Seems like Twitter is looking to embrace, extend and extinguish Mastodon, etc.
This is good, in a sense - means Twitter is feeling the competition. But any open source developers out there should trust Twitter just as far as you can throw them.
I think Jack's ideas usually should be new companies and not changes to Square or Twitter. I also am disappointed that Vine was shuttered when TikTok is basically the same thing and now is a massive social network[1].
Twitter, the company that started out with an open API which attracted lots of developers who then got kicked off once the company figured out what worked.
He's CEO of twitter and Square. His plan is for square to be at the center of decentralized payments via cryptocoins. Africa will be a huge place to start, as the incumbents in the west will sabotage any such effort
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 include Kademlia (used in BitTorrent) and simple flooding/gossipping (like in Kazaa) or ad-hoc networks
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.
If you're using Mastodon or email you need a server with a public IP address, which most people don't have. Distributed solutions like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) don't require that, so you can pass messages via any available relay server, LAN, or even a sneaker-net.
It's also worth mentioning that most people have to trust their Mastodon / email provider not to snoop in their private messages. Systems like SSB provide true end-to-end encryption that makes it safe to broadcast your private messages to the world.
The Web and email are both federated and thus theoretically decentralized, but in practice they're highly centralized. Yet another federated protocol (sitting on top of an already centralized federated protocol) is probably not a reliable path to decentralization.
Cool idea, sure. Maybe they should have had the marketing team look at the banner image before going live. Definitely undermines the perceived legitimacy of the effort in my opinion: https://twitter.com/bluesky
I personally get really strong uncanny valley vibes from that thing. I might dig a cartoon version of it, but that banner image seriously creeps me out.
This brings to mind the (truthfully) quite useless Minds.com social network. Twitter doesn't NEED a blockchain. Just look at Pleroma, Mastodon, or Gab to see p2p twitter replacements that are blockchain-free.
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.
Does anyone on HN have an interest in building a decentralized social network together? I've been thinking about doing this for a while now. Feel free to shoot me an email laksman [at] stanford [dot] edu
What's the problem with existing ones? And why do social networks draw so much attention relative to other social platform patterns, like forums?
I've been thinking for a while that there should be something like a decentralized omni-Reddit. I liked forums, but people don't want to use them anymore, because there are too many different signups and too many different notification streams/etc. on too many different sites to bother with - so if you had something like Mastodon for forums, that could mitigate that.
But it seems like a consensus has set in that Facebook/Twitter-like social networks are the One True Model, and very few people are interested in things like forums anymore.
I want to build the "NationBuilder" of the Fediverse. A PaaS / SaaS giving nonprofits, indie media, and grassroots pols access to host their own social media platform on their own web domain.
I am worried that ultimately this means that the twitter of the future will be something where people can't be deplatformed. It's been pretty effective in the past to deplatform some outrageous individuals who have stoked racial hatred and violence. They get deplatformed, and their audience disappears. There are a lot of places where hate speech is illegal. And I know that Twitter has had huge problems when called to censor things and making it completely decentralized would allow them not have to.
Even if you think the current usage of deplatforming has been positive, it poses a huge black swan risk. If our major communication platforms expose a centralized censorship mechanism, that becomes a deliciously tempting target to be leveraged by authoritarian regimes.
Even if I trust the Twitter mod team, what's to stop tomorrow's jack-booted thugs from shooting the Twitter team and seizing control of the servers? I'd much rather we as a society move to decentralized censorship-resistant networks while we still have the freedom to openly build and advocate for them.
I really doubt that banning Hitler's social media accounts in the 1920s would have done anything to stop the Nazi rise to power. Whereas in the 1930s, rest assured that centralized platforms would have made the Gestapo's life a hundred times easier.
- a few proper web frontends (and especially one like Google+),
- groups (like Google+, WhatsApp, Telegram)
then this would start to look seriously promising.
I'd happily pay a 20-40 bucks a year for that and (if Telegram didn't exist) a bit more to get a hosted but private instance for my extended family.
(That said I have been experimenting with hubzilla this year and it seems seriously promising but all instances seems to be locked down really hard or doesn't acvept new members and testing on my own instance alone doesn't really give me a feel for how it works in practice.)
A team of "up to five" - is this actually a serious effort? I get that five strong minds can do quite a lot but from a corporate strategic point of view this is a minnow, surely?
What does that mean in terms of responsibility to take bad content content down? Seems like this would allow them to argue fake news is not their problem anymore.
They are just a nice interface to visualise stuff that is stored in a decentralised way, outside of their direct control.
Also I guess it means you can cut this AWS bill by like a lot.
And it feels like it gives a very clear path to direct monetisation.
I'm cautiously optimistic. Twitter has been been making some bad decisions with content moderation, and has abandoned the idea of being the "Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party". Decentralization should restore that...
...should. That notion could disappear really fast if Twitter gets to decide who can run an instance based on their belief systems.
In the mean time, it's an interesting case study of what happened to Wil Wheaton when he tried to join a Mastodon instance. Already, even in these comments, people are expressing concerns about how Twitter will be able to maintain control over "misinformation and abuse".
That's the whole point of decentralization guys. It's impossible to moderate Twitter without being authoritarian and creepy. Bail on the concept of controlling others, and delegate that power to the end user by means of improved blocking tools.
If decentralization is going to work, we have to abandon our desire to control others with a centralized authority, and accept that responsibility as our own.
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.
I wonder if he realizes how terrible Twitter is for long form writing and publishing like this when he does it. It’s always baffled me why they haven’t removed the character limit entirely and instantly become the largest networked publishing platform that’s ever existed over night.
i like the character limit. Twitter is a telegraph office, not a magazine. he kinda has to use these threads himself, because it's his company. Hopefully his new system will suppport dual "excerpt/full text" publishing, because i 'd hate my feed to be full of 3 page articles instead of TL-DRs
it made more sense when mobile phones operated via SMS rather than 3g/4g/wifi, but it doesn't make a lot of sense now to have the character limit. What do you actually gain by capping posts to 240 characters per message? People seem to primarily use Twitter to communicate and forcing people to break a thought into multiple posts adds nothing to the experience.
"Twitter is a telegraph office" -- but should it be?
Look at ATOM/RSS, they are telegraph offices too, yet they don't have character limits. ActivityPub services like Pleroma also are "telegraph offices" without strict character limits yet they don't seem to suffer for it. In fact it's much more pleasant to use Pleroma for this reason, you have the freedom to express complete thoughts.
In my mind Twitter’s streaming API (user feeds) _was_ the standard. I understand there were technical reasons for shutting it down, but is there any reason they couldn’t rearchitect it and have eventing with the same format?
Decentralization first came to mind as a "try to pawn off the hosting costs" as a motivation but I can see trying legal zones to try to adapt to the multiple conflicting legal requirements and demands because countries would never agree on "neutral international business rules". It is certainly rational and often of questionable legal fairness to expect otherwise.
I am not happy with the balkanization involved in that concept - part of the beauty of the internet is a disregard for the globe's petty fiefdoms and their ability to literally divide and conquer.
I think that most monopoly technology companies now expect decentralized systems to challenge them eventually.
So its smart to try to build and promote something that is decentralized but also allows them a profit model. It also makes sense just from an architectural standpoint in terms of scaling. I think Ethereum offers at least a chance they may do both of those things.
Unless its open source and everyone can contribute, decentralized enough that everyone can set up their own networks, then its just another company trying to make long term investment in their company
I am not going to trust Jack, any company, on any single person on anything.
Apparently they want to create a distributed ledger using something akin to a blockchain. If that is the case then they can benefit from transactions going over their network but I doubt that it will be open source. Maybe the code to operate a node will be open sourced but just that.
I wonder how much user engagement would decrease if a CAPTCHA was needed to read a tweet. I think a big percentage of accounts are bots either trying to gauge sentiment, or push groups further to their respective political corners.
We have a lots of great initiatives these days: wt.social, brave, twitter+. Monopoly stopped not being evil. Puts shadow on the Internet. But there are still people who believe. Who try to save it!
The cynic in me thinks that by adding yet another open standard into the mix, this will ultimately help in preventing any open standard from gaining critical mass, thus keeping the status quo.
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].
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.
Wisely so: eventually two autocrats are going to pressure him to remove the other for policy violations. Better to decentralize than collect Interpol warrants.
Pleroma is light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi; its primary web interface is inspired by Twitter but it also includes the classic Mastodon interface at https://host/web endpoint. It's very easy to set up and run. It's also compatible with anything that works with Mastodon via MastodonAPI (bots, desktop clients, mobile clients such as FediLab).
Definitely the best ActivityPub software on the market!
Old Twitter even included RSS for user profiles & hashtags I believe, much like how Pleroma provides ATOM feeds for user profiles and hashtags/search queries.
This is huge. The problem for any federated initiative is that most of the users are already on established social media platforms. If Twitter adopts an existing protocol (or creates a new one that others can join on), then new services can be compatible with Twitter's massive user base.
How do you write a tweet that cribs the ideals of existing federated social media projects (Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, Write Freely etc.) without at least acknowledging their existence?
Twitter has repeatedly demonstrated that they are not a developer friendly company and that you should never build anything on their APIs. Since day one, they've done nothing but crack down on 3rd party development and peel away access.
They are the last company that should be trusted to develop an open standard.
But it looks like a ranking where one can only rank at the bottom. Who is the company most loved by developers? GitHub? Stripe? Atlassian? SalesForce? Each of them has done something wrong at some point, and it may even be the sign of management’s ability to get rid of cruft, even if those choices don’t make us happy.
So now instead of a focused team of experts detecting and removing disinformation campaigns, each user will have to figure it out on their own or hire a service to do it.
> A third-party Twitter client might be prettier and more functional than Twitter’s own client — shout out to Tweetbot! — but it certainly would not be more profitable.
I never understood this, why can't the API/firehose serve ads that would be presented in the 3rd-party apps?
Additionally 90% of users would naturally gravitate to the default app regardless, leaving 3rd-parties for cool/interesting/advanced/innovative use-cases. I still feel this was a mistake - not as some hippy idealogue - but from a ruthless capitalist perspective. This was their like button.
I think it will not be difficult for anybody to siphon that data, and I don't know how one could prevent it, and it would be nice to see it done without complicated solutions. I think twitter could be biased.
I don't know if a law like GDPR would prevent it. If it doesn't, there should be law forbidding entities to gather data.
Can you please not post duplicate comments to HN? It lowers the signal/noise ratio of the site and creates a headache when we merge threads, like we did in this case.
If two threads are so much the same that you want to post the same comment to both, that's a strong indication that they should be merged. Sending us a heads up at hn@ycombinator.com is a forcing function to make that happen.
This retconned history of the mistake that's popped up in the last few years is bizarre. No one thought this at the time.
Bush tripped over his words all the time. It's much more likely that than a calculated move (that backfired btw, it's been his most famous quote since the day he said it.)
This is good, in a sense - means Twitter is feeling the competition. But any open source developers out there should trust Twitter just as far as you can throw them.