I really think that open source federated services are the future. There are now a bunch of these services all using the same protocol called ActivityPub. PeetTube is a YouTube alternative, PixelFed replaces instagram, Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit, and Plume is like medium. There are a few other projects as well. All of these services are able to talk to each other and allow users to share data across them creating one large federated platform. Meanwhile, traditional commercial platforms like Fb, Twitter, and Youtube have zero incentive to allow users to move data between them.
Another important aspect of the Fediverse is that it's much harder to censor and manipulate than centralized networks. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries.
A federated network that's developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit is the way internet was intended to work in the first place before it was hijacked by corporations. I'm very glad to see that decentralized networks are finally starting to get popular again.
I agree it's the future - however their positives - the net benefit - has challenges that must be designed for as well.
It will have to unfold that you decide what trusted federated network you follow - whereby access, the freedom to that decision (or not) will act as a canary for when democracy and freedom is more or less at odds with tyranny; control of systems of information as a mechanism, or symptom of fear by not having access to what everyone says (good and potential bad actors) will be a forcing mechanism toward people developing real trust - our own ability to trust, to be healthy, open minded and open hearted enough, that we naturally organize into trusted-social hierarchies - a chain of command.
The line between tyrannical and democratic behaviour of a suppressed or free state is quite clear and obvious once you're paying attention and know where to look (when you have the ability to see what's going on, which of course is difficult when there are physical systems of censorship and suppression).
'has challenges that must be designed for as well.'
one of the challenges I been thinking about for some time, and spoken with a few.. choosing your filters.
At the moment, I am thinking it could be a set of 'bouncer-bots'; maybe these are built into browser extensions?
A federated list of bouncer bots where people can describe, vote, add notes, fork.. so that people on the 'other side' of whatever.. can detail why they think 'sam's no sex in the fediverse bot' is too strict, or not strict enough..
I think choice not only in servers to follow (which may be made behind the scenes without in-your-face-knowledge to the newer users.. should become more choice of groups of bouncer bots to filter or not filter.
A concern pops into mind, that his works okay so long as people are honest about groups they are in, like 100 people downvote this fakenews filter but they identify as XX'.. and that may be good at first.. but what stops a fourchn group from coming in and storming the votes with 200 people vote Y as fakenews and they identify as YY's..
so filter options for opinions on the bots and comments that are voted up by people who self identify as ZZ and have identity verified by phone number? or twitter or signal.. and checkboxes to include only poeople like that, and to remove vote counts and comments by people have been flagged as trolls, or only people flagged as trolls that have been flagged by accounts that were verified by phone.. etc..
Then how to handle those who would try to game that.. but I think after time there will be some pretty popular and solid block-lists and people will have more options for choosing their syphon filters which some may block entire sites, some may block just articles by author FG but not whole site..
heck I'd like some that added a line across the top with extra info, like your bouncers block 10% of this portal due to reasons, and 1,000 have said this portal hides facts about LGB or whatever..
Yes, interesting, good ideas. These fit into a system I have been developing, evolving "on paper" - called Reputas.
Basically create a system that allows leaders - thought leaders, policy leaders, security-safety leaders, etc - to be as transparent as they can by sharing and evolving (with version control to review their history of changes) their current understanding and reasoning, and present - if they have one - their arguably better solution.
There will need to be centralized bodies who are the curators, governors - moderators - of these different competing filter systems. There will need to be many - the more the better, to some degree - and they can and will learn from each other, and lead to discourse between leaders; or there will be a frontrunner that gains a large lead at the beginning - a similar trajectory like Elon Musk has lead with Tesla et al, whereby the status quo systems had no incentive to innovate and create a much better, necessary system that is better for society, for the environment. Twitter with its audience may become one such curator - however Jack is heavily bought into Bitcoin and I think that will lead him astray and not allow him to evolve Twitter's network development adequately. Facebook and Mark have the potential as well to evolve to a new system - though I think their advertising financial model (shallow and cheap mass manipulation of society) as their leading design metric will corner them as well. Neither of those founders have understood or let go of fear and control, and so they are designing, thinking, from a control and greed perspective - of scarcity vs. abundance mindset, also why I think the VC industrial complex won't last too much longer (relatively speaking) - the abnormal, e.g. unnecessary pressures it applies to organizations to scale fast and exit, and only expecting 2% of their investments to give them their ROI on 100% of their investments as another terrible, lazy investment strategy that they've confined themselves as part of their strategy to convincing LPs casino or lottery-like risk of getting an ROI after 10 years.
One goal of this system would be to allow society and peer review, and also would act as allowing the OP to gauge the state of the union (or lack therefore) - where society is at compared to their own understanding of all that is this crazy, magical, arguably infinite universe where the past-present-future all exist at the same time and there's likely universal hierarchy, a chain of command, that has evolved towards a single consciousness that some call God; or those who are passionate and interest enough to engage critically, in a non-violent way, can then engage and argue their points - to which then would give me an opportunity to further explain and counter their points.
I also think Joe Rogan's podcast model is an evolving archetype, but where individuals with such reach - and growing - as his, should hold a practice of non-violence to include reviewing and updating knowledge and thoughts from their old content, as to not be perpetuating older knowledge; a momentous task, however important and the reward will come as someone like Joe refines himself, becoming a better and better role model, and as systems are designed to fluidly support such an effort. For example, old information from when Presidential candidate Andrew Yang (currently suspended his campaign) spoke with Joe Rogan - he had updated, evolved his policies a little bit since then, primarily that the $1,000/month Universal Basic Income/Freedom Dividend (as he calls it) - would now start at 18 and go until you expire (die), whereas before his policy plan was 18 to 65 I believe, when social security would kick in; there should have been a mechanism in place, where both Joe and Andrew agree to update - or overlay the video content - so people are exposed to this updated information, and so prior, aged information, isn't perpetuated - which will only lead to confusion and people not having as accurate of an understanding.
I won't have downvotes or at least if they are as part of the decentralized systems, downvotes (for most if not all content) won't have any impact in the systems I would design.
As you brainstorm, you're right that there are different possibilities of bad actors or bad behaviour that have to be managed for - and why it's good to have more groups observing and attacking these possible patterns through evolving their own system. Verified identities of various levels will certainly be a necessary filter type - and people will have to decide what leadership they trust the most, is doing their best, is as transparent and follows adequate process for them to trust more than less.
The ultimate purpose has to be leading global society towards a healthy condition, a democratic state that supports freedom with a practice of non-violence and forgiveness. Society in general, worldwide, is generally very unhealthy - physically, emotionally, mentally, and perhaps spiritually. There is a path of healing though - I've been forced to find it and continue to struggle to venture to problem solve and heal different health issues I've had throughout my life. I still don't know if I'll make it, I cycle through becoming very suicidal due to post LASIK eye surgery I did 7+ years ago; there will be a long, thorough book, if it ever gets written.
Send me an email matt@engn.com if you want to be part of what I eventually hope to create; I currently struggle daily with chronic pain, so Hacker News is a temporary distraction each day where I can keep my mind busy and away from the pain - hopefully getting some dopamine hits and reenforcing excitement for what is possible in the future.
Why? They are better for serious techies who care a lot about privacy and data control. But the huge majority of people don't value this highly and they come with major downsides. They are harder to implement, they are harder to monetize, they are harder to curate against objectionable content.
This feels like "year of the linux desktop" to me. There are tons of great things about linux desktops for tech people but it never took off for obvious reasons.
I was curious about Lemmy, but it is really not easy to find on Google. I was able to find this through a google search for "lemmy activitypub" which took me to a random github issue which linked here, presumably it's the right site?
edit: nvm I see that Mastodon is more like twitter. I don't think I really understand why I'm having to create separate accounts on each instance if they can all communicate with each other?
ActivityPub is a protocol that does very little with a whole lot of words in the spec.
Accounts are not federated, there's no reasonable way of automating your switch to another server assuming yours dies, so forth, so on. Mastodon has a feature claiming to do the last one, but it doesn't actually work, because it's not backwards compatible and only works with relatively modern Mastodon instances (which most are not).
Also, you don't really a heavy expectation of privacy using ActivityPub. It's very trust-based, and not in the good way.
A lot of the function of ActivityPub would be better served by RSS feeds, the rest would probably be better served on a protocol like Zot; Diaspora would also give you a better expectation of privacy than ActivityPub.
Zot, though, fixes basically all of those problems, and is really pretty cool. You have one identity that you can use everywhere, all of your followers come with you because it wasn't an afterthought, access control actually does control access, so on, so on.
The way it works with email is that I create an MX record on the DNS server to tell people where mail for *@mydomain.com should go.
When I switch email hosters, I change that MX record. The downside is that it only works for the domain as a whole but not for individual email addresses.
Does ActivityPub have something like this as well?
There's no support for messages addressed to @mastodon.xyz to really point to @social.me directly, unless you do some server-side tricks yourself.
But the similarity to email is in that accounts are not federated. xyz@gmail.com is an independent email, including storage, from xyz@outlook.com - might be a different person entirely.
The 'federated' part of email is that xyz@gmail.com can send email to xyz@outlook.com, practically as if both were on the same server.
This is what ActivityPub does for social networking.
Right, so I think there are actually two separate issues here. One is federation, which is similar between email and ActivityPub as you point out.
The other is user identity. That's the part where email appears to be more flexible by relying on DNS to seperate user identity from email hosting (for the small minority of users who own their domain name).
Section 3.1 of the ActivityPub spec says that objects (I think this includes users) are identified by "publicly dereferencable URIs, such as HTTPS URIs, with their authority belonging to that of their originating server" [1].
Now, I wonder if an "originating server" is actually required or if it's sufficient to control the domain to which this URI belongs. It seems to me that it should be rather simple for ActivityPub implementations to support a mechanism similar to MX records. For instance, TXT records could be used to achieve the same thing.
Yes, you're right that email is more flexible here, however the issue is that lets say you have your own domain name, but use fastmail. If you loose your fastmail for whatever reason and didn't have backups, you get to keep your email identity if you point your MX to a new provider, which means people can still contact you, but you won't have any of your old email.
ActivityPub servers could do something similar here and in fact Mastodon in a sense supports this, (as you point out, the Actor's identity is essentially the URL of their profile, which could change host), but the problem then becomes that old interactions with the user will have 'ghost replies'. Understandably, as far as I know to save on storage and improve response times, not every interaction a user has on the fediverse with different users is copied to his/her server, that is replies in a thread from different users on different servers are still stored on their servers. Therefore if someone in a thread deletes their server, their responses/interactions will essentially disappear to anyone viewing that thread, so I might be replying to something a user said, but you won't be able to see what I am replying to etc.
Mastodon supports import/export, so that an Actor/user should be able to move servers and as long as they import their toots+followers + use the same domain, you shouldn't notice a difference, but I don't believe this is supported by the protocol directly.
Accounts (I believe ) are similar to email addresses. So it's like having an account userX@gmail.com and trying to migrate that to userX@yahoo.com. Essentially the account is tied to the domain/server.
Communication happens at server level where different instances can choose to federate with one another. Your account lives on a particular server along with the data associated with it such as your posts.
Another important aspect of the Fediverse is that it's much harder to censor and manipulate than centralized networks. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries.
A federated network that's developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit is the way internet was intended to work in the first place before it was hijacked by corporations. I'm very glad to see that decentralized networks are finally starting to get popular again.