We Need a PBS for Social Media
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A way that my device can securely communicate with my friends devices and say "Sup?". A way that we can share messages, photos, calendars, contacts, etc without some behemoth (or state) sticking its nose in the middle.
I've had this conversation here before and somebody mentions RSS but it's not enough on its own. It's certainly a basis for content exchange but nowhere near enough for the authentication, and authoring side of things.
I know it seems logical that a "social network protocol" is the answer to replace Facebook but after studying the mechanics of social networks, I've concluded that focusing on technical protocols is incorrect.
My suggestion to programmers seriously thinking of new solutions in the social networking space: don't get sidetracked into thinking about the protocol because if you do, your new social network will end up in the graveyard of previous failed projects like Diaspora. Instead, think about the database of real names.
My previous comment on why protocols like ActivityPub & Mastodon are not the answer for a general purpose social network adopted by the masses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727230
Also, another previous comment on how focusing on protocols is (inadvertently) analyzing the wrong drivers for success: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960
And another previous comment about how an open and free-to-use protocol like Signal does not mean Moxie Marlinspike is willing to federate with others' servers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499
(If you still believe that designing a new protocol is the correct answer after reading my 3 previous comments, please explain your thinking. I'm open to changing my mind on this.)
I don't use Facebook because of the reasons it's popular. I don't want my information easily accessible online, and I do want as much control as possible over who sees my information. I believe it should be easy to give and revoke access to my information and content. The European solution here is to legislate our way to that end goal, whereas the "market" way is to make something that's appealing that gets you most of what you liked about the centralized service, but with more control over your data.
And that's why I'm so interested in projects like ActivityPub and Matrix: it's not because I think they'll become popular, but because of what will happen if they become popular. If I was to invest money, I'd go with Facebook's business model every time, but if I'm going to evangelise something, it'll be something like Mastodon or Riot.im.
After that, I think there are multiple routes to a true peer-to-peer social network (I've just detailed what I'd do in in another comment in this thread) but the important thing is that companies (looking at phone manufacturers here) aren't storming off and reinventing their own custom shapes of wheel.
So unless Facebook does this all for us and then vanishes (yeah right), it has to be a international standard spec. Nothing else could get enough traction at the consumer-electronics level.
but this is not an either/or, it's a both/and - the problems with excessive influence on some open protocol (r.e. your Moxie comment) are funding problems (perhaps what you mean). But, even if funding is the main issue, one still needs something worthy of funding.
It's not perfect yet, but it's the best solution so far that works, and works today.
One of the requirements to get the funds probably would be "install backdoors" or something of the like. :P
Have you tried asking the users to donate? That might work.
"As someone running a Mastodon server out of her own pocket (with some help from enough of her users that it’s not too bad)"...
And actually I think I set up donations because some of my users asked if they could help out.
I think the cost has grown to around us$50/mo, it has some issues with refusing to purge remote media and I’ve been too busy to see if updating will help that.
I don't much like what's come since, but there you go.
They won't be the people proving real solutions.
> Lack of choice is ok, lack of vendor diversity is also ok.
Is how current US monopoly regulation works, this needs to change.
This assumes that social network is not a purely commercial idea that has some important social benefit. I don't think this is the case, even the name itself implies some control over an entire network of people. Communications between people don't have to take such form whatsoever. If people were respected and their limited attention was cherished and not steered somewhere for profit, there shouldn't be a social network at all.
It works with Gmail/Facebook/Discord/Reddit, etc.
By encrypting your message end-to-end on public platforms:
Ideally a decentralized protocol that gets better - not worse as more people join would be more likely to succeed (like bittorrent)
Yeah, I'm "friends" with hundreds of people on Facebook but how many do I really care about?
more practically, how much will it cost to run e.g. a Matrix synapse server to support a community of a few thousands (the size of a typical small website community). Since chat is really deadweight and typically unmonetizable, if this cost is too high it will not get traction
I "add" you to my friends. I send you something like a v-card: A blob of metadata saying who I am and what my devices are (with certificates). You get a notification, you see this information and you get to decide there and then what access (if any) I get. This information gets sent to all your devices and you send me back a list of devices and their certificates. You post an update. It gets sent to all your devices. My device does a round-robin attempt on your devices for updates. It sees new stuff, downloads and spawns a notification (if applicable). I'd imagine there'd be ways to make push notifications happen too (ie for chat).
That scales well with a sensibly sized pool of people.
"But I'm an Insta-model with 2 million subs and a business!" ... then make one of your devices a real server in a real datacentre. That's the good thing here, with multiple devices, you can throw as much or little as you like at this. People at the low end still get first-class service up to a point, for just their data.
So people like Facebook and Google can stay in business but only as federated endpoints to this system, charging to provide delegated access.
Scuttlebutt is exactly this: https://scuttlebutt.nz
I've been working on a federated address book and thinking about how to sync contacts with other address books... It's like Really Simple Federation.
I think that the absolute last thing we need is government-funded social media. If YouTube "spreads propaganda," what do you expect from a platform that a massive government has its hands directly on? I don't understand. It's as dystopian-sounding as any idea I have ever heard.
> In other words, it should be built to prioritize sharing things you love over getting attention by simply being loud online.
This is an over-trivialization of Twitter. At risk of sounding snarky: if you think Twitter is all about getting attention, you're using the app wrong, and maybe you only follow celebrities.
Also, I think the question "Will people use it, and how many?" is the wrong question ask. Why will people use it? Can I get news updates? Can I find funny/entertaining content? Can I reasonably expect organic engagement, and potential virality? Can I get private life updates from my friends, without the government's eyes peering in? People don't typically go to PBS for most of these things (news is one thing they do), so I can't imagine how a "PBS" for social media would be very different.
Yet another question: "Why would I be on a social media app with my parents?"
I can understand the reasoning behind this, but I don't see it realistically gaining any traction or significant usage, ever.
All this being said, Mr. Mark Coatney is a former director of Tumblr, so obviously there's a big gulf in social media experience between us, and I could be egregiously wrong on some of what I have said above. Who knows?
Can you explain what types of conversations that you think would not happen and why being government run would result in this.
Copyright is also a form a censorship.
Have you thought that maybe their biases align with your ideology so you just don't notice them?
They'd thrive even more on a government-funded platform which is legally obligated not to censor their speech.
Later in the article, the author explicitly suggests that accounts be connected to real world identities in order to prevent fake accounts and discourage trolls.
This solves one problem and introduces about ten other massive issues with underrepresented populations, protected classes, and stalking.
This is not a new idea. It's been tried many times before and shot down regularly for very obvious reasons.
I think the author already considered this. From the article:
"An account on a public media platform would be tied to a real-world, local identity, like a driver’s license or library card. Anonymity online has real benefits, and a user name doesn’t have to be your real name. The public social media network could keep this information hashed, unscrambled only when action against a user is required, which would make it easier to crack down on fake and troll accounts."
Anyone who says this has no technical credibility.
Then the author is delusional (not offense). If we could create any platform that consistently tied an online profile to an online identity it would be a holy grail. But alas here we are.
It's not being done because this already exists. It's called 4chan (though 8chan is a better fit; I don't recall if source code for it was ever made available).
Of course, 4chan depended on a single individual's pocketbook and liberal moderation policies, which has let it down in the past; having such a service be government-funded and shardable so that if one mod goes bad you still have a place to go would help.
But at its core, you'd still have 4/8chan, because that's what "public access" (and "free speech") means. And while it is very valuable, a lot of people just can't properly digest it.
Decentralized systems preclude this, but they don’t preclude you filtering them either.
"YouTube spreads propaganda and is toxic to children. Twitter spreads propaganda and is toxic to racial relations. Facebook spreads propaganda and is toxic to democracy itself."
What does the author actually mean by this? Messages posted and shared by government entities? Or, people sharing inflammatory opinions?
Yes we should be wary of hyperbole, but we can also recognize the real deal when we encounter it.
ditto for anyone else in the public sphere currently publishing status updates via walled garden platforms (elected officials, agencies, educational institutions, et cetera)
edit: or, more generically, any implementation of ActivityPub will do. or write your own!
I like this idea. But I think it's unlikely to happen. Universities often don't even run their own email anymore (at least for students; faculty often have a local Exchange setup for them). I would have thought that Universities would want to run their own services for file synchronization and sharing (i.e., internal Dropbox), audio/video conferencing (i.e., internal but interoperable Zoom/Skype, perhaps set up with SIP), etc. This would enable them to better manage IP and sensitive student information (SSN's, etc.), but they don't seem to have enough foresight to offer those kinds of services until the faculty are already using a freemium service. Then, _if_ they roll out something, the University version is clumsy and error-ridden.
Additionally, the network effects of other social networks likely means it would be a tall order to convince the sufficiently senior administrator that they should dump twitter and go to their own Mastodon instance.
20 years ago this might've been a possibility. That was back when individual departments ran their own email/web/whatever servers. So individual departments within universities that had more agility and flexibility might've tried something like that. But now most universities seem to be clawing that functionality and freedom away from departments and putting it into a centralized IT department. So email stays because it's already embedded in the culture, but it makes it hard to add something new like a federated social network (or even video conferencing, it seems).
[0] http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=15...
The next step would be a distributed topology, where every user of the network communicates directly with every other user. Pure p2p communication protocols have failed to catch on with users for a multitude of reasons.
No. I am pointing out the sense in which federated networks aren't decentralized by the definition of the word "decentralized" itself, and not the topologic category--which gets its definition from the meaning of the word as well, of course, but is an umbrella term.
They are decentralized in how servers communicate between them; they are not in how each server is organized, even more so in the case of Mastodon, as I already said.
The whole article is futile attempt to try to embellish that concept.
I would start with just a very stripped-down platform, and then allow integrations, such that every government entity could use the platform to publish information and communicate. Citizens could also communicate among themselves, either in "neighborhood groups", or privately. But personal profiles should be private by default, and require strong authentication guarantees for others to view. Everyone could still comment on public content as they do today, but personal data would remain private.
As government entities integrate into the platform, they could begin publishing data that citizens could subscribe to. Community classes at the local library, parks department announcing a call for volunteers, DMV office closings, IRS filing deadlines, local civic board meeting notes, and of course, PBS content. It could be one source to consume all of the potential open data available to citizens. It could also be a portal to find the right government services, as well as pass information to it: report a crime, pothole, zoning violation, etc much like '311 apps' do today (Philadelphia 311: https://www.phila.gov/311/form/Pages/default.aspx Open Maps Philly: https://openmaps.phila.gov/ Open Data Philly: https://www.opendataphilly.org/ Philly Property History: https://li.phila.gov/ Philly Atlas: https://atlas.phila.gov/)
Right now Facebook and custom regional solutions serves much of this need, but it's also filled with a huge amount of crap that we shouldn't have to deal with just to find this information. And of course, privacy can come first on such a platform, rather than last.
> Let’s build one.
Fuck it, yeah, let's. Where do I sign up?
Things the local government is about to do, or should do, such as putting in traffic lights or fixing creacked sidewalks
People wanting to buy or sell furniture, rent out rooms, etc.
People looking for recomendations for tradesmen, doctors, etc. and warning against bad ones
Missing pets, and other lost or found items
Promoting events held by chuches, schools, social clubs, etc.
Wildlife sightings - it's useful to know when there are coyote and bear sightings in our neighborhood
Warnings about scams, or about crimes such as cars being broken into or things stolen from people's yards.
Severe weather warnings
Local news in general - we recently had a boil water notice, so there was some discussion about that
https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/social_network_plan
Social networks are challenging to create and maintain, both in terms of user participation and growth scaling. I believe that any new social network, that aims to be large, will want to tackle the ideas in the above repo.
We (still) have IRC.
Facebook in particular is nearly an operating system.
This article echoes a lot of the reasons I'm working on Tildes (https://tildes.net) and specifically founded it as a non-profit. My announcement post from last year discusses how the current approach to community-based sites -- specifically the dependence on venture capital and advertising -- makes companies chase goals that are harmful for the users themselves: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
I believe that a non-profit model is the only way to break out of the current cycle of sites starting out as "too good to be true" (as they burn through their VC), and inevitably devolving into privacy-invading, advertising-heavy sites dominated by lowest-common-denominator content when they need to keep forcing growth and monetize their users.
Tildes has been publicly visible for a while now, but still requires an invite to register an account. If you're interested in registering and participating just send me an email, the address is in the announcement post linked above. It's not intended to be difficult to get invites, I mostly just want to keep the growth rate under control while more features and the early site culture continue building up.
This is why such an apparently unlikely candidate as Discord has become the medium of choice for a lot of young people. It's basically group chat with a few extra features like history search, different "channels", and easy media sharing. It's also why I think a lot of the current open source attempts are likely doomed to failure for this purpose - they're basically decentralized Twitter.
Do you have plans for Tildes to fill this kind of role? Admittedly, I didn't look all that closely at it, and so what you're getting from me is my surface impression.
I agree with this. In all of the decentralized social media iterations I've seen, the main two things I've always missed were the "personal aspect," and appealing visual design.
It's worth asking, though, how possible it is to achieve that in a truly decentralized fashion, while still providing a good user experience. From a user's perspective, it doesn't make much sense to have separate sites with limited interoperability when you can simply just one (centralized) site. I guess that for the Fediverse to truly take off, there really needs to be a concept that simply cannot be implemented without de-centralization. Until then, it'll be an uphill battle.
Some security experts have indicated that it's not up to par with Signal for those who need the strongest confidentiality guarantees. (I wouldn't fully trust Signal either if my adversary was the NSA, but there might also be no better alternative you could get people to use.)
So it's really telling to me that years of work on decentralized "personal" social media hasn't come up with anything that's fully functional, let alone a replacement to existing social media sites.
The biggest problem I've faced is dealing with the encryption. Every new device in a conversation has to be verified with every other, which means you need n(n-1)/2 pairings for a room with n devices. That's right, if you're trying to set up a chat with 10 people who have an average of three devices, you're going to need to do 435 pairings. The pairings themselves are a huge pain: there are different pairing "methods" to use, and different clients will make guesses about the method the other client supports, and the whole thing falls apart if it guesses wrong (there's no negotiation, as far as I can tell) or if the person with the device doesn't immediately respond. There's no notion of a web of trust or trusting a person instead of a specific device. Even if everything goes right (it usually doesn't) it's going to take about 30 seconds per person to do each pairing, which means your group chat with just 10 people is going to take over 7 hours to set up. You could just ignore the verification stuff, but presumably the reason you wanted to use Matrix (instead of a centralized service) in the first place was because you thought it was more secure / private.
Someone adds a new device, or logs out of a device, or there's some glitch (it's happened to me)? Everyone in the room gets to do another pairing. With every one of their devices.
Another issue has been the unreliability of the service itself. Sometimes it breaks, logging you out. (Hope everyone backed up their keys!) Or they get hacked and the server goes down for days: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediati...
And then there's just the random client bugs. I literally just opened the tab for Riot to remind myself of other issues and was greeted with this: https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png They don't seem to be keeping up with them, either. Riot Web alone has almost 4000 open issues: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues
Having a searchable history is supposed to be one of the major advantages of a Discord-like interface, but I just did a search for a word that I'm looking at in the chat and got no results.
So basically, it's a mess right now. I'm using it with one person because they're the only person who wants a Discord-like chat with me and are willing to put up with the amount of nonsense needed to use an alternative that doesn't siphon off your data to a private company.
Totally agreed that the lack of cross-signing for key verification is our single biggest problem. It turns out that this is not an easy problem to solve, but after a few rethinks we finally have a design (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1756) and an implementation (https://scitech.video/videos/watch/d1ef04a8-397a-4570-a9a9-c...) which works. The only bit that remains is wiring it into the Riot's UI itself, which we started a few weeks ago and is looking promising. The TL;DR is that it optimises the number of verifications to the absolute bare minimum. You verify your new device once when you log into it (a bit like WhatsApp), and then everyone else will transitively trust the new device.
In terms of the unreliability of the matrix.org server: we added encrypted key backup about a year ago to solve the whole "if you get logged out you lose your keys" problem, but agreed it used to be a massive problem. And yes, the matrix.org security breach was a nightmare - apologies.
For the i18n bug: if the request to load the i18n file for your language fails for whatever reason, you get that ugly error - it's similar to getting an ugly page if the CSS didn't load. We can make the i18n req retry, though - i just filed https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10965 for this.
In terms of the number of bugs - yes, we have 3775 open, and 5871 closed. This is because we deliberately try to track each and every possible suggestion & feature request & bug of every severity in the issue tacker; trying to use it as the main knowledge store for the project. I wouldn't judge the quality of a project by the number of bugs - it's like judging the quality of a book by the number of pages. It doesn't tell you much beyond how big a book it is.
Search should work, but delegates straight through to postgres's FTS engine. We need to tune it better, for sure.
> So basically, it's a mess right now
Hopefully key verification will fix the biggest issue here. Thanks for persevering with it in the interim.
> If Discord is "good enough" for social media, then Matrix is trying to be an open source, decentralized Discord. It's also (in my personal experience) unbelievably crappy
it was sort of a loving complaint. I brought up Matrix in the first place because to me it is one of the few attempts to solve the personal social media problem with decentralized open source software. So I really want to see it succeed, and my quick rant about how the state of it now was in that light. Kind of like complaining about your favorite sports team. You forget sometimes what a range of people are on HN, and so I hope you / others who work on Matrix aren't too disheartened by complaints.
I've been following the cross-signing bug for a while now. I had hoped to see it implemented earlier, but it's good that it's being worked on. I wonder if an encrypted copy of the keys could be stored in the browser's local storage, so that logging out doesn't reset the client. It would also be great to have all my devices store encrypted backups of each other's keys, so that unless all my devices get signed out everything just works without requiring a backup or re-verifying devices. I think Signal works like that, and I thought Matrix was supposed to do this partially, but it didn't work last time I was signed out. From the user's point of view, you want one identity / set of keys / backup for all your devices, even if that's not what's happening at a lower level.
> the i18n bug
Since you already have the pre-translation English text, wouldn't it make sense to fall back to showing that instead of "translation failed" on every line of text? Plus, my locale is en_US so especially in my case failing to fetch the i18n files shouldn't result in such an ugly bug.
> Search should work, but delegates straight through to postgres's FTS engine.
If I'm understanding you, this means the search is always done server-side. Doesn't this mean that search will never work on encrypted chats, since the Matrix server doesn't have the text of my chats to search? If that's expected, some user-facing way of making this obvious would help.
Thanks again for the detailed reply.
I usually think of the distinction as something like being "subject-based" instead of "people-based". Some sites focus on one or the other, and some try to do both. Tildes is definitely on the subject-based end.
I think a good question to ask would be to ask how we insure that governmental intelligence agencies do not have their hooks in the effort.
That's before you consider the network effects of misinformation.
If you are saying people shouldnt be allowed to express or amplify sentiment, then I would think you are against the mail as well.
I don't think Hacker News or "Email" are collecting/monetizing your data, or have teams of PhD's actively researching how the UX/UI can psychologically addict you so you spend more time using them...thats just for starters.
But sure lets bury our head in the sand and pretend FB is still some fun startup college kids built in their dorm for college kids to communicate with each other, and lets also pretend Zuckerburg has matured from those days of calling users "dumbfucks" for trusting him with their data.
Just like commercial TV and radio.
Hence the proposal of the article.
No one is blaming technology with a broad brushstroke, hence the article suggesting a "PBS for Social Media", if social media was painted as inherently bad, they wouldn't be proposing and alternative platform. It was you who originally extrapolated some judgement on social media to Hacker News and Email. I was simply suggesting there are certain concerning behaviors social media giants engage in that clearly are not applicable to HN or Email as a whole. Not sure how you again extrapolate that to blaming technology.
>is addictive design ux harmful tech or an attack on human psychology and behavior?
Attacking human psychology and behavior through addictive design is harmful, especially when its successful and done at scale.
Just as allowing corporations behind harmful and addictive products (tobacco) to attack human psychology and behavior...such as marketing tobacco as "cool" to children using cartoons as they historically did. Are cartoons bad? I guess they could be. Is marketing to children bad? Maybe, we need more information. Are tobacco products harmful? It took nearly 50 years of litigation, but the answer is a resounding yes, tobacco products are harmful to health.
It's been early on and recent as far as I know - if you watch the whole clip you'll see that, though they only show a second or two of the new clips. I would never teach kids to make fun of others. It's simply bad form.
Because they parody a lot of celebrities and always have.
It's obviously about Trump as a mean-spirited real estate developer, which he is well documented to be. The character is lampooning heartless big business' effect on neighborhoods, a common American sentiment even today. I don't think the lesson is making fun of Trump, the lesson is on how to put structure in thinking around neighborhood upheaval, what can be done about it, and that maybe it isn't your parent's fault. This is stuff I would be happy to put in front of my child. Certainly better than Transformers and Paw Patrol, which like 90% of kids programming, is about using guns to solve your problems.
I'm a registered Republican, and I don't find these clips offensive, considering they were made well before he even started running for President.
Also, Donald Trump has in the past been a Democrat and may have been when Sesame Street made these segments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Donald_....
So if you should think this was an attack by "liberal" Public Broadcasting people against "conservatives", it's really not that simple.
2. Is this really the primary concern, in the grand scheme of things? In a utilitarian sense, a problematic or offensive choice of words is peanuts compared to (for instance) failing to sufficiently question the WMD narrative in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Between the linked stories and the whole Sarah Jeong thing, the NYT doesn't have the gravitas to come out and ask for this right now. The Gray Lady is failing its mission (for more reasons than just this).
https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york-times-tightens-up-on-...
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/339852/tweets...
https://nypost.com/2019/08/22/new-york-times-political-edito...