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The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

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Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#71

Post by Kinrany »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #50

I'm convinced decentralization is viable for local applications and services like offline document editors and Syncthing, somewhat so for geographically dispersed but closed systems like 1:1 DMs and group chats/video calls (Tailscale sharing might work for static sets of people like friend groups and polycules), but I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where y…

> I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where you expect anyone on any server to be able to reply to people on another server

I don't think that's a desirable goal. It's up to individual services to host centralized forums and deal with the ensuing moderation issues.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#72

Post by csande17 »

ilyt wrote: post #67
ForHackernews wrote: post #49

I think this article underestimates the inefficiencies in large, centralized systems where efficiency is not a goal, and incentives are weighted against it. Famously, Facebook's iOS app is over 100 MB[0] and for Android, their engineers hacked the Dalvik VM because they had so many class definitions they were overflowing a 5MB buffer just for the definitions - and then, staggeringly, they bragged about this obscenity…

From what I've seen their datancenter stuff is way more competent >I can only imagine their backend systems are a similar nightmare, that leads to nonsense like FB building its own data centers to run their photos-and-ads crud app. Uh, of course they are running their own datacenters, they are one of biggest sites on net, outsourcing infrastructure to cloud makes no goddamn sense to them

From my limited experience in Big Tech, these kinds of companies are pretty good at running data centers from the hardware, networking, and low-level OS management perspectives. But their server-side programming/"backend engineering" suffers from a lot of the same problems as their mobile app development. In fact, it's frequently way worse because you can't say anything like "what if someone wants to download our app over a 3G data connection" to get people to cut down on bloat.

Overstaffing and ship-the-org-chart syndrome leads to ginormous app bundles on the client and 7000 microservices on the server.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#74

Post by rsynnott »

peterweyand wrote: post #16

I've seen more and more advertisements for Mastadon on HN, probably because of the whole Twitter debacle. Does anyone use the service? I mean, enough people so that the average person would know what it is? From my experience with Mastadon it took me a while to even learn how the service was used, and all I remember was thinking "wow that's too complicated to use or get Joe Average User to sign up for". Without ease…

I think the answer a few weeks ago was ‘no’, but that’s changing. At this point most of the people I followed on Twitter have migrated. Now, I followed mostly tech people, lawyers, and cat and bird photo twitters; someone who uses twitter to follow celebrities may have a different experience. (I do also get the impression that Irish twitter moved maybe quicker that most twitter quasi-communities)

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#75

Post by ZeroGravitas »

I'm not sure I accept the premise.

I can imagine it being both more efficient and just better in various measures as well.

For starters just the ads and trackers must have a cost, which is paid on every visit.

As we've seen many times on the internet, cacheable content can be far more efficient than constantly updated content that needs refetched just to show you an ad impression. Google's web page speed tools will warn you about Google Ads non-cachable JS tracker.

Combine that with the incentive to show growth in 'user' metrics, which encourages both leniency on bots and intentionally addictive designs for non-bots and I can see an obvious case for twitter being less efficient.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#76

Post by scrollaway »

ilyt wrote: post #60
bawolff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although i think that's what most people want. One of the reasons centralization won out for email is dealing with spam can be absolutely exhausting, so gmail started to look really attractive for the average user.

Yeah but in case of e-mail all it takes for you to "own" your identity is to own your domain at few bucks a year. Bit more work with setting up mastodon instance and dealing with all that mess. I do wonder how mastodon would handle influx of spammers. There is zero barrier to entry, and banning servers is ineffective if it is just an account doing the spamming.

More mastodon and mastodon-like hosts should allow for custom domain names. Then it would allow you to own your AP identity similarly to email.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#77

Post by nagonago »

jimbob45 wrote: post #38
AustinDev wrote: post #2

Mastodon will never have the level of censorship or control that a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok have. I can't wait for it to be the norm but I doubt that it will ever happen due to the lack of censorship.

It’s not censorship. It’s the simplicity of the product. Social spaces succeed because they attract interesting people. In general, interesting people have the least amount of time to spend trying to maneuver through spam or wading through Nazi sympathizer/woke leftist posts. The barrier to entry has to be negligible to get the interesting people on board.

Depends on your definition of interesting people. If you mean celebrities and public figures, I agree that most will probably never join the Fediverse because of the high barrier to entry, although I think there's more to that problem than just a lack of centralized moderation.

That said, in my opinion there are plenty of interesting people in the fediverse already. Personally I don't really care if the fediverse is widely adopted by celebrities and public figures or not.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#78

Post by thrown_22 »

turtleyacht wrote: post #61
thrown_22 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a gross oversimplification of the premodern economic system. You could only grow food crops next to navigable rivers, they doubled in price for every 20 miles they were transported overland. This meant that the majority of land could only be used for subsistence farming because nothing else could keep the people working the land from starving. Cash crops like frankincense were the only ones that could be grown…

These kinds of insights for old-school roleplaying (OSR) games. Hard to farm out of books, but very insightful having stumbled upon it. And it's not just needing to be true in an absolute, historical sense, but a useful mechanic to save for later.

If you want a good overview of a bunch of similar ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvZlXaGEzwg&list=PLsOFk2nGmz...

A course that goes over how everything we think is bad today is good in a world stuck in the Malthusian trap. Working harder today to have a better life tomorrow just means your children working harder tomorrow to have the same life you have today.

The option he didn't talk about at all was how in such a world sexism could keep average living standards quite high so long as all women of reproductive age were kept in near starvation so they could barely carry children to term. But there's only so much unthinkableness you can expect from someone living in the current day lecturing at a university.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#79

Post by csande17 »

oaiey wrote: post #70
ilyt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm almost sure they are not. Moderator of some server deciding that their users do not deserve to communicate with someone from some other server is just terrible model from every perspective. It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with. I want to decide to ban user, or ban topic/tag, or even ban server, not have decision deferred to whoever is running the server, that's no better than…

And what is the difference to SMTP? That is literally the decentralized messaging platform which is alive for 40 (?) years and still kicking. There will be problems but there is evidence that it can work.

SMTP being created 40 years ago is probably why it still works today. Just like the telephone network, it has a historical exception from the moral obligation to prevent Bad People from using the network to say harmful or incorrect things. (Section 230 didn't exist back then, so it wasn't clear that that kind of moderation was even legal without taking full responsibility for everything users say.)

Mastodon doesn't have this kind of exception, so it suffers from a lot of conflict about who exactly the Bad People are and whether accepting messages from them causes you to become a Bad Person yourself.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#80

Post by ekidd »

ilyt wrote: post #59
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #50

I'm convinced decentralization is viable for local applications and services like offline document editors and Syncthing, somewhat so for geographically dispersed but closed systems like 1:1 DMs and group chats/video calls (Tailscale sharing might work for static sets of people like friend groups and polycules), but I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where y…

I'm almost sure they are not. Moderator of some server deciding that their users do not deserve to communicate with someone from some other server is just terrible model from every perspective. It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with. I want to decide to ban user, or ban topic/tag, or even ban server, not have decision deferred to whoever is running the server, that's no better than…

> It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with. I want to decide to ban user, or ban topic/tag, or even ban server, not have decision deferred to whoever is running the server, that's no better than twatter."

You can pay someone to host a server for you, starting at $4/month. (Well, MastoHost is a little behind on signups this week, but they'll catch up.) If you do this, then you'll have total control over your moderation policy.

My instance is run by someone who mostly only blocks the absolute worst, including instances that are illegal under European law. I'm fine with those blocks! Other instances are focused on serving people who are regularly harassed, and those instances ban aggressively. There's even a "co-op" instance where users vote on policy.

I think it's worth remembering that for many users, a pleasant experience without harassment is a valuable service. I've moderated niche communities for years, and it has become obvious that if you let a handful of jerks abuse everyone else, then dozens of amazing community members will quit.

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