The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community:
I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse:
A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients
B. Understands the value of decentralized platforms and holds those values themselves
C. Knows more than 1-2 people who ALSO meet the qualifications of A and B (aside from me)
I think this leaves two possibilities:
1. There can be a small number of large instances, which removes the issues caused by A and B but has the effect of reducing most of the benefits found in B (focus, privacy, catered speech, etc).
2. There will need to be a million tiny silo'd instances (<5 people). This solves B, but we run into the issues of A and C. I realize this is closer to the goal.
I'd love to see Fediverse “platforms” succeed, but I'm not sure how they can since the network effect is what is needed.
> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients
This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace.
Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will be the dominant players once the ecosystem evolves.
also, I'll repeat my new business model Twitter should adopt -- take the underlying protocol (ActivityPub), white-label their services and sell them to orgs who want Twitter on their own domain (also allowing for control over the username namespace like email / @anyusername@domain.tld). I've been pitching this idea for years and no one's ever given a serious critique of the idea. A global unified namespace like the one Twitter uses is problematic (squatting/trademark disputes, etc) and awful.
> I've been pitching this idea for years and no one's ever given a serious critique of the idea.
It would dilute the Twitter brand and divide internal resources. That's the main critique I can think of. Would never happen while Twitter was a publicly traded corporation. Under private ownership, it very well might happen.
I think the Fediverse idea is great, but people are dumb. @somebody is about as far as most people can handle. @somebody@domain.with.dots is confusing, and nobody will understand. Imagine having to explain bang paths to Fred in accounting so he can send an electronic mail.
Never underestimate how obtuse the average computer user is. They can be taught, but it takes many, many years before it becomes common enough that people grok it without trouble.
It's strange to argue that people are stupid because they don't want to deal with irrelevant technicalities. Are they also stupid because they prefer domain names to IP addresses?
Fair enough, swap out "ignorant" if you want. The learning curve for Internety-thing is pretty steep, which is why people like "Find us on Facebook!" so much.
But what I was doing was comparing Fedi @somebody@some.thing.com to old-school bang paths. It's unlikely to take off among the masses until significant time passes. Heck, even email addresses baffle enough people to make me doubt whether all of this Internet stuff was worth the trouble.
fair critique and absolutely reasonable considering why they've never done it. It just seems like a more ethical business model than selling ads and data licensing (https://octodon.social/@jalefkowit/108216691483123862).
Interesting thing: one of the major ActivityPub platforms (Write.as) offers a white label version of their blogging platform if you don't want to run it yourself.
Don't hosted services defeat the point of federation in the first place? That's how we've ended up with email being as difficult as it is to self-host.
Same issue with Discord, it's a centralized service where you and your content are at the mercy of the owner of the service, which I think is one of the big things that federated alternatives (like Matrix) are meant to solve, so any single entity can't unilaterally revoke your participation in the entire network.
Being able to switch what provider hosts your social media without losing your network is valuable (and has pro-social effects) without needing to self-host.
> That's how we've ended up with email being as difficult as it is to self-host.
I'm not sure what you mean, what's the "that", what do you think led to the situation where email is hard to self-host?
Even if hard to self-host, email succeeds in avoiding vendor lock-in if you have your own domain. Which most people don't, because of cost and because _that_ can be hard to manage for a normal person. But if fediverse succeeds at giving a typical person the lack of vendor lock-in that email-with-your-own-custom-domain does, I'd consider that a success on the criteria of what federation is meant to achieve.
>I'm not sure what you mean, what's the "that", what do you think led to the situation where email is hard to self-host?
I was referring to spam filtering, where all the big hosts know to allow each other through, but make it very difficult for smaller hosts to participate by being tight lipped about their filtering criteria and making others have to jump through lots of hoops to not be treated as spam. Which, when considering the high cost of being spam filtered (eg. if you're a business) ends up making it very hard to practically self-host.
Similarly, I wouldn't think fediverse would have succeeded in the goals of federation with large centralized hosting providers. Since upon reaching critical mass, they could easily enact similar policies in the name of preventing spam or for 'safety'. The content would be going through their network and would be stored on their hardware, so they would use the same logic current social media uses to justify their right to moderate without oversight.
probably. Fortunately Bluesky is vaporware so the Fediverse and ActivityPub actually have the advantage here of being a standard that has an established community of implementors, and momentum.
EDIT: I've said before, the PBLLC should be working with the W3C, IETF, or other open bodies, and they've always had a seat at the table (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/join).
We're absolutely not vaporware. We're also completely happy to live in a world where both ActivityPub and Bluesky exist, and prioritize different problems with different approaches.
> Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients
Yep. Self-hosting something like Plex (please consider Jellyfin instead) or a social Fediverse server shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone. I think projects like Sandstorm, yunohost, Cloudron, etc have the right idea, but they're still way too complicated for the average person to get up and running. I've been chewing on this problem for about a year, and I believe it's solvable with technologies that are currently available. This is the focus of my current main side project.
https://runyourown.social/#keep-it-small <-- Something like 50, where only 1 or 2 have to have the technical skills, seems reasonable to amortize the admin time. I don't totally know why we're saying that kind of middle number is infeasible.
Platforms should not own content and subscribers graph. Users should own content and subscribers graph, preferably by reliance on public key cryptography. Then you will be notified of your peers' contents on any platform.
Imagine a popular but controversial blogger deplatforming attempt, followed by his 300k subscribers getting an 'Your contact has just uploaded their first video on NextTube' notification in five minutes. You don't need many platforms when platform understands they only have power to de-content themselves.
You also no longer need those rows of social icons since you only need to subscribe to a creator once.
Content should reside in P2P/DHT mesh and platforms would only present, curate, decorate and discover it. But it should also be discoverable via PKI+DHT.
I completely agree, there's such a barrier for entry that's incredibly difficult for not-tech people to emphasize with.
I think there's an interesting case to be looked at with Discord. Not that discord itself is decentralized, but the surprising amount of vibrant and active communities in the form of Discord servers. If the client-side barrier can be sufficiently lowered, I'm sure many communities like that have at least one or two people knowledgeable enough to set up an instance or two
For 2, I wonder if there could be a 'wrapper' service (website) around Fediverse that makes it as easy to set up an instance as Slack or Discord. It would still be decentralized, except the service could abstract away the technical bits entirely.
Bingo. Send payment here, choose a name, your instance spins up, and stays up as long as you've paid for hosting.
When payment runs out, it emails you a download link to export your data which you can take to another provider, or just start paying again and it starts working again.
It depends on who "your community" is - if they're people who can set up their own instance, and care about decentralisation - congrats, there are already loads of them on the Fediverse, in terms of users and instances. C) solved.
If your community is "people I'm interested in talking to" then they don't need A) or B, and there are so many of those on the Fediverse that congrats, C) is solved.
The fact of the matter is the Fediverse (and even just Mastodon) is that 1) is not the current reality (plenty of medium and small-ish instances), and 2) does not have to be, and indeed is not the reality, and even if it were, A and C still need not apply.
I sometimes fear people jump into the Fedi but, understandably, aren't versed on how discoverability works, thinks there's no-one interesting there, and leaves. Whether setting up your own instance or using a tiny existing one, you can browse the user directories and posts from other, larger instances, and find interesting souls to connect with, without having to make an account there.
Most importantly one can search tags used in posts and profiles which relate to your interests. Any good / mature client (or the web UI) lets you search for tags and pin them as their own timelines - so a rolling conversation about your fav topics, across all instances that you federate with.
As someone whose primary social media is in the Fediverse, the discussion in this thread is ... confusing? It's so disconnected from my experienced reality of the Fediverse I don't even know where to begin.
Functionally, my experience within the Fediverse is it's literally just Twitter but with moderation fully broken up between instances and not agreed on. An instance's administrator(s) can decide what instances users are allowed to interact with. This is done either via whitelisting or blacklisting, though almost all instances work via blacklisting. Furthermore, administrators have total control over moderation.
Users pick the instances that closely align with their own ideals. If they don't like the moderation, they can move instances.
The software that backs the Fediverse and the software that consumes it is quite varied. Users are unusually adept at navigating all this.
We had the same sort of frontend diversity in Twitter for many years. This isn't much more than that, honestly. Now you just can match any client with any set of moderation rules you like best. It's very much a free market approach to the question of moderation of user generated content by Big Tech.
When it's so easy to move between instances and you have a large selection of moderation rules to select from for your account's "residence", you no longer really have a legal leg to stand on for "censorship" because you can just move next door where explicit adult gifs are totes cool and your followers will be updated with your new home. There's literally a network of instances that can be as moderated as your most loathsome ban happy video game board to as unmoderated as your favorite anonymous image board. And you get to pick. Not Musk. Not wall street. And certainly not Congress.
This is a nice idea in theory, but the issue then becomes inconsistent moderation that affects what is visible to everyone. If you get banned or have posts deleted on one platform, presumably those posts disappear from that instance, and thus the Fediverse as a whole.
This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or instances at large, which seems pretty unhealthy.
Not to mention, people don't typically want to pay for these services, or pay to host them, they want to access them for free. On top of that, with something like Twitter, the desire is to be visible to all, rather than just a few. Most people use Twitter to interact with 'the world', not just a local part of it.
> This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or instances at large, which seems pretty unhealthy.
I really keep coming back to this sentence and still continue to not see the downside. Why is it a problem if an instance walls itself off from the Fediverse? What right do you have to force an instance to do literally anything? This idea that people think you should be forced to engage or interact with content they don't want to see is ... disturbing. Free speech gives you the right to say what you want but it doesn't give you the right to force people to listen to you.
I really want to give the benefit of the doubt but your protests seem entirely based around this idea that you have the right to force people to interact with you. That aspect of Twitter is entirely what enabled Twitter Mobs to mete out life destroying "justice" over the smallest of infractions.
I think people should just drop the expectation that they can just be "visible to all". Not everybody wants to see your content. If they want to block you, then they should be able to. If a group of people wants to block you (think: getting banned from a mastadon instance), they should be able to as well. At least in the case of the Fediverse, you can look for a community where you'll be accepted. That's not possible on Twitter, you're either allowed or banned.
I don’t pay for my account on my home instance. I don’t want to interact with the world and I think most people are tired of living under threat of being one misstep away from a Twitter Mob.
Your complaints are features. People are fleeing to group chats for a reason.
As for the problem of your data being deleted if you’re concerned with that export your data regularly or run your own instance. Anyways, while it’d be nice to take a stab at that problem, it’s no worse than Twitter banning you.
I'm also confused about all these comments about whether it could work. There are already people using it in practice.
I may have joined mastodon because I wanted a non-corporate social media, but I've been using it for years because I like it. Not I'm hoping I will like it, but I like it how it works now.
In fact I have mixed feelings about a potential twitter exodus, because you never know how it will change things. (I also don't understand why you would quit twitter because it may suck when musk takes over. Why not wait until it sucks an then quit? And in the meantime you can also try the fediverse).
If anyone decides to give it a try, I recommended following many people, and later freely unfollowing people if it turns out you don't like their posts. Mastodon won't give you any content you didn't subscribe to, so you need to find some stuff yourself. You can find lists of people sorted by subject to start you out.
Which are the platforms that let you own your data cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly for yourself and your followers? Basically the network should be in the data and the servers should be replaceable. I think those are very obvious bottlenecks that affect most of these alternative networks.
On the other side, censorship is also very important, nobody wants to have to dwell into spam and filth to read a small amount of valuable content. Maybe be able to choose your own censors somehow? Or build chains of trusts with your friends and "friends-of-friends" that can be revoked at any point?
The idea is that every individual person has a container for their own data, and then platforms interact with that data using methods built on the Semantic Web.
I frankly don't think it has a hope in hell of succeeding, but I love the concept!
I haven't dived into the specs, but how does solid solve bad actors getting access to your pod?
Usually today your data is fragmented across platforms (so damage is reduced) which have centralized authorities who can step in and fix bad actor issues.
Honestly, I'm gonna be super lazy and just quote the front page of the site:
> Anyone or anything that accesses data in a Solid Pod uses a unique ID, authenticated by a decentralized extension of OpenID Connect. Solid's access control system uses these IDs to determine whether a person or application has access to a resource in a Pod.
Of course, as a data owner, you could accidentally grant a bad actor access to your data, but presumably you can also revoke that access as well.
But that's just it though - if bad actors gain control, you lose the ability to reject OAuth creds (which is what OpenID is). Things like social engineering or phishing of credentials, which happens at scale today.
They need a way to handle situations when bad actors take over, because other solutions handle this with centralized authorities who step in and rectify the issue.
I'm now confused by what you mean when you say "gain control".
Are you talking about literally exploiting a bug and hacking the underlying service that is providing access to the pod?
In that case, it's a question of who owns and operates the pod. Solid is conceived as a set of standards that can be implemented by either individuals, or by companies on behalf of individuals. Think "data ownership as a service".
So you can still have centralized entities that implement the spec and provide support and other services for users, including dealing with security incidents.
I was thinking about "physical reality" as a means to establish a chain of trust. If you and I sit next to each other, we have vocal and image chat available. Other than someone coming and physically injecting themselves into our "sphere", our communications can be trustworthy and reliable.
If a "chunk" of data could be "sovereignized" by association with other "nearby" chunks of data (through some common signing event), one could "move" seamlessly from one chunk to the other, regardless of where it was being "served" from.
When I talk about "chunks" here, I'm talking about document boundaries and ownership/control of the data.
If we were in some sort of simulation, moving from my sphere of data to yours would look something like a probability distribution. By having signed contracts between the spheres, one could increase the probability that movement in a general direction resulted in access and loading of trusted data.
Because the chains start out empty, nobody "owns" these fictitious plots until they are established through preexisting trusted channels. Various channels as well. None of this bullshit NFT land grab crap that nobody can trust. Use NFTs, or even better, Lightning payments to establish the "authenticity" of the nearby data spheres.
Its interesting that DNS doesn't come up more often as the solution here. Owning a domain (or subdomain) seems a whole lot easier than most of the other "decentralized" solutions that get discussed. And if DNS is too centralized for you then something like ENS can replace it without needing very many changes to the rest of the stack.
Exactly. That's the approach defended and promoted by the indieweb thinking heads: start with identity and structure things bottom-up. Machines are quite good at translating between the different protocols. If I want to publish my content using RSS and you want to consume it using ActivityPub, it is easy to write software that makes the bridge, provided your identity doesn't change.
Properties:
* fully self-authenticating protocol independent of DNS and the TLS certificate authorities
* self sovereign identity
* you can migrate to a different host and keep all your data, and social graph, and old links continue to work.
* You can authorize and run live mirrors of your data which help provide bandwidth
* you only see things from or via people you follow
I think this was the premise of the original World Wide Web (minus the cryptographic part) before everything was centralised. Essentially people would have their own personal web pages and readers subscribe via RSS.
That’s, to a large extent, what the WWW is today. I have my own personal site, and a collection of RSS/Atom feeds that I check to see what’s happening on other people’s personal sites. It’s surely an exaggeration to say that “everything” is centralized, despite the rise of the huge monoliths such as Twitter.
> Which are the platforms that let you own your data cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly for yourself and your followers?
If you know of a homomorphic encryption scheme that would work for this and remain economically viable for other people to host, let me know. I simply don't think it's reasonable to expect that degree of privacy, much less on a Twitter clone. If you want privacy, use Matrix or OMEMO.
I mean "own" not in the sense of privacy in this case. But in the sense that the account (public key) belongs to the person who has a certain private key. So you can move your content to a different server or domain and keep all your audience, maybe with a small transition period while the new server becomes well known, but not like now getting kicked out of twitter or youtube just results on a bunch or broken links and contextless comments.
AFAIK Mastodon implements a migration feature that lets you move your followers to/from different accounts if you want to use a new homeserver. Not sure how it works on the backend, but it's got this base mostly covered.
Love the idea and will look more into it. Not sure why you got such a non-constructive and rude dismissal in another comment, especially given the hacker news guidelines
I have tried to wrap my head around how this works as a total outsider noob, and I just can not get it! But, I want to.
I get the email comparison (different platforms can all speak, so why not have social media be the same?). But, then the white sheets are just all php and python and all this stuff that doesn't make any sense (I know what they are, just not what to do with that info), and for better or worse doesn't make sense to anyone I know. I'm, like, doing the Odin Project, actively trying to learn, and I still can't really get it. How is this supposed to translate to anyone else?
I don't think you need to understand anything about php or Python to understand this. I think the email comparison is the best metaphor.
Gmail and Yahoo and whatnot all speak the same language, "email". They've friended one another ("federated") and have unfriended spam mail servers. They've also settled on roughly the same design for their mail clients, but they didn't need to.
Unlike Gmail, there are a zillion Mastodon servers, because anyone can make it. And unlike email, the "ActivityPub" protocol can be used for a bunch of different uses. Mastodon cuts it up to look like Twitter, Pixelfed cuts it up to look like Instagram, PeerTube cuts it up to look like YouTube, etc.
Basically, Gmail is just one email server, and it speaks SMTP .
Similarly, Mastodon.social is just one Mastodon server, and it speaks ActivityPub.
In practice, I don't think you really need to understand it any further than the email analogy. I just tell those interested to sing up for Mastodon.social and see if they like it.
ActivityPub is a generalization of Email. Email gives you a cloud-hosted inbox that others can put stuff in. ActivityPub gives you both an online inbox AND a "outbox" that YOU can put stuff in that others can check out. Check out this diagram: https://activitypub.rocks/static/images/ActivityPub-tutorial...
The stuff here is called an "Activity" around "Objects". Follow request is a "Follow" activity with the "Actor" as the object. A tweet is a "Create" activity with the "Note" being the object. There's an entire vocabulary defined in the spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#object-typ...
This way, all kinds of social platforms - from YouTube to GitHub - can be modeled in this general distributed pub/sub system.
Basically you have e-mail, which is a protocol (actually a set of protocols, but ignore for now). Thus you can e-mail a protonmail user from your gmail/corporate account without any issues. However Twitter and Facebook are proprietary black box services and beyond using a Facebook-provided identity to create a Twitter account, there is no way to 'friend' a Twitter user on your FB account or interact with content in any way.
Then there comes a protocol called ActivityPub[1], which "e-mailifies" social networking. So far Mastodon and their goodreads clone are harvesting modest success.
I am a great fan of the goal, but not of the top-down approach W3C have taken with ActivityPub. For example LBRY solves this problem in a different way and is way more successful than all of Fediverse in total.
This might help. If Twitter for some reason decided to migrate to the Fediverse, then you could login to their mastodon.social account, follow @elonmusk@twitter.com, and reply to Elon's tweets, all without having a Twitter account. And Elon and other people on Twitter would see your reply (coming from, say, @taurusnoises@mastodon.social) and could reply to you.
I joined a fediverse group but it’s all just random short posts. Kind of like knock-off Twitter to put it bluntly. Also the “home” tab is empty which is a bit confusing.
I want this to succeed, but as a social media site in order to succeed they need people (interesting people who like to post interesting things), and a good feed algorithm. This is where Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc. are worth a lot: many social media sites could easily replace Twitter except they don’t have these.
It's like twitter but decentralized and with no algorithm. You follow people and you see their posts in chronological order. It works great once you've started, but yeah if you don't know anyone on fedi to begin with you're going to have a rough time finding people to follow. If you already know people who have fedi, follow them and when they boost posts see if the person who wrote the post they boosted is interesting. If they are, follow. Don't follow too many people though or you will have an unmanageably large timeline. I've been on fedi for about a year and a quarter. I started out following one person (@maia@crimew.gay) and now I follow 108 people and have made ~3.2k posts. It works for me and my friends at least and I don't really care about adoption beyond that.
For the home tab to populate, you need to follow people. Mastodon doesn't push content you didn't ask for. I would recommend checking out the local and federated timelines and see what people are up to.
Ratio of active vs created accounts is very low, it feels like most of them ware abandon by users after the initial boom. That one that’s stands out is Mastodon which isn’t a surprise.
For whole fediverse to succeed it will have to jump out from niche groups and fight for ordinary users that are used to Facebook or Twitter. Which will not happen until some big brands/interesting people start to use them as PR/commentary tools. And, yes, that’s the single point of all social networks, and not connecting with friends.
Niche groups? Have you seen how huge and heterogeneous mastodon.social and the likes are? They're even bigger than that ;-)
Even the "niche" instances have sufficient numbers that there are enough niches for many people to see something of interest there, and most of them freely allow off-topic chatter, nay welcome it.
One of the benefits of the Fediverse is that even if you're on an instance that's for talking about movies, you can a) almost always talk about anything and b) talk to your followers about whatever you please.
The Fediverse isn't about brands or influencers using them for PR or commentary, although there's nothing to stop that. It's kinda against the fundamental ethos: that it's about people not brands. And in that, it enjoys the fact that it's already succeeded, but it inherently doesn't want to "succeed" in the commercial or capitalistic sense. All it needs to do is continue to exist.
General purpose social media will be considered the greatest mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented discussion boards.
When you have no common topic around which to organize, then people have to search each other's personalities for commonality. And in doing so, they stratify along political lines. This isn't enough, so then they micro-stratify into various, rabid subgroups within those political wings.
But when you have the only message board dedicated to an obscure brand of motorcycle from the 1940s (or whatever, IDK), then you're stuck with those people. You're stuck with either having to learn to get along or lose out on your favorite thing.
Go back to topic-oriented message boards. You don't need identity continuity between all the message boards you are membered in. That serves the corporate surveillance state more than it serves you. You don't need people on Board A to see what you're doing on Board B. If it's important and relevant, you can tell them. You dn't need to be friended with all your aunts and cousins and ex boyfriends. That shit is weird, family is for seeing at Thanksgiving to remember why you hate them and then go back to being happy for the rest of the year.
In my opinion, social media like Facebook and Twitter were (mostly) fine before commercial interests killed them.
There are plenty of reasons to connect with a group of people and have asynchronous communication. In many ways, current messaging groups are a poor replacement of early facebook and twitter.
Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates.
Over time, the initial concept of people who have something to say, watered down to liking or forwarding other people's updates.
Topic-oriented discussion is great. But there is also a need to connect to a small group of people that just want to talk about random subjects that come up in everyday life.
> Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates.
I think where it went wrong was moneyed advertising interests forcing controversial content on people because they had a one-stop-shop to do it instead of the unmanageably costly operation it would have been to carpet bomb the PHPBBs of yor.
Advertising was still a thing back then, but advertisers were not in a position of power. Popular boards like Penny-Arcade could demand a premium and had full editorial control. Smaller boards had less of a bargaining position, but only insofar as they were willing to annoy users. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth the day Gamedev.net introduced a one-time, full-page ad, that could be dismissed immediately, that only showed up when you first visited the site for the day. It lasted less than a week. Now you can't go 10 minutes on YouTube without getting essentially the same thing with a strict timer making sure you have suffered to a satisfactory degree before being allowed to continue on. If advertisers could track your eyes and make sure you were actually looking at the screen before engaging the timer, they would.
It has nothing to do with user facing features on these platforms. It's the centralization and control that centralization gives to the owners of the platform that is the problem.
Recall the 90/9/1 rule of the Internet. It's always been the case that 90% of people are nothing more than lurkers and the content is only created by 1% of people, with the missing middle commenting on it. Like buttons shifted the scale on how many people "engaged" with content, drawing from that 90% of lurkers, but didn't change the 9/1 part. That alone doesn't stratify people. It takes maliciously weaponizing that content against people.
No, this is how a subset of its users treat it, and there is a significant amount of people (myself included) who think topic-based instances are a poorly conceived idea for federated systems [0].
This gives me the thought that the focus should be on federating communities (boards/subreddits/forums/newsgroups/whatever you want to call it), and user identities only as a secondary aspect. The instances would choose which boards they want to host, and the contents of the boards would be synchronized between instances. The contents of the boards would be controlled by the community (board owners/moderators). Instances would decide which instances they want to synchronize with. Communities can also decide to fork. That’s actually similar to how Usenet works, except that we want built-in moderation, and cryptography for content integrity and cross-instance authentication.
I think we really need to get over the idea of trying to get our content perpetually propagated out to the population, or trying to not miss out on consuming every single bit of content in a category.
It's okay to live in a small community. Hell, it's okay to live in an enclave of a small community. There were whole sections of various topic boards I never visited, with active members there that I would not have recognized because they didn't visit the sections I frequented.
It's okay to miss out on things. It's okay to not know about the latest JavaScript framework because it was developed in a community of stamp enthusiasts instead of your community of train enthusiasts. It's okay that fashion in Milan takes time to propagate to NYC and then to the country. It's okay to not hear about every single humanitarian crisis in the world when we can't reasonably do anything about it and we have our own to handle here at home.
So much energy is put into pushing content, pushing pushing pushing. Boredom is okay! All this hyper optimization of content dissemination has started to feel like a system of control. Keep people preoccupied, overwhelmed with the enormity of the world. Then they won't question the coal plant in their back yard.
I’m not sure how that relates to my parent comment. What I outlined can apply both to private boards and public boards.
Nevertheless, for the purpose of discoverability, I’m a fan of public forums. However that’s still more a pull model than a push model, and very different from “microblogging” platforms (e.g. Twitter).
I love my mother. I wish I talked to her more often. But I wish it were about whatever she's doing and not whatever stupid shit she's seen on Facebook. Some post from 8 years ago about killer mosquitos that are going to wipe us out so don't let the kids play outside. "This really happened to this person I've never met or even talked to on Facebook". Mom, I think we would have heard about towns getting wiped out by mosquitos. Though I guess she does have cataracts, so maybe she can't see the date field.
But you used to only get that kind of shit from Reader's Digest. So you only had to hear about it once per month, not every day, with old topics you thought were long dead suddenly coming back with a vengeance.
This is not going against what you said in principle, I feel what you are saying, but I feel the need to add that I was admin of a few topic oriented message boards in the 90's and early 2000's, and yeah as you said it was pretty good simply to be able to be part of some group that cared about the same random stuff as me, and I think a big part of it is because humanity literally had not ever been able to connect so quickly on shared interests from such geographically diverse regions before, but it wasn't all roses there either.
Personality cults were a regular theme. Honestly just one individual with no other goals in life could wreak havoc by constantly weaving between the rules, launching sock puppets to do some virtual Munchausen-by-proxy performance, painting admin as the bad guys, staging crises that didn't really exist to get more followers (in the social sense, there was not really a "follow" option in the platforms at the time). These topic-based forums were often in direct competition, and on more than one occasion it was revealed (usually by infiltrating via long-term social engineering so you could get to see the IP addresses of the members) that these users were from competitors trying to stir trouble and siphon off members.
Diversity and cliquishness was an issue. Generally a community would kick off around some exciting new theme, or just a general shared interest and grow organically from there. This was great but the longer the same group hangs together, the more insular the atmosphere and inside references became. It's just what groups of people do in physical groups when they hang together a lot - they grow bonds with each other, their shared experiences strengthen these bonds, and newcomers see this and can see that it will take a lot of effort and patience to reach the same level of acceptance, and the older and more insular a community becomes, the less people are attracted to it. Then eventually the older members see there's nothing new to learn here and drift off. So the lifecycle of topic-based message boards followed a standard inception/growth/stagnation/diaspora pattern.
Generalised social media puts everyone on an even platform - albeit a pretty shitty one - everyone sucks equally by default. You're correct in that the centralisation has a ton of other side effects and I don't disagree that many of these aren't what people want (if they're aware of it). Just that as I said it wasn't all roses and we can't just "go back". There were tons of reasons why the topic-oriented message boards faded away and it wasn't just laziness or convenience. It is human nature to desire connection and a sense of place, balanced with a need for novelty and invigoration of ideas. Generalised social media provides that routinely and formulaically, they basically hacked our brains.
Also on practicality of your suggestion, we can't force people to go back. You can't put a gun to people's heads and force them to only use single issue forums. I get the nostalgia because I was a part of it and it was great for a time, but it did also have a ton of downsides.
I think we need to move forward not go back. Federated social networks are one attempt at this. It's a lot to take on board as we have to learn new things like managing our identity / signatures and learning differences between providers, but efforts are underway to try and shift us away from the big old attention silos people have been trained to use these days.
I never ran an popular board. I had ran some small ones, mostly folks I knew in real life. I've also ran several in-person clubs over the years, which obviously don't scale to the same degree. But I do have some inkling of the issues you're talking about.
The newess of the whole thing is a great point. I keep hoping that Internet culture as a whole will invent a new sense of manners. (At the risk of being accused of being an Eternal Septemberist, which was actually before my time) 'Member when people talked about being a "good 'netizen"? We had trolls, but they knew what they were doing was against good manners (indeed, that's why they did it).
Somewhere along the line, people stopped getting on-ramped onto the Internet. They got dumped on instead and the only role models they had were other folks who couldn't see the humanity behind the handle.
A lot of the issues you talked about still exist in general-purpose social media. Indeed, the platform reinforces it, as it gets to know your political proclivities better and pushes you into their engagement bubbles.
I think the decentralization is a bulkheading against those issues. When they happen--and they will happen--the limited scope of the topic board limits the damage to that subculture. It doesn't impact the Whole Damn Nation. Can you imagine someone like Donald Trump winning the presidency without a one-stop-shop of advertising and propaganda dissemination that Facebook provides? You don't even have to spend that much money, you can get the people to organically self-sustain it with the right meme seeding.
We had competing boards, too. I was active on two different game development boards. There were more that I just didn't bother with. If one started to feel like shit, I could dump over to another one. There was some continuity, but it wasn't absolute.
IDK. I know I'm probably rose-colored-glasses on the issue. And you're right, there's no putting the cat back in the bag. Maybe the bigger problem is that most people really are shit and smartphones gave them access to the internet. "Garbage in, garbage out". But it seems like they'd all be fighting it out on the ESPN boards, away from my eyes, if it weren't for general-purpose social media.
Is having both a normal social media account & a federated version okay? I've seen a lot of people delete their Twitter and then hop on Mastodon because they're worried about Musk. Whether their concern about Musk is valid is another question. How do people see his acquisition of Twitter as a bad thing? If anything he will try to improve it no?
This is the best commentary I've seen about the Twitter situation, from someone who worked there for four years at a senior level (but isn't there now so is free to share their thoughts): https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2022/04/anchors-away
The short version: Twitter's challenges are not hard technology problems, they're hard social and community problems. These are not areas Elon has shown any interest in understanding or respecting.
Twitter was a space with a set of rules, Elon has publicly indicated his intention to change those rules, and many of the people who came to it with the understanding that those rules existed don't really want to be there without those rules in place.
Improve is subjective. Some people want to go to a coffee shop, others a Bar. Elon is buying the space and turning it from one into the other, of course there's going to be turnover in the patrons of the space.
You can certainly have a normal and a federated social media. I do. You likely already have email, which is also kind of federated and kind of social media.
Yes, as a several-year fedi user I don't see anything wrong per se with having and using both. (I never got into twitter so I personally don't.) The most important thing to remember is that it is specifically not Twitter, and you'll be disappointed if you try to bring the exact same kind of interactions you might have had on Twitter. Every instance has its own themes and inside jokes that you can get to know and become part of. It's designed to be more about forming relationships and community than getting lots of likes and followers.
It's possible to use a bot to crosspost your tweets onto a fedi account. Hardcore fedi fans tend to frown on it because it's a very arms-length way to interact with people on the platform, but a lot of people do it and I've even followed a few. If you're considering using a crosspost bot make sure your instance's rules allow them; different instances have different policies about that kind of thing.
As far as Musk goes, I have no doubt he will try to improve Twitter according to his vision of improvement, which not every user will agree with. We've already seen similar situations with Tumblr's policy changes a few years back leading to a wave of new users across the fediverse. Eventually some people go back/elsewhere and some stick around and become a part of these communities. Welcome to the fediverse!
I think it's fine, comes down to your reasons for trying the Fediverse. I'm not fully opposed to Twitter etc, a lot of people I'm interested in are there and I've managed to filter out the bad stuff to a reasonable extent.
Similarly I find the Fediverse interesting technically and there's at least some content I enjoy, so I have that too.
It's the same with Discord and Matrix. It's probably even better to have both accounts because then it isn't as much of a hurdle to move platforms if one thing doesn't go in the direction you'd like.
As for people leaving Twitter over Musk, I expect most of the big ones to quietly come back once they find an excuse, after all, most of them are mainly addicted to the attention, which isn't as easy to earn in the Fediverse due to a lack of a recommender system with perverse incentives to manipulate.
Intra-elite competition between old media types and silicon valley types has being on for a while in different ways. Musk has been openly exposing some outsider narratives, so he is seen as an enemy to the old media types.
I think this is most of it. The "billionaire" narrative doesn't make any sense. It's not like Twitter, or any other media companies, were owned by poor people until now.
>It's not like Twitter, or any other media companies, were owned by poor people until now
To an extent they were because they're a public company. A public company is accountable to its shareholders which in principle is open to everyone (generally represented by institutional investors in practice), whereas a private company is, in this case, only answering to one person, and only really serving one person.
That basic democratic aspect of American capitalism where everyone can take a stake in the economy is undermined when people withdraw from public markets altogether. It looks more like another gilded age.
>Is having both a normal social media account & a federated version okay?
Of course it is. There will always be a small number of [insert thing here] purists, it's best to (mostly) ignore them when they moralise about only using [thing] (but don't completely ignore them, they're usually on to something, despite the hardline position).
If these people are fleeing Twitter because they're terrified about a platform where everyone they don't like isn't banned, just wait until they realize there's no way to ban someone from the fediverse
Is that a typo? This post doesn't make sense to me.
The latter isn't true, because individual instances can ban you and instances that allow bad behavior will be defederated. Elon has indicated a desire to unban users, not ban them.
Yup, it was a typo (edited now). I meant that if they want everyone they don't like to be banned, the fediverse doesn't seem like the place for that.
Getting banned from a fediverse instance isn't as impactful as being banned from twitter, and I think those people would want it to work like twitter. Not too sure about instances being defederated though, that's the first I've heard of that.
The biggest defederation example I know of (with the caveat that I haven't actually used Mastodon in years) is that when Pixiv launched their own instance it quickly grew to be something like the 1st or 2nd biggest instance in the network and was eventually defederated by many other instances because people were REALLY antsy about the fact that a lot of Japanese art on Pixiv is illegal in other countries.
Yeah, I meant specifically a lot of the content on Pixiv. It kind of is a self-selection problem because content that won't cut it on services like Twitter is allowed there since it operates out of Japan, so naturally their Mastodon instance will also be used by artists to post stuff they can't post on Twitter.
fwiw while the underaged illustrations are the most objectionable part, there's also other stuff that could get you in trouble - for example, illustrations of ww2 nazi soldiers with accurate garb would run up against regulations in germany and put the operators of german fediverse instances at risk. There are a few high-profile japanese games that feature accurate ww2 uniforms, weapons, vehicles etc so if you end up with fan-art for those games on your service you will quickly need an answer for "what happens if content on the fediverse is illegal in germany"
A Twitter replacement shouldn't be federated. It should be fully P2P.
Federated platforms can still be censored and walled off. Not all Mastodon instances are peers, and your data isn't portable. It still has most of the same pitfalls as the platforms we complain about today.
P2P is naturally efficient. The best ideas will gain traction within their memetic networks, and you can branch out and explore anything and respond to it.
Sign and publish with a pubkey so you have pseudonymous identity and can keep track of peers. Publish and consume through a gateway proxy or VPN if you want to keep your IP private.
Supernodes can help with scaling, especially for mobile clients.
You can block whomever you dislike or share only with your direct network. You can write your own prioritization algorithm to cut down on noise and create high signal channels. You can archive whatever you like easily.
No, P2P is impractical and it inevitably leaks into the UX, making it significantly more cumbersome. With a P2P system, you can't just send someone a link to something you found — you either expect them to have a client for the service, or use a web proxy.
> Sign and publish with a pubkey
No, absolutely not. Public keys make terrible identifiers. You leak it and anyone can impresonate you, with you having no recourse. You lose it and you have to start a new life basically.
Account recovery and the ability to revoke access are not "nice to have" things — they're hard requirements for any identity system that is to be used in the real world by real, including non-tech, people. Trust me, I worked at the largest Russian social media company, they have a dedicated account recovery department for a reason.
> With a P2P system, you can't just send someone a link to something you found — you either expect them to have a client for the service, or use a web proxy
That's not a property of P2P, it's a property of anything that's not built into browsers.
That is, either the protocol is built into browsers and the browser is the client, or else it is not built into browsers and something else is the client.
Modern browsers already support P2P through RTCPeerConnection. In the future there may be even more general P2P capabilities built into browsers.
What you're talking about is at most a limitation of current browsers, not of P2P.
> No, absolutely not. Public keys make terrible identifiers. You leak it and anyone can impresonate you, with you having no recourse. You lose it and you have to start a new life basically.
Most average people can't even get the platforms to deal with ATOs.
I'm not into crypto, but it's also accepted in that community that you must safeguard your keys.
But beyond the status quo, I can easily imagine dozens of mitigations and protections and additional proofs: revokable cert authorities and peers, multiple signatures, portable / updatable keys, etc. etc.
> I'm not into crypto, but it's also accepted in that community that you must safeguard your keys.
Of course it is accepted, but so it is with passwords. And people are terrible enough with passwords, yet here you are suggesting that they use something that can't even be (easily) memorized, can't be invalidated, and has to be stored reliably yet secretly, as "the" identifier. You're putting too much trust into your average user.
None of these cryptography-based identity schemes can possibly work in the real world, period.
The only time these systems will work is when the perceived risk of snooping is greater than the value of account recovery. There is certainly a niche for this, but it probably isn't very broad. The majority of internet users seem uncomfortable with surveillance, but accepting of it.
I suspect the pendulum will swing if users no longer feel they have anyway to opt-out of surveillance. e.g. private browsing and other systems are recognized as ineffective, or sensitive data such as chat messages become broadly leaked and accessible to the typical user.
The other solutions don't work in the real world either. If somebody says that their Facebook account is lost and can't be recovered, people will believe them and not Facebook.
You could still have public-key-identified accounts with ActivityPub, too. ActivityPub does, in fact, use public-key cryptography for authentication, and each actor must have a key pair. It's just that it's not its identity — the identifier is a URL where the actor JSON object can be found.
Couldn't this be solved by chains of trust and "blacklisting" accounts? This is pretty much how it already works in the most annonymous corners of the internet, and those are the best corners.
P2P is just a special case of federation, where n=1. IMO PKI is simply not a realistic identity platform for the average person. You have to back your private key up with some reliable third party and their recovery system is going to be based on email so you may as well just use email for identity.
ActivityPub is mixed. It's peer-to-peer for follow/follower relationships, with you yourself deciding whether you want to sign up to an instance operated by someone else, or your own. It only need the federation for the "firehose" of public messages. But you don't need that to be 100% distributed, as long as there are enough publicly accessible endpoints. Nothing also stops you from gatewaying between the current federation mechanism for it and a fully peer-to-peer model if you invent a more distributed model.
I think that the ActivityPub protocol is better than Twitter, Facebook, etc, but is still too many problematic and is more complicated than it should be. I can see many problems, one of which is that it seems to default to HTML and some services seem to require it, and that it probably requires Unicode too, and that auth services may also need a web browser to work, which is also no good.
There is NNTP, email, IRC, etc, that you can use, which I think can work better. (I invented "Unusenet" to avoid namespace collision, if needed; there are a few different ways to define names in Unusenet, one of which is reverse domain names)
An implementation should not need a web browser or something as complicated as it, and should be independent of the programming language to be used (you could use C, JavaScript, etc), with optional TLS.
Of course you will need to be able to block messages, or to not block them if that is what you wish, but that will be possible easily enough. ActivityPub does this too, but so does NNTP, email, IRC, etc; you can define your own filter criteria, and NNTP can have moderated or unmoderated newsgroups. Many clients can have scoring files, and a few support global scoring files (which the user can install or not at their choice, but unfortunately these do not seem to be portable across different implementations, as far as I can tell).
Mailing lists are still sometimes used, but NNTP would be better, I think.
The subset of HTML supported by Mastodon is quite small and would likely be easy to parse and render without a browser. Misskey and glitch-soc support more IIRC, but still not everything.
RE: Unicode, of course it uses Unicode. What else would it use??
I feel the branding here is just not very appealing. "Federated" brings up associations of something boring and complicated and bureaucratic. And now because of the metaverse hype, "Fediverse" sounds like a VR training program for FBI agents.
Take a leaf from the crypto pumpers and call it web4?
"It's like web3 but advanced beyond money. You know, like in Star Trek. Hoarding tokens is just so 20th century."
I agree — I find this more exciting and approachable than the name implies!
It’s striking how much sense this makes to me: you interact in social networks like mail servers interact with each other. How did this concept take this long! (I know it’s not NEW new but still… fairly new)
Suddenly, due to the distributed nature, it doesn’t need to be expensive to have your own server to be part of it, like how running a mail server can be cheap. But if you don’t want to care about that, just sign up on an existing server like most do! In either case, it’s cheaper because it’s not centralized and because it’s cheaper it doesn’t need ads for funding and because it doesn’t need ads it doesn’t need to keep distracting you with an ever changing feed and pulling in “suggestions” (read: AI noise)
So, there is really not that much to it!
Like mail servers or chat servers (remember XMPP?), but now social network servers.
And now Mastodon has an official app too, besides an approachable web interface. And thanks to the ActivityPub standard, anyone can write a server, or client app. I think it’s pretty revolutionizing with the voice now put in our hands rather than in a corporation’s.
Definitely deserving of something more fun than “Fediverse” which sounds geeky and alienating.
Every time I see "fediverse", I think it's some kind of US federal government cloud, until I remember that it's something else... I'm still not sure what.
yours is the most important post here. so i need the fediverse to escape the feds? sounds confusing. here's an example of a conversation that will never happen in the real world:
"Why should I use the Fediverse?"
"It's federated"
The types of names that become popular are things like Beats or Goop. Is there anything remarkable about Beats headphones? No there's literally nothing except the name because it makes the average braindead person think it must be bass-boosted or something, and this was enough to make what dumb rapper came up with that name, a billionaire. But apparently this is just too intelligent for any nerds to figure out, so the Fediverse will remain unused.
It seems to me that the main reason for unpopularity, in addition to the lack of advertising, is monetization.
How can I recoup my production of content that can be expensive? It seems to me that a competent symbiosis of fediverse and cryptocurrency is the real web3.
The Fediverse is not for your target market. We hate Internet advertising: it serves to use and abuse us, and is a security risk to our devices. It exists in opposition of monetising people and what they do and say, because we're sick of being retreated like we're worth a ton of beans. We don't live to be a part of profit.
And how can fediverse survive, and how can it pay for servers? Who among the professionals will do this? If you leave this system only for enthusiasts, then you can leave everything as it is and improve only the code. And if you want to overthrow the monopoly without violence, then the authors will need monetization tools and not necessarily advertising . Linux would not have become so popular without redhat and other commercial companies. P. S I myself really like everything free and use only open source software, give donates periodically to the authors.
How does it / will it pay for servers? This is a great question and I can guarantee if you set up an account somewhere, and start asking instance admins this question, you'll find out exactly how. I'd answer your question but you'll get much more organic answers and they'll answer you in a way you'll believe and understand far better than just from me.
The system is not, and was never, just for technology enthusiasts. The majority of people I chat with probably wouldn't know their RAM from their GPU and I wouldn't expect them to. Sure there are a lot of Linux/FOSS enthusiasts there, but they're the minority.
I don't know anyone trying to overthrow monopolies by running an instance because again, I say that not everyone's motivation for everything they do is for the acquisition of wealth.
I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse:
I think this leaves two possibilities: I'd love to see Fediverse “platforms” succeed, but I'm not sure how they can since the network effect is what is needed.