cross-posted from: https://hachyderm.io/users/maegul/statuses/111820598712013429
Is decentralised federated social media over engineered?
Can’t get this brain fart out of my head.
What would the simplest, FOSS, alternative look like and would it be worth it?
Quick thoughts:
* FOSS platforms intended to be big single servers, but dedicated to …
* Shared/Single Sign On
* Easy cross posting
* Enabling and building universal Multi-platform clients.
* Unlike email, supporting small serversNo duplication/federation/protocol required, just software.
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The more simple approaches have already been tried and tend to die before they live.
Social media requires a network effect in order to be successful. Given the established players have had nearly 2 decades to accumulate vast networks, it would be a huge uphill struggle to start from zero content and users. Federated & decentralised social media is the answer to this—you get a network for free, giving the software a chance to stand on its own merits.
For this to all work correctly, they must all talk the same, ideally standard, language (the activitypub protocol) and for decentralised software to actually be decentralised, there can be no single point of failure (therefore caching). As someone mentioned, SSO is inherently centralised, even with something like OpenID, if your authority is down, your account is unusable, so it wouldn’t really add much to the experience as it stands (and possibly may risk complicating it more for new users).
Yea, buy in and network effects are certainly the tricky part. But that’s also true of the fediverse … it’s been going a long time and in many ways was really “gifted” with Musk’s twitter purchase (seriously, if someone else were to take charge there and reset it back to pre-musk, you’d see a bunch of people leave masto) … and Spez’s API pricing. Before these events, the fedi was pretty quiet compared to now. Lemmy, before the reddit migration was very quiet and may very well have failed by now or soon were it not for the migration.
Moreover, ActivityPub doesn’t get you seamless network effects. Lemmy and mastodon mostly don’t have cross-traffic, and that’s because their platforms basically lack any mutual support for each other. If they worked well with each other, Lemmy would be a much busier place (and masto would be better structured). Same probably goes to some extent for things like Peertube and bookwyrm. There’s also the lowest common denominator effect when it comes to features. One platform may support/provide “Quote posts”. But because Mastodon doesn’t, and they have the bigger user base, it doesn’t really matter, as no one else will see the quote posts and so the new platform doesn’t really have much to offer new users, which in turn basically turns the fediverse into the mastoverse (which is actually happening) and undermines the promise of enabling new platforms with built in network effects. Mastodon could just become one big single server or platform today and many probably wouldn’t mind.
Otherwise, RE SSO, I had in mind that trusted platforms would be mutual sources of authentication such that an account on one is effectively an account on all of them.
Usenet?
I do not know enough about how Usenet worked apart from picking up the impression that much of what was done there is being reinvented in the fedi (however accurate that is).
For me, the commitment to having good aggregating and unifying clients, and the commitment to open APIs that would necessitate, is pretty central to my suggestion. Not sure how much of that was in the usenet system (though probably more than I’m aware!).
Usenet servers had no web UI since the web was not yet invented. They ONLY provided an API and the presentation layer was done completely by the client. There were dozens of client programs people used, maybe 100s. Clients handled all features like subscriptions, tracking read articles, boosting or blocking topics or users, etc. So in that regard it was much more private for users. The servers were computers 1000x slower than a modern mobile phone. So yes, Lemmy seems overbuilt.
The servers were computers 1000x slower than a modern mobile phone. So yes, Lemmy seems overbuilt.
Well yea, part of my thinking here is whether all the work of federation, from building the software, debugging and testing it (which AFAICT is a huge pain in the ass) and then actually running it as a job … is actually worth it … when users could very well be happy with something much simpler and the mission of creating a more open, safe and “billionaire proof” social web easier to achieve with something more straightforward.
Usenet had a counterpart to federation in that posts got automatically propagated between servers. I haven’t read the Wikipedia article about it but that might be a good place to start if you want to learn about it. Being a server admin did require some ongoing effort, just like with Lemmy.
The fediverse isn’t over engineered, it’s just not quite focused on the right aspects. A federated social network needs to be more like a block chain, where the content is centralized, and the instances (miners) are decentralized. The content is the important part, and with everything being tied to an instance, it makes the content harder to access. You have instances defederating, going down, closing, and version conflicts, all that makes it harder for a network to gain traction.
You are describing a different thing than what the idea of the fediverse is. Content is collected at an instance and these instances federate. That’s why its called Fediverse: people basically form groups, these group federate. It’s a social thing, there is trust involved. With blockchain, the idea is that you don’t need to trust a central entity.
I think you talk about something like nostr.
It doesn’t need to have the full trustless or buring energy for fun, but it does need to be resilient against instances going down, which currently isn’t the case.
I think thats just a thing that will get better over time
Sounds like you’re describing BlueSky there. Have you looked into it?
Unless you’re talking about something more nostr/web3.0?
bluesky depends on one single entity. they promised a lot about their protocol, but they have yet to show that other instances other than the official one can operate in a fully independent manner.
I was under the impression that it’s clear that additional relays can work within their system? Have they not setup anything in the protocol for how that’d work?
I still think we need a simple social media protocol that gives me the power to curate my feed rather than hoping my admins don’t defederate with everybody else (followed by hordes of drooling goons telling me to start my own instance).
Well that’s kinda the point of my quick suggestion in the original post.
Instead of committing to federation, how about committing to aggregating clients that allow you to do exactly this. Right now, there’s no app that will work for both lemmy/kbin and mastodon/microblogging. No way to unify the notifications or even combine the feeds or just have a unified interface for the two platforms (that are, let’s face, both just full of text messages and feeds).
By allowing each platform to be distinct but remain open with their APIs and “play nice with each other” while leaning into the value of aggregators as a primary part of the value proposition of the system, users might be better served.
I have a hard time imagining what that looks like, which is just a failure of my ability to think about these technologies. But what I’m talking about is a little different, simply because I don’t think we can go from these diverse systems into something simple and elegantly connected.
I mean something like email but structured differently. Though email still has spam filters and blacklists, and a new social media protocol might still need those (inevitably infringing on my curatorial freedom similarly to defederation).
My point is that I’m still looking for something new, rather than to reform the defediverse.
Edit:
I might be wrong. It might be good to leverage what we started here and reform the tech to give users more freedom, and take pressure from admins.
Also… maybe email is not the example I should follow. Maybe it’s more like torrents. P2P social media.
Well I’m spitballing here, so I wouldn’t worry about not being able to imagine it! I’m struggling too!!
Is there a chance that BlueSky is more like what you’re after?
No, that’s fairly centralized too. I think I want a peer-to-peer social media protocol. Maybe more like torrents than email.
Yea right. Me too I think. It’s out there and has been for a while. Just don’t think it’s ever taken off.
You might find this interesting: https://pfrazee.com/blog/why-not-p2p
I’m checking this out!
Yea I didn’t know before seeing that that one of the BlueSky devs (the author of the blog post) was heavily involved in p2p stuff (eg beaker browser).
The fundamental problem is that all this data needs to be hosted somewhere. P2P systems have the issue of persistence: either posts only stick around as long as the people who posted them keep their server online, which is then a burden on anyone who wants to be active in the community, or everyone shares the responsibility for hosting, and then what happens if someone posts CP? Is it just mirrored across the entire P2P system, and each person has to individually root out the CP or just be okay with hosting CP?
Torrents work because you have to actively join a torrent. But discoverability is handled from the outside, through trackers. Trackers choose what they want to host.
Tor or really I2P are the closest equivalents, but they work because everything is encrypted going through them. It’s a privacy thing. With social media, everything is public by design.
Persistence could be traded off for decentralization. Just like torrents’ associated data are stored on people’s computers (and the data dies if nobody is seeding) this kind of social media doesn’t have to be permanently stored on a server.
HTTP is all you need 👍
