of us. It doesn't root the problems.

If I could impress upon you some serious advice, it would be to value people less transactionally. Don't estimate a person's worth by how they fill a few open gaps in your grand master plan and then dispense with them as if they won't be filling in any more. Avoid that by valuing people by how they think, and then don't try to think like them yourself. Delegate to them instead.

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

#405

Post by fiatjaf »

sectiondetail wrote: post #403
fiatjaf wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your previous comment came closer to the truth: ActivityPub may work today _as a workaround_, a half-baked alternative to closed silos; but it doesn't have a solid foundation, its problems can't be solved by tweaks and improvements, and that's what every of its critics say.

I think this is going to be an "agree to disagree" situation. Frankly, I think Activitypub is just fine as the basis for building Twitter alternatives. Most complaints I've read about it are from people who dislike its lack of privacy and of the necessity of trusting servers with regards to private messages. I think those people are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I'm actually building an Activitypub impl…

Let me agree with your second paragraph, then.

I've tried to include ActivityPub support on an app, too, and it was a nightmare, it kinda worked, but I ended up abandoning everything.

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

#406

Post by Teknoman117 »

dgellow wrote: post #378
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.

You're right, I don't quite recall what I was thinking at the time.

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

#407

Post by app4soft »

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…

> 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.

Sadly, all centralized Facebook/Twitter/YouTube since 1st January of 2020 would add more restrictions (according each new ToS and Privacy rules).

BTW, I already prepared for fully migrating my Twitter activity to Mastodon.

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

#408

Post by mariusor »

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.

Operational: activitypub can be extended with proprietary vocabulary without any issues, so they can develop features quietly before proposing them for inclusion in the spec, if they even do that.

Business: what kind of work would contribute to their competitors? On the standard? Well, 90% of open standards (invented number) was created by for profit companies. On libraries and services, why would it?

Technical: implementing global search on the www as a whole is also impossible.

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

#409

Post by [deleted] »

kick wrote: post #75
thosakwe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate AP as a protocol, but also I'd still rather use it than try to invent a new one that wouldn't get a lot of traction (though I guess if you're a big corp, there will always be traction).

For two of the biggest uses of Twitter, privately-scoped posts and private messages, Twitter implementing ActivityPub would effectively make that information public. Not a good thing, and one that Twitter would get a lawsuit for. AP is broken for any use other than publicly-scoped posts, and given that Twitter is already a huge target, I think adding fuel to the fire would really be bad here.

[deleted]

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

#410

Post by mariusor »

anaphor wrote: post #247
mariusor wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, it's very silly to think you can use Activity Pub for non-public things What do you base your statement on? I've heard this take before, but I haven't seen anyone provide a good explanation for it.

I would guess it's based on the fact that when most people hear "access control" they think of "access control lists", but it's possible to do decentralized access control. That's what ocaps are.

I still don't really understand.

ActivityPub can be private in the same way email is private. All the people in the recipients chain will have a copy of the object you're sending. If in these recipients there's the Public namespace, then yes, you can't talk about "private" any more, but outside of that ActivityPub supports private interactions.

As a followup on this discussion, I actually spent half a day today to add private messaging to my ActivityPub service. It actually works.

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