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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

#51

Post by mactavish88 »

kick wrote: post #33
mactavish88 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization? Are there genuine technical shortcomings in the ActivityPub standard that Twitter's engineering team has identified? Why not talk about that and contribute improvements to the standard? Are there shortcomings to being part of the standardization process in the W3C? Then talk…

ActivityPub is a horrible protocol, and not decentralized. Neither of you know what you're talking about, and not even the people working on AP like AP!

First of all, I literally read the spec (and related specs) last week in detail.

Secondly, there's a massive difference between decentralized and distributed systems (I build distributed systems for a living). Perhaps you're confused about that difference?

Thirdly, if you're going to knock a collective effort like ActivityPub by calling it a "horrible protocol" without genuine technical substantiation, you're effectively just trolling. Show us that you know what you're talking about by doing some in-depth analysis of the protocol and where its shortcomings are in terms of being decentralized.

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

#52

Post by kick »

While it's probably just an extension of Jack's obsession over blockchain, it's a bit interesting that you'd have to use Twitter to apply: there are a few truly-decentralized/or federated solutions that have been proposed and have an active userbase, and the authors of the good stuff don't tend to be on Twitter.

For example, one of the people working on one of the most prominent pieces of software implementing the ActivityPub specification has proposed/is ~close to releasing a reference-implementation of one [a non-AP distributed protocol], which seems to solve most of the issues that Twitter would need to solve for privately-scoped posts (a major problem with most federated and decentralized social media), with plans to ~eventually get around to solving publicly-scoped things:

https://socially.whimsic.al/notice/9p6cjMLaIZxtCKyNto

(Pleroma doesn't really do per-user threading, so the responses to the original post are mixed in with the author continuing the original thread. Reader beware, etc.)

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

#55

Post by Kye »

walt74 wrote: post #8

Interesting. Twitter early kicked open standards in the nuts, so I understand everyone who's sceptical to say the least. But if they manage to detangle that ugly mess that is the Fediverse this could be a real and good step into the right direction.

No one should trust them to do it without making it favorable to them and their business model. Microsoft was just the first to get caught and punished for embracing, extending, and extinguishing in the new century. The pattern is as old as time.

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

#57

Post by mathgenius »

"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.

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

#58

Post by hugey010 »

paulgb wrote: post #18
kashprime wrote: post #9

They should use RSS; Youtube, Medium and most blogs already generate RSS feeds for their content.

Am I mixed up, or did Twitter at one point have RSS feeds? I also distinctly recall XMPP support circa 2008.

You're right, I remember, not fondly, parsing that XML for mobile.

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

#59

Post by dgellow »

kick wrote: post #35
Angostura wrote: post #25

Mastodon, anyone? https://joinmastodon.org

Mastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).

That's a type of decentralization. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network which is using both terms:

> A distributed social network or federated social network is an Internet social networking service that is decentralized and distributed across distinct providers (something like email but for social networks), such as the Fediverse.

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

#60

Post by kick »

mactavish88 wrote: post #51
kick wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ActivityPub is a horrible protocol, and not decentralized. Neither of you know what you're talking about, and not even the people working on AP like AP!

First of all, I literally read the spec (and related specs) last week in detail. Secondly, there's a massive difference between decentralized and distributed systems (I build distributed systems for a living). Perhaps you're confused about that difference? Thirdly, if you're going to knock a collective effort like ActivityPub by calling it a "horrible protocol" without genuine technical substantiation, you're effecti…

Webber's trashed it (the initial author), the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (look on their Pleroma profiles, there's a _bunch_ of bitching about AP).

You're frankly uninformed on many levels, and while I'd normally refrain from replying to someone so obviously delusional, let's give a tiny peek at the problems:

AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped content, relying on a lot of trust for every party involved. This gets broken frequently, and has had consequences so far on networks implementing it.

The specification itself is far too ambiguous. If you've got a lick of sense, you'd know this. But here's a post by a maintainer of Diaspora explaining this part further: https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to...

So let's assume you can get Twitter to implement ActivityPub perfectly to-spec. Great! It doesn't work with literally any pre-existing ActivityPub software, and users' DMs and are more or less public, with users' private accounts literally being public.

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