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Comment by mathnmusic | Hacker News Reader

They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon.

In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub client. Implementation was easy and the data model is quite easy to understand.

ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter could have been.

https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/

http://activitypub.rocks/

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Three reasons why not: operational, business, and technical.

Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen as embrace-extend-extinguish.

Business: it would contribute work to their competitors.

Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.

This is doomed from the start, then. There’s no way for them to work on an open standard without leaking features or contributing work to their competitors.

It depends on what goal you see being defined.

I see one public and one private:

Publicly, organize social engagement. As long as they are at the helm, and at the forefront of tech innovation, they won't have issues on that goal.

Privately, diffuse regulatory pressure. If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter. It is the whack-a-mole approach, similar to BitTorrent vs. Napster.

> If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter.

I don't buy this. Nothing is going to change from the user perspective, and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.

well it would solve problems for all the people who really do want to use a different / better social network or chat app but cant get their friends to switch too, killing the idea on arrival. that would change perception of social media, because it'd allow every host-site could be distinct to their targeted users' qualities as a group, but maintain connections to everyone in their lives.

i mean, you arent really saying that you dont believe a massively-confederated social networking infrastructure would change the political perception of social media? i think it necessarily would, and change every individuals relationship to social media too. its like that marshall mcLuhan quote 'the medium is the message', ie the medium defines what it contains and what those contents mean.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but I'm skeptical that whatever "open standard" Twitter is working on will achieve that utopian future you're dreaming of. In practice, I think the vast majority of people won't even know it exists and will continue to exclusively use their preferred platform (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) despite all the issues with it. The idea of being able to move all of your content to another social network at a whim, with all your connections undisturbed, is (IMO) simply never going to be something that your average user does, no matter how technically feasible it is.

Hopefully I'm wrong and I'm not giving enough credit to social media users in aggregate.

yeah i mean honestly you're probably right. But in reality, the whole point of advocating for something that skeptics call "utopian" isn't to achieve that specific utopia per se. IT is to make improvements towards that "utopia". Like for example, if this social media interoperability and open standard world is our utopia, that would rely on having at least a framework for inter-network communication and migration from one to another.

What im saying is you probably never get to the utopia, but maybe building some of the requirements for that utopia will be beneficial in an ever imperfect world.

Yeah you're right, I'm being overly cynical and dismissing what is otherwise a really good thing. I'll try to work on that!

Maybe I misunderstand the scope of the technical details, but if the underlying flow of messages across social media was forcibly abstracted to a universal master hub, then could not individual clients (or sub-platforms) not then exert control over capabilities (filtering, censorship, etc) that is currently controlled entirely by the individual social media platforms who own the networks and userbase?

> and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.

I would argue this is a side-effect of the current state of affairs - obfuscation during studies and testimony (what little takes place), but mainly the inability to demonstrate superior implementations.

I'd rather we don't give up without having actually tried anything.

EDIT: Although, I could easily agree that this is simply a disingenuous smokescreen to buy time and mitigate legislative risks. In fact, I'd bet money on it.

> Although, I could easily agree that this is simply a disingenuous smokescreen to buy time and mitigate legislative risks. In fact, I'd bet money on it.

To be clear, this is roughly what I'm arguing. In theory, I openly welcome Twitter and Facebook adopting an open standard and giving users the option of easily moving their content to another service, but I don't think it will pan out that way in practice due to the current state of affairs. For one, brand recognition is very powerful, and I think Twitter knows this and is banking on momentum keeping users on their platform regardless of the technical ability to move to another service. Also, most people simply won't understand the implications of this standard or why they should care. ("Why would I use XYZ when I can just use Twitter/Facebook?")

At some point, wouldn't that be like public servants blaming Gmail for people using e-mails to share pedopornography and terrorist plots?

You actually describe yet another benefit of decentralisation.

Because this would certainly happen when the current movement of email into two major silo's (Gmail, Outlook) goes forward. When those two (or three, or four) have a majority of email-users on board, governments will start discouraging or forbidding usage of other mailservers. And will start making demands of those few leftover mailserver monopolists.

That’s fair, but then why are they receiving any sort of praise for this? Neither of those goals benefit anyone who doesn’t work for or own stock in Twitter.

Lessening regulatory pressure benefits everyone who doesn't want those regulators stepping in on behalf of politicians and causes they support.

The question is, is that really a problem?

It’s not a problem per se, but then there’s no reason for anyone outside of Twitter to care about this.

Indeed. If they aren't working on an open standard, what are they working on, and what's the point then? It won't solve any of the problems open standard is supposed to solve.

i feel like the function of success would be pushed into other areas like the actual value of the feature being made available to competitors. or speed of competitors adoption of said feature. basically, sharing a foundational open standard could make everything thats distinct about a feature's implementation, or that companies policies / mission, the decider about what differentiates success.

now, current leaders probably wouldnt want to adopt a system like this because it would be a test of their value on all those metrics, but i wouldnt say that makes the notion doomed from the start. i get what you mean though.

i mean, where would be right now without the open standards of 30 years ago?

As long they are the gatekeepers for the standard, they absolutely can keep new features private

Completely agree; commercial services prefer to use their own protocol over a common protocol for technical and commercial reasons. For example XMPP is a federated messaging protocol but Facebook Chat moved off XMPP, AOL AIM moved off XMPP, Google Talk moved of XMPP., even Twitter moved off XMPP at one point, because they all implemented custom features and eventually devolve from the base protocol.

I read this as a trivial 'truth' that I've internalized myself as well; but the way you worded it... makes me naively ask:

doesn't it speak to the limitations or choices of XMPP itself then, not the idea of a common protocol, if businesses can't reliably extend the protocol (only custom fork, and somehow barring eventual upstream contrib, whatever)?

I can think of an extensible protocol paradigm, with 'extensions' (really just libraries, packages, like those we fetch with `apt` or `npm` and optionally push to clients as well). Down to first principles, that's how we structured UNIX/Linux, most modern programming languages, the web itself (well, at least the Js and now wasm part of it).

(Thinking out loud...)

I actually don't think it has anything to do with technology or problems with XMPP. Corporations can move standards better than anyone (look at web and chrome/google). If Google and Facebook had scale problems then they would just build better implementation.

Facebook messages happened when FB didn't have so many users and in chat space there were XMPP services like ICQ/Jabber. Network effect was against FB so it made lot of sense to federate. When FB was convinced that by killing federation more people come to FB instead of leaving they just pulled the plug.

I am sure that if 80% of email users were using gmail Google would do the same thing. There is a chance of that happening... First gmail adds some amazing but nonstandard features, people start relying on those features and in time gmail becomes the one. Only thing thats keeping that from happening is actually other big businesses.

This has already started happening with things like AMP for Gmail.

Just like implementing global search across all websites is impossible

To be fair there is no open standard for global search across all websites.

I'm not sure what you would want from a standard. The basic idea is very simple, crawl the entire web starting from a few known points and visiting every single url you see on every page. Now you have an index of the internet you can run searches on.

The only problem is meaningfully ordering those results and having the computing power to do it. An open standard doesn't solve those.

Yes, this is why HTML, CSS, HTTP are all dead as open standards, right?

Google's power over those is becoming worrisome...

It is controlled by an oligarchy of browsers.

Which is converging on a monarchy.

Email is only federated and thus interoperable between operators because to not federate would be to not have email.

Many, many private money grabs were made trying to establish a proprietary replacement to web standards, including ActiveX, Flash, and NaCL.

>The web? Bad for business, it contributes to competitors.

If that’s the case it’s just going to be dumb crap; it’s driven by business and not technology.

They should learn from the beautiful JMAP story (jmap.io)

Operational: activitypub can be extended with proprietary vocabulary without any issues, so they can develop features quietly before proposing them for inclusion in the spec, if they even do that.

Business: what kind of work would contribute to their competitors? On the standard? Well, 90% of open standards (invented number) was created by for profit companies. On libraries and services, why would it?

Technical: implementing global search on the www as a whole is also impossible.

They got rid of RSS to force everyone to have to engage with their timeline. I doubt they would be nice enough to do this

I hope they will be.

About Twitter RSS: I recently discovered nitter.net. It's a Twitter front-end without all that tracking and with the addition of RSS. Jack's at https://nitter.net/jack and the RSS is https://nitter.net/jack/rss

I really like this. I had been looking for a cli client and wasn't impressed by any of them, and this seems like a good compromise for reading others timelines, especially since I am an RSS-aholic.

Very relevant context for what they are looking for can be found not in Jack's thread but Parag's thread: https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1204766188074459136?s=19

This rules out a lot of existing projects. IMO rules out AP, SSB, Matrix, etc

Specifically...? Small group vs Consensus building? Requirement for monetization mechanism and incentives?

I found the answer in your twitter thread: https://twitter.com/i/status/1204847952134656000

Apparently they will evaluate existing APIs: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766089353129984

>ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter could have been.

Twitter management actively and specifically decided to not be that.

I am a daily and happy user of Mastodon. I honestly see no reason to use Twitter, nor one of their products at this time. Calling it now: too little, too late.

ActivityPub lacks cryptographic signing/identity (table stakes for 2020) and anti-censorship features. It is more of an MVP/example than a mature, forward-looking protocol design.

> They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon.

Sadly, all centralized Facebook/Twitter/YouTube since 1st January of 2020 would add more restrictions (according each new ToS and Privacy rules).

BTW, I already prepared for fully migrating my Twitter activity to Mastodon.

@jack's idea probably involves some kind of cryptocurrency integration into the protocol. I think having a digital native currency can alter the economics of protocols. The end result may be some combination of ActivityPub and an economic incentive layer.

Can someone explain in 3 short phrases or less how ActivityPub or another standard actually solves the problems that centralized social media creates?

Best to think about it like email. You can send and receive email to anyone at any domain, if their server is set up for email. We all just happened to centralize ourselves onto Gmail and Google's servers.

Replace email with "social media content" and you have ActivityPub.

Choice of your instance, moderators, and client. It enables smaller, self-policing communities to run a compatible instance with minimal costs.

I thought the W3C has been captured by corporations?

Not really? From my perspective as an outside observer, the WHATWG is the one built/captured by corporations. The W3C gave up and agrees now that the HTML spec is mostly just whatever WHATWG says it is, but that's partly because the W3C seems more interested in putting time/money/effort into standardizing things where they are wanted such as ActivityPub.

W3C has suffered a much worse fate: capture by academics. See their multi-year detour into the cul-de-sac of the semantic web.

It has learned from those times, as much as you can even talk about "W3C" as an entity doing coherent things. Individual working groups have can have very little overlap with other groups, and have a lot of freedom in how they work. Which means they can putter about in ivory towers, or do effective work, as they wish.

Perhaps.

I agree that sounds good, but can you point to something that they have actually done lately?

The ActivityPub process is a good example - yes, it got there, but much of the difficulties around the standardisation process seem related to the W3C process, not standardisation itself.

I was involved around the edges of the Atom standardisation process[1]. There's a reason that went through the IEFT and not the W3C[2].

[1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt

[2] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/06/10/AtomIETFY...

That's not going to work....

There are egos at stake here!

I don't think its mostly about egos but rather about money. Something like Ethereum offers a potential profit model which ActivityPub does not.

Also ActivityPub relies on servers/federated rather than p2p.

It's been tried before on Eth... can't recall the name now but the biggest issue is the Gas price/cost to post any update.

As with all(Most) Blockchains ~ it simply is too expensive to store data. Especially at any scale.

A typical solution to this is to store the data outside of the blockchain and then checkpoint a hash of the data snapshot into the blockchain at regular intervals.

This provides tamper resistance to the data.

Incentivizing users or organizations to store large amounts of data is still a problem of course.

It costs ~$1500 for the Internet Archive to store a TB of data forever. Cut them a check or provide an ongoing endowment (along perhaps with some technical resources to scale up a distributed web instead of existing solely in SF) for them to be storage of last resort (everything else can be a tier of caching on your platform).

Let's Encrypt runs for around $3MM/year. Same budget for Internet Archive allows for adding storage for 2PB of content. Scale up accordingly. No blockchain! [1]

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Die5UdaX0AALEtL.jpg

Depends... are decentralized version control systems like git "blockchains" or not?

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