Also, instance owners can unilaterally control what you see and who may follow you (by blocking individual users and whole servers from federating with theirs). Whether or not such a block exists is transparent to you as a user (this is different from earlier, similar approaches, like NNTP-Servers, where it was pretty clear when a particular group was not being distributed by your server - also, differently from Mastodon, NNTP did not represent your identity identifier - using different servers for different groups was perfectly usable with the same identity (which came down to your email address).
They sell this as a feature and celebrate when "undesirable" servers get blocked.
Mastodon is a good idea turned bad by building in pretty dystopian functionality.
It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping you there.
Just the pain of actually figuring out its going on or atively monitoring, and the the non-zero hassle of finding, choosing and transferring to another instance. And then be prepared to do it all again. This is not stuff the average user wants to ever be bothered with.
But Mastodon instances do tell you what is going on. They provide lists of the other instances they have banned from their own, with a statement on why. Here's the one I'm on right now: https://mstdn.social/about (scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section).
Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you.
I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
> scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section
Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”.
Everyone wants to return to the old internet. The old internet was run by self appointed gods who created little fiefdoms. Some form of censorship could happen similiar to reddit groups.
To come back to my NNTP example: Back in the day, servers were not banned by admins, individual users were killfiled (essentially a filter) by other individual users, meaning that if you really disliked someone, you would get rid of their output - without denying anyone else access to their musings, related to the topic at hand or anywhere else.
It was a more civilized time.
Today, server admins ban other servers for random issues. Users do not use the built-in killfile-esque blocking method, but instead go and complain to server admins (who then are incentivized to use massive action against other servers). This obviously is not an environment that will lead to societal harmony.
There are plenty of instances who makes it a selling point that they don't block anything. If the have free speech in their name, you can assume that's the case.
The end result however is what you'd expect and the experience on those instances are very different from what you see on the more mainstream ones, and most people wouldn't like it.
A few do. Mostly, though, those servers are blocked because of continued harassment from their users. https://xkcd.com/1357/ comes to mind.
Some of the "free speech", "low-moderation" instances have self-policing communities. Others are full of neo-nazis. Yet others are run by bigots and ban anyone who objects to the hate and vitriol. They are not all the same.
That was the comic that made me lose respect for Mr. Munroe, because he is too intelligent to miss the point so badly: Free Speech is an age-of-enlightenment concept, not a legal construct from the US constitution. Worse, while it is true that no-one HAS to listen, actively preventing OTHERS from listening is obviously ethically wrong.
If you feel harassed by an user, filter that user. If you feel harassed by every single account on an instance, filter that instance for yourself (this option currently does not seem to exist in Mastodon). But do not go crying to our admin and deny me, who happens to be on the same server as you and is semi-ok with some of the folks on that other server the ability to interact with them.
This is creating filter bubbles, your users will at first love the friendlyness and fluff, but it also is exactly what led to the right-wing successes we've seen all over the world in the last few years. Filter bubbles destroy democratic societies.
> Yet others are run by bigots and ban anyone who objects to the hate and vitriol.
You see the dangers of giving admins that level of control? Now you got an instance in which there are no more discussions, only self-assuring and groupthink, and which will slowly become more radicalised. If filtering was strictly an user's issue, other users may have seen the objection to hate and vitriol (which often starts underhanded), and have had another view.
By the way, that is true no matter which political fringe a server admin belongs to: I know a Mastodon instance on which some users become increasingly radicalised against car owners right now, to the point where mass executions are being normalised by joking about them. Guess what happens when you try to become a voice for reason... But are ALL of them just evil, unredeemable beings that need to be banned from talking? Should my Mastodon admin block that instance for spreading hate and vitriol, even though the majority still talks about other things? Obviously, that's a silly idea.
> But do not go crying to our admin and deny me, who happens to be on the same server as you and is semi-ok with some of the folks on that other server the ability to interact with them.
Here's another way to look at it: Our instance has moderation policies. You chose that instance in part because of those moderation policies, just as I did. Those moderation policies are there so we can interact with each other with the peace of mind that we're not going to have, say, child sexual abuse imagery DM'd to us.
Then an instance comes along with a few hundred follow bots that do that. So, after a few reports, our instance admin defederates from the instance.
If you don't like this, you're perfectly welcome to go to another instance, with different federation policies. Thanks to federation, you can do this and still stay in contact with me! It's a win-win!
> You see the dangers of giving admins that level of control?
No, not really. Those people are probably always going to exist. Honestly, much as I hate Nazis, if they're over there doing their thing, and not trying to harass or murder me and my friends, I'm happy just to let them do that. It's just a website; it's not like their kids won't have external influences and be able to figure out that, hey, Nazism is actually bad.
Turn on showdead on HN if you want to see the shadowbanning hell that most social media networks I know of can send their users to. In general, users have no idea that they're even banned. There's a few people on HN who have been posting nonsense here for years while shadowbanned.
Not saying it's good or bad, just that it isn't a dichotomy between Mastodon restricting things or centralized systems that don't.
I believe (dang feel free to correct me) some of what you are seeing are bots. They might be OK with only those with showdead seeing the links or to your point might not have bothered to check what sites have blocked them unless they get a status 403.
For example, on my silly hobby sites I provide all bots a status 200 for all GET and POST requests and just send them to a dummy virtual host to let them play in the sandbox for years on end. If they even once looked at the output they would see my silly ASCII art.
Some may be curious about search engines, but since I only allow HTTP/2.0, only bing can even connect with my site and robots.txt tells them to go away.
When I first created an account on some instance, I saw other people’s content even though I hadn’t followed anyone yet, so that advice seems insufficient.
Content from all federated instances is added to the feed in your instance, so you personally don't need to follow illegal stuff for it to appear in your feed. This is actually the most off-putting feature of Mastodon for me.
Sure, on the federated feed; that one can be a bit of a free-for-all. Once you follow a good handful of people you can spend most of your time on the home feed and only see stuff from people you follow and the things they boost.
Have you ever tried to follow anyone from an instance that your instance refused to federate with? I am wondering how big of a problem this is. Not that I have encountered it, mostly just see this as potential a drawback of Mastodon's approach to federation.
Good question! I hadn't tried, but just found a random user on an instance that mine doesn't federate with and clicked Follow. It took me through the remote follow and that user did appear on my list and showed up in searches when they didn't before.
Unfortunately I seem to have chosen an abandoned or dormant account for my test, so I can't say for certain whether posts will show up in Home, but I would expect so given the other visibility changes. Hopefully someone else with some fedi experience can chime in.
Given how discovery in Mastodon works, by following "boosted" (think: re-tweeted) content creator or reading new people in a discussion, you wouldn't even know these accounts exist - sure, you can manually enter a mastodon id in the search bar to go directly to an account somewhere else (and thus try to access a potentially blocked node), but that's not the common use-case.
Now, if that increases or decreases the problem space is a philosophical question. I personally do have issues with blocking instances as a whole because one admin disagrees with another admin on unrelated issues.
If I get denied access to other people to organise around, e.g. building our own zen retreat because my admin and their admin disagree on political factions or because one admin nuked the connection to another instance for not being trigger-happy enough against their own users, everyone loses. Such technical possibilities and - in fact - recommendations run against the ideas of a civil society.
I see the situation you described in the last paragraph as a very real possibility. Not going to defend Twitter, but at least it can’t ban whole organized communities at once. Mastodon’s federation that is left up to instance admins to decide on is bad design.
I would prefer to use an instance that has no control over who I can follow. As an added benefit, this instance wouldn’t have to fully federate with every instance I follow users from, so wouldn’t add all updates to the federated feed.
This way the instance would only be responsible for user identities but would not have much control over who its users can follow. I still don’t fully understand why Mastodon did not choose this design.
unfortunately I have. an instance was brigaded and flooded with very illegal content. and then the instance was taken down forever by authorities. all the instance users could do was try to flag everything they could but it was too much.
edit: it was called sinblr and rumors are that it was an instance called pawoo that flooded it with seriously illegal content.
That breaks the idea of having a federated network, if you have no guarantees that sending a message on one end of it reaches its recipient. Now we just have all the same problems of email but with the mechanics of a multicast medium.
Eventually, you'll reach the point where a duopoly will effectively control who is allowed to be part of the larger network. And this was the original problem people were trying to solve by creating a federated network.
> That breaks the idea of having a federated network
What fresh nonsense is this? There's never been a federated system with anything like a perfect guarantee of connectivity to literally anything. There are always limits, both social and technical.
The argument is a case of begging the question: Start with your conclusion, then reason backwards to the justification.
It's the case that a federation tends to erode. Likewise, it's the case that a centralized system tends to collapse.
The question to ask is really one of backing a horse to ride on to be pragmatically useful; winning the technical argument is academic.
The fediverse has a few core principles in mind, and they tend to get centered in Mastodon's marketing. So it does make some sense that it gets attacked for being an imperfect realization of those principles, and for being unprincipled in other respects. But in a head-to-head comparison with other implementations of social media it can still claim to be more principled on those things it tried to pursue.
Having the inability to know if a message is propagated federation wide, based on an arbitrary value judgement based on ????, renders it useless as a communication medium.
For this to work it needs to be treated as a common carrier, and not a social network.
Federation implies variation on how things are operated, it's a feature against the monoculture and fragility of centeralized systems. That some instances operate with different standards is to be expected.
Dystopian would be dictating that everyone operates the software they choose to run using their own time and resources in the same exact way.
Calling it dystopian is a bit harsh. Some degree of moderation is unavoidable or you end up with 4chan (actually, even 4chan had moderation, I think; it's just unavoidable).
Ultimately of course you're supposed to choose a server that you like and trust. At least here you have that choice. On Twitter or Facebook you don't.
Of course it should have had end to end encryption. It sounds like a massive omission. I found a discussion about adding that to ActivityPub[0] where someone points out that if you don't want server admins able to read messages, you can't store private keys on the server, which sounds to me like it would hurt usability. Makes you wonder how unbreakable the end-to-end encryption of other systems really is. I'm not enough of an encryption guru to say how big of a problem this really is.
If you don't own the key exchange (and you don't, even on the services most people consider secure), you're still, on some level or another, just relying on trust that this is the case.
At any rate, mastodon is a web app, not an IM client. No one who's ever raised this has even begun to explain how you could work e2e into something like it. Certainly no other microblogging platform has e2e anything, because that's not actually a thing that makes sense.
> No for micro-blogging, but Mastodon supports direct messaging, and if you support direct messaging, you should support end-to-end.
No other microblogging service with DM support has e2e anything. Because they're websites. To have meaningful e2e you need to have key exchange and device keys, and if you have a website you can look at your DMs on then the website has to have a key. If the website has a key the owner of the website can look at your DMs. This is just fundamental to hosted web services, and it's why if you use icloud messaging with imessage you're no longer guaranteed e2e, and why signal just doesn't even have a website for you to use.
LE has nothing to do with this? The key exchange I'm talking about is the end keys. User keys. LE doesn't provide those. For e2e IM systems a server has to manage user/device:key mappings, and are a central point of trust. They can potentially inject a "listening key" into your recipient list without you knowing and tap you or even impersonate you (but only in a forward way).
E2E is not a panacea, but it's also largely irrelevant to websites.
Eh, if you don't trust your masto instance admin to not read your DMs do you really trust them to not break the "your password never leaves the client" guarantees that protonmail for eg. promises?
This is the thing about this argument: Either you trust your instance admins or not. If they promise you e2e and you don't trust them, you should rightly look at that as snakeoil.
This is meaningless if you don't trust the site admins, and the reason to use e2ee in the first place is to avoid trusting the site admins. All it takes is for them to serve you different JavaScript one time that exfiltrates your messages, and I guarantee you'll never notice.
What I'm suggesting is that the same certificate infrastructure that is used to secure the connection between a server and a client could also be used to secure the connections between users.
There's nothing specific to HTTPS about CAs and trust chains.
But for encrypted DMs you need per user keys that are stored on the users computer, otherwise the owner of the server has control over the key and we're back at square one. Or am I somehow misunderstanding you?
Go look at that PR and read the details and ask yourself who you have to trust with a list of device keys you're encrypting your dm for.
You might be surprised to discover that you're still trusting an instance admin.
It does improve some things, potentially, in terms of intermediaries being able to read things, but there are a lot of things that are still reliant on trusting your admin, or are outright unclear how they'll work in practice.
That said, I take back that "no one has begun to explain..." - they've begun. But so far they've kinda just thrown some well established protocols at it but not done much to explain how it really helps the "trust your admin" problem.
Chances of a centralized Twitter stealing your sensitive information is quite a bit lower than N number of federated Mastodon instances run by any number and types of actors.
(Hypothetically) wouldn't it be possible for client devices to generate key pairs, and for messages to be stored on the server encrypted in such a way that recipients' client devices could decrypt them? (I think that's what Signal does?)
Not saying that that's what happens on Mastodon instances, I don't know enough about it's operation to comment.
Yes, end-to-end encryption is possible. It just needs support in clients, as well as a common protocol if you want it to work between different clients.
But there's also less of a reason for anyone with permission to read DMs @ Twitter to do so, possibly with logging for any audits into unauthorized access. For mastodon, chances are your instance is focused around some general interest and thus getting on an admin's bad side could mean abusing their power to extract personal information/DMs from your account.
> But there's also less of a reason for anyone with permission to read DMs @ Twitter to do so, possibly with logging for any audits into unauthorized access.
People pay employees and contractors at social media companies to delve into others' accounts and messages all of the time. Some of them do it on their own without any outside influence, as well.
It isn't really the same as email, because with the email it doesn't matter if you are on the same domain as other people. You can avoid this risk by hosting your own email but running your own Mastodon instance just for yourself wouldn't make much sense.
It's exactly the same as an email server. Whomever owns the server can send email from your address therefore impersonating you as per the original question.
It's the same in that way, yes: both are federated protocols where you need to trust the owner of your server. But with Mastodon there are within-server interactions like the local timeline (https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong....) that have no equivalent in email, so if you decide to try to avoid this risk by self-hosting you're giving up something that a lot of Mastodon users really enjoy.
Forget about what instance owners can do within the confines of the common Mastodon server codebase - Mastodon in the end is a protocol, so there are NO guarantees about the behavior of individual instances.
It seems like Mastodon assumes that misbehaving nodes will be cut off and just ignored by well-behaved ones - but that assumes that abuse is detectable and that standards of behavior will be enforced even if it means cutting off potentially large communities.
Whatever your software, the person running it can read your messages. Unless you're using a non-web client that does E2EE, of which there are none right now.
The server has the bits to do it [1], but clients need to implement it (they are the "ends" in "end-to-end encryption" after all). However this hasn't seen much interest from app developers and users.
Most Mastodon instance are hosted by individuals. Granted, I would assume most people are hosting the service with good faith, but there is no binding way to ensure that. With Twitter, doing something feral will (at least was possible to bring) doom to the company and it's investment, which is far bigger balancing factor than just someone's honesty.
I'm not promoting Twitter here, but for Mastodon, something needs to be done to protect the integrity of the content posted, so the admin cannot modify it easily (moderation can still be done through deletion).
AFAIK if you access a user's private info at Facebook your employee's ID will be immediately flagged leading to very severe consequences (instant firing in most cases).
"Admins of <website> can read data on <website>" is just a tautology. It's true of everything you use on the internet where you don't own the server, and even then it's dubious.
If people don't get that about mastodon they probably don't get it about everything else they use either, so this recurring argument just seems like FUD...
[note: Edited <service> to <website> above because people keep coming at this from the angle of chat clients that run on your phone, and we're talking about websites here - a website can't have "e2e" encryption because it is both ends. That said, some of y'all believe way too hard in the perfectness of e2e in general and I addressed that in some of my replies]
yeah, but on twitter you're probably a nobody, the staff have no incentive to read your dms. on mastodon, you're at least a friend-of-a-friend of the operator unless you're on a huge instance.
Others have pointed out that this is fallacious -- even on big services sometimes employees are creepy stalkers, sometimes they're malicious actors of other sorts -- but even if you ignore that on twitter you are a target of advertising and if you think they aren't slurping up all the data they can about you and storing it in a database somewhere, you're fooling yourself.
Anyways, down this logic path is an internet where we somehow put all our trust in megacorporations and absolutely none in our fellow human beings and I dunno about you but one of those sounds a lot more dystopian to me than the other.
twitter has hundreds of millions of users and 7,000 (less now, unfortunately) employees, not all of which have production access. i don't know anyone at twitter, so them accessing my data would need to be a random choice from the whole userbase. they'd need to evade internal checks (which, however weak they are, are infinitely stronger than the average fediverse instance). could it happen? could i be eaten by an escaped zoo leopard during my morning walk?
having my data "read" by a non-sentient advertising model, while irritating, is nowhere near the same as having it read by a human being. that is a false equivalence.
i made no argument about the absolute merit of twitter vs the fediverse. this is simply a downside of small communities that people excitedly migrating to the fediverse with little understanding of how it works or experience with its predecessors will soon run into—twitter is neutral ground, on mastodon you might be arguing with the instance admin's friend and find yourself retaliated against. anyone who used a forum or IRC in the 90's/00's knows what i'm talking about.
> having my data "read" by a non-sentient advertising model, while irritating, is nowhere near the same as having it read by a human being. that is a false equivalence.
I agree they're not equivalent.
One is a small harm guaranteed to be perpetrated every day against every single person using Twitter, numbering in the hundreds of millions of people, largely without those people knowing or consenting to it.
The other is a large harm sometimes inflicted on a small number of people, and when it does happen is isolated to a small community where people can find out about it and act on that knowledge how they see fit.
I've been around a long time. I've seen power abused on irc and forums and even small social networks. To me, the idea that we need supposedly benevolent megacorporations to keep us from doing harm to each other is a repulsive idea, far and away above "my instance admin might read something I wrote on their server."
If we've forgotten how to exist in community with each other, we should relearn that skill.
Signal is not a "hosted website," which is more the context we're talking about here. But even on those services, yes, there are ways that the owners of the service could tap or impersonate you through exploiting their own key exchange service. You are trusting that they won't do that.
This might be less true for matrix, since you could in theory be using an open source client where you have somehow guaranteed it will alert you to an attempt to add an unwanted device key to your e2e chat, but on signal you're running a binary you didn't compile against a service you can't see.
I don't think you shouldn't trust them. But you are doing so to some extent.
In the case of signal, they would have to forge the SGX enclave signature (by an intel held key) or release a client that didn’t validate that sig. Definitely possible but if I had an SGX bypass I’d want to use it on something known to be high value, and releasing a non-verifying client would at least be noticeable on android and desktop.
I think the latter (manipulating the client) is far more likely than the former, and I think it would also be pretty difficult to detect in practice. But the point is less "I think they will do this" than "there is still an element of trust here, even if it is a much harder hoop to jump through." I don't think any situation where signal does anything like this is likely.
You don't need to release a non-verifying client. Just one that generates a key which is known to the other side. What about existing clients? "Your identity in the database became corrupted and can't be recovered. Would you like to generate a new key and continue using the service?" or just release a version which is both verifying and lying to you about which key has been verified... or a low effort "hey, new phone, key changed".
Sure. My point was more that - at least on android - you can compare decompiled binaries with the open source implementation, presumably making it reasonably likely that it’d be noticed and reported on.
> private messages aren't always necessary, as long as the platform is crystal clear about this
When sending a DM on Mastodon, there is literally a message that pops up saying: "Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon."
I don't know much about Mastodon, but I know that it's main selling point is that it's decentralized, and it's pretty easy to assume that decentralized means there isn't anybody with special privileges who can read private messages. The same way decentralized finance (blockchain) means there isn't anybody with special privileges who can take your money.
And I would certainly assume that in 2022, any service would be built using encryption for the parts that are private, and aren't DM's private? Why would admins be able to read them? Is there a justification for that?
> it's pretty easy to assume that decentralized means there aren't admins who can read private messages.
I'm not sure why you would assume that? It's not something you run on your computer, it's still a website (or set of websites). Admins of your email can also read your email, if they want, and even with gmail in the mix it's probably one of the most "federated" systems ever built.
> I would certainly assume that in 2022 it would built using encryption for the parts that are private, and aren't DM's private? Why would admins be able to read them? Is there a justification for that?
They could potentially be encrypted at rest, in the database, but that doesn't really help much. The owner of the site would have the keys to decrypt them, and on smaller sites it's very unlikely that there'd be any real chain of custody involved.
If you've ever sent a DM on a forum did you think that was encrypted? It wasn't. Or twitter or facebook for that matter. It's not really practical for any data stored on a central server to be encrypted in a way that irrevocably prevents the owner of the service from accessing it.
> I'm not sure why you would assume that?... If you've ever sent a DM on a forum did you think that was encrypted?
The whole assumption here is that Mastodon is supposed to be better than those, right? Or else why are we switching? Twitter is centralized and can read all your stuff and censor it too. So isn't the point that Mastodon isn't and can't do those bad things?
We expect WhatsApp and iMessage to provide E2EE. Similarly open-source Signal and Telegram are encrypted. So why wouldn't you assume another high-profile open source project isn't adopting those same best practices for the private-messages part of it?
> Mastodon is supposed to be better than those, right?
Here are the ways mastodon is better than twitter:
- It can't be bought by a billionaire man baby
- It can't be coerced into hosting awful people because they drive revenue
- It doesn't require advertising in order to continue existing
- Because of that I'm not being endlessly datamined by adtech every moment I'm using it.
- It can't die because one website goes down, and everyone on it doesn't experience awful performance just because one instance is falling over.
- If I don't like the admins of the instance I'm on, I can move to another instance and bring much of my data with me without having to exfiltrate it with tools that violate the TOS.
- I can use whatever clients I like with it and I never have to worry about the company deciding it doesn't like third party apps and killing them slowly with api rate limits.
There are also a lot of ways it's worse than twitter, though they're mostly along the lines of "some of my friends aren't on it". Things don't have to be "better in every way" than other things to be "better for me (or you)". There are always tradeoffs.
Re. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and iMessage are all apps you run on your phone. And if you can read the messages on them from a website (as you can if you turn on a feature for imessage), then the admins of the service also have access to your messages.
> Re. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and iMessage are all apps you run on your phone. And if you can read the messages on them from a website (as you can if you turn on a feature for imessage), then the admins of the service also have access to your messages.
Not true. Web clients for Matrix are open source, and you can self host them if you are afraid of the default host trying to inject spyware to the page
That's true. Though I guess that when my parent comment referred to "admin", the were referring to the admin for the homeserver (the one routing the messages), which is different from the one hosting of the web client.
This is why services like Matrix and Signal open source their client. Because for security minded people, securing the client is much easier than securing the server.
Decentralisation is orthogonal to privacy. Your messages can be end-to-end encrypted on a centralised system (e.g. Signal) and not on a decentralises system (apparently here Mastoson).
Decentralisation is about control: the Signal admins could shut down the server and kill the service. For Mastoson, if you stop one server, the others still work.
In a sense, yes. Email contents in gmail are technically accessible to Google. But they are protected like hell via a bunch of dedicated systems that make it very difficult to access this material without an explicit auditable ticket associated with helping that user with some problem and permission to access their gmail contents. Attempts to circumvent this will get people fired.
This does rely on you trusting Google to implement and use these systems. The question is whether you trust a major tech company or whatever Mastodon server owner more to not peek at your DMs.
I really don't like that ActivityPub does not support encryption. I wanted to setup an instance of one of these platforms for friends and family to use, but hated the thought of having to tell them that, by the way I can read all of your messages. I wouldn't, but I hate that that's even possible. So, instead I'm trying to twist Matrix to work more like a social media platform. It's janky, but totally workable, so long as you're not looking for global engagement.
In my experience, federation is like email, except in the early days before gmail was email, and if your ISP could arbitrarily and without notice subscribe you to a fire hose of illegal content.
This is the part that never made sense to me. The way mastodon is built the server automatically downloads all content you federate with to your own server. That means if someone on your instance hits follow on any account, boom you're now legally responsible for hosting and disseminating everything that account posts. It's just not practical to moderate every post from every account anyone on your server follows. Even one seriously egregious image squeaks through and you're looking at the possibility of actual jail time.
I always wondered if the expectation could be flipped to expect the frontend client to fetch the majority of content remotely from the followees' servers on the fly. The architecture is so complex in a federated scenario though that could be a total mess or not even technically feasible at all.
Hmm, but isn't this lack of moderation also what is supposed to protect hosts from legal problems, just like it does for ISPs ? (Why wouldn't an ISP be legally bothered about transferring an illegal file ?)
SMTP servers host and transmit piles of illegal content, but so long as server operators make best efforts to use spam lists it is never a legal problem.
Kind of like you can send an email attachment containing illegal content to thousands of people and their SMTP servers will automatically download and store it.
This is not a new problem. Shared spam lists and block lists are already emerging on mastodon, matrix, and other decentralized systems too.
I'm talking more about instance operators. Using an email analogy it's more like running an equivalent of gmail/yahoo mail/fastmail. There's this second order of magnitude on the problem because you're responsible for all of the touch points on all of your users in aggregate. Spam lists and block lists on the fediverse are a thing, but they're just step one of a marathon battle against fediverse spam/illicit content. Most instances are very scrappy operations and spam/block lists only put a dent in a very large and often overwhelming issue.
Working dynamic spam/block list solutions at scale that are capable enough to actually erase the issue are a hand wavey future potential solution, whereas the tidal wave of content exceeding the ability of instance owners to moderate is a very real very today problem.
I think what's actually happening on the ground is instance owners slap on some instance block list of the worst offenders and turn a blind eye hoping there's nothing too bad hidden in the mountain of media they have cached, or they just hope nobody starts caring enough to look. That might work fine for a while but I don't think this problem is going away.
Centralization does have some economies of scale in this regard. It seems like hosting your own Mastodon server is not for the faint of heart, and requires significant time investment. It's like a Twitter starter kit, just add capital and water daily.
When a Mastodon instance chooses to relay another it's like if your email provider could arbitrarily sign you up for mailing lists, in a way that bypasses your mailbox filters. This is something generally unheard of in email land.
I have hosted public shell accounts and email servers for the public for 20 years and this is just as real of a problem for small community classic internet service providers as it is mastodon servers.
If anyone user of your email users gets on a spam list for illegal content, then it gets cached on your servers. Or a shell user simply uploads pirated movies.
This is a harsh reality well known to anyone who provides any public internet services. There is illegal content embedded in every blockchain, ipfs, and freenet node, and you cannot easily detect or censor it.
Some people will inevitably do disgusting or illegal things with all public internet resources at some point, but we absolutely cannot let such individuals discourage small community hosting which is vital for the survival of the free internet.
Decentralized services will always be abused to share CSAM but paradoxically are our only practical defense against giant surveillance capitalism corporations that we -know- are manipulating and selling the behavior of live children at massive scale today.
Mastodon has a feature where you can choose not to cache content separately, so that it’s served from the original server. I’ve turned that on for instances that host lots of weird content.
Even better: you can use Mastodon with an RSS reader. All tags and profiles produce RSS feeds. In theory, a feed reader could be ActivityPub aware and support comments/replies for feeds from AP platforms.
And instead of peddling hypotheticals about what your instance will/won't do, it would benefit you to make an account on one who has admins that will listen to your pleas or have similar inclinations towards content as you.
Or I could use a service that employs an army of content moderators to ensure that I am likely never to be placed at legal liability due to content someone else uploaded to the platform.
I tried Mastodon about two or three years ago; I used the largest instance I could find that claimed not to allow Adult content, but which still relayed other instances. I was shown pornographic content as soon as I logged in; some of it illegal in my country.
So I tried another instance that made similar claims. Same problem.
Maybe it's better now. Maybe it's no longer awash in loli hentai or cartoon beastiality.
I upvoted you but all I'm hearing is that you want people to do the work for you while you don't spend a cent or a drop of sweat on the problem. It has a whiff of entitlement in my opinion.
I tend to recommend people find a small server with frienda and friends of friends if they want a public feed they can trust. Or simply follow people they trust to not post illegal content and ignore the firehose. That is what I do. Mastodon is basically an RSS reader for me.
Mastodon is great, but think Web 2.0 needs more open source alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Telegram et al that have all their features and are just as easy to use, or the public won’t join. With Zuck and Elon now owning some of the world’s largest public forums, their policies have to satisfy everyone, which is impossible. Not to mention that governments can pressure them into stuff. So we once again get to this same conversation.
We need open source alternatives like Mastodon. But it is difficult to match the ease of use and network effect of current Big Tech. Federation for example makes it so that downloading 50 avatars from 50 different sites much slower than if they were all stored om central site.
For me personally, I have spent around 10 years and reinvested $1 million of our revenues to build this open source platform, which I think will help liberate people from privately owned Big Tech platgorms the way Web 1.0 helped liberate them from AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, MiniTel etc. and opened up new business models like Software As a Service and E-Commerce.
All the big companies, from PayPal to EBay, Google, Facebook, Amazon, only became possible because the Web was open and permissionless. AOL wouldn’t allow any of these business models to permanently be built on top of it (keyword: Facebook LOL).
Web 1.0 has a hugely adopted open source solution: Wordpress. NYTimes was one of the first investors. To publish something, people can choose from a free market of hosting companies, and plugin developers can sell directly to them, and no one can get deplatformed.
But for Web 2.0, I’m sorry but Mastodon and Matrix are not at the level consumers expect after being spoiled by Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, etc. That’s why we built Qbix… it’s supposed to be an open source alternative that lets you assemble your own community apps, if you want you can quickly stand up an alternative to what Zuck and Elon run:
If you want to play around with it, it’s free to use. The platform is ready for use but needs a lot more tutorials and needs to be packaged for hosting companies… ultimately the goal is to incorporate micropayments:
Edit: 4 downvotes in 4 minutes. That’s not enough time to even read the comment or look thru the link, let alone try it. Why such a vehement response to what is essentially free software, which is intended to help humanity? Mastodon and Matrix are in the same category… I would definitely appreciate any TEXT accompanying the downvotes, so that I can learn what you are thinking.
From your own site this seems like another crypto scam:
“QBUX is currently an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum protocol. In the future, versions of QBUX running on other protocols may be developed, exchangeable 1-1 with the current QBUX token.”
Maybe you’re not willing to cop to it being “crypto” but it’s in essence the same.
Have you even clicked https://github.com/Qbix/Platform? Qbix is an open source platform that doesn't require a token for anything. You can use it, with absolutely no encumbrances or needing to buy any token at all. There is zero need, right now, for a crypto token. And going forward there will never be a need to do anything it currently does now. Qbix is like Wordpress. So please explain what the scam is, I am lost.
The QBUX ecosystem is something that is planned for 2024, to denominate micropayments between sites, if they choose to pay each other for content. For example, monetizing open source plugins, digital content, journalism, user attention, and so on. Right now, the Web ad-supported model is broken, as the Ecosystem page explains. Qbix does plan to have sites (not people) settle balances with each other in something eventually. For micropayments between sites to be possible, there has to be a unit of account.
If it's planned for 2024, why does https://qbix.com/ecosystem put it front and centre? Between that and the mouse pointer twinkles, most people are probably going to bounce right away; the site clearly sends the message that this is not something to be taken seriously, and may well be an outright scam.
There are a few other things that immediately put me off as well, though they may be just wording/messaging. Let me dissect just half of the first sentence from https://github.com/Qbix/Platform, and what springs to mind reading it:
> Our company spent 10 years building a decentralized Social Operating System for the web
Who is the nameless "Our company"? Even if we know who they are, building on open source projects controlled by a single company is often a bad idea. How did you spend 10 years on this? Is it the open-sourced corpse of a failed commercial endeavour? Also bad to rely on. Or is it new?
Most people that spend 10 years building something in private with no users end up building the wrong thing. "Decentralised" may be true, but screams "trendy buzzword". "Social Operating System" doesn't seem to make the slightest bit of sense. "Operating System for the web", oh, so it's like Linux or FreeBSD, or maybe WASI? How is that social or web-specific? No, it's not like that at all; reading a bit further shows that it's not anything like an operating system (AFAICT), and is actually a web framework (I think?).
There are plenty of other things that look like warning signs on that page too.
These immediate first impressions together with the apparently off-topic self-promotion of your first comment explain the down votes. (For the record, I upvoted.)
That's a good question. The Qbix.com/ecosystem section is the section of the site that discusses the broader ecosystem we are building. QBUX is at the center of that ecosystem. But you don't have to participate in it, if you don't want to. You can, for example, run Qbix applications on a wifi mesh network in a rural village anywhere in the world, allowing people to make plans, date, organize events, make appointments, go to school, learn things online and much more.
Please tell me, what software would you use today to do all that?
> "Social Operating System" doesn't make sense
It even defines it right there under https://qbix.com/platform ... what social applications are. Did you see the video, or really anything?
> "Who is the nameless Our Company"?
Qbix Inc. The company behind https://qbix.com -- it's right on the site.
Automattic is behind Wordpress. No, it's not a corpse of a failed commercial endeavor. NGinX took 10 years before it was commercialized. MySQL took 7. And commercializing it didn't really add much value to it... MySQL was simply forked to MariaDB. But both NGiNX and MySQL were in fact "controlled" by one entity for quite a while, before they became big. This is normal.
What are the other things that look like warning signs? And why did you not look at anything besides "QBUX"?
My goal was to understand and explain the quick down votes, but I read enough to determine that it didn't seem useful to me. I followed the first two links in your original comment, so didn't see these other pages, and didn't want to watch a 7 minute video.
I understand what social applications are, what operating systems are, and what web frameworks are. I can't see anything resembling an operating system on any Qbix page I've looked at, but I do see things like a web framework, which is what you call it in some places. I've now watched the video - I think you should put Qbix's capabilities of identity sharing and friends but not websites knowing your private info in text form up the top, as not many people will watch a 7 minute video to figure out what something is (since that feature seems kind of neat and unusual).
I think the GitHub page should mention that the company is also named Qbix, as that's kind of confusing.
Some other things I interpreted as warning signs on the GitHub page are:
- The overly-ambitious goals like "We aim to do to Facebook and Google what the Web did to AOL and CompuServe" - almost no one stating goals like that will achieve them.
- The screenshots are mostly American politics, which is to many people the worst aspect of social media, so quite off-putting.
- "Build once, run everywhere". Developers have heard that before, and it's never been correct before, so seems dubious now.
- In several places there seems to be a lack of distinction between the open source software platform, and the online platform Qbix runs (controls?), e.g. "If your app turns out to be very useful, we can discuss giving it a head start by making it available to everyone on our platform.". I can't tell if it's actually the case, but that makes you sound like gatekeepers in some sense; isn't an app I make already available to everyone?
Those are good examples of open source projects controlled by a single company, but people using them are running the software on their own systems, isolated from the company. Qbix the software sounds more entangled with Qbix the company. I've now read a whole lot more, but I still don't really understand.
I found some broken links on https://qbix.com/platform, on the left "For Developers" etc. don't do anything when I click.
That's a really long way of saying "yes it is cryptocurrency related"
But it doesn't really matter. You asked why people were downvoting.
And the reputation of cryptocurrency has sunk so low that a lot of people aren't going to stick to see exactly what a product is. If they get even a hint that something might be cryptocurrency adjunct, they leave.
> That's a really long way of saying "yes it is cryptocurrency related"
No, it's not, though.
In the future it might be cryptocurrency-related. But currently it is not.
I'm sorry that you don't stick around to read 99% of the site that doesn't mention cryptocurrency, but see something that sort of seems like cryptocurrency and leave. That sounds like the attitude of many on HN to other nitpicks (e.g. comic sans, maybe, used somewhere... and then the person announces they stopped looking at that point)
Hmm, typically blogs are defined as Web 2.0 rather than 1.0, because easy to use and allow collaboration (comments).
I think that you just mean "platforms" ? They are indeed bad, being closed and centralized... ("protocols, not platforms" !) not sure that you want to associate yourself semantically with them ?
Qbix supports: events, videoconferencing, livestreaming, calling into the show, group reservations, paying for them, earning credits, sharing content, collaborating on various files, scheduling team meetings, dating, making appointments, teaching students, and more.
That's what Web 2.0 is
Four years ago I started a Web 3.0 company called intercoin.org -- with the same approach. It also has a free open-source set of applications
But that one is "cryptocurrency-related" so I'm sure people on HN will automatically think it's a scam lol. Even though you can just take the code and do whatever you want with it.
It's not a Federation otherwise you wouldn't be able to disconnect from other instances.
It is in reality a Confediverse.
Edit: All Elon has to do is send out a Tweet with something to the effect of "The Left's alternative to Twitter is Mastodon a Confederacy. Now that's what I call ironic." and watch them lose their minds.
A cursory search on Google yields four results pertaining to the "confediverse". Being such a niche I wonder whether it's wise to label technology with such contrieved descriptions.
I think it would be useful if you could explain the anatomy of such a term?
My reading [1] on the matter indicates that it can't be defined as a fediverse because the content is not owned by individual posters, indeed if I were to post something on a mastodon instance, I do not retain sole ownership of the data - a moderator could delete it, and thus "censor" my opinions. But I question, is this a true critisism? And does federation require each client connected to a distributed node to in it's own right retain absolute sovereignty over the content posted on that federated instance?
> The Left's alternative to Twitter is Mastodon a Confederacy.
Why would that be ironic? Apart from the most well-known historical example—I assume that's your reference—there's nothing about a confederation that's inherently 'anti-left', as far as I can tell. The European Union resembles a confederation.
Federation is fine for groups of like minded people who want to discuss topics in echo chambers. That might be most of the discussion that happens online. It's absolutely fine.
However we also need a public square online. One where anyone may speak and anyone may respond and challenge the ideas. A place where anyone can put their claims on the record. It's not a place for sharing holiday photos. It is a place for public figures, journalists and politicians. Twitter has already been moving out of this space with it's various 'snowflake protection' policies and I hope Mr. Musk can restore this public square and strengthen it.
This comparison of Twitter to some fantasy public square will never stop bewildering me. What was the global public square before Twitter? When did we have a place where every person on the planet could freely express themselves?
This is just a purely imaginary space which for some reason even very smart people keep bringing up.
Why? What is this notion based on? A global public square never existed in the history of our species, why do we keep bringing up the idea of a public square as something completely reasonable?
You are certainly aware that Twitter did not start as a public square either (the original idea was to share SMS messages with a group of friends). So I am not following your argument.
My argument is that there is a place online where anyone can go and express an idea and challenge ideas of other’s. That place is (among others) 4chan. It’s not some obscure personal blog, it’s a large and influential platform. Is it working as a public square? Are you using it to challenge ideas you disagree with?
Even if the public square analogy held, wouldn’t that be an even better argument for federation? Do people really want the “global public square” to be controlled by one man, or even a publicly traded company?
The fact that Twitter is controlled by one man or a group of investors is precisely why it's not a public square. It has nothing to do with the amount of users; if the public doesn't control it, then it's not public.
The idea that Twitter is a "public square" was recently popularized purely to create the argument that it should be owned and/or heavily regulated by the government. The imagined goal of this is for Twitter to somehow no longer have a moderation policy and only follow by the first amendment.
One problem with this argument (and there are many) is that we assume that this _global_ public square should be controlled by the US government. That doesn’t make it much more fair or impartial than the current ownership. If being gay is illegal in many parts of the world, should people from those countries be able to call for punishment and basically harass gay people? If not, why not if this is a global public square.
The idea that a company with an audience of hundreds of millions should not be able to impose its own bias on its users dates back at least almost a hundred years with utility service policies. I highly doubt this was invented overnight by the government.
This is just not a solid argument. Let's replace Twitter with the US government. Why should it be allowed to impose its own bias on billions of people worldwide?
It is actually a perfect analogy. You have most of the world leaders and government officials on Twitter. On the other end of the spectrum, I can get local ISP updates and my local fire department is on Twitter.
Twitter really is a public square in the true sense of the term.
Why does that need to be a single place? Surely having a single place ensures a limited set of views because there has to be a "one size fits the world" moderation policy.
Smaller distinct places that iter-operate and have the same UI for consistent UX seems strictly better for a public square.
Yes, interoperability between multiple interfaces is ideal. However federation can break this interoperability because the conversation can be fractured by instance owners. Decentralization with strong user-selected filters is the ideal model for a public square.
Mastodon is an interesting case because it was a splinter of Twitter but it basically had the same moderation policies so it was the same thing and imo had no appeal of its own. Now with Musk it's possible that things will change in Twitter's policies so Mastodon may become useful, but we'll see.
I just have such a hard time trying to understand why DeSo hasn't caught on. Seems to solve every single one of these problems in a more elegant way. What am I missing here?
Huh. My server (tech.lgbt) is awesome, populated; and the content is relevant to my interests. I'm truly enjoying it. I've been here less than a week and already have 26 followers and I'm following 20. But I'm also a queer programmer; so...maybe it's just really dependant on the particular server you're using and your interests?
LGBT communities are mostly very supportive and welcoming (which I envy as a straight man). Also they are not niche in the same sense as some music genre communities, which I am trying to be a part of but the discussion is just not happening.
It's possible that it is simple to use, but the community hasn't been able to explain it yet. My attempt: Mastadon is Twitter with far fewer users. The self-hosting and federation stuff is really detail to most people, much like most of email infrastructure.
I don't think it's correct or useful to make an equivalence between Twitter and Mastodon.
Mastodon is software. It implements the ActivityPub protocol. People run Mastodon instances of their own to connect to other ActivityPub systems. There are other ActivityPub implementations, Mastodon is just one. It's not a platform like Twitter any more than WordPress is like the NYTimes.
I’m technical (as most people are on HN), but I don’t care how it works. I don’t care whether it’s a service or a protocol. I don’t care if it’s centralized or federated. What I want to know is how I use it as easily as possible. If that requires me to know the details - it failed. By “failed” in this context I mean “to be a viable Twitter alternative”. There may be other goals such as being a viable social network/protocol on a different scale or with other goals than being a Twitter competitor - but I don’t think most are interested in Mastodon for any purpose other than as a Twitter alternative.
If you read the TFA you'd realize that your second paragraph is precisely what she's criticizing.
It's possible that some concepts or tools can't be simplified or there's no point. Try explaining Webpack to an end-user. Such categories of things exist, in which case they are not products but components of other products. If Mastodon can't be understood simply, then it will only catch on with those who understand complexity, and be used in a product that is itself simple.
It's an intentionally obtuse criticism, and I don't think it's been made in good faith. I'm seeing all kinds of weird, gleeful hatred being thrown at a piece of software that a bunch of people are running for a variety of their own reasons. It's like being mad at WordPress because of a hateful website you found.
Mastodon is not that hard to understand. It's just not Twitter. It's not meant to be a 1-to-1 replacement for Twitter, but people keep trying to compare it to Twitter and then acting out like they're all upset because they don't find everything they're looking for in the thing.
If "Mastodon replace Twitter" is a thing, it will mostly be in the sense that people will be using their time differently, not that they'll be doing the same things as they do on Twitter. You're not going to "build a brand" on Mastodon. You're not going to make a name for yourself posting "dank memes". You're not going to get a chance to show off your "sick dunks" to your followers.
I think it's weird that people keep calling Twitter a "public square", but if that's how they want to think of Twitter, that's not at all Mastodon.
What is Twitter, actually? It's an advertising platform. It carrots people with celebrities and sticks them with promoted tweets. Along the way, some people find they can keep up with their friends, colleagues, and industry acquaintances through the thing.
I've used it for months and I still couldn't tell you exactly how it works. Open efforts like Mastodon desperately need simple infographics to explain the service to newcomers or you'll end up with a bunch of ex-twatter users signing up, using it for 5 minutes, being annoyed that it's not nearly as simple as twatter and then idling their accounts while they switch to something else. See also: matrix, which has some uptake by the open source technical crowd but nowhere near the general adoption of telegram.
People have written whole books on how to use twitter. There's a whole generation that needed this kind of introduction to make sense of it, when it was relatively new.
Every time a twitter thread gets posted on HN, there's at least one comment on how difficult it is to read it, for one reason or another.
Are you serious? It took me 5 minutes to spin up twitter and post a shitty twit. It took me half an hour to get mastodon and i still dont know what it is, other than a distributed clone of twitter with unlimited powers given to server owners.
Yeah, I don't get the big deal at all. I self-host a Pleroma instance, it took me about 10 minutes of doc-reading to set it up - similar complexity to the IRC bouncer I set up a while back. And if you don't want to self-host, you just sign up to an existing instance.
The threading mechanics of twitter took me a non-trivial amount of time to get my head around.
I suppose if the goal is to emulate irc servers but for short twits then depending on who owns a server and how well they keep things on topic then it could work. Say a mastodon thingie for software developers, than bans any politics or crypto would be nice to have. Ideally something that search engines can index so we dont silo knowledge. I think, i still dont know what this is.
"You visit a website (or install an app) and you create an account with an email address and password" is something the average person is used to. The UX will be confusing at first - there are new concepts to learn. People will figure it out.
You seem to be out of touch with what the non-technical web users. Practically none will read and implement the stuff in their documentation in 10 minutes.
Even if some do, most of those will run into a tiny random roadblock and will give up.
Nothing as "techy" as Mastodon or the one you mentioned will be adopted at the scale of Twitter.
The Mastodon registration comes to a halt for many already at the server selection page where you are presented with topics (why?) and list of instances. There should be a default choice in the express signup for people who don’t care about instances at all.
Exactly this. Also, servers should not be topic oriented. Imagine that email services did something like that: "it's email for plumbers and it's plumbers you talk mostly with here"
The qualities that make a social network successful have little to do with the protocol technologies involved. If the next hit social network happens to be on Mastodon, that will only be a coincidence.
It's not hard to use. Make an account and visit the web page or use a client app. But people feel they don't have a valid reason _why_ they'd use it over Twitter.
So geeks explain the geeky benefits, which are substantial, but virtually no non-geeks care about.
My wife was struggling with the password reset flow yesterday, which behaved in unexpectedly and seemingly broken ways via the mobile app she was using. Just basic usability.
Mastodon is like the 1990’s internet came back. It’s the balkanization of social, just like it used to be. The problem is that each group will eventually split for w/e reason into 2 smaller groups. Rinse and repeat. The irony being the end state is a server for each individual as a group!
Federation is not the answer ultimately because centralization is how money is made. It’s also how the world works, but with certain expectations based on context.
Mastodon is like Linux on the desktop - it won’t work for most people.
> Linux on the desktop - it won’t work for most people.
Assumptions for this to be true:
- Windows and MacOS are a UX champions and most people can use them without any issues. (Not objectively true)
- People will be unable to comprehend GUIs like Gnome or KDE. (Not objectively true)
- Linux Desktop is incapable of doing things other Operating Systems are doing. (Not objectively true)
- Linux Desktop is based on a rigid idea and represents unusable software. (Couldn't be more wrong)
- Linux cannot be used for consumer use. (Again false, Google Chromebooks)
I don't even get how you're comparing Mastodon to Linux Desktop. Linux Desktop is functional, great for everyone who doesn't have an exclusive bias against open soruce software. Mastodon is FOSS, that's the only similarity.
Anybody who tells me that Linux distros like ZorinOS "won't work for most people" is either lying to themselves or being ignorant on purpose.
> And yet, approximately nobody is using linux on the desktop.
I am, my whole family is, my friends are. I don't see why I would choose to use a bloatware OS just because most people who don't know any better are using it.
Turns out, better software can replace Windows and give you a better experience, crazy I know.
Register on website A -> you can post at and follow people from website A. Go to website B and follow a person from that website without registering. Now you can also see their updates on website A.
For 3 months I visited the Fosstodon server daily (and tried to participate, but ...) My overall impression: there were few incidences of conversation going on. It was like a blog for a group of hundreds of people who had somewhat related interests ... but (unlike HN) no sense of community. I left disappointed; the technology worked, the experience pleasant enough (if museum-like) but something very essential was missing. (A critical mass? Forums?)
I have the same experience so far but also acknowledge that it will take a very long time for communities to form around individual Mastodon instances. Of course, that might never happen at scale (a large number of instances with functioning communities). Twitter (and Reddit, IG, etc) certainly benefited from mixing different people together and not being limited to a specific niche. On the other hand, niche forums and discussion boards in the 90s and early 2000s had a wide variety of amazing communities. So maybe it's just a question of time.
Just tried fosstodon and the european commission has an account there?? Cant these political creeps stay the heck out of our daily lives? I dont want to see government propaganda creeping into foss, please! Even if its the eu - sets a precedent for others to follow. Keep politics out of all this.
I am a people but the EC is a government. It doesnt have the same rights. I mean we debate government control and surveillance all day long yet these try and invade everything in our lives. Should use political channels for their propaganda. Else we are back to square one. Today its the ec, tomorrow the ccp, then trump, then we argue we dont want trump and the ccp then we argue about censorship then we argue about what is even censorship and so on. I for one wont be using this server until these creeps are banned.
I’m trying to come up with a reasonable discussion to have with you but you’re just so off base that I’m not sure it’s possible.
1. What “rights”, dude? The right to sign up to an instance? Anyone can. And all those instances have different rules, different instances they federate to, etc.
2. Who do you think works at the EC if not people?
3. What does the ccp or trump have to do with this?
4. Do you realise how insane it is to even ban individuals because they work in politics? Or because of where they work in general? Does your ban apply if they left their position? Does it apply to congresspeople? Mayors? Neighbourhood watch? Any government employee? If yes then teachers too yes? What about other countries political systems?
I… don’t know why I’m even entertaining your post.
Not an issue, but they need to stay away for social interaction. Whats this communism and there is an agent infiltrated everywhere just to be sure we are constantly fed propaganda?
The EU has their own instance. You likely saw messages from that one that was federated with your instance.
They may also have created an account before their instance was live, but their posts should all be from their instance now so if you don't want to see it you can just block the EU instance
Thanks for the clarification. I guess my concerns are more of a philosophical nature and what direction we want this new social network concept to head towards.
That's fair, and a concern I share with you. I've been a heavy user of the Fediverse since 2017, and what I see right now is a bit of an eternal september moment. I'm hoping it'll return to some kind of normal once the current storm settles, but there is a risk that this time will be the one that changes the Fediverse landscape forever.
The EU instance has been nice, and I'm following several of their accounts, and they're mostly posting policy information as well as updates on various programs, but I can't expect every singe organisational account to be similarly nice. Especially if new ones arrive that post much more controversial content.
If only there was a way to mute, or block individuals or whole instances from your own account. :P By which I mean: there are some knobs in your profile to ensure that you can do all of that.
I think what's missing is that Mastodon doesn't cultivate the "Local timeline" in a way to encourage people to act like a community. On their iOS application I believe they actively removed the possibility of accessing it - which was hated on at the time, but the devs were very adamant to keep it like that.
There is a mastodon fork called Hometown, that gives the local timeline a higher importance, but I haven't used, I don't know the details.
Timeline should not be focused on posts from local server. It should be tag oriented. I think it would be better to show users posts about their interests and hobbies from all around the network, on whichever sever they were posted.
What if I started my own server, just for me to manage my own data? What would "local timeline" look like then?
You might be right from a purely theoretical perspective, but through the way the ActivityPub federation mechanism works, there' will be an inherent difference between local content (in easy reach on the same server) and remote content which would require additional HTTP requests to make sure you have the latest versions of the objects related to it (authors, recipients, etc).
Same garbage as twitter but federated. I did a search for #gaming on a local server and sure enough it yielded crypto, politics and identity politics results. No means to ban people from showing up for a particular hash. I just wanted to see bloody gaming setups and gaming videos. How hard is it?
It's much more common to tag things on mastodon since there's no auto-discovery like on twitter. So broadening your timeline is usually a "search for a tag -> follow interesting people" loop.
I think you're jumping the gun. I don't like Mastodon's dominant culture, but gaming communities (also in Pleroma) have been some of the few hobby places I've seen that haven't been dominated by culture war infighting.
I hope you are right because i cant stand the mess social networks are in. I really with we had something cool we can use for topics we like. I really really really dont care about politics. It’s all going down the drain anyway might as well make it enjoyable.
You can't expect a platform to solve the pervasive society issue. I mean, I went for a walk and saw someone advertising a car -> doesn't mean world is the same garbage as twitter but 3d.
There's overlap between gaming and crypto and politics and identity. You can select specific people to follow from the #gaming results, so you concentrate on just what you want to see. Alternatively you can mute specific phrases to not see for example crypto. But don't expect people won't post about what they are interested in. People post for themselves and their interests, not for your enjoyment.
Cant they just post those things in places where those are the topic? Or not spam unrelated tags? Why does everyone have to push their little agenda on everyone else? I swear everyone runs their own little politics thinking they change the world but all they do is annoy people.
If you post about topic X and tag tens of unrelated topics it means you are no longer posting for yourself but your pushing a narrative. Stop. I dont care nor does the world care when they search for … #game.
> Cant they just post those things in places where those are the topic? Or not spam unrelated tags?
No. They either don't want to or they want to spam.
> Why does everyone have to push their little agenda on everyone else?
You realise the irony here about you pushing your agenda about how other people should communicate, right? (if it's actually spam and you're using an instance which doesn't allow it, you can report it)
The irony of you pushing the agenda that i should not be pushing my agenda that people should not be pushing their agenda through spam is through the roof. I want to be able to somehow vote for tags to be removed from posts. Instagram is suffering from the same issue. You search for vr or gaming and pop there is some thot or basic dude spamming the topic with an unrelated post. No option to remove their content or have them blocked from showing up again. Basically i want us to be able to train an ai that will filter out content from tags or topics.
Well, not 280 character specifically, but I can deploy a myriad of forums and image/text boards in minutes. I suppose in the config file I could limit text posts to 280 characters but I would rather leave it a bit bigger.
Forums can be federated on the backend with database replication or LDAP which is also basically database replication. I suppose tooling could be created to manage LDAP branches so that people could replicate sub-sets of data read-only and some sub-sets read-write. I know I just made some admins heave a bit. Using one of the now-sanctioned Russian forks of OpenLDAP ReOpenLDAP [1] the federation could scale to several million users so at some point that code would have to evolve again to reach Twitter scale. What is their active user count?
Some IRC daemons can also use LDAP for identity. No idea if Matrix can support LDAP.
For me Twitter is mainly a substitute to RSS: a central location to consume interesting content from diverse sources. In that role having an algorithmically curated as opposed to a strictly chronological feed is essential. For most people/entities I follow I'm interested in only a fraction of their tweets and I can rely on Twitter to do a good enough job of surfacing them for me. By following about a thousand accounts I can reliably hear about the latest trends in the areas that interest me by spending about half an hour each day.
On the other hand, right now I follow only a few dozen accounts on Mastodon and I'm already drowning in irrelevant posts. It can at best be a glorified group chat.
This is the equivalent of “I am moving to Canada if so and so wins”. In my opinion after all the stages of grief are complete, everyone will still be in the USofA
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThey sell this as a feature and celebrate when "undesirable" servers get blocked.
Mastodon is a good idea turned bad by building in pretty dystopian functionality.
Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you.
I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”.
No thanks.
It was a more civilized time.
Today, server admins ban other servers for random issues. Users do not use the built-in killfile-esque blocking method, but instead go and complain to server admins (who then are incentivized to use massive action against other servers). This obviously is not an environment that will lead to societal harmony.
The end result however is what you'd expect and the experience on those instances are very different from what you see on the more mainstream ones, and most people wouldn't like it.
Some of the "free speech", "low-moderation" instances have self-policing communities. Others are full of neo-nazis. Yet others are run by bigots and ban anyone who objects to the hate and vitriol. They are not all the same.
If you feel harassed by an user, filter that user. If you feel harassed by every single account on an instance, filter that instance for yourself (this option currently does not seem to exist in Mastodon). But do not go crying to our admin and deny me, who happens to be on the same server as you and is semi-ok with some of the folks on that other server the ability to interact with them.
This is creating filter bubbles, your users will at first love the friendlyness and fluff, but it also is exactly what led to the right-wing successes we've seen all over the world in the last few years. Filter bubbles destroy democratic societies.
> Yet others are run by bigots and ban anyone who objects to the hate and vitriol.
You see the dangers of giving admins that level of control? Now you got an instance in which there are no more discussions, only self-assuring and groupthink, and which will slowly become more radicalised. If filtering was strictly an user's issue, other users may have seen the objection to hate and vitriol (which often starts underhanded), and have had another view.
By the way, that is true no matter which political fringe a server admin belongs to: I know a Mastodon instance on which some users become increasingly radicalised against car owners right now, to the point where mass executions are being normalised by joking about them. Guess what happens when you try to become a voice for reason... But are ALL of them just evil, unredeemable beings that need to be banned from talking? Should my Mastodon admin block that instance for spreading hate and vitriol, even though the majority still talks about other things? Obviously, that's a silly idea.
Here's another way to look at it: Our instance has moderation policies. You chose that instance in part because of those moderation policies, just as I did. Those moderation policies are there so we can interact with each other with the peace of mind that we're not going to have, say, child sexual abuse imagery DM'd to us.
Then an instance comes along with a few hundred follow bots that do that. So, after a few reports, our instance admin defederates from the instance.
If you don't like this, you're perfectly welcome to go to another instance, with different federation policies. Thanks to federation, you can do this and still stay in contact with me! It's a win-win!
> You see the dangers of giving admins that level of control?
No, not really. Those people are probably always going to exist. Honestly, much as I hate Nazis, if they're over there doing their thing, and not trying to harass or murder me and my friends, I'm happy just to let them do that. It's just a website; it's not like their kids won't have external influences and be able to figure out that, hey, Nazism is actually bad.
Not saying it's good or bad, just that it isn't a dichotomy between Mastodon restricting things or centralized systems that don't.
For example, on my silly hobby sites I provide all bots a status 200 for all GET and POST requests and just send them to a dummy virtual host to let them play in the sandbox for years on end. If they even once looked at the output they would see my silly ASCII art.
Some may be curious about search engines, but since I only allow HTTP/2.0, only bing can even connect with my site and robots.txt tells them to go away.
In NGinx:
e.txt is just ASCII art in a tmpfs ram disk.You can stream illegal content from the firehose on Twitter too btw.
https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-us...
In general just following topics or people that interest you is a safer bet on any platform with user generated media.
Unfortunately I seem to have chosen an abandoned or dormant account for my test, so I can't say for certain whether posts will show up in Home, but I would expect so given the other visibility changes. Hopefully someone else with some fedi experience can chime in.
Now, if that increases or decreases the problem space is a philosophical question. I personally do have issues with blocking instances as a whole because one admin disagrees with another admin on unrelated issues.
If I get denied access to other people to organise around, e.g. building our own zen retreat because my admin and their admin disagree on political factions or because one admin nuked the connection to another instance for not being trigger-happy enough against their own users, everyone loses. Such technical possibilities and - in fact - recommendations run against the ideas of a civil society.
I would prefer to use an instance that has no control over who I can follow. As an added benefit, this instance wouldn’t have to fully federate with every instance I follow users from, so wouldn’t add all updates to the federated feed.
This way the instance would only be responsible for user identities but would not have much control over who its users can follow. I still don’t fully understand why Mastodon did not choose this design.
edit: it was called sinblr and rumors are that it was an instance called pawoo that flooded it with seriously illegal content.
Also, is the functionality dystopian or the application thereof?
Eventually, you'll reach the point where a duopoly will effectively control who is allowed to be part of the larger network. And this was the original problem people were trying to solve by creating a federated network.
What fresh nonsense is this? There's never been a federated system with anything like a perfect guarantee of connectivity to literally anything. There are always limits, both social and technical.
Where do people get these ideas?
It's the case that a federation tends to erode. Likewise, it's the case that a centralized system tends to collapse.
The question to ask is really one of backing a horse to ride on to be pragmatically useful; winning the technical argument is academic.
The fediverse has a few core principles in mind, and they tend to get centered in Mastodon's marketing. So it does make some sense that it gets attacked for being an imperfect realization of those principles, and for being unprincipled in other respects. But in a head-to-head comparison with other implementations of social media it can still claim to be more principled on those things it tried to pursue.
For this to work it needs to be treated as a common carrier, and not a social network.
Dystopian would be dictating that everyone operates the software they choose to run using their own time and resources in the same exact way.
Ultimately of course you're supposed to choose a server that you like and trust. At least here you have that choice. On Twitter or Facebook you don't.
Of course it should have had end to end encryption. It sounds like a massive omission. I found a discussion about adding that to ActivityPub[0] where someone points out that if you don't want server admins able to read messages, you can't store private keys on the server, which sounds to me like it would hurt usability. Makes you wonder how unbreakable the end-to-end encryption of other systems really is. I'm not enough of an encryption guru to say how big of a problem this really is.
[0] https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225
At any rate, mastodon is a web app, not an IM client. No one who's ever raised this has even begun to explain how you could work e2e into something like it. Certainly no other microblogging platform has e2e anything, because that's not actually a thing that makes sense.
No for micro-blogging, but Mastodon supports direct messaging, and if you support direct messaging, you should support end-to-end.
> If you don't own the key exchange ...
Sure, but I trust https://letsencrypt.org/ more than I trust some random running a server.
No other microblogging service with DM support has e2e anything. Because they're websites. To have meaningful e2e you need to have key exchange and device keys, and if you have a website you can look at your DMs on then the website has to have a key. If the website has a key the owner of the website can look at your DMs. This is just fundamental to hosted web services, and it's why if you use icloud messaging with imessage you're no longer guaranteed e2e, and why signal just doesn't even have a website for you to use.
> Sure, but I trust https://letsencrypt.org/ more than I trust some random running a server.
LE has nothing to do with this? The key exchange I'm talking about is the end keys. User keys. LE doesn't provide those. For e2e IM systems a server has to manage user/device:key mappings, and are a central point of trust. They can potentially inject a "listening key" into your recipient list without you knowing and tap you or even impersonate you (but only in a forward way).
E2E is not a panacea, but it's also largely irrelevant to websites.
This is the thing about this argument: Either you trust your instance admins or not. If they promise you e2e and you don't trust them, you should rightly look at that as snakeoil.
You probably want a CA signing the public keys that you store on the site.
> They can potentially inject a "listening key"
You mean a MITM attack? Isn't that the reason for certificate authorities?
What I'm suggesting is that the same certificate infrastructure that is used to secure the connection between a server and a client could also be used to secure the connections between users.
There's nothing specific to HTTPS about CAs and trust chains.
It means that weak keys are a problem, but that's been the case since the dawn of time.
You might be surprised to discover that you're still trusting an instance admin.
It does improve some things, potentially, in terms of intermediaries being able to read things, but there are a lot of things that are still reliant on trusting your admin, or are outright unclear how they'll work in practice.
That said, I take back that "no one has begun to explain..." - they've begun. But so far they've kinda just thrown some well established protocols at it but not done much to explain how it really helps the "trust your admin" problem.
Not saying that that's what happens on Mastodon instances, I don't know enough about it's operation to comment.
Mastodon has actually done some work towards that but I don't think it's useable yet, see https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820
The only real issue with this wrt Twitter is that such failure of their internal employee auth allows malicious attackers to access DMs as well: https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/22/twitter-admits-hackers-acc...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extrac...
I'd expect there to be many Facebookers who weren't caught, and I'd expect the same to be true of Twitter.
It seems like Mastodon assumes that misbehaving nodes will be cut off and just ignored by well-behaved ones - but that assumes that abuse is detectable and that standards of behavior will be enforced even if it means cutting off potentially large communities.
Yeah, I guess secure scuttlebutt comes to mind? But it's kinda it's own thing, notably with it's own scaling issues when it comes to widespread use.
[1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820
Signal?
A de novo Eris-free network?
Most Mastodon instance are hosted by individuals. Granted, I would assume most people are hosting the service with good faith, but there is no binding way to ensure that. With Twitter, doing something feral will (at least was possible to bring) doom to the company and it's investment, which is far bigger balancing factor than just someone's honesty.
I'm not promoting Twitter here, but for Mastodon, something needs to be done to protect the integrity of the content posted, so the admin cannot modify it easily (moderation can still be done through deletion).
"Admins of <website> can read data on <website>" is just a tautology. It's true of everything you use on the internet where you don't own the server, and even then it's dubious.
If people don't get that about mastodon they probably don't get it about everything else they use either, so this recurring argument just seems like FUD...
[note: Edited <service> to <website> above because people keep coming at this from the angle of chat clients that run on your phone, and we're talking about websites here - a website can't have "e2e" encryption because it is both ends. That said, some of y'all believe way too hard in the perfectness of e2e in general and I addressed that in some of my replies]
Anyways, down this logic path is an internet where we somehow put all our trust in megacorporations and absolutely none in our fellow human beings and I dunno about you but one of those sounds a lot more dystopian to me than the other.
having my data "read" by a non-sentient advertising model, while irritating, is nowhere near the same as having it read by a human being. that is a false equivalence.
i made no argument about the absolute merit of twitter vs the fediverse. this is simply a downside of small communities that people excitedly migrating to the fediverse with little understanding of how it works or experience with its predecessors will soon run into—twitter is neutral ground, on mastodon you might be arguing with the instance admin's friend and find yourself retaliated against. anyone who used a forum or IRC in the 90's/00's knows what i'm talking about.
As for:
> they'd need to evade internal checks (which, however weak they are, are infinitely stronger than the average fediverse instance).
Did you watch Mudge's testemony? Even if Musk wants to, it'll take a total re-org to get a semblance of security at Twitter, by the sound of it...
Mudge Twitter whistleblower testimony [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32824504
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/data-security-at-r...
I agree they're not equivalent.
One is a small harm guaranteed to be perpetrated every day against every single person using Twitter, numbering in the hundreds of millions of people, largely without those people knowing or consenting to it.
The other is a large harm sometimes inflicted on a small number of people, and when it does happen is isolated to a small community where people can find out about it and act on that knowledge how they see fit.
I've been around a long time. I've seen power abused on irc and forums and even small social networks. To me, the idea that we need supposedly benevolent megacorporations to keep us from doing harm to each other is a repulsive idea, far and away above "my instance admin might read something I wrote on their server."
If we've forgotten how to exist in community with each other, we should relearn that skill.
Huh? This is certainly not true for Signal and Matrix, heck even whatsapp and telegram sounds better than some random instance operator.
That said, truly private messages aren't always necessary, as long as the platform is crystal clear about this.
This might be less true for matrix, since you could in theory be using an open source client where you have somehow guaranteed it will alert you to an attempt to add an unwanted device key to your e2e chat, but on signal you're running a binary you didn't compile against a service you can't see.
I don't think you shouldn't trust them. But you are doing so to some extent.
When sending a DM on Mastodon, there is literally a message that pops up saying: "Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon."
And I would certainly assume that in 2022, any service would be built using encryption for the parts that are private, and aren't DM's private? Why would admins be able to read them? Is there a justification for that?
I'm not sure why you would assume that? It's not something you run on your computer, it's still a website (or set of websites). Admins of your email can also read your email, if they want, and even with gmail in the mix it's probably one of the most "federated" systems ever built.
> I would certainly assume that in 2022 it would built using encryption for the parts that are private, and aren't DM's private? Why would admins be able to read them? Is there a justification for that?
They could potentially be encrypted at rest, in the database, but that doesn't really help much. The owner of the site would have the keys to decrypt them, and on smaller sites it's very unlikely that there'd be any real chain of custody involved.
If you've ever sent a DM on a forum did you think that was encrypted? It wasn't. Or twitter or facebook for that matter. It's not really practical for any data stored on a central server to be encrypted in a way that irrevocably prevents the owner of the service from accessing it.
The whole assumption here is that Mastodon is supposed to be better than those, right? Or else why are we switching? Twitter is centralized and can read all your stuff and censor it too. So isn't the point that Mastodon isn't and can't do those bad things?
We expect WhatsApp and iMessage to provide E2EE. Similarly open-source Signal and Telegram are encrypted. So why wouldn't you assume another high-profile open source project isn't adopting those same best practices for the private-messages part of it?
Here are the ways mastodon is better than twitter:
- It can't be bought by a billionaire man baby
- It can't be coerced into hosting awful people because they drive revenue
- It doesn't require advertising in order to continue existing
- Because of that I'm not being endlessly datamined by adtech every moment I'm using it.
- It can't die because one website goes down, and everyone on it doesn't experience awful performance just because one instance is falling over.
- If I don't like the admins of the instance I'm on, I can move to another instance and bring much of my data with me without having to exfiltrate it with tools that violate the TOS.
- I can use whatever clients I like with it and I never have to worry about the company deciding it doesn't like third party apps and killing them slowly with api rate limits.
There are also a lot of ways it's worse than twitter, though they're mostly along the lines of "some of my friends aren't on it". Things don't have to be "better in every way" than other things to be "better for me (or you)". There are always tradeoffs.
Re. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and iMessage are all apps you run on your phone. And if you can read the messages on them from a website (as you can if you turn on a feature for imessage), then the admins of the service also have access to your messages.
Again, we're talking about a website here.
Not true. Web clients for Matrix are open source, and you can self host them if you are afraid of the default host trying to inject spyware to the page
This is why services like Matrix and Signal open source their client. Because for security minded people, securing the client is much easier than securing the server.
Decentralisation is about control: the Signal admins could shut down the server and kill the service. For Mastoson, if you stop one server, the others still work.
Use e2ee messengers (like Signal) for DMs, use Mastodon (or whatever you want) for public posts.
I know yahoo employees read email, I got my account back once by telling them recent subject lines.
This does rely on you trusting Google to implement and use these systems. The question is whether you trust a major tech company or whatever Mastodon server owner more to not peek at your DMs.
I always wondered if the expectation could be flipped to expect the frontend client to fetch the majority of content remotely from the followees' servers on the fly. The architecture is so complex in a federated scenario though that could be a total mess or not even technically feasible at all.
This is not a new problem. Shared spam lists and block lists are already emerging on mastodon, matrix, and other decentralized systems too.
Working dynamic spam/block list solutions at scale that are capable enough to actually erase the issue are a hand wavey future potential solution, whereas the tidal wave of content exceeding the ability of instance owners to moderate is a very real very today problem.
I think what's actually happening on the ground is instance owners slap on some instance block list of the worst offenders and turn a blind eye hoping there's nothing too bad hidden in the mountain of media they have cached, or they just hope nobody starts caring enough to look. That might work fine for a while but I don't think this problem is going away.
If anyone user of your email users gets on a spam list for illegal content, then it gets cached on your servers. Or a shell user simply uploads pirated movies.
This is a harsh reality well known to anyone who provides any public internet services. There is illegal content embedded in every blockchain, ipfs, and freenet node, and you cannot easily detect or censor it.
Some people will inevitably do disgusting or illegal things with all public internet resources at some point, but we absolutely cannot let such individuals discourage small community hosting which is vital for the survival of the free internet.
Decentralized services will always be abused to share CSAM but paradoxically are our only practical defense against giant surveillance capitalism corporations that we -know- are manipulating and selling the behavior of live children at massive scale today.
It's the reason Twitter isn't liable when someone uses it to send death threats to another person.
I only see things from people I follow. It is perfectly valid to use Mastodon like an RSS reader.
And instead of peddling hypotheticals about what your instance will/won't do, it would benefit you to make an account on one who has admins that will listen to your pleas or have similar inclinations towards content as you.
I tried Mastodon about two or three years ago; I used the largest instance I could find that claimed not to allow Adult content, but which still relayed other instances. I was shown pornographic content as soon as I logged in; some of it illegal in my country.
So I tried another instance that made similar claims. Same problem.
Maybe it's better now. Maybe it's no longer awash in loli hentai or cartoon beastiality.
I tend to recommend people find a small server with frienda and friends of friends if they want a public feed they can trust. Or simply follow people they trust to not post illegal content and ignore the firehose. That is what I do. Mastodon is basically an RSS reader for me.
We need open source alternatives like Mastodon. But it is difficult to match the ease of use and network effect of current Big Tech. Federation for example makes it so that downloading 50 avatars from 50 different sites much slower than if they were all stored om central site.
For me personally, I have spent around 10 years and reinvested $1 million of our revenues to build this open source platform, which I think will help liberate people from privately owned Big Tech platgorms the way Web 1.0 helped liberate them from AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, MiniTel etc. and opened up new business models like Software As a Service and E-Commerce.
All the big companies, from PayPal to EBay, Google, Facebook, Amazon, only became possible because the Web was open and permissionless. AOL wouldn’t allow any of these business models to permanently be built on top of it (keyword: Facebook LOL).
Web 1.0 has a hugely adopted open source solution: Wordpress. NYTimes was one of the first investors. To publish something, people can choose from a free market of hosting companies, and plugin developers can sell directly to them, and no one can get deplatformed.
But for Web 2.0, I’m sorry but Mastodon and Matrix are not at the level consumers expect after being spoiled by Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, etc. That’s why we built Qbix… it’s supposed to be an open source alternative that lets you assemble your own community apps, if you want you can quickly stand up an alternative to what Zuck and Elon run:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
If you want to play around with it, it’s free to use. The platform is ready for use but needs a lot more tutorials and needs to be packaged for hosting companies… ultimately the goal is to incorporate micropayments:
https://qbix.com/ecosystem
If you’re interested, here is more on why it’s needed:
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
Edit: 4 downvotes in 4 minutes. That’s not enough time to even read the comment or look thru the link, let alone try it. Why such a vehement response to what is essentially free software, which is intended to help humanity? Mastodon and Matrix are in the same category… I would definitely appreciate any TEXT accompanying the downvotes, so that I can learn what you are thinking.
“QBUX is currently an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum protocol. In the future, versions of QBUX running on other protocols may be developed, exchangeable 1-1 with the current QBUX token.”
Maybe you’re not willing to cop to it being “crypto” but it’s in essence the same.
The QBUX ecosystem is something that is planned for 2024, to denominate micropayments between sites, if they choose to pay each other for content. For example, monetizing open source plugins, digital content, journalism, user attention, and so on. Right now, the Web ad-supported model is broken, as the Ecosystem page explains. Qbix does plan to have sites (not people) settle balances with each other in something eventually. For micropayments between sites to be possible, there has to be a unit of account.
There are a few other things that immediately put me off as well, though they may be just wording/messaging. Let me dissect just half of the first sentence from https://github.com/Qbix/Platform, and what springs to mind reading it:
> Our company spent 10 years building a decentralized Social Operating System for the web
Who is the nameless "Our company"? Even if we know who they are, building on open source projects controlled by a single company is often a bad idea. How did you spend 10 years on this? Is it the open-sourced corpse of a failed commercial endeavour? Also bad to rely on. Or is it new? Most people that spend 10 years building something in private with no users end up building the wrong thing. "Decentralised" may be true, but screams "trendy buzzword". "Social Operating System" doesn't seem to make the slightest bit of sense. "Operating System for the web", oh, so it's like Linux or FreeBSD, or maybe WASI? How is that social or web-specific? No, it's not like that at all; reading a bit further shows that it's not anything like an operating system (AFAICT), and is actually a web framework (I think?).
There are plenty of other things that look like warning signs on that page too.
These immediate first impressions together with the apparently off-topic self-promotion of your first comment explain the down votes. (For the record, I upvoted.)
Please tell me, what software would you use today to do all that?
> "Social Operating System" doesn't make sense
It even defines it right there under https://qbix.com/platform ... what social applications are. Did you see the video, or really anything?
> "Who is the nameless Our Company"?
Qbix Inc. The company behind https://qbix.com -- it's right on the site.
Automattic is behind Wordpress. No, it's not a corpse of a failed commercial endeavor. NGinX took 10 years before it was commercialized. MySQL took 7. And commercializing it didn't really add much value to it... MySQL was simply forked to MariaDB. But both NGiNX and MySQL were in fact "controlled" by one entity for quite a while, before they became big. This is normal.
What are the other things that look like warning signs? And why did you not look at anything besides "QBUX"?
I understand what social applications are, what operating systems are, and what web frameworks are. I can't see anything resembling an operating system on any Qbix page I've looked at, but I do see things like a web framework, which is what you call it in some places. I've now watched the video - I think you should put Qbix's capabilities of identity sharing and friends but not websites knowing your private info in text form up the top, as not many people will watch a 7 minute video to figure out what something is (since that feature seems kind of neat and unusual).
I think the GitHub page should mention that the company is also named Qbix, as that's kind of confusing.
Some other things I interpreted as warning signs on the GitHub page are:
- The overly-ambitious goals like "We aim to do to Facebook and Google what the Web did to AOL and CompuServe" - almost no one stating goals like that will achieve them.
- The screenshots are mostly American politics, which is to many people the worst aspect of social media, so quite off-putting.
- "Build once, run everywhere". Developers have heard that before, and it's never been correct before, so seems dubious now.
- In several places there seems to be a lack of distinction between the open source software platform, and the online platform Qbix runs (controls?), e.g. "If your app turns out to be very useful, we can discuss giving it a head start by making it available to everyone on our platform.". I can't tell if it's actually the case, but that makes you sound like gatekeepers in some sense; isn't an app I make already available to everyone?
Those are good examples of open source projects controlled by a single company, but people using them are running the software on their own systems, isolated from the company. Qbix the software sounds more entangled with Qbix the company. I've now read a whole lot more, but I still don't really understand.
I found some broken links on https://qbix.com/platform, on the left "For Developers" etc. don't do anything when I click.
But it doesn't really matter. You asked why people were downvoting.
And the reputation of cryptocurrency has sunk so low that a lot of people aren't going to stick to see exactly what a product is. If they get even a hint that something might be cryptocurrency adjunct, they leave.
No, it's not, though. In the future it might be cryptocurrency-related. But currently it is not.
I'm sorry that you don't stick around to read 99% of the site that doesn't mention cryptocurrency, but see something that sort of seems like cryptocurrency and leave. That sounds like the attitude of many on HN to other nitpicks (e.g. comic sans, maybe, used somewhere... and then the person announces they stopped looking at that point)
Saying that, my guess is that you are being downvoted for self-promotion.
Finally. Someone who shares the same viewpoint as myself. thank you.
That's actually a very good idea!
I think that you just mean "platforms" ? They are indeed bad, being closed and centralized... ("protocols, not platforms" !) not sure that you want to associate yourself semantically with them ?
Qbix supports: events, videoconferencing, livestreaming, calling into the show, group reservations, paying for them, earning credits, sharing content, collaborating on various files, scheduling team meetings, dating, making appointments, teaching students, and more.
That's what Web 2.0 is
Four years ago I started a Web 3.0 company called intercoin.org -- with the same approach. It also has a free open-source set of applications
https://intercoin.org/applications
But that one is "cryptocurrency-related" so I'm sure people on HN will automatically think it's a scam lol. Even though you can just take the code and do whatever you want with it.
It is in reality a Confediverse.
Edit: All Elon has to do is send out a Tweet with something to the effect of "The Left's alternative to Twitter is Mastodon a Confederacy. Now that's what I call ironic." and watch them lose their minds.
I think it would be useful if you could explain the anatomy of such a term?
My reading [1] on the matter indicates that it can't be defined as a fediverse because the content is not owned by individual posters, indeed if I were to post something on a mastodon instance, I do not retain sole ownership of the data - a moderator could delete it, and thus "censor" my opinions. But I question, is this a true critisism? And does federation require each client connected to a distributed node to in it's own right retain absolute sovereignty over the content posted on that federated instance?
1: https://evbogue.com/howtosavetwitter
Instances can block other instances. That's not a Federation. Instances can have other rules and allow other content. That's not a Federation.
Mastodon is a confederacy by definition.
Why would that be ironic? Apart from the most well-known historical example—I assume that's your reference—there's nothing about a confederation that's inherently 'anti-left', as far as I can tell. The European Union resembles a confederation.
> Apart from the most well-known historical example—I assume that's your reference
But that particular confederacy doesn't have a monopoly on the term.
However we also need a public square online. One where anyone may speak and anyone may respond and challenge the ideas. A place where anyone can put their claims on the record. It's not a place for sharing holiday photos. It is a place for public figures, journalists and politicians. Twitter has already been moving out of this space with it's various 'snowflake protection' policies and I hope Mr. Musk can restore this public square and strengthen it.
This is just a purely imaginary space which for some reason even very smart people keep bringing up.
Why? What is this notion based on? A global public square never existed in the history of our species, why do we keep bringing up the idea of a public square as something completely reasonable?
It's kind of like pointing at an institution run by edgy, lonely teenagers and asking, "How is that working so far as a ${institution_type}?"
My argument is that there is a place online where anyone can go and express an idea and challenge ideas of other’s. That place is (among others) 4chan. It’s not some obscure personal blog, it’s a large and influential platform. Is it working as a public square? Are you using it to challenge ideas you disagree with?
If someone says something dumb you call them a slur and move on. So yeah, actually.
On the other hand, a global neutral public square where all ideas can be expressed and challenged is just not feasible in any meaningful way.
Twitter really is a public square in the true sense of the term.
Smaller distinct places that iter-operate and have the same UI for consistent UX seems strictly better for a public square.
Here is the spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it doesn't look very complex.
On the one I can still login there is no one on it.
Mastadon is NOT a replacement for twitter in its current form. I actually cant tell you what it is.
But the text on this story is pretty close... just unintelligent gobblygook.
Mastodon is software. It implements the ActivityPub protocol. People run Mastodon instances of their own to connect to other ActivityPub systems. There are other ActivityPub implementations, Mastodon is just one. It's not a platform like Twitter any more than WordPress is like the NYTimes.
It's possible that some concepts or tools can't be simplified or there's no point. Try explaining Webpack to an end-user. Such categories of things exist, in which case they are not products but components of other products. If Mastodon can't be understood simply, then it will only catch on with those who understand complexity, and be used in a product that is itself simple.
Mastodon is not that hard to understand. It's just not Twitter. It's not meant to be a 1-to-1 replacement for Twitter, but people keep trying to compare it to Twitter and then acting out like they're all upset because they don't find everything they're looking for in the thing.
If "Mastodon replace Twitter" is a thing, it will mostly be in the sense that people will be using their time differently, not that they'll be doing the same things as they do on Twitter. You're not going to "build a brand" on Mastodon. You're not going to make a name for yourself posting "dank memes". You're not going to get a chance to show off your "sick dunks" to your followers.
I think it's weird that people keep calling Twitter a "public square", but if that's how they want to think of Twitter, that's not at all Mastodon.
What is Twitter, actually? It's an advertising platform. It carrots people with celebrities and sticks them with promoted tweets. Along the way, some people find they can keep up with their friends, colleagues, and industry acquaintances through the thing.
Mastodon is just about the last thing.
Every time a twitter thread gets posted on HN, there's at least one comment on how difficult it is to read it, for one reason or another.
The threading mechanics of twitter took me a non-trivial amount of time to get my head around.
"You visit a website (or install an app) and you create an account with an email address and password" is something the average person is used to. The UX will be confusing at first - there are new concepts to learn. People will figure it out.
Even if some do, most of those will run into a tiny random roadblock and will give up.
Nothing as "techy" as Mastodon or the one you mentioned will be adopted at the scale of Twitter.
So geeks explain the geeky benefits, which are substantial, but virtually no non-geeks care about.
Federation is not the answer ultimately because centralization is how money is made. It’s also how the world works, but with certain expectations based on context.
Mastodon is like Linux on the desktop - it won’t work for most people.
Don't you threaten me with a good time!
Assumptions for this to be true:
- Windows and MacOS are a UX champions and most people can use them without any issues. (Not objectively true)
- People will be unable to comprehend GUIs like Gnome or KDE. (Not objectively true)
- Linux Desktop is incapable of doing things other Operating Systems are doing. (Not objectively true)
- Linux Desktop is based on a rigid idea and represents unusable software. (Couldn't be more wrong)
- Linux cannot be used for consumer use. (Again false, Google Chromebooks)
I don't even get how you're comparing Mastodon to Linux Desktop. Linux Desktop is functional, great for everyone who doesn't have an exclusive bias against open soruce software. Mastodon is FOSS, that's the only similarity.
Anybody who tells me that Linux distros like ZorinOS "won't work for most people" is either lying to themselves or being ignorant on purpose.
I am, my whole family is, my friends are. I don't see why I would choose to use a bloatware OS just because most people who don't know any better are using it.
Turns out, better software can replace Windows and give you a better experience, crazy I know.
The population of linux desktop users is nonzero but it is very small compared to the overall population of desktop users.
The original comment says: "it won’t work for most people", not "Most people don't use it".
1. What “rights”, dude? The right to sign up to an instance? Anyone can. And all those instances have different rules, different instances they federate to, etc.
2. Who do you think works at the EC if not people?
3. What does the ccp or trump have to do with this?
4. Do you realise how insane it is to even ban individuals because they work in politics? Or because of where they work in general? Does your ban apply if they left their position? Does it apply to congresspeople? Mayors? Neighbourhood watch? Any government employee? If yes then teachers too yes? What about other countries political systems?
I… don’t know why I’m even entertaining your post.
They may also have created an account before their instance was live, but their posts should all be from their instance now so if you don't want to see it you can just block the EU instance
The EU instance has been nice, and I'm following several of their accounts, and they're mostly posting policy information as well as updates on various programs, but I can't expect every singe organisational account to be similarly nice. Especially if new ones arrive that post much more controversial content.
There is a mastodon fork called Hometown, that gives the local timeline a higher importance, but I haven't used, I don't know the details.
What if I started my own server, just for me to manage my own data? What would "local timeline" look like then?
There's overlap between gaming and crypto and politics and identity. You can select specific people to follow from the #gaming results, so you concentrate on just what you want to see. Alternatively you can mute specific phrases to not see for example crypto. But don't expect people won't post about what they are interested in. People post for themselves and their interests, not for your enjoyment.
If you post about topic X and tag tens of unrelated topics it means you are no longer posting for yourself but your pushing a narrative. Stop. I dont care nor does the world care when they search for … #game.
No. They either don't want to or they want to spam.
> Why does everyone have to push their little agenda on everyone else?
You realise the irony here about you pushing your agenda about how other people should communicate, right? (if it's actually spam and you're using an instance which doesn't allow it, you can report it)
Forums can be federated on the backend with database replication or LDAP which is also basically database replication. I suppose tooling could be created to manage LDAP branches so that people could replicate sub-sets of data read-only and some sub-sets read-write. I know I just made some admins heave a bit. Using one of the now-sanctioned Russian forks of OpenLDAP ReOpenLDAP [1] the federation could scale to several million users so at some point that code would have to evolve again to reach Twitter scale. What is their active user count?
Some IRC daemons can also use LDAP for identity. No idea if Matrix can support LDAP.
[1] - https://abf.io/erthink/ReOpenLDAP
Until then.................
On the other hand, right now I follow only a few dozen accounts on Mastodon and I'm already drowning in irrelevant posts. It can at best be a glorified group chat.
On Twitter I just follow say 100 people and my client shows me their posts in chronological order and nothing else, with no ads.
If a feed tried to algorithmically insert a post I’d stop using that service in a hurry.
What I have seen from mastodon is that there is such a feed available so by the look of it, so far so good.