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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

#411

Post by Arathorn »

jasonzemos wrote: post #404
Arathorn wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i think the tl;dr here is that we have a bunch of tech debt, and we’re not working on the things that you think we should be working on, and that we undervalue your input and should delegate to you rather than discussing specifics.

i’m afraid that nobody is going to delegate to you, but you are welcome to contribute via concrete spec proposals, which are assessed based on merits (and whose review is far from dominated by me; if they were my own proposals might move along faster than they do). if the spec process is too slow and doesn’t work for you, then feel free to spell out the proposal however you like.

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

#412

Post by exadeci »

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 will https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204952252747661312

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

#413

Post by pg_is_a_butt »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #324
baroffoos wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like implementing global search across all websites is impossible

To be fair there is no open standard for global search across all websites.

there is and

too bad humans don't follow a standard of decency, so those were abused to the point of being ignored.

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

#414

Post by jasonzemos »

Arathorn wrote: post #411
jasonzemos wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i think the tl;dr here is that we have a bunch of tech debt, and we’re not working on the things that you think we should be working on, and that we undervalue your input and should delegate to you rather than discussing specifics. i’m afraid that nobody is going to delegate to you, but you are welcome to contribute via concrete spec proposals, which are assessed based on merits (and whose review is far from dominate…

Who am I to submit a proposal to fix fundamental problems in your company? That's called consulting. You just raised an 8 million dollar Series A you are soliciting me to work for you for free, in the leaf comments of a Hacker News thread? Are you for real?

I volunteered at least three solid examples of fundamental indecisions that have unambiguously cost your investors alone millions of dollars over several funding rounds; lest I mention also cost every poor soul that has volunteered their free time in the name of FOSS -- an ethically ambiguous embrace by you at best; every one of them is locked into the cost of your missteps.

I have clearly linked these indecisions to real-world outcomes. It's all history by now. The foundations of state resolution weren't in place when you built Communities/Groups so you didn't use the matrix chatroom; you built an entirely new inferior HTTP protocol without any state or replication whatsoever over several months. Now that you finally prioritized fixing that underlying problem with rooms there's a need to replace and spec an actual Groups system. In the meantime nobody can develop Matrix Groups into their software, not my server, not clients like Ditto, etc, because you tell everyone not to. You're going to overhaul the whole thing. You're doing them a favor by saving them that wasted effort. But Synapse and Riot use Groups and Matrix promotes it on matrix.org; still there's been no serious visible progress toward groups-as-rooms.

This is why Matrix is indeed a de facto centralized system. Let's not even get into issues in this system where every server trusts matrix.org for cryptographic keys. Matrix is really centralized around you.

In the end nobody is working with you. I have the only third-party implementation of this stack. Nobody is working with me either, but that's called the transitive property.

You have some time to think about this. I would say until the next recession hits. Then this is over. The way you do things won't survive that.

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

#415

Post by ChristianBundy »

acrispino wrote: post #257
ChristianBundy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secure Scuttlebutt (not a fan, but it's much better than AP) If you have any specific feedback about which improvements are most important to you, I'd love to hear it. It's hard to see things with fresh eyes after you've been working on them for a bit.

A while back, I came across this message: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16880060 Is this accurate currently? Its a turn off.

Yeah, none of us are very happy about that.

It's a quirk of the main feed encoding type, but there are other feed types (e.g. Gabby-Grove) that are major improvements. Right now the main hurdle is just adding support for more feed types to the major clients, which is something I'm actively working on.

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

#416

Post by ChristianBundy »

lucideer wrote: post #173
ChristianBundy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secure Scuttlebutt (not a fan, but it's much better than AP) If you have any specific feedback about which improvements are most important to you, I'd love to hear it. It's hard to see things with fresh eyes after you've been working on them for a bit.

Not op but would like to comment on this: SSB is great; I'm not sure if others would agree, but while I think it has a lot of problems, none seem inherent (i.e. while they mightn't necessarily be easy to fix, they wouldn't involve any major architectural overhauls or scratch rethinks; what's there is conceptually sound). The main issue for me is performance and resource usage, which is tricky since a lot of the tradi…

The performance problem is hard, but we have lots of active experiments that I'm optimistic about. Implementations in Golang and Rust, a handful of great database experiments (even simple stuff like Sqlite), and a bunch of people who are actively using SSB on low-resource devices daily. The Manyverse app in particular runs on Android devices, which are going to be very resource-constrained when compared to most computers.

The NIH problem is hard, but I think we're moving in the right direction.

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

#417

Post by RussianCow »

deusofnull wrote: post #400
RussianCow wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but I'm skeptical that whatever "open standard" Twitter is working on will achieve that utopian future you're dreaming of. In practice, I think the vast majority of people won't even know it exists and will continue to exclusively use their preferred platform (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) despite all the issues with it. The idea of being able to move all of your content to another social netw…

yeah i mean honestly you're probably right. But in reality, the whole point of advocating for something that skeptics call "utopian" isn't to achieve that specific utopia per se. IT is to make improvements towards that "utopia". Like for example, if this social media interoperability and open standard world is our utopia, that would rely on having at least a framework for inter-network communication and migration fro…

Yeah you're right, I'm being overly cynical and dismissing what is otherwise a really good thing. I'll try to work on that!

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

#418

Post by ratsmack »

larnmar wrote: post #291
akhilcacharya wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Free speech” twitter alternatives exist, and invariably turn into cesspools (see gab.ai).

Is gab really a “cesspool”? I just looked at it for the first time. The way people talk about it I was expecting /pol/ squared, but the parts I could see without making an account seemed surprisingly normie, more reminiscent of instapundit than Stormfront.

Gab is a good site and has been vilified by the rage mobs that only want to hear one side of any issue. And like many sites, there will always be the fringe lunatics, but that is what free speech is all about.

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

#419

Post by floatingatoll »

specialist wrote: post #402
floatingatoll wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can adjudication be impartial with regards to civility?

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

#420

Post by woah »

floatingatoll wrote: post #396
0x445442 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email lists are not private if you choose to sign up for one and post to it, the same way Twitter is not private if you choose to sign up and post to it. Email lists are very similar to Usenet which was the precursor to all these social media sites.

Apples can be orange in certain breeds or lighting conditions, but that doesn’t make them oranges. Twitter is not equal to an email list. They share certain aspects but they are significantly dissimilar in UI, approach, social perception (by participants and by others), and publication. M Twitter has not replaced mailing lists, and mailing lists continue to operate effectively. Twitter is an electronic billboard that…

You’re acting like there’s some extremely clear difference, but there isn’t. The only real difference is that email has kind of a bad UX. The comparison is not apples and oranges, it is grapefruit and oranges.
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