They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon.<p>In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub client. Implementation was easy and the data model is quite easy to understand.<p>ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter could have been.<p><a href="https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/" rel="nofollow">https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/</a><p><a href="http://activitypub.rocks/" rel="nofollow">http://activitypub.rocks/</a>
Twitter and Facebook and Google and others share one common concern that, if addressed, would see their staffing budgets massively reduced (and thus profits increased):<p>Human moderators.<p>Each grudgingly uses human moderators to squash the worst of the problems on their platform, and does a terrible job of it. Each underspends on human beings, using contractors without sufficient mental health care to ensure their well-being as they sift through our online sewer pipes.<p>Google outsources YouTube moderation to third-parties: the Content ID system is a labor shifting device designed to force the labor cost of enforcement outside of Google’s responsibility.<p>Twitter ended political advertisements rather than spend the human cost required to moderate them, and is now proposing a decentralized platform where Twitter is no longer responsible for content moderation for other platforms.<p>By doing so, they can continue to act as your “aggregator” of individual (RSS-like) Twitter accounts, so that they can continue showing you ads based on the data they harvest from you and your feeds — while outsourcing responsibility for moderation to others.<p>This is an effective strategy for increasing profits and if implemented correctly will permit mass layoffs of most of their content moderation workforce. This will also vastly increase the prevalence of abuse, racism, and other societal ills that infect Twitter with its underpowered moderation today.<p>Props to Twitter for identifying a way to externalize the cost of civility while continuing to profit from the resulting cesspool that will ensue.
"the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention"<p>I really wish I could hack on the youtube recommendation algorithm. It seems to be tuned for zombie viewing pleasure, and totally not for finding surprising new content. Even just having several "personas" would be a big help.
For what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes here - complete with relative reputation systems (<a href="https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/proposals/2313-moderation-policy-rooms.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos...</a>) and an open standard (<a href="https://matrix.org/docs/spec" rel="nofollow">https://matrix.org/docs/spec</a>) and even an open governance process and foundation (<a href="https://matrix.org/foundation" rel="nofollow">https://matrix.org/foundation</a>) - and with work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix.<p>Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some opportunity to join forces on this.
While it's probably just an extension of Jack's obsession over blockchain, it's a bit interesting that you'd have to use Twitter to apply: there are a few truly-decentralized/or federated solutions that have been proposed and have an active userbase, and the authors of the good stuff don't tend to be on Twitter.<p>For example, one of the people working on one of the most prominent pieces of software implementing the ActivityPub specification has proposed/is ~close to releasing a reference-implementation of one [a non-AP distributed protocol], which seems to solve most of the issues that Twitter would need to solve for privately-scoped posts (a major problem with most federated and decentralized social media), with plans to ~eventually get around to solving publicly-scoped things:<p><a href="https://socially.whimsic.al/notice/9p6cjMLaIZxtCKyNto" rel="nofollow">https://socially.whimsic.al/notice/9p6cjMLaIZxtCKyNto</a><p>(Pleroma doesn't really do per-user threading, so the responses to the original post are mixed in with the author continuing the original thread. Reader beware, etc.)
I operate an open source standard called Shareable Tweets <a href="http://2fb.me" rel="nofollow">http://2fb.me</a><p>A service designed to get tweets to a larger audience. But Twitter banned the account that was working to put this standard into practice @shareU<p>Ironically Twitter has been, historically; the most restrictive force in social media.
The Mastodon project Twitter helpfully provided a list of existing projects that are robust and already fairly popular.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/MastodonProject/status/1204774808015327232" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/MastodonProject/status/12047748080153272...</a><p>Mastodon has a number of instance and user-level boundary controls, like image muting for porn and sex work instances, that let people still federate with instances that could be trouble without that boundary. It would keep a hypothetical Twitter.com instance from causing what happened when AOL brought millions of people online.
Jack is building his own Fediverse.<p>I think Twitter should whitelabel its application and sell 'instances' to media, publishers, government agencies, and other organizations who would benefit over control of their namespace. G Suite seems to be a good model to follow.<p>What I'd really like to see would be a focus on nonprofits and grassroots political candidates, such as a NationBuilder for the Fediverse.
I'm curious about their motives here.<p>One of the massive "troubles" that social media has been having to deal with in recent years is the whole fake news problem. (in quotes, because it also has driven social media engagement, and thus revenue from ad impressions up, so from a business perspective it's a boon with the right narrative) Admittedly, it isn't a new problem, it just it's perceived impact has grown to the point of catching the public eye.<p>Twitter's response is that they're banning political speech entirely, to try and get out of the fake news domains that people care the most about.<p>Now, they're pushing a decentralized social media system that by it's very definition will be hard to control content on. In being a client for said open standard, they are certainly free to block whatever comes in that suits their fancy, but to me, it feels more than they're using this as a way to shift blame with regulation looking like it's on the horizon. It'd be an awful conveinent excuse to say "but Mr/Mrs/Miss regulator, we're just an aggregator, other entities are responsible for this content."<p>Maybe they really do believe the best approach to combatting this is to serve as a principled (by someone's definition) client of a sewer of public content, or maybe this is a strategic move to shift responsibility. I wonder which it'll be...
To those of you pushing for ActivityPub:<p>Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (Pleroma).<p>AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped content, relying on a lot of trust for every party involved. This gets broken frequently, and has had consequences so far on networks implementing it (like half of them are incompatible implementations, so I think it's completely fine to say "networks").<p>The specification itself is far too ambiguous. Here's a post by a maintainer of Diaspora explaining this part further: <a href="https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to-rule-them-all.html" rel="nofollow">https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to...</a><p>So let's assume you can get Twitter to implement ActivityPub perfectly to-spec. Great! It doesn't work with literally any pre-existing ActivityPub software, and users' DMs and are more or less public, with users' private accounts literally being public.<p>I use AP daily, and while it's fine for technical users with a reasonable understanding that anything they post is public, putting naive users' data at risk has never and will never be acceptable; pushing AP will harm everyone.
ActivityPub? Who cares about what JSON schema gets adopted?<p>Much more interesting is the why, not the how.<p>#1 reason to decentralize:<p><i>"Centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people."</i><p>#2 reason:<p><i>"The value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention. Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can’t choose or build alternatives. Yet."</i><p>#3 reason:<p><i>"social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health."</i>
> Instead he pointed to the principle of decentralization, and key technologies, such as blockchain, as the solution.<p>Ah... so that's how he's going to get the funding: <a href="https://external-preview.redd.it/CypLdP3MLDVm15Lwm1f-M98gyMhcUkj9_yd0CfOpZHw.png?s=10fd0161fb48dfe7393aa8d62873b88baeec91f3" rel="nofollow">https://external-preview.redd.it/CypLdP3MLDVm15Lwm1f-M98gyMh...</a><p>Why else would you need to insert a blockchain into the solution? Scuttlebutt (<a href="https://scuttlebutt.nz/" rel="nofollow">https://scuttlebutt.nz/</a>) is already one possible solution and they wouldn't have to reinvent some new protocol.
yay, blockchain. :(<p><a href="https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766085037248512" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766085037248512</a><p>"Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there."
Seems like Twitter is looking to embrace, extend and extinguish Mastodon, etc.<p>This is good, in a sense - means Twitter is feeling the competition. But any open source developers out there should trust Twitter just as far as you can throw them.
I think Jack's ideas usually should be <i>new</i> companies and not changes to Square or Twitter. I also am disappointed that Vine was shuttered when TikTok is basically the same thing and now is a massive social network[1].<p>[1] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/01/instagram-vs-tiktok/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/01/instagram-vs-tiktok/</a>
This sounds more like Scuttlebutt[1] than Mastodon.<p>[1] <a href="https://scuttlebutt.nz/" rel="nofollow">https://scuttlebutt.nz/</a>
Twitter, the company that started out with an open API which attracted lots of developers who then got kicked off once the company figured out what worked.<p>Good luck with your 'open standard'.
NNTP FTW!<p>He's CEO of twitter and Square. His plan is for square to be at the center of decentralized payments via cryptocoins. Africa will be a huge place to start, as the incumbents in the west will sabotage any such effort
This can also seen as Twitter getting out ahead of <a href="https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s2658/BILLS-116s2658is.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s2658/BILLS-116s2658is.pd...</a> (press release at <a href="https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/10/senators-introduce-bipartisan-bill-to-encourage-competition-in-social-media" rel="nofollow">https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/10/senat...</a>) -- which would call for NIST to define:<p><i>model technical standards by which to make interoperable popular classes of communications or information services, including—</i><p><i>(1) online messaging;</i><p><i>(2) multimedia sharing; and</i><p><i>(3) social networking</i><p>(And all within 180 days ;-) No small feat.)
Cool idea, sure. Maybe they should have had the marketing team look at the banner image before going live. Definitely undermines the perceived legitimacy of the effort in my opinion: <a href="https://twitter.com/bluesky" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/bluesky</a>
Interesting. Twitter early kicked open standards in the nuts, so I understand everyone who's sceptical to say the least. But if they manage to detangle that ugly mess that is the Fediverse this could be a real and good step into the right direction.
Ah, the impact of Mastodon - the decentralized Twitter-alternative. I highly recommend it.<p>You can even run an instance yourself, just like you run WordPress.
Does anyone on HN have an interest in building a decentralized social network together? I've been thinking about doing this for a while now. Feel free to shoot me an email laksman [at] stanford [dot] edu
I am worried that ultimately this means that the twitter of the future will be something where people can't be deplatformed. It's been pretty effective in the past to deplatform some outrageous individuals who have stoked racial hatred and violence. They get deplatformed, and their audience disappears. There are a lot of places where hate speech is illegal. And I know that Twitter has had huge problems when called to censor things and making it completely decentralized would allow them not have to.<p>Also it's weird but Jack follows Cernovich.
Now if we could get<p>- a few proper web frontends (and especially one like Google+),<p>- groups (like Google+, WhatsApp, Telegram)<p>then this would start to look seriously promising.<p>I'd happily pay a 20-40 bucks a year for that and (if Telegram didn't exist) a bit more to get a hosted but private instance for my extended family.<p>(That said I have been experimenting with hubzilla this year and it seems seriously promising but all instances seems to be locked down really hard or doesn't acvept new members and testing on my own instance alone doesn't really give me a feel for how it works in practice.)
A team of "up to five" - is this actually a serious effort? I get that five strong minds can do quite a lot but from a corporate strategic point of view this is a minnow, surely?
What does that mean in terms of responsibility to take bad content content down? Seems like this would allow them to argue fake news is not their problem anymore.
They are just a nice interface to visualise stuff that is stored in a decentralised way, outside of their direct control.
Also I guess it means you can cut this AWS bill by like a lot.
And it feels like it gives a very clear path to direct monetisation.
I'm cautiously optimistic. Twitter has been been making some bad decisions with content moderation, and has abandoned the idea of being the "Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party". Decentralization should restore that...<p>...should. That notion could disappear really fast if Twitter gets to decide who can run an instance based on their belief systems.<p>In the mean time, it's an interesting case study of what happened to Wil Wheaton when he tried to join a Mastodon instance. Already, even in these comments, people are expressing concerns about how Twitter will be able to maintain control over "misinformation and abuse".<p>That's the whole point of decentralization guys. It's impossible to moderate Twitter without being authoritarian and creepy. Bail on the concept of controlling others, and delegate that power to the end user by means of improved blocking tools.<p>If decentralization is going to work, we have to abandon our desire to control others with a centralized authority, and accept that responsibility as our own.
I wonder if he realizes how terrible Twitter is for long form writing and publishing like this when he does it. It’s always baffled me why they haven’t removed the character limit entirely and instantly become the largest networked publishing platform that’s ever existed over night.
In my mind Twitter’s streaming API (user feeds) _was_ the standard. I understand there were technical reasons for shutting it down, but is there any reason they couldn’t rearchitect it and have eventing with the same format?
Decentralization first came to mind as a "try to pawn off the hosting costs" as a motivation but I can see trying legal zones to try to adapt to the multiple conflicting legal requirements and demands because countries would never agree on "neutral international business rules". It is certainly rational and often of questionable legal fairness to expect otherwise.<p>I am not happy with the balkanization involved in that concept - part of the beauty of the internet is a disregard for the globe's petty fiefdoms and their ability to literally divide and conquer.
Old Jack seems a little wild these days--like some of that Paul LeRoux / John McAfee outlaw energy has entered his soul.<p>Will keep my fingers crossed.
I think that most monopoly technology companies now expect decentralized systems to challenge them eventually.<p>So its smart to try to build and promote something that is decentralized but also allows them a profit model. It also makes sense just from an architectural standpoint in terms of scaling. I think Ethereum offers at least a chance they may do both of those things.
Honestly... I've never wanted to embed an image in HN more than now. Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown says what 1000 words cannot.<p><a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/football-prank-Ou18ZgE49Fss0" rel="nofollow">https://giphy.com/gifs/football-prank-Ou18ZgE49Fss0</a>
Unless its open source and everyone can contribute, decentralized enough that everyone can set up their own networks, then its just another company trying to make long term investment in their company
I am not going to trust Jack, any company, on any single person on anything.
The "Protocols Not Platforms" article that he references was discussed here a few months ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059</a>
I wonder how much user engagement would decrease if a CAPTCHA was needed to read a tweet. I think a big percentage of accounts are bots either trying to gauge sentiment, or push groups further to their respective political corners.
How much is this in intersection with the <a href="https://datatransferproject.dev" rel="nofollow">https://datatransferproject.dev</a> currently also supported officially by Twitter.
We have a lots of great initiatives these days: wt.social, brave, twitter+. Monopoly stopped not being evil. Puts shadow on the Internet. But there are still people who believe. Who try to save it!
I'm kind of tired of Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, and all the other big names.<p>Do we really need a billion dollar company to figure this out, or is it just an advertising issue?
The cynic in me thinks that by adding yet another open standard into the mix, this will ultimately help in preventing any open standard from gaining critical mass, thus keeping the status quo.
I'd say they should use ActivityPub[1] instead of wasting time on their own incompatible solution, but quite frankly I don't want Twitter federating with Mastodon. We get our fill of chuds with anime avatars thanks to Pleroma, and don't really need or want Twitter around because decentralization won't make it any less of a digital sacrifice zone[2].<p>1: <a href="https://activitypub.rocks/" rel="nofollow">https://activitypub.rocks/</a><p>2: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_zone" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_zone</a>
Wisely so: eventually two autocrats are going to pressure him to remove the other for policy violations. Better to decentralize than collect Interpol warrants.
This is huge. The problem for any federated initiative is that most of the users are already on established social media platforms. If Twitter adopts an existing protocol (or creates a new one that others can join on), then new services can be compatible with Twitter's massive user base.
dear mod, this is a dup of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780</a>
How do you write a tweet that cribs the ideals of existing federated social media projects (Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, Write Freely etc.) without at least acknowledging their existence?<p>Also: Relevant XKCD: <a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/927/</a>
Twitter has repeatedly demonstrated that they are not a developer friendly company and that you should never build anything on their APIs. Since day one, they've done nothing but crack down on 3rd party development and peel away access.<p>They are the last company that should be trusted to develop an open standard.
So now instead of a focused team of experts detecting and removing disinformation campaigns, each user will have to figure it out on their own or hire a service to do it.
Duplicate of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780</a>
> A third-party Twitter client might be prettier and more functional than Twitter’s own client — shout out to Tweetbot! — but it certainly would not be more profitable.<p>I never understood this, why can't the API/firehose serve ads that would be presented in the 3rd-party apps?<p>Additionally 90% of users would naturally gravitate to the default app regardless, leaving 3rd-parties for cool/interesting/advanced/innovative use-cases. I still feel this was a mistake - not as some hippy idealogue - but from a ruthless capitalist perspective. This was their like button.
The core problem will be privacy.<p>I think it will not be difficult for anybody to siphon that data, and I don't know how one could prevent it, and it would be nice to see it done without complicated solutions. I think twitter could be biased.<p>I don't know if a law like GDPR would prevent it. If it doesn't, there should be law forbidding entities to gather data.
Decentralized non-blockchain social network and messaging protocols that have existed for years:<p>- Scuttlebutt<p>- GNUnet<p>- Secureshare<p>- Fereenet<p>- ZeroNet<p>- Retroshare<p>- Diaspora<p>- Mastadon<p>- Matrix<p>- Cabal
For what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes here - complete with relative reputation systems (<a href="https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/proposals/2313-moderation-policy-rooms.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos...</a>) and an open standard (<a href="https://matrix.org/docs/spec" rel="nofollow">https://matrix.org/docs/spec</a>) and even an open governance process and foundation (<a href="https://matrix.org/foundation" rel="nofollow">https://matrix.org/foundation</a>) - and with work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix.<p>Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some opportunity to join forces on this.