Pull not being a good model of two way communications is going to be the major blocker here in my opinion. It's going to mean that people are only going to see comments and reactions on their posts or comments from people they already subscribe to, because their RSS reader would have no possible way of knowing if anyone outside of that list commented, since you can't get notified of content sources you don't already know about, only poll ones you already know. That's already bad enough (one of the big negative things people with large followings on the fediverse talk about is how they can't see what people are saying in the replies to their posts a lot of the time if the servers those people are on are blocked by their server, which means hate and harassment and one sided conversations can fester, and often many commenters can't even see each others' comments, leading to people saying the same things over and over exhaustingly). This also means that people who don't have any followers will literally be essentially muted by default: no one will see their comments or interactions, because no one polls their feed yet, which means that it's basically pointless for them to interact at all, which sounds dispiriting and would probably lead to no one wanting to use this type of social media — moreover, it also creates a catch-22 problem, because a major way to get followers in the first place is to directly interact with other people and bigger blog posts, to make people aware of you and maybe get some of them interested in hearing more of what you have to say, yet in this model, you can't really interact until you have a following already, so your main means of getting a following is gated behind needing a following to work!
In the olden days when bloggers walked the earth, emitting lengthy posts over RSS, they solved this problem in two ways:
Firstly, by appending forms to the end of the post where someone could type out a reply that was more likely to be a few sentences or paragraph, rather than a full-blown essay.
Secondly, by inventing "TrackBack", a standardized way for someone else's blog software to say "hey I wrote some stuff on my blog in response to this post of yours".
Both of these would get appended to the end of the blog post's page as "comments".
This very quickly enabled the new problem of "trackback/comment spam"; the enduring solution in the world of blogs to that has been "Wordpress' Askimet plugin", which is a very centralized piece of the otherwise mostly-distributed infrastructure of RSS-based blogs. I think it's like $15 a year on top of the $60 or so I pay for my Wordpress site on cheap hosting.
Note RSS is an ill-defined polling protocol. The server emits an RSS file which has the top N pieces of content.
All you can do is poll it at a greater or less frequency and hope you don't underpoll or overpoll. (I can easily fetch the RSS feed for an independent blog 1000 times for every time I fetch an HTML page, but should I? What if I wanted to follow 1000 independent blogs?)
With ActivityPub on the other hand you can ask for all updates since the last time you checked so there is a well-defined strategy to keep synced.
Thanks for the advice and compliment! :D I usually write them out and then read them and use the edit function to insert paragraph breaks after the fact, but I forgot to do that this time lol
Yes it is a big hurdle. However, I think content discovery is generally a big part of any content platform, way broader than discovering "who have reacted to my content". Now if you want to solve the problem of content discovery in a broader sense, then you have already fixed this particular shortcoming of pull-model as well. If a service that can inform you about new posts with a particular hashtag, it most probably can also tell you about reactions to a particular post.
And yes, I do realise that such services will tend to not be really decentralised (similar to the relationship of websites and search engines). But that means the downside is not that you don't get such discovery, but that you'll be reliant on more centralised services for such discovery, whereas in the fediverse you would be less reliant on such services for finding out who has commented on your post (though it will, as you've mentioned still not be enough).
> Yes it is a big hurdle. However, I think content discovery is generally a big part of any content platform, way broader than discovering "who have reacted to my content". Now if you want to solve the problem of content discovery in a broader sense, then you have already fixed this particular shortcoming of pull-model as well.
Right but I don't think as a general case finding all RSS feeds on the internet that satisfy a certain criteria, like publishing a hashtag or responding to a particular post, is a problem that can actually be solved in a principled way, because a fundamental limitation of the pull methodology is that you have to know the list of places you are checking beforehand, you can't get content from somewhere you didn't know about prior. The only way to solve this would be to have some kind of crawling and indexing system that regularly crawls the entire internet looking for these expanded RSS feeds and then categorized them according to various criteria in order to poll them. And that is both a very high technical investment and has a lot of limitations itself. So in the end it seems like you haven't really actually distributed the work of a social media system more equally after all, you've just inverted who is doing the work, going from a Federated set of servers that do all the work pushing content everywhere to a Federated set of servers that do all the work pulling content from places.
I see your negatives as mostly positive. Engagement and virality are inevitably cancerous to any social network, and comment velocity needs to be suppressed and controlled to reduce entropy and limit the degree to which that network can be used by people primarily interested in "getting a following." Any feature (or anti-feature) that makes a platform unattractive to capitalists and influencers and shitposting trolls is a good thing. Discouraging people from posting and commenting is a good thing. Making it difficult to network is a good thing. None of these things need to be impossible, but I do believe there needs to be enough friction to make low hanging fruit and opportunism not worth the effort.
Otherwise everything gets taken over by AI and bots and psychopaths and propagandists and turns to shit.
For me, the peak of decentralization efforts were Beaker Browser [1] and Stealth [2].
But one project didn't make enough money and the author of the other one got doxxed into oblivion, so I guess we can't have nice things.
A peer to peer browser has so much potential, I wish somebody else might give it a try. Imagine the possibilities when you can just share the content with others, without needing a web server.
Does anybody know whether there's a decentralized (static/generated) blog for ipfs or similar? Maybe that would make a nice starting point.
I actually can't imagine what are the possibilities the personal web server gives me, compared to github pages or cloudflare pages or tons of other super cheap web hosts.
Ease of use / nice design tools? You don't need a new protocol for it, create your web editor and add plugins for common providers. Your website would be accessible from any browser, nicely solving chicken-and-egg problems.
Free domain names? Plenty of existing systems exists, and many of them are actually compatible with existing browsers.
Availability? Any real server will be way more reliable than your home machine that will go to sleep when unused, get updates, etc. And if you say "IPFS", then you still need to sign up with some centralized service to pin your site, so might as well sign up for webhost instead.
Illegal content? P2P exposes your IP, so your local police has access to it. And if it's kind of the content that is not actually illegal, just heavily frowned upon, there would still be plenty of hosters willing to host you.
Unlimited media storage? That could be a legitimate reason, but most people would want to store their video using dedicated system anyway (youtube / peertube), and modern storage is so cheap, the photos are not going to be a problem (Cloudflare free plan gives you up to 20,000 files up to 25 MB each for free for example)
> if you say "IPFS", then you still need to sign up with some centralized service
Ipfs actually has some inbuilt cashing, so visitors to your site also take part of the load and can serve your assets when your PC/internet is down. All without pinning, purely based on GC timing. So as long as you are online reasonably often and your content has readers you will be fine. Another idea has been to make it so that bookmarking works a bit like pinning so by using the decentralized web you actually archive it (sort of)
How do you handle outdated pages? A p2p file sharing is one thing. A file is pretty static, but websites change very often. By the time your file got shared all the way across the planet you might be already displaying something else. Do they all have to keep track of the original file?
I agree that pull is the best model for posts. For comments I still think the best model is to push them to the post author, and let the post author moderate. This way people who can behave civilly can get an initial audience by writing comments, and having a link to their blog in the profile, with no intermediaries involved. If someone doesn't like the moderation, they're always free to write a comment-as-post, where they can write anything they want but have to take care of distribution themselves.
What if someone posts a dangerous lie? The post author is going to delete any comments that expose the lie. How would comments-as-posts be sufficiently linked to the original post so the lie can properly be exposed to as much of the audience as possible?
What if somebody posts a dangerous lie on a centralized platform and blocks everybody who criticizes it? Even if it doesn't allow deleting comments, you can effectively the same result with just block.
A mute-only social media platform would be doable technically but it would likely involve tons of spammers replying to large accounts. Think about how unusable the replies to an American politician's tweets are on Twitter because the US courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional for politicians to block people on social media.
The best solution to this problem I've seen so far is Community Notes on Twitter where a crowdsourced fact check is directly pinned to the tweet allowing users to challenge liars without directly calling them out and getting blocked. More centralized approaches to fact checking don't work particularly well because you end up with biased fact checkers who clearly have an agenda and thus aren't trusted at all by the liar's audience.
the thing is, with no intermediaries involved, more specifically, without any proper "search engines" (or "aggregators") involved, the network will suffer greatly from a content discovery problem regardless (as the fediverse currently is, IMO).
with presence of such services, the problem of comments (and reactions in general) can be solved too. if a poster is ok with engaging with potentially hostile content, then they can get reactions to their posts from aggregators that aren't heavy handed on moderation. if they don't want to bother with such interactions, then they can choose safer aggregators. if they want, they can only pull reactions from feeds they are already subscribed to, similar to private posts on twitter.
I'm more thinking about the social side of things. When comments follow the pull model, you get the pingback problem of old: most "comments" will be links to blog posts, themselves stuffed with more promotional links and so on. The only way to avoid it and have comments look like a somewhat nice garden is to allow post authors to say: please write text comments and don't stuff them with links, or you won't pass moderation on my blog. In other words, the push model. In my experience that's the best solution to this particular problem.
Yeah, this is precisely what I said as well, being able to comment on anything and have that seen even without a follower count is important for making initial connections on a social network.
I’ve also been thinking about this problem for a while. The push model and account portability are definitely the most important dimensions of this issue.
Can’t we just solve this problem with IPFS? And something like DHT tables for protocol-level awareness of state changes?
Your client app would just be responsible for pushing and pinning content to IPFS, scanning state tables for interesting updates, and then sending you push notifications.
Really simple to take your IPFS key with you can switch to a new app.
> In the pull-based system, more work in the end is required (when should Alice query Bob? Also Bob needs to respond to the query, though thats super easy as it is static responses), but the work is better distributed, lowering the maximum amount of work someone has to do (in this case, Bob).
I don't see how that follows. Yes, work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing), but the baseline load of these polls will in the end be larger than that of having to do the push fanout per post – at least for people posting less frequently than the average poll rate.
Generally, the push-vs-pull discussion seems like a red herring: For every pull system, we'll want some push mechanism for efficiency reasons in the end anyway; for every push system, we'll need a pull way to catch up with posts potentially missed initially.
To me, the practically relevant differences between Mastodon (push) and e.g. Bluesky (pull-ish, with aggregators) seem to revolve around the actual ease of self-hosting: As the author notes, setting up a Mastodon server seems roughly as complicated as self-hosting email (i.e. possible but practically almost nobody will do it), but I don't see this as a limitation of the protocol (Activitypub), but rather its implementation.
Decoupling identity resolution from hosting an entire server would also be a smart move: Webfinger is way too complicated for this; DNS TXT records would be ideal.
yes it is a federated system by design. doesn't mean it is not a limitation though.
to give you an example: in case of email, though it is not that difficult to host your own server (and even if you are a small startup you'll most probably do so without much effort), in the end basically Google decides on "who is an accepted participant in the network". If Google deems you spam, you are spam. If Google deems your authentication emails "promotion", for most intents and purposes, you are "promotion" and your users will miss your emails.
that, I feel, is an inherent limitation of any federated system, specifically one whose design is really inspired by email.
> I don't see how that follows.
as you've mentioned right after.
> work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing).
Still, what's the benefit of that? If peak load is a concern, a push-based system can stagger out individual post deliveries just as well, and push gives the producer much more control over load management. If that's not enough, several posts can be combined too.
In a pull system, you are at the mercy of your consumers' refresh rate setting, and for infrequent producers, you'll have lots of wasted cycles fetching nothing new on top of that.
I do agree that pull is simpler to implement (since subscription management is handled entirely on the consumer side, requiring no network protocol and server-side state for it), but in terms of network calls, it's strictly worse.
Yes, we can easily get more decentralized that the Fediverse, and we have. Both Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit are peer-to-peer social networking, with rather different takes on what that means. There might be more, those are the ones I'm aware of.
Urbit choosing to artificially limit their "address space" with an NFT sale was a bit of a gut punch tbh and I don't see how this will work out positively for the project in the long run.
Urbit's address space is 128 bits wide, so scarcity is physically impossible, unless there were a need for every atom in the observable universe to have many addresses.
The decision to make the bottom 32 bits valuable was a clever one, but it's lead to some misunderstanding of how things actually work. Specifically, planets (a 32 bit address) only own an additional 2^32 addresses, called moons. That leaves 2^64 of the address space "wild", these are called comets. There are plenty.
If you want a four-syllable address, they're loss leaders from hosting providers, currently. Two syllables you have to pay for, and one syllable is not usually on the market. A sixteen-syllable address is and will always be free.
How this is handled socially, in a hypothetical future where there are more than 4 billion active Urbit users, is a problem for that future to address.
We need better-than-bittorrent p2p social swarms that are fast, efficient, and massive.
I want for when someones posts an article, to have my local custom filters flag it for interest, schedule it for reading, grab the photos and videos, pull in relevant comments (again filtered, perhaps to my interest graph peers and highly-ranked dissenting opinions), and never have to step foot on the corrupted, ad-ridden, algorithmically boosted web again.
News websites are trash. Reddit and socials are trash. I want complete unfettered control over the inbound stream. Everything first class from engineering principles. The protocol, the data structures, the ranking, the visualization, etc.
I want data I can easily copy into my notebook, easily bookmark, easily remix and respond to.
The web doesn't cut it, and it never has.
P2P social should be article and media centric. Sharing news, blogs, videos, etc. with first class threaded comments built atop it.
Everything is ephemeral and immutable unless you want to save it or publish a correction.
I echo your sentiment about bittorrent and p2p swarm protocols. Seeing the current fediverse emerge has felt almost anachronistic to me - the tech put to use is, at baseline, older and less resilient than the p2p protocols from the late 1990s and early 2000s. There may or may not be milage in the Matrix protocol...
The problem with fediverse style setups is that they tend to become highly centralized. Email being a great example. It's often pointed to as a perfect example of federation but naive because when highly centralized it only slightly reduces issues of full centralization. So the question is how you be federated while being highly decentralized.
This of course isn't important for everything. Centralization can even be good at times. But an example might be like browsers. Technically anyone can run their own. But since the ecosystem is so Chrom{e,ium} based, Google can exert a lot of control over what standards are set on webpages and how to process data. You might have heard about them trying to destroy the cookie. Which in part I feel is great, but at the same time it's not like they aren't still tracking people. Either way, the point is that a singular (or even a few) compan{y,ies} shouldn't get to dictate critical infrastructure. This can actually even lead to fragmentation, especially when we consider that more than one country exists.
So it has to be easy, near trivial, to run your own server, and must also be cheap, if you want a highly decentralized platform. If it isn't, there's always a strong pressure for centralization.
Sure, whats fundamentally difficult about setting up a federated instance? Its just a db, and backend/frontend service. You can put in a docker container and run it in minutes.
Things tend to get centralized because users want to be where users are. Developing another platform doesn't change that. Even if that platform just straight up does not allow centralization, it doesn't stop people from using centralized platforms.
To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.
Social media is the most important counter measure to propaganda. Before social media, we had a one way stream of information from the media outlets without much opportunity to question, discuss, and debunk. The fediverse resolves the problem of centrally controlled algorithms and censorship that manipulate people's speech depending on the moderation rules of individual instances.
Your first sentence is the exact reason why propaganda thrives in social media. There's an understanding that fellow people are somehow more trustworthy than Big Media. The part that's not considered is that people on a whole are not able to understand every intricacy of problems out in the world - but they sure do love sharing opinions about every problem as if they do understand.
Given this, easy-to-digest messages are easily amplified through social media and every complex detail is withered to nothing. This is why I stopped using Lemmy. The larger communities (read: the only ones that get any posts) ended up being a worse echo-chamber than every other platform due to people repeating the same simple concepts ad nauseam.
On the contrary, social media is a huge target for propaganda
Special interest groups have been around forever (see Cryptome's article "The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies" which outlines some useful tactics). These groups still exist (eg: the JIDF, or ShareBlue in whatever name it's calling itself these days, to name a couple)
Platforms themselves also engage in tactics such as shadowbanning its users (Reddit and Twitter were both in the news for this at least a few times), or using a curation algorithm to show you what it thinks is relevant (Facebook's wall, or YouTube comments/chat being shuffled rather than showing activity chronologically to discourage discussion and to more easily hide censored comments). The idea that social media platforms are not one-way is an illusion
In short, the people who you're talking to are not always real people. Some of the discussions you're trying to have might be getting silenced without you knowing. And the facts you read from a given source could have been invented. The Fediverse isn't exempt from these problems
This is a good point actually, despite my reservations about social media, if you want to get a big message out quickly there really is nothing better than something like twitter.
First, nobody cares what anybody on the Fediverse says. It's tiny. It's pinnacle "app", Mastodon, is losing lots of MAU every single day and is now below 1M MAU. Besides being tiny, it's scattered and discovery and search do not work. How can this mess possibly counter propaganda?
Second, whilst the Fediverse may not have sophisticated algorithms, it very much has censorship and typically way more than traditional social networks. It's basically a collection of far-left misfits that engage in constant defederation wars. You can't even post a photo of a meal because somebody will be "triggered".
Somehow amusing you’re posting this on a pseudo-anonymous social network with an upvote based algorithm.
Although I’d probably agree. Even tightly moderated communities who fancy themselves as “intellectual” and “rational” like this one are prone to bizarre group-think and emotional manipulation.
But that’s also just humans in general. What you might call bringing out “the worst” in people, might actually be the best we can do given our biology.
I tend to agree with this sort of. In my opinion, stuff that's more real time, ephemeral, one to one, and focused on closed groups below a certain size, like IRC or Discord, or stuff that is one to many like modern social media but much less highly visible and networked, like the classic blogosphere, tends to be much more healthy and in the long run rewarding then microblogging social media like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or whatever.
I don't think it's necessarily the anonymity though. Or even the algorithms — the fediverse has no algorithms and yet in my experience (having been a minor player in some big drama there before I left) it's getting just as toxic and judgy as Twitter, maybe even more. I think it's more that in micro blogging social media, because interactions and posts are automatically broadcast to this huge audience that doesnt necessarily share any values or social norms, and are immediately highly discoverable and visible to everyone even outside the people who initially saw it, and these interactions can sort of stay around in the zeitgeist a bit more permanently than an instant message, instead of being ephemeral, in the moment, and directed at one or two or a few people within a closed form community, every post you make and every interaction with people takes on a sort of grandstanding, performing for the crowd, dare I say it virtue signaling (I say this as a leftist lol so you know I'm serious) tenor. It becomes automatically a lot more adversarial and fake and just weird and distorted. And then if you add on top of that the fact that posts and responses are highly asynchronous, so it's actually difficult to feel like you're really having a dialogue with a person, instead of just combatting disembodied words on a screen, and difficult to engage in compassion and quickly correct misunderstandings and respond to feelings in the moment, it means that all of the grandstanding and performing for the crowd and virtue signaling will be that much more dysfunctional and detached from actual human social interaction.
Chronological feed + boosting is an algorithm and it's about as toxic of an algorithm as you could get without making a data set of toxic vs toxic posts.
It's difficult to impossible to implement bulk level social media algorithms on decentralized networks because no single node has all the data and views/interactions are largely private.
This is a feature and is perhaps an even more compelling reason to go federated or decentralized than the other autonomy and privacy related reasons. Social media algorithms are cultural lobotomy machines.
A great example of technological limitations improving content is podcasts. Podcasts are one-way, still fairly simple in their distribution methods (RSS and a few major apps but no clear monopoly), and mostly non-interactive. This limits the ability of platforms and advertisers to ruin them, which is why podcasting is still a bastion of quality media online.
it was quite easy for a small team to crawl and index a good portion of the internet, enough to become the de facto gateway (talking about Google).
it was similarly possible for a relatively small team to crawl a good chunk of the available internet and train some of the most sophisticated "algorithms" we've seen on them (talking about Open AI).
if there is an incentive, this problem can be solved. if this was actually a hard problem, most current social media companies wouldn't put so much effort in restricting crawling to force everyone through restricted API access (look at Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or Facebook, as examples).
I make algorithms that filter RSS feeds and other social media content. You don't need a global view of the system at all to do this, you just need a point of view. That is, if you have a few thousand posts and a thumbs up/thumbs down judgement you can train an ML model that will predict those judgements.
With about two days looking at toots I could make a model that shows you nothing but angry toots about politics or one that removes angry toots (could take down that keyword filter that means I never hear if somebody is having trouble with the transmission in their truck or that Transnistria got invaded.)
The main reason I haven't developed a social media (as opposed to product/service) sentiment model like this is that it would involve looking at a few thousand angry toots. (1) The reason I want it is that I don't want to read those toots, (2) it would cause me great suffering to look at those toots. Social media moderators at companies like Facebook have been traumatized, it's no joke.
If it was my social network, I'd use that filter to put a brake on selfish angry memes spreading so that the pain of one person reading angry toots gives relief to so many more.
I have a model that predicts the probability of a headline getting a lot of comments relative to votes on hacker news: some high scoring headlines in my RSS reader right now are:
Why do women commit far less crime than men?
Study suggests anti-Black racism may account for conservatives' negative reactions to jobs requiring DEI statements
Checking a bag will cost you more on United Airlines, which is copying a similar move by American
Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened (2022)
Three of those are clickbait, the last one is a good HN submission. A social media sentiment model can give a larger algorithm a "superego". There are other ways to pursue engagement other than selfish angry memes.
I've got to disagree on this point. I am a firm believer in "democratisation" of anything, including "publishing content that many other people will see".
this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc).
of course, that means posting and spreading "worst in people" is also easier (as is spreading spam, etc). this aspect I feel has nothing to do with the "social" part of these platforms, any form of lowering the entry barrier would have caused more terrible things to be published and spread (maybe with different extents, but not essentially different).
> this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc).
It was very easy to publish things on the internet before modern social media.
Good. The "worst" in people is a part of people. To pretend it doesn't exist and suppress it forever is an insane social engineering experiment.
And the Dionysian night of the Internet is a way better and safer place for it than the Appolonian day of real life.
If you're willing to surrender that outlet and the game theoretic ground of pseudo/anonymity because your feelings are too hurt, I sorely hope whatever totalitarian government is in your future punishes you for your weakness.
Readit News
Firstly, by appending forms to the end of the post where someone could type out a reply that was more likely to be a few sentences or paragraph, rather than a full-blown essay.
Secondly, by inventing "TrackBack", a standardized way for someone else's blog software to say "hey I wrote some stuff on my blog in response to this post of yours".
Both of these would get appended to the end of the blog post's page as "comments".
This very quickly enabled the new problem of "trackback/comment spam"; the enduring solution in the world of blogs to that has been "Wordpress' Askimet plugin", which is a very centralized piece of the otherwise mostly-distributed infrastructure of RSS-based blogs. I think it's like $15 a year on top of the $60 or so I pay for my Wordpress site on cheap hosting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol)
All you can do is poll it at a greater or less frequency and hope you don't underpoll or overpoll. (I can easily fetch the RSS feed for an independent blog 1000 times for every time I fetch an HTML page, but should I? What if I wanted to follow 1000 independent blogs?)
With ActivityPub on the other hand you can ask for all updates since the last time you checked so there is a well-defined strategy to keep synced.
WebSub can help with solving the poll rate issue, but that presumably wouldn't solve the problem for consumers that are offline for a while.
Makes it a ton easier to parse. Cheers!
And yes, I do realise that such services will tend to not be really decentralised (similar to the relationship of websites and search engines). But that means the downside is not that you don't get such discovery, but that you'll be reliant on more centralised services for such discovery, whereas in the fediverse you would be less reliant on such services for finding out who has commented on your post (though it will, as you've mentioned still not be enough).
Right but I don't think as a general case finding all RSS feeds on the internet that satisfy a certain criteria, like publishing a hashtag or responding to a particular post, is a problem that can actually be solved in a principled way, because a fundamental limitation of the pull methodology is that you have to know the list of places you are checking beforehand, you can't get content from somewhere you didn't know about prior. The only way to solve this would be to have some kind of crawling and indexing system that regularly crawls the entire internet looking for these expanded RSS feeds and then categorized them according to various criteria in order to poll them. And that is both a very high technical investment and has a lot of limitations itself. So in the end it seems like you haven't really actually distributed the work of a social media system more equally after all, you've just inverted who is doing the work, going from a Federated set of servers that do all the work pushing content everywhere to a Federated set of servers that do all the work pulling content from places.
Otherwise everything gets taken over by AI and bots and psychopaths and propagandists and turns to shit.
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But one project didn't make enough money and the author of the other one got doxxed into oblivion, so I guess we can't have nice things.
A peer to peer browser has so much potential, I wish somebody else might give it a try. Imagine the possibilities when you can just share the content with others, without needing a web server.
Does anybody know whether there's a decentralized (static/generated) blog for ipfs or similar? Maybe that would make a nice starting point.
[1] https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker
[2] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth
Ease of use / nice design tools? You don't need a new protocol for it, create your web editor and add plugins for common providers. Your website would be accessible from any browser, nicely solving chicken-and-egg problems.
Free domain names? Plenty of existing systems exists, and many of them are actually compatible with existing browsers.
Availability? Any real server will be way more reliable than your home machine that will go to sleep when unused, get updates, etc. And if you say "IPFS", then you still need to sign up with some centralized service to pin your site, so might as well sign up for webhost instead.
Illegal content? P2P exposes your IP, so your local police has access to it. And if it's kind of the content that is not actually illegal, just heavily frowned upon, there would still be plenty of hosters willing to host you.
Unlimited media storage? That could be a legitimate reason, but most people would want to store their video using dedicated system anyway (youtube / peertube), and modern storage is so cheap, the photos are not going to be a problem (Cloudflare free plan gives you up to 20,000 files up to 25 MB each for free for example)
Ipfs actually has some inbuilt cashing, so visitors to your site also take part of the load and can serve your assets when your PC/internet is down. All without pinning, purely based on GC timing. So as long as you are online reasonably often and your content has readers you will be fine. Another idea has been to make it so that bookmarking works a bit like pinning so by using the decentralized web you actually archive it (sort of)
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A mute-only social media platform would be doable technically but it would likely involve tons of spammers replying to large accounts. Think about how unusable the replies to an American politician's tweets are on Twitter because the US courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional for politicians to block people on social media.
The best solution to this problem I've seen so far is Community Notes on Twitter where a crowdsourced fact check is directly pinned to the tweet allowing users to challenge liars without directly calling them out and getting blocked. More centralized approaches to fact checking don't work particularly well because you end up with biased fact checkers who clearly have an agenda and thus aren't trusted at all by the liar's audience.
with presence of such services, the problem of comments (and reactions in general) can be solved too. if a poster is ok with engaging with potentially hostile content, then they can get reactions to their posts from aggregators that aren't heavy handed on moderation. if they don't want to bother with such interactions, then they can choose safer aggregators. if they want, they can only pull reactions from feeds they are already subscribed to, similar to private posts on twitter.
Can’t we just solve this problem with IPFS? And something like DHT tables for protocol-level awareness of state changes?
Your client app would just be responsible for pushing and pinning content to IPFS, scanning state tables for interesting updates, and then sending you push notifications.
Really simple to take your IPFS key with you can switch to a new app.
I don't see how that follows. Yes, work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing), but the baseline load of these polls will in the end be larger than that of having to do the push fanout per post – at least for people posting less frequently than the average poll rate.
Generally, the push-vs-pull discussion seems like a red herring: For every pull system, we'll want some push mechanism for efficiency reasons in the end anyway; for every push system, we'll need a pull way to catch up with posts potentially missed initially.
To me, the practically relevant differences between Mastodon (push) and e.g. Bluesky (pull-ish, with aggregators) seem to revolve around the actual ease of self-hosting: As the author notes, setting up a Mastodon server seems roughly as complicated as self-hosting email (i.e. possible but practically almost nobody will do it), but I don't see this as a limitation of the protocol (Activitypub), but rather its implementation.
Decoupling identity resolution from hosting an entire server would also be a smart move: Webfinger is way too complicated for this; DNS TXT records would be ideal.
to give you an example: in case of email, though it is not that difficult to host your own server (and even if you are a small startup you'll most probably do so without much effort), in the end basically Google decides on "who is an accepted participant in the network". If Google deems you spam, you are spam. If Google deems your authentication emails "promotion", for most intents and purposes, you are "promotion" and your users will miss your emails.
that, I feel, is an inherent limitation of any federated system, specifically one whose design is really inspired by email.
> I don't see how that follows.
as you've mentioned right after.
> work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing).
In a pull system, you are at the mercy of your consumers' refresh rate setting, and for infrequent producers, you'll have lots of wasted cycles fetching nothing new on top of that.
I do agree that pull is simpler to implement (since subscription management is handled entirely on the consumer side, requiring no network protocol and server-side state for it), but in terms of network calls, it's strictly worse.
The decision to make the bottom 32 bits valuable was a clever one, but it's lead to some misunderstanding of how things actually work. Specifically, planets (a 32 bit address) only own an additional 2^32 addresses, called moons. That leaves 2^64 of the address space "wild", these are called comets. There are plenty.
If you want a four-syllable address, they're loss leaders from hosting providers, currently. Two syllables you have to pay for, and one syllable is not usually on the market. A sixteen-syllable address is and will always be free.
How this is handled socially, in a hypothetical future where there are more than 4 billion active Urbit users, is a problem for that future to address.
I want for when someones posts an article, to have my local custom filters flag it for interest, schedule it for reading, grab the photos and videos, pull in relevant comments (again filtered, perhaps to my interest graph peers and highly-ranked dissenting opinions), and never have to step foot on the corrupted, ad-ridden, algorithmically boosted web again.
News websites are trash. Reddit and socials are trash. I want complete unfettered control over the inbound stream. Everything first class from engineering principles. The protocol, the data structures, the ranking, the visualization, etc.
I want data I can easily copy into my notebook, easily bookmark, easily remix and respond to.
The web doesn't cut it, and it never has.
P2P social should be article and media centric. Sharing news, blogs, videos, etc. with first class threaded comments built atop it.
Everything is ephemeral and immutable unless you want to save it or publish a correction.
Decentralization is just a parameter of how many people choose to join an existing server or create their own.
This of course isn't important for everything. Centralization can even be good at times. But an example might be like browsers. Technically anyone can run their own. But since the ecosystem is so Chrom{e,ium} based, Google can exert a lot of control over what standards are set on webpages and how to process data. You might have heard about them trying to destroy the cookie. Which in part I feel is great, but at the same time it's not like they aren't still tracking people. Either way, the point is that a singular (or even a few) compan{y,ies} shouldn't get to dictate critical infrastructure. This can actually even lead to fragmentation, especially when we consider that more than one country exists.
So it has to be easy, near trivial, to run your own server, and must also be cheap, if you want a highly decentralized platform. If it isn't, there's always a strong pressure for centralization.
Things tend to get centralized because users want to be where users are. Developing another platform doesn't change that. Even if that platform just straight up does not allow centralization, it doesn't stop people from using centralized platforms.
Given this, easy-to-digest messages are easily amplified through social media and every complex detail is withered to nothing. This is why I stopped using Lemmy. The larger communities (read: the only ones that get any posts) ended up being a worse echo-chamber than every other platform due to people repeating the same simple concepts ad nauseam.
Special interest groups have been around forever (see Cryptome's article "The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies" which outlines some useful tactics). These groups still exist (eg: the JIDF, or ShareBlue in whatever name it's calling itself these days, to name a couple)
Platforms themselves also engage in tactics such as shadowbanning its users (Reddit and Twitter were both in the news for this at least a few times), or using a curation algorithm to show you what it thinks is relevant (Facebook's wall, or YouTube comments/chat being shuffled rather than showing activity chronologically to discourage discussion and to more easily hide censored comments). The idea that social media platforms are not one-way is an illusion
In short, the people who you're talking to are not always real people. Some of the discussions you're trying to have might be getting silenced without you knowing. And the facts you read from a given source could have been invented. The Fediverse isn't exempt from these problems
First, nobody cares what anybody on the Fediverse says. It's tiny. It's pinnacle "app", Mastodon, is losing lots of MAU every single day and is now below 1M MAU. Besides being tiny, it's scattered and discovery and search do not work. How can this mess possibly counter propaganda?
Second, whilst the Fediverse may not have sophisticated algorithms, it very much has censorship and typically way more than traditional social networks. It's basically a collection of far-left misfits that engage in constant defederation wars. You can't even post a photo of a meal because somebody will be "triggered".
Although I’d probably agree. Even tightly moderated communities who fancy themselves as “intellectual” and “rational” like this one are prone to bizarre group-think and emotional manipulation.
But that’s also just humans in general. What you might call bringing out “the worst” in people, might actually be the best we can do given our biology.
I don't think it's necessarily the anonymity though. Or even the algorithms — the fediverse has no algorithms and yet in my experience (having been a minor player in some big drama there before I left) it's getting just as toxic and judgy as Twitter, maybe even more. I think it's more that in micro blogging social media, because interactions and posts are automatically broadcast to this huge audience that doesnt necessarily share any values or social norms, and are immediately highly discoverable and visible to everyone even outside the people who initially saw it, and these interactions can sort of stay around in the zeitgeist a bit more permanently than an instant message, instead of being ephemeral, in the moment, and directed at one or two or a few people within a closed form community, every post you make and every interaction with people takes on a sort of grandstanding, performing for the crowd, dare I say it virtue signaling (I say this as a leftist lol so you know I'm serious) tenor. It becomes automatically a lot more adversarial and fake and just weird and distorted. And then if you add on top of that the fact that posts and responses are highly asynchronous, so it's actually difficult to feel like you're really having a dialogue with a person, instead of just combatting disembodied words on a screen, and difficult to engage in compassion and quickly correct misunderstandings and respond to feelings in the moment, it means that all of the grandstanding and performing for the crowd and virtue signaling will be that much more dysfunctional and detached from actual human social interaction.
This is a feature and is perhaps an even more compelling reason to go federated or decentralized than the other autonomy and privacy related reasons. Social media algorithms are cultural lobotomy machines.
A great example of technological limitations improving content is podcasts. Podcasts are one-way, still fairly simple in their distribution methods (RSS and a few major apps but no clear monopoly), and mostly non-interactive. This limits the ability of platforms and advertisers to ruin them, which is why podcasting is still a bastion of quality media online.
it was similarly possible for a relatively small team to crawl a good chunk of the available internet and train some of the most sophisticated "algorithms" we've seen on them (talking about Open AI).
if there is an incentive, this problem can be solved. if this was actually a hard problem, most current social media companies wouldn't put so much effort in restricting crawling to force everyone through restricted API access (look at Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or Facebook, as examples).
With about two days looking at toots I could make a model that shows you nothing but angry toots about politics or one that removes angry toots (could take down that keyword filter that means I never hear if somebody is having trouble with the transmission in their truck or that Transnistria got invaded.)
The main reason I haven't developed a social media (as opposed to product/service) sentiment model like this is that it would involve looking at a few thousand angry toots. (1) The reason I want it is that I don't want to read those toots, (2) it would cause me great suffering to look at those toots. Social media moderators at companies like Facebook have been traumatized, it's no joke.
If it was my social network, I'd use that filter to put a brake on selfish angry memes spreading so that the pain of one person reading angry toots gives relief to so many more.
I have a model that predicts the probability of a headline getting a lot of comments relative to votes on hacker news: some high scoring headlines in my RSS reader right now are:
Why do women commit far less crime than men?
Study suggests anti-Black racism may account for conservatives' negative reactions to jobs requiring DEI statements
Checking a bag will cost you more on United Airlines, which is copying a similar move by American
Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened (2022)
Three of those are clickbait, the last one is a good HN submission. A social media sentiment model can give a larger algorithm a "superego". There are other ways to pursue engagement other than selfish angry memes.
this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc).
of course, that means posting and spreading "worst in people" is also easier (as is spreading spam, etc). this aspect I feel has nothing to do with the "social" part of these platforms, any form of lowering the entry barrier would have caused more terrible things to be published and spread (maybe with different extents, but not essentially different).
p.s. you might find this interesting if you haven't seen it already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t
It was very easy to publish things on the internet before modern social media.
And the Dionysian night of the Internet is a way better and safer place for it than the Appolonian day of real life.
If you're willing to surrender that outlet and the game theoretic ground of pseudo/anonymity because your feelings are too hurt, I sorely hope whatever totalitarian government is in your future punishes you for your weakness.