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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

#81

Post by hnuser77 »

Porthos9K wrote: post #5

I'd say they should use ActivityPub[1] instead of wasting time on their own incompatible solution, but quite frankly I don't want Twitter federating with Mastodon. We get our fill of chuds with anime avatars thanks to Pleroma, and don't really need or want Twitter around because decentralization won't make it any less of a digital sacrifice zone[2]. 1: https://activitypub.rocks/ 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacri…

For those unfamiliar with this situation: Pleroma is an ActivityPub server and frontend written in Elixir and designed for low resource consumption, somewhat of an alterative to Mastodon. One or two of the most prominent early Pleroma instances had very sparse moderation policies, leading some to associate Pleroma with trolls and far-right users. Today, most Pleroma instances prohibit hate speech, harassment, and so on. Of course, anyone is free to make their own Pleroma or Mastodon instance with whatever rules and federation policies they like, and the most "chud-filled" instance in the entire fediverse (Gab) is running a Mastodon fork, not Pleroma.

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

#82

Post by kick »

To those of you pushing for ActivityPub:

Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, 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 (Pleroma).

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 (like half of them are incompatible implementations, so I think it's completely fine to say "networks").

The specification itself is far too ambiguous. 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.

I use AP daily, and while it's fine for technical users with a reasonable understanding that anything they post is public, putting naive users' data at risk has never and will never be acceptable; pushing AP will harm everyone.

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

#84

Post by api »

Porthos9K wrote: post #5

I'd say they should use ActivityPub[1] instead of wasting time on their own incompatible solution, but quite frankly I don't want Twitter federating with Mastodon. We get our fill of chuds with anime avatars thanks to Pleroma, and don't really need or want Twitter around because decentralization won't make it any less of a digital sacrifice zone[2]. 1: https://activitypub.rocks/ 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacri…

> get our fill of chuds with anime avatars thanks to Pleroma

"In 2019 Anime will be associated with fascism, neo-Nazis, and hard-core misogyny." - Time traveler me from the future.

"LOL WUT?" - Me in 2005 before murdering this obviously false me from an obviously impossible timeline to prevent damage to the space-time continuum.

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

#85

Post by crabasa »

dgellow wrote: post #66
crabasa wrote: post #56

Honestly... I've never wanted to embed an image in HN more than now. Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown says what 1000 words cannot. https://giphy.com/gifs/football-prank-Ou18ZgE49Fss0

Could you elaborate? I checked the gif and don't understand what you mean.

https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+screws+developers

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

#87

Post by edf13 »

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…

That's not going to work....

There are egos at stake here!

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

#89

Post by danShumway »

EGreg wrote: post #49
Angostura wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not clear to me what ‘decentralized’ means her, if not federated. Perhaps you could explain?

Federated means you’re part of a giant tree with some authority on the top (like DNS has with ICANN). Decentralized means there is no center I would add that Distributed to me seems there are no inherent “domains” you need to belong to, like for example email is federated but with scuttlebutt you’re identified by your public key and a hub is just a dumb relay and you can have many. Non-federated routing alternatives…

What's the authority at the top of Mastadon? You can have private instances that don't federate with anyone, and there's no coordinated authority that controls any other instance.

For that matter, what is the authority at the top of email? You and I can set up an email server and start talking to each other right now without anyone's permission. We don't have to be connected to anyone else, and we don't have any authority that can control our implementations or even that keeps track of what servers exist.

I don't get the comparison between Email or Mastadon to ICANN.

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