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Twitter to decentralize something
- pwinnski 7y agoThis seems right. Twitter is not engaging in this in pursuit of real openness, and the end result--if anything--is unlikely to be better for twitter users.
- rahuldottech 7y agoI have a question, what is it about blockchain that's so attractive to every new idea nowadays? New social network? Blockchain! New news platform? Blockchain! I get what blockchain is. I get how it's used in cryptocurrency transactions. But will someone please explain why it's being incorporated into industries that always have done (and IMO can continue to do) just fine without it? I skim through this [1] list, and see no clear benefit to incorporating blockchain into most/all of these? Most of them seem to be using it as 'secure database' or something. [1]: https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/11/20-real-world-uses-for-blockchain-technology.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/11/20-real-world-uses...
- xmly 7y agoWhat you really need is an open database. That is all. As long as data is stored in Twitter managed database, it would never work.
- russian_bot 7y agocan you define "open"?
- MS90 7y agolol @ this screen name and question combo. By open we mean everyone gets full permissions, tovarisch!
- code-is-code 7y agomongoDB with default credentials
- egfx 7y agoDang beat me to it
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoActivityPub
- dmitriid 7y agoAnd a few petabytes of open storage. And a few open data centers to handle the load to the database and to the storage.
- miohtama 7y agoTardigrade from Storj is the closest thing in production to solve decentralized data storage: https://tardigrade.io/ https://tardigrade.io/ The user pays the storage cost upfront. However it is suitable only for file like content, not mutable content like databases AFAIK.
- ficklepickle 7y agoWeird. I'm wearing one of their shirts that I got from a convention!
- hliyan 7y agoWhat you really need is an appropriate UI layer over email: https://medium.com/hackernoon/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-network-c33b175f3a9e https://medium.com/hackernoon/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-n...
- MayeulC 7y agoThe Matrix protocol is more or less an open, replicated database. E-mail is similar in some ways, but: 1: it doesn't define enough metadata ("this is an image", etc) 2: it doesn't handle backtracking well, if one of the recipient servers misses a message (servers are just supposed to retry a given number of times). 3: it has no security/authentication concept. All of these could be bolted on regular e-mail, but calling it e-mail at that point would be a travesty, and we might as well call that a new protocol. And if we are writing a new protocol, we might as well take a few liberties to address the shortcommings of the first (one could argue against the last part).
- im_dario 7y agoFun bit: "BCC is not possible". Actually, a BCC e-mail would be an ad.
- dang 7y agoSubmitted title was "Micro.blog founder on Twitter's bluesky project". That's good information! but the place to add it is as a first comment in the thread, not in the submission title. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22level%20playing%20field%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cdevroe 7y agoThanks I didn’t know that.
- rolleiflex 7y agoThe problems with P2P is not problems of tech, they’re problems of incentives. The tech exists and it’s mostly solved — it’s just that anyone who is capable of building such a thing is not incentivised to do so, because that work could be spent in more productive (i.e. money-making) endeavours than what will by definition be incapable of making money since it explicitly decentralises the concentration of power. So if Jack wants you to come build it, and you’re a P2P person, you should go work for him in even if you don’t like him, because he has both the willingness to pay for it, and the broadcast power to make it mainstream. And those are the main problems that needs to be solved, not tech. I know this because I’m going through the same thing myself — I work on Aether (https://getaether.net https://getaether.net), which is close to what I think he is talking about. If we want ourselves to solve this, and not rely on @jacks of the world, we need to find a way to make P2P into a viable business. For me, in the end I decided to create a Pro version for use within companies, so that the P2P version can be fully free of monetisation concerns.
- dmitriid 7y agoP2P is not really solved. Not to the true satisfaction. For example, there are tens of millions of images uploaded to Twitter daily. They all have to be stored, and then retrieved for nearly arbitrary tweets and arbitrary users. All this content has to be stored somewhere and retrieved fast enough to be useable.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoStoring images in multiple, decentralized servers and making them available to arbitrary users instantly? Pretty sure that's a solved problem. </IMG>
- josh2600 7y agoI'm pretty sure no major service (petabyte+ scale) functions this way.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
- taytus 7y agoThey are dedicating 5 people to this project... I mean... full 5 people... this is not a project, this is a charade.
- wmf 7y agoFive people is pretty large for the first phase of a research project. If they come up with something good Twitter can add more people later.
- jrbuhl 7y agoIt's bigger than the size most startups being with.
- taytus 7y agoExcept they are a multibillion-dollar public company with almost infinite resources and reach.
- batuhanicoz 7y agoAnd this team of 5 would surely have access to those resources.
- gshulegaard 7y agoI mean depending on seniority of the team hired that represents at least a million dollar (maybe more) per year investment. I don't want to over sell it, but that kind of investment in something which is unlikely to yield revenue from a public company is at least unusual.
- adventured 7y agoIf they immediately tasked 20 or 50 people to the project, it would be far more absurd than starting with five. Ideally a project like this starts out from a small team and is given more resources only when it's needed.
- m463 7y agoPeople want "the cloud" so they don't want to be responsible for things. Is this the same thing?
- rjbwork 7y agoPeople want the cloud so that they can be responsible for things at the right level of abstraction. Nobody wants to maintain a server with a message bus and a bunch of individual applications that communicate on it. Just set up AWS EventBridge (or Azure EventGrid), or any of a dozen other options that don't require you to administer a server. And then use AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Zapier, etc, etc. Don't maintain a server that runs a bunch of apps. We care about what we're managing, and care about being responsible for it, we just want to manage it at the right level of abstraction. Let the cloud provider manage and be responsible for the hardware.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- viraptor 7y ago> If Twitter is hoping to outsource curation to shared protocols, I don't think they would ever do that. It would be really dangerous to implement and would possibly expose an unfiltered stream of partially illegal content. I mean, can you imagine "validate if this is an unsolicited dickpic", or "verify if this is a dox attempt", or "verify this is cp"? This is one area that can never be exposed to non-employees.
- dmurray 7y agoIt's almost certainly done by non-employees now, through contracting arrangements. While it's possible the unfiltered stream never leaves Twitter's premises or Twitter's computers, and the individual contractors sign an agreement directly with Twitter, it's only one step removed from just sending your stream to the service and getting back an annotation.
- viraptor 7y agoYes, they have contacts/agreements with the parties that get access. Whether that's full time employees or contractors, I don't think that changes the main issue. They will never expose that information to the public.
- dgellow 7y agoIt’s an experiment to explore a distributed Twitter. People read way too much into those tweets. It seems clear that they will evaluate existing projects, and technologies and make their own decisions. More competition in this domain is a very good sign IMHO.
- orblivion 7y agoI'm suspicious of motives here as much as anyone, but I think the issue of policy enforcement (and policy itself) is very important here. It already occurred to me that Mastodon and Gab were, despite being worst enemies, together inadvertently creating a reasonable content meta-policy. Some people want freedom of expression, some people want protection from objectionable material. With ActivityPub, you can choose your gatekeeper, and still more or less exist in the same social universe.
- tom_mellior 7y ago> Some people want freedom of expression, some people want protection from objectionable material. You make things sound far too benign. Where do death threads fall in this classification, are they "free speech" or "objectionable material"? Where do disinformation bot armies fall? There's a lot more to content moderation than just "that person doesn't want to see boobies or the f-word".
- Vinnl 7y agoIn this context, I think they meant "free speech" and "objectionable material" referring to the same things, but by different groups. So death threats would fall under both: Gab would allow them, most other Mastodon communities wouldn't. People (or law enforcement agencies) can then choose their gatekeeper.
- orblivion 7y agoGab, per their claims anyway, use US law as their guideline (plus banning porn). I know they've removed at least a couple people who cross a certain line when it came to directly advocating violence.
- orblivion 7y agoPresumably most people don't want their life threatened so almost nobody will pick an instance that allows that to happen. The few people who are interested in posting death threats can go ahead and make a rogue Gab instance or something, and every other instance will block them. They'll be their own silo where super sketchy things go on until the feds decide it's time to step in (since death treats are legally actionable). Such silo websites are already possible without the fediverse (and by some accounts already exist), so my model doesn't change anything here (assuming blocking is effective). (BTW even Gab dot com would block that; they ban people for death threats and porn and maybe even Doxing). Disinformation campaigns? Well again, if you don't want to be misinformed, pick your gatekeeper. Probably all the better. If somebody's going to protect me from being misinformed, I want to know what their biases are. I don't trust Twitter or Facebook; it's not a simple and objective task. I think your point that this stuff is complicated is exactly my point. It is complicated, and people have different preferences. No one company can be the gatekeeper that satisfies the entire planet's preferences (at least, not under the current models).
- andy_ppp 7y agoTwitter to embrace and extend a decentralised system and bend it to their own will using their incumbent position.
- lxe 7y agoBlockchain is probably not the best (or maybe even the worst) solution for decentralized messaging.
- zadler 7y agoThe blockchain isn’t a messaging hub, it’s more about identity management
- jayd16 7y agoSo like... Doesn't the open web exist? We have RSS feeds for subscription. I guess we need a way to share things we've liked? Retweets should be representable through RSS entries. Hashtags are just searchable text.
- alexmingoia 7y agoThe IndieWeb ecosystem is already doing this with microformats2 + webmention to support decentralized replies, likes, reposts, etc. with HTML blogs. See https://aaronparecki.com https://aaronparecki.com for an example and https://indieweb.org/friendly https://indieweb.org/friendly and https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention
- marknadal 7y agoOpen Source has generated $Trillions in value creation over the last few decades. Twitter is fighting to stay relevant, they dropped to Top 35 website from Top 14 in last several months. This is an opportunity for them to become a global standard, and that is worth it. The most important piece is that they can scale when they pull it off. I've been working on decentralized tech for a while (I run https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun) and can say it takes a lot of attention that most projects (dare I say "blockchains") have no scaling abilities at all.
- viburnum 7y agoThe want to keep ad revenue and outsource moderation.
- mratsim 7y agoIsn't Twitter ad revenue actually super low compared to the infrastructure costs?
- Ericson2314 7y agoThey should just use ActivityPub. Sure it has problems, but federating with their biggest decentralized competitors would signal that they are serious. Improving the protocol can come next.
- RRRA 7y agoHow has IPFS evolved lately?
- gatestone 7y agoWhat's wrong with NNTP? At least as a starting point?
- pmlnr 7y agoThere's nothing wrong with NNTP. It's exactly what they'd need. Trouble is developer memory: people don't read back on technology, and thus, no trendy dev remembers NNTP in the container era.
- dm33tri 7y agoAttempts to decentralize are so decentralized. Still only TOR and Eth are somewhat functioning. Let's see what Telegram Open Network will offer.
- 0xdeadb00f 7y agoNo mention of ActivityPub, Mastodon or Pleroma?