Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

Yeah. Meta is hiring, Meta is firing, Meta is about to publish their first coloring book, ML models available, discount mattresses, the boss-lost-his-mind-everything-has-to-go, Meta is taking VR to the next level, Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network. Sure, sure. Good luck, Meta!

&gt; Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work.<p>This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit&#x27;s own preferences.<p>As another commenter put it [1], the property that makes a decentralized social network desirable is actually that it&#x27;s non-excludeable. There&#x27;s no outside entity that can exclude people from the network. This is very similar to the core of what censorship is: there is a speaker and a listener who both want to communicate, but some third party prevents them.<p>What I would like from a social network is opt-in filtering, where you can choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists. But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view. If this new social network Meta is building puts users in control, it could be great.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35091164" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35091164</a>

What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?

&quot;Is the Twitter replacement we&#x27;ve been waiting for?&quot;<p>...by Meta. No. No sir, it is not.<p>ActivityPub (Mastodon variety) has been a breath of fresh air for me. That&#x27;s my Twitter replacement, though that&#x27;s bad wording, because I don&#x27;t want what Twitter has been for years.

&gt; The app is codenamed P92 and will allow users to log in through their existing Instagram credentials<p>So if it relies on the servers of one centralized entity for authentication, how exactly is this thing &quot;decentralized&quot;?

&gt; Building a decentralized network could also give Meta the opportunity for its new app to interoperate with other social products — a previously unheard-of gesture from a company known for building some of the most lucrative walled gardens in the industry’s history.<p>It&#x27;s clear to me that this person forgot everything what earlier Facebook was doing like Facebook Platform <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Facebook_Platform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Facebook_Platform</a> and Facebook Chat via Jabber&#x2F;XMPP <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;110&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;110&#x2F;</a>

Seems like they&#x27;re taking aim at Discord. The &quot;decentralized&quot; is probably just them latching onto a buzzword, I wouldn&#x27;t count on that part making it into the resulting app.

&gt; decentralized, text-based social network<p>We had that. It was called Usenet, and it was great. Google destroyed it, so Facebook is going to own the next one from the get-go? Doesn&#x27;t sound good.

Curious that the article speaks plenty about Dorsey and ommits the fact that he has been very active on the Nostr platform.<p>Nostr is so far the only platform where I see a decentralized future. Mastodon does not provide portable identities that you can easily move to other servers, nor helps you to preserve your post from previous years.<p>Nostr solved both obstacles. One private key, zero email addresses needed. Move your texts to wherever you want, your identity is <i>always</i> verified (as long as you don&#x27;t leak your private key) and fully private when you wish to remain so.<p>There are even built-in payments over there now. Basically everything that these larger groups have been talking about for years has been implemented with success in a few months independently from them.

Why is this obsession with decentralized? I don’t see the benefits of it at all. A central server is better if they have a good moderation plan built in. This whole decentralized idea is to wash their hands off moderation and not take a blame for the hellhole it will become. From a pure functional point of view, how can a decentralized network provide any performance guarantee? What am I missing?

I don&#x27;t care what facebook is selling, I am not buying. Like every other big tech company they have been &quot;building&quot; all kinds of things, but haven&#x27;t actually BUILT anything for years. The only two things they seem to be able to do at this point are stagnate or buy something someone else built.

IMO decentralization should never be a key selling &quot;feature&quot; that users should experience.<p>Similar to the philosophy behind the &quot;right to bear arms&quot; it&#x27;s best as a self-imposed framework of checks and balance on the centralized system. The majority of people are better off in a centralized system.<p>Decentralization is the solution to the &quot;who will guard the guards&quot; problem of power &amp; corruption. I don&#x27;t currently have a desire to become a gun-prepper-hoarder but living in a country where this is a potential-possibility model of life gives a sense of freedom even as I overly-specialize in typing alphanumeric letters in a specific format and rely on the System to transmute this effort into tokens-of-worth to trade for things like toilet paper and housing rights.<p>Where Meta and other companies fail here is that they&#x27;re trying to ride the hype w&#x2F;o understanding that it&#x27;s not a feature in of itself but a &quot;meta&quot;-feature to allow for better features.<p>Decentralization forces the leader to actually lead through leadership qualities. Not through owning 51% of voting rights, not through golden handcuffs, not through implicit H1B or EB1-C visa and greencard threats.<p>The failure mode for decentralization is when it enforces a meritocracy that no one single human is capable of living up to. The leaders are ceremonial or non-existent.<p>The desire for decentralized technologies is a frustration with how fallible and incompetent the current set of leaders feel and a desire to shorten or outright eliminate the complexity of the brittle chain of value transformations necessary to maintain a living.<p>It&#x27;s a desire to ascend technology into a force of nature like the sun or the wind. This goes against every company&#x27;s reason-for-being because nature is free while a company is a system that harvests nature and makes a profit by selling customers concentrated forms of it.

The whole benefit of centralized social media is that a large corporation has the resources to maintain it and the control that gives them. I don’t understand what’s in this for them. Maybe there will still be forced ads embedded into the instances.<p>My guess is it’ll be a lot easier to self host than other existing ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon. That’s the sales pitch at the price of an augmented proprietary service. And who knows what restrictions that’s entailed to.<p>There’s not a lot known, but who’s this for? Anyone conscious about this enough to even think about hosting expects freedom to use their own algorithms, moderation, etc.<p>I could only imagine it serving for commercial use. But no customer wants to install MyHomeDepotLife and upload a profile pic just to return a belt sander, I’m at loss for words.

&quot; The P92 app will support ActivityPub, MoneyControl reported.&quot;<p>Big if true. Color me skeptical, though. How would they be able to control that? (and FB likes control)

What&#x27;s in it for them? ActivityPub is a lot like e-mail and that is now basically controlled by the large centralized players like Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft.<p>It was just a matter of time before one of those large actors got into ActivityPub. People who want to communicate with their instances will have to conform.<p>Yes many in the fediverse are very distrusting of the large corporations and will instantly block Meta. But many others just love the technology, the ability to communicate across platforms, and will try hard to be part of it.

using Instagram login is not decentralized, a text-based social network prototype doesn&#x27;t sounds a lot of work, are they dusting off one project in past hackathon to make the news?<p>Meta do have some good cryptography work and talent in FB msg &#x2F; Whatsapp, that may lead them to build a somewhat ATP&#x2F;Bluesky competitor. With that said, they are really behind in this game.<p>My main concern is these new product from social OG will still be likely ad driven model, which made Facebook&#x2F;Twitter what they are today.

It sounds interesting to me but I wish it was not Meta.

What we need is a single distributed protocol for both file sharing, chat and &quot;posts&quot; tied to a verified human identity, with the concept of trust baked in. I want to search my social graph for content rather than google. If your social graph has people shitting out spam or bad content, you could just revoke the trust of the people in the graph that enabled that content.

This is a tangent, but it&#x27;s so cute that Meta copied Apple&#x27;s naming scheme for secret projects. Mark really thinks he can be Steve.

Just curious. Has anyone experienced this claim: &quot;Twitter’s revenue collapsing and the site itself going down for hours now on a regular basis,&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t spend much time on Twitter, but every time I&#x27;ve fired it up, I was met with a bunch of current tweets. Is it really going down &quot;on a regular basis&quot;?

&gt; &quot;Twitter’s decline...&quot;<p>Is Twitter in decline? According to what measure?<p>I use Twitter as a read-only way to follow a handful of interesting people in tech, science, journalism etc. All of them, regardless of their political leaning, are still posting the same as ever. If anything I see more activity than before.

Reminds me of Noah Smith&#x27;s recent article, Vertical Communities (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noahpinion.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;vertical-communities" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noahpinion.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;vertical-communities</a>).<p>It does seem like there is a slight trend with some of the Twitter-exodus leading to users going to specific Mastodon communities, which seem closer to subreddits than Twitter. Takes me back to my early internet days of growing up on phpbb forums.<p>But then of course you have the flip side of companies trying to copy the Tiktok model, one feed with the algo ruling all. I think I prefer the former though!

Since an increasing amount of people now has experienced what social media can be like without ads and algorithm-driven feeds in the Fediverse, monetizing these social networks this way will be increasingly difficult.<p>The ethos that has formed among people communicating on top of the open and free ActivityPub protocol is a strong stance against everything that has made Meta so much money. Any company wanting to introduce ads or user tracking&#x2F;profiling into the Fediverse would most likely be blocked by a large majority of existing communities.

I am not particularly interested about Meta&#x27;s views on decentralized social networks.<p>But I would be interested to hear what Apple engineers might think about this. After all at some point there was a thing called AppleTalk [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AppleTalk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AppleTalk</a>

For what it&#x27;s worth, Urbit is this sort of thing. At least right now, and in a de facto way, for it has untapped functionality that might soon enable a wide variety of additional use cases. The barriers to entry are now pretty low, as anybody can sign up via tlon.network

Will this be the Compuserve to ActivityPub&#x27;s &quot;email&quot;? I look forward to my free CD.

I call it .. Metastatic.. oh wait.

I will never use any Facebook product again after they completely bricked my oculus devices with the forced sign in.

But why? Why would Meta, an ad driven for profit company, build a decentralized platform?<p>If there is enough centralization to tatget users and show them ads (which might be the incentive of Meta), is it really decentralized?

Decentralized, text-based social network? I seem to recall something like that from the 90s. BluesNet? ScrewsWet? Something like that.<p>Being the 90s and all, it was probably all just a fever dream anyway.

Social networks and &quot;apps&quot; to the great unwashed masses are akin to giving a shiny new rock to a chimp. No think just use look nice better way tell people more bout me.

This sounds like they want to take the spot of Twitter and have no images or video. At the same time an opportunity to harvest data from other connected social media platforms.

This is a reification of that chatgpt meme of a meat company trying to appeal to vegans by launching a new vegan meat made of real meat.

Adding decentralization to your twitter competing product isn’t gonna out content twitter which is what most care about.

Would I share a product from this company with my family, or have a device they can manage in my home?

It is a bit early for April fools.

&quot;decentralized, text-based social network&quot; just sounds like IRC all over again.

Another social network, yay.<p>I don&#x27;t see us realizing the star trek utopia anytime soon.

MySpace is still around. Maybe they could buy that. Or LiveJournal.

Work for them? Quit. Considering it? Don&#x27;t. Using them? Don&#x27;t.<p>Few companies members of this site convince themselves it&#x27;s OK to work for, have done and continue to do more harm to our society, psyches, and body politic.<p>Just don&#x27;t.<p>No one asked for a surveillance-first Shitter.

It&#x27;s going to make the fediverse crumble from the load.

Media is expensive to scale, so use text is better strategy

My Instagram <i>used</i> to be full of stuff I actually liked, like cars and women.<p>Now it&#x27;s full of TikTok videos with the same text-to-speech narration.<p>I don&#x27;t trust Meta to not somehow ruin whatever they happen to come up with.

It&#x27;s like Shell that sponsors COP. No, thanks.

They better not pull a Google Talk to Mastodon.

&gt; Twitter&#x27;s decline<p>Where?

&quot;Decentralized&quot; has become a red flag term for businesses. It&#x27;s been corrupted by crypto scams. There needs to be a new word.

Nice try Zuck. Fool me once...

&quot;decentralized&quot;?

I still wouldnt use it

So IRC?

you mean IRC right?