11 ms·

Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

65 points by bohm 3y ago

alchemy65 3y ago
[dead]
bitwize 3y ago
Coming up next on Hackernews: Should Twitter be owned by anyone other than its users? (jacobin.com)
- bohm 3y ago
  Do you have an actual critique of replacing centralized companies with decentralized protocols?
  - rvz 3y ago
    Such responses are typical from those emotionally invested in the perpetual Twitter schadenfreude brigade. They are too emotional to have an objective answer at the moment. The main difficulty is the network effect which Twitter has entrenched for decades. We're talking about 220M+ active users on the platform. Daily.
    - jjcon 3y ago
      I’m as annoyed as the next person at those looking to see the new twitter fail, having said that I simultaneously love the idea of new things challenging the status quo. Decentralization is somewhat a core tenant of the hacker ethos so I don’t think it is strange to see that reflected here.
- dang 3y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
jacobreg 3y ago
There's a lot of consideration of if we could, and previous little of if we should. Unmoderated sites inevitably become breading grounds for harassment and worse, especially as more mainstream platforms get better at driving this content away. I would be terrified to live in a world where kiwifarms and its ilk cannot be shut down
- bohm 3y ago
  OP here. I don't expect these servers to become unmoderated. I think a lot of them will moderate as strictly or stricter than Twitter currently is.
  - ryan29 3y ago
    This is something I said, but didn't explain well in the thread about Bluesky using domains as handles. You did a much better job of explaining it in your article. Being able to adjust the moderation rules to fit specific scenarios is useful. I also think the use of domains could have a significant impact on the quality of online discourse because building a good reputation on a domain and having that transferable anywhere on the internet is a lot more valuable than a handle that's only usable within the silo of a single company. Sub-domains add another layer where the owner of the top level domain has incentive to make sure they're not bringing bad actors onto the network because moderation could be enacted against the base domain, not just individual sub-domains. Domain based attestation could also drive significant change. Imagine a system where spending money at a reputable company gave you a digital token / receipt that you could attribute to a domain (aka identity) as a way to attest to that domain being a good participant. The attestation wouldn't cost anything beyond what you're already spending, but it's valuable because it demonstrates you're spending real money somewhere and attributing it to an identity. That doesn't scale well for bad actors running millions of bots because someone like me might have thousands of dollars of spending per year that I can attribute to my reputation or the reputation of someone I've had a good interaction with and bots can't throw that kind of money away. IE: It's a good indicator that a domain / identity isn't a bot, spammer, jerk, etc..
  - jacobreg 3y ago
davidw 3y ago
The tricky bit is kind of hand-waved away here: > throw The One Ring (Twitter) back into the volcano from which it was forged What does content moderation and that whole thorny problem look like on this new system? I don't want to hang out in a bar with a drunk nazi and his buddies screaming at everyone. Yeah, it's tricky and there are all kinds of difficult considerations and tradeoffs and it's all quite imperfect, but for any new platform, I want to have some idea of how they imagine it all working.
- bohm 3y ago
  Author here. You get to have all the moderation, filtering, etc. that is implemented on the servers you use. I'm sure there will be servers that very closely try to approximate what Twitter is/has been doing. Servers also can share any and all information needed to effectively moderate.
  - selectodude 3y ago
    So it’s closed source Mastodon?
    - bohm 3y ago
      I don't expect it to stay closed source. But there are significant differences to Mastodon. Just to give one example: Mastodon server admins actually can read your private messages. Also Blue Sky's approach to data portability and how to implement filtering/indexing is more developed. It might be personal preference, but I prefer AT Protocol's approach where the servers have less powers, and the users have more power. A lot of little design decisions add up to a qualitative difference.
      - polygamous_bat 3y ago
        I would imagine Twitter server admins can also read your private messages if they really wanted to since Twitter doesn't use E2E encryption. Am I unaware of something/Is there a reason to believe differently?
1attice 3y ago
The comparison to email (SMTP) is telling. I'm old enough to remember how SMTP almost collapsed beneath the first wave of spam in the nineties. These days, it's effectively centralized by an ogliopoly consisting of Gmail, Outlook, AWS, and whatever Apple calls its iCloud offering. If, like me, you run your own `maild`, you basically have to work incredibly hard to keep the ogliopols happy. You are always one bad DKIM keypair away from death. And the system is set up like this because, back when it was truly decentralized, it nearly collapsed. Centralization saved email. As much as I hate the ~ Big Corporations ~, they have preserved my ability to send and receive email. And what's more, I'm old enough to remember how NNTP (usenet) did, in effect, collapse, despite Google's attempts to rescue it. The dream of somehow doing away with: central banks; central social media; central servers, etc. is deep in the Internet's DNA. So is the pragmatism that comes from having tried all that.
- omeid2 3y ago
  It is not that bad, there is many "mid-size" players like FastMail, ProtonMail, Yandex, Baidu, Zoho, GMX, Gandi, and heaps more.
  - 1attice 3y ago
    It's not that bad at all - that's my point. I use protonmail and for some other addresses, I self host. But it's the self hosting that showed me how much I live and die by the Big Ones. And yes, they set and drive policy for the whole system. You better believe I pay attention to my Gmail bounce rate.
nextaccountic 3y ago
I can't find it so I gotta ask: does Blue Sky integrates with mastodon instances and support ActivityPub?
- bohm 3y ago
  Nope, AT Protocol is not compatible with ActivityPub.
  - nextaccountic 3y ago
    But what are the differences? Does Blue Sky use another protocol just to be deliberately incompatible with existing federated networks? Could mastodon instances theoretically be made compatible with AT Protocol anyway, and federate through both it and ActivityPub?
zol 3y ago
> Having all the data of the entire network on all the Big-World Servers. That's what you need to do if you want to crunch the data, make it searchable, and provide algorithms that help you discover new content and new people to follow. How is this all possible if the data is encrypted? Also, what’s the economic incentive for building and maintaining the software that runs on the servers?
- bohm 3y ago
  The posts and likes are all public. Some servers can charge users, and will likely have more resources to improve their offerings that way.
  - zol 3y ago
    > A centralized service runs on computers wholly under control of a single entity. They can change, monitor, amplify and bury all information. They can read your private messages. They can delete content, promote other content, and even impersonate you. Apart from reading your private messages, does that mean you still need to trust that the server you’re connected to isn’t doing all those other things?
    - bohm 3y ago
      Nope. You own your keys, and you can switch to a different server instantly while retaining both your username and your followers. They can't impersonate you because they don't have your keys. They can't ready your messages because they don't have your keys. It's a bit more complex underneath (e.g. the are light-clients that you can entrust with part of your key), but that's the gist.
thrashh 3y ago
I don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this. A server can’t really charge its users. I and most people would probably not pay to help support a server. Twitter works because most people who actually interact on it don’t pay. And the source of Twitter’s woes is honestly because the company has never been profitable (unlike Facebook, Google and so on which did). Also, requiring a domain name to have an alias? So this service is just going to be a community of sysadmins and web developers?
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  The simplest/best way I could think of is for users to be paid for their messages. You post something insightful, funny, worthy of attention, other users decide to pay you 0.00whatever USD. The problem then becomes that we haven't actually solved micro and nano-transactions in these 30-something years of HTTP over TCP connections [1]. [1] RFC 8905 - The 'payto' URI Scheme for Payments, https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8905.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8905.html
- diordiderot 3y ago
  > Also, requiring a domain name to have an alias? So this service is just going to be a community of sysadmins and web developers e.g. mastodon
  - bohm 3y ago
    there's no requirement to get your own domain name. when you sign up you automatically get a yourname.bsky.social domain.
- jrm4 3y ago
  Um, ever heard of email?
- ryan29 3y ago
  > I don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this. I'd pay something for it. The way the author describes it I would have a 'Small-World' server. I'd be willing to pay $5-10 per month to connect that to a 'Big-World' server. After that I'd expect the costs to scale with the size of my 'Small-World' server. As long as that's based on resource consumption rather than some kind of per-user scheme I think it would work fairly well. The biggest issue for me would be setting up and maintaining a server. I don't really want to do that and a hosted service for it probably skews towards costs that are more than I'd be willing to pay just to be connected to the network.
darksun54 3y ago
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jtode 3y ago
What you're thinking of is called Nationalization, and they do not like it here.
publicbutter67 3y ago
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witchoria86 3y ago
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ssense854 3y ago
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loversland75 3y ago
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ihateblonde57 3y ago
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loveseeker86 3y ago
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rainbowsalt57 3y ago
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comefeelme75 3y ago
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coyote453 3y ago
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wattson445 3y ago
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woldandmoon8 3y ago
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scarymommy75 3y ago
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basementfox6 3y ago
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thandbleeker 3y ago
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theloversand 3y ago
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digitalf33lsr 3y ago
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lackofcolour 3y ago
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weekendlust6 3y ago
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zippyseve78 3y ago
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natureangel6 3y ago
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clashstudio45 3y ago
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vintage56 3y ago
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socialclub 3y ago
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purrienne 3y ago
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dirtydisco65 3y ago
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latenight 3y ago
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sinthecity 3y ago
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sugarhigh 3y ago
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jimsandkitty 3y ago
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sundaze6 3y ago
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chillwildlife56 3y ago
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acuminate9 3y ago
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angel865 3y ago
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spellbound6 3y ago
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lilscolder7 3y ago
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teengraph6 3y ago
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jcarrano 3y ago
Short answer: if it could it would already be. First, no one wants to move away from the "real" thing. The alternatives are there and there, even things line NOSTR where you own your own identity and not a server. Then, and most importantly, the fact that users do not make the rules is part of the appeal of twitter, even if users themselves do not recognize it. It forces the most dissenting people together on the same platform. If they had to agree on rules, then either everything would be banned, or islands of incompatible moderation policies would form.

65 points by bohm 3y ago

alchemy65 3y ago

[dead]

bitwize 3y ago

Coming up next on Hackernews: Should Twitter be owned by anyone other than its users? (jacobin.com)

bohm 3y ago
Do you have an actual critique of replacing centralized companies with decentralized protocols?
- rvz 3y ago
  Such responses are typical from those emotionally invested in the perpetual Twitter schadenfreude brigade. They are too emotional to have an objective answer at the moment. The main difficulty is the network effect which Twitter has entrenched for decades. We're talking about 220M+ active users on the platform. Daily.
  - jjcon 3y ago
    I’m as annoyed as the next person at those looking to see the new twitter fail, having said that I simultaneously love the idea of new things challenging the status quo. Decentralization is somewhat a core tenant of the hacker ethos so I don’t think it is strange to see that reflected here.
dang 3y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

jacobreg 3y ago

There's a lot of consideration of if we could, and previous little of if we should. Unmoderated sites inevitably become breading grounds for harassment and worse, especially as more mainstream platforms get better at driving this content away. I would be terrified to live in a world where kiwifarms and its ilk cannot be shut down

bohm 3y ago
OP here. I don't expect these servers to become unmoderated. I think a lot of them will moderate as strictly or stricter than Twitter currently is.
- ryan29 3y ago
  This is something I said, but didn't explain well in the thread about Bluesky using domains as handles. You did a much better job of explaining it in your article. Being able to adjust the moderation rules to fit specific scenarios is useful. I also think the use of domains could have a significant impact on the quality of online discourse because building a good reputation on a domain and having that transferable anywhere on the internet is a lot more valuable than a handle that's only usable within the silo of a single company. Sub-domains add another layer where the owner of the top level domain has incentive to make sure they're not bringing bad actors onto the network because moderation could be enacted against the base domain, not just individual sub-domains. Domain based attestation could also drive significant change. Imagine a system where spending money at a reputable company gave you a digital token / receipt that you could attribute to a domain (aka identity) as a way to attest to that domain being a good participant. The attestation wouldn't cost anything beyond what you're already spending, but it's valuable because it demonstrates you're spending real money somewhere and attributing it to an identity. That doesn't scale well for bad actors running millions of bots because someone like me might have thousands of dollars of spending per year that I can attribute to my reputation or the reputation of someone I've had a good interaction with and bots can't throw that kind of money away. IE: It's a good indicator that a domain / identity isn't a bot, spammer, jerk, etc..
- jacobreg 3y ago

davidw 3y ago

The tricky bit is kind of hand-waved away here: > throw The One Ring (Twitter) back into the volcano from which it was forged What does content moderation and that whole thorny problem look like on this new system? I don't want to hang out in a bar with a drunk nazi and his buddies screaming at everyone. Yeah, it's tricky and there are all kinds of difficult considerations and tradeoffs and it's all quite imperfect, but for any new platform, I want to have some idea of how they imagine it all working.

bohm 3y ago
Author here. You get to have all the moderation, filtering, etc. that is implemented on the servers you use. I'm sure there will be servers that very closely try to approximate what Twitter is/has been doing. Servers also can share any and all information needed to effectively moderate.
- selectodude 3y ago
  So it’s closed source Mastodon?
  - bohm 3y ago
    I don't expect it to stay closed source. But there are significant differences to Mastodon. Just to give one example: Mastodon server admins actually can read your private messages. Also Blue Sky's approach to data portability and how to implement filtering/indexing is more developed. It might be personal preference, but I prefer AT Protocol's approach where the servers have less powers, and the users have more power. A lot of little design decisions add up to a qualitative difference.
    - polygamous_bat 3y ago
      I would imagine Twitter server admins can also read your private messages if they really wanted to since Twitter doesn't use E2E encryption. Am I unaware of something/Is there a reason to believe differently?

1attice 3y ago

The comparison to email (SMTP) is telling. I'm old enough to remember how SMTP almost collapsed beneath the first wave of spam in the nineties. These days, it's effectively centralized by an ogliopoly consisting of Gmail, Outlook, AWS, and whatever Apple calls its iCloud offering. If, like me, you run your own `maild`, you basically have to work incredibly hard to keep the ogliopols happy. You are always one bad DKIM keypair away from death. And the system is set up like this because, back when it was truly decentralized, it nearly collapsed. Centralization saved email. As much as I hate the ~ Big Corporations ~, they have preserved my ability to send and receive email. And what's more, I'm old enough to remember how NNTP (usenet) did, in effect, collapse, despite Google's attempts to rescue it. The dream of somehow doing away with: central banks; central social media; central servers, etc. is deep in the Internet's DNA. So is the pragmatism that comes from having tried all that.

omeid2 3y ago
It is not that bad, there is many "mid-size" players like FastMail, ProtonMail, Yandex, Baidu, Zoho, GMX, Gandi, and heaps more.
- 1attice 3y ago
  It's not that bad at all - that's my point. I use protonmail and for some other addresses, I self host. But it's the self hosting that showed me how much I live and die by the Big Ones. And yes, they set and drive policy for the whole system. You better believe I pay attention to my Gmail bounce rate.

nextaccountic 3y ago

I can't find it so I gotta ask: does Blue Sky integrates with mastodon instances and support ActivityPub?

bohm 3y ago
Nope, AT Protocol is not compatible with ActivityPub.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  But what are the differences? Does Blue Sky use another protocol just to be deliberately incompatible with existing federated networks? Could mastodon instances theoretically be made compatible with AT Protocol anyway, and federate through both it and ActivityPub?

zol 3y ago

> Having all the data of the entire network on all the Big-World Servers. That's what you need to do if you want to crunch the data, make it searchable, and provide algorithms that help you discover new content and new people to follow. How is this all possible if the data is encrypted? Also, what’s the economic incentive for building and maintaining the software that runs on the servers?

bohm 3y ago
The posts and likes are all public. Some servers can charge users, and will likely have more resources to improve their offerings that way.
- zol 3y ago
  > A centralized service runs on computers wholly under control of a single entity. They can change, monitor, amplify and bury all information. They can read your private messages. They can delete content, promote other content, and even impersonate you. Apart from reading your private messages, does that mean you still need to trust that the server you’re connected to isn’t doing all those other things?
  - bohm 3y ago
    Nope. You own your keys, and you can switch to a different server instantly while retaining both your username and your followers. They can't impersonate you because they don't have your keys. They can't ready your messages because they don't have your keys. It's a bit more complex underneath (e.g. the are light-clients that you can entrust with part of your key), but that's the gist.

thrashh 3y ago

I don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this. A server can’t really charge its users. I and most people would probably not pay to help support a server. Twitter works because most people who actually interact on it don’t pay. And the source of Twitter’s woes is honestly because the company has never been profitable (unlike Facebook, Google and so on which did). Also, requiring a domain name to have an alias? So this service is just going to be a community of sysadmins and web developers?

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
The simplest/best way I could think of is for users to be paid for their messages. You post something insightful, funny, worthy of attention, other users decide to pay you 0.00whatever USD. The problem then becomes that we haven't actually solved micro and nano-transactions in these 30-something years of HTTP over TCP connections [1]. [1] RFC 8905 - The 'payto' URI Scheme for Payments, https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8905.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8905.html
diordiderot 3y ago
> Also, requiring a domain name to have an alias? So this service is just going to be a community of sysadmins and web developers e.g. mastodon
- bohm 3y ago
  there's no requirement to get your own domain name. when you sign up you automatically get a yourname.bsky.social domain.
jrm4 3y ago
Um, ever heard of email?
ryan29 3y ago
> I don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this. I'd pay something for it. The way the author describes it I would have a 'Small-World' server. I'd be willing to pay $5-10 per month to connect that to a 'Big-World' server. After that I'd expect the costs to scale with the size of my 'Small-World' server. As long as that's based on resource consumption rather than some kind of per-user scheme I think it would work fairly well. The biggest issue for me would be setting up and maintaining a server. I don't really want to do that and a hosted service for it probably skews towards costs that are more than I'd be willing to pay just to be connected to the network.

darksun54 3y ago

[dead]

jtode 3y ago

What you're thinking of is called Nationalization, and they do not like it here.

publicbutter67 3y ago

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witchoria86 3y ago

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ssense854 3y ago

[dead]

loversland75 3y ago

[dead]

ihateblonde57 3y ago

[dead]

loveseeker86 3y ago

[dead]

rainbowsalt57 3y ago

[dead]

comefeelme75 3y ago

[dead]

coyote453 3y ago

[dead]

wattson445 3y ago

[dead]

woldandmoon8 3y ago

[dead]

scarymommy75 3y ago

[dead]

basementfox6 3y ago

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thandbleeker 3y ago

[dead]

theloversand 3y ago

[dead]

digitalf33lsr 3y ago

[dead]

lackofcolour 3y ago

[dead]

weekendlust6 3y ago

[dead]

zippyseve78 3y ago

[dead]

natureangel6 3y ago

[dead]

clashstudio45 3y ago

[dead]

vintage56 3y ago

[dead]

socialclub 3y ago

[dead]

purrienne 3y ago

[dead]

dirtydisco65 3y ago

[dead]

latenight 3y ago

[dead]

sinthecity 3y ago

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sugarhigh 3y ago

[dead]

jimsandkitty 3y ago

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sundaze6 3y ago

[dead]

chillwildlife56 3y ago

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acuminate9 3y ago

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angel865 3y ago

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spellbound6 3y ago

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lilscolder7 3y ago

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teengraph6 3y ago

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jcarrano 3y ago

Short answer: if it could it would already be. First, no one wants to move away from the "real" thing. The alternatives are there and there, even things line NOSTR where you own your own identity and not a server. Then, and most importantly, the fact that users do not make the rules is part of the appeal of twitter, even if users themselves do not recognize it. It forces the most dissenting people together on the same platform. If they had to agree on rules, then either everything would be banned, or islands of incompatible moderation policies would form.