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Comment by russdpale | Hacker News Reader

I look through the listing of peers, and I don't see a single instance which trustworthy enough to devote my time too. For instance, checking the box "education" brings up a completely non sensible list that provides no context in which to make a judgement about the quality or character of the "tube".

Also, this seems to have the same problem as mastodon, where I have to create an account for each tube, no thanks. Clicking "English" still brings up non english listings, furthering the difficulty of using the app.

Good idea, poor execution.

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> Also, this seems to have the same problem as mastodon, where I have to create an account for each tube, no thanks.

Creating an account per node is federation working as intended. The idea is that this is then your identity across the network, the same way that you create an email address with an email provider that then lets you send email to users using other email providers. Each node should then network with other nodes to provide its users access to videos from nodes it trusts (same as Mastodon does - you don't have to be on the same node as a user you follow as long as your node networks with their node). The trust model is centered around your trust of the admin of a particular node, which brings a more human scale to the tech (particularly as compared to something like YouTube).

Federation is coming back into vogue particularly now as a reaction to the Facebook/Google problem where a single entity collects all the data about all users of the platform and can unilaterally ban a user with no recourse. In a federated network a node decides what other nodes it federates with and so self-regulates. But email is an example of federated technology everyone uses.

> Creating an account per node is federation working as intended.

I call that broken by design. Having your identity tied to a server means somebody else controls it. Email has the same problem, if GMail changes the ways it handles emails and makes a provider switch necessary, tough luck, you now have to tell everybody that you are moving to a new sever and your email/identity changed.

Just using a GPG key to represent your identity or something along those lines would be a much better way to handle it.

> Just using a GPG key to represent your identity or something along those lines would be a much better way to handle it.

This is something the web3 world is moving towards a user-friendly solution for[1]. A web3 wallet (something like metamask which is a browser extension) actually holds a public/private key pair. Websites can authenticate by asking the user to "connect their wallet"[2] which actually means signing a message which the site can validate. To do this, the browser extension shows a popup showing the relevant bits of the request with "Approve" and "Reject" buttons. Once signed you are able to use the facilities of whatever website even though you don't have any sort of account. If at a later stage I want to revoke my approval I can just do that in my wallet - I don't even need to go to the site and there is of course no account to delete there. You can easily maintain multiple distinct personas because a wallet can contain multiple "accounts".[3]

Something similar might presumably work for the fediverse. No accounts just an identity service/API that allows sites to get your public key and ask you to verify things by signing with the private key.

[1] I say moving towards because there are plenty of rough edges, but the basic idea is pretty good and the UX is already streets ahead of the normal GPG verification/signing type workflows

[2] There is an API called "walletConnect" and as long as wallets and sites implement that, they are able to interoperate fairly seamlessly (in theory). In practise it doesn't always work that great. https://docs.walletconnect.com/

[3] These are actually an address and a keypair. The address is used to perform transactions on the blockchain so wouldn't be relevant to the fediverse I wouldn't think.

I see this a lot as a justification for crypto and tbh I don’t buy it.

Why can’t we just use key pairs without all the commodity token nonsense? Blockchains are a hyper redundant global network of adversarial servers. This is the silliest way possible to implement a key based id system.

You absolutely can, and if you read what I wrote above I'm not shilling for any token or pushing any kind of blockchain.

I'm saying the user experience of having your keypair in a browser extension with an API that lots of sites agree to use is significantly superior to the old gpg way of doing signatures and verification and means that you can do what the GP wanted (having a key that you control representing your identity which is strongly authenticated with zero knowledge and not an account on each server). You can do all of that without any sort of blockchain and it's something fediverse sites could adopt.

That’s fair I just assumed you were shilling because you mentioned web3 and metamask.

I totally agree and hope the web moves in that direction. Unfortunately I think the tech giants will fight tooth and nail to retain their sso products. People also generally do not want to perform key management :(

Another issue is that if you choose the wrong node and they decide to shut down for some reason, you lose all your content.[1] There has already been precedent for this.[2] All it takes is being out of the loop for too long and missing a message announcing a shutdown/migration to lose your data. In practice this makes the largest nodes the most appealing for registering an account since their popularity gives you the highest chance of your data living on, which defeats the point of decentralization.

Also, if you're Twitter, you can afford lawyers and moderators to clean up illicit content. If you're operating a Mastodon instance, that responsibility falls on you. It's simply a question of who has more capital, human resources, and free time.[3]

Twitter being centralized means that it's unlikely that Twitter will go away in the long term. That's what would make me choose Twitter over a Mastodon instance if I wanted a public archive of something. I have to wonder what would happen if content of more and more importance started to be hosted on the Fediverse if it was subject to link rot from the nature of federalization.

[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10305

[2] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/103295961293741634

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290985

> Federation is coming back into vogue particularly now as a reaction to the Facebook/Google problem where a single entity collects all the data about all users of the platform and can unilaterally ban a user with no recourse. In a federated network a node decides what other nodes it federates with and so self-regulates. But email is an example of federated technology everyone uses.

I swear I read this exact sentence back in 2017 when Mastodon first came out with a splash and it has only gotten less relevant in the five years since.

> it has only gotten less relevant in the five years since

What does "relevant" mean? Hacker News is irrelevant to people who aren't into the tech scene. Mastodon is irrelevant if someone doesn't care about federation, but for those of us who do, it's still as relevant as ever.

Neither Hacker News nor federation (I expect) are going to take over the world, but they have their respective audiences.

> Neither Hacker News nor federation (I expect) are going to take over the world, but they have their respective audiences.

You see how this is at odds with the claim that federation is "in vogue", right?

Federation is a small and shrinking niche. It had a brief moment in 2017, and has been in recession ever since.

Is it really shrinking? Mastodon gained 950k users in 2021, combining with other platforms they probably gained over a million.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/12/mastodon-recap-2021/

Projects like Matrix.org are also seeing huge growth. Of course these are nothing on FAANG scale, but still far from shrinking.

Of those 950,000 sign-ups, only 814 users remained active according to the very same page you linked.

That's not a cultural wave, that's a fad more swingy than gym memberships in January. "Vogue" technologies don't have a 99.93% churn rate.

That's sort of a misreading of the figures though, isn't it? It's not that those 950K sign-ups have all disappeared; you just have a slightly higher replacement level of new entrants. What it describes have a fairly consistent monthly usage rate -- not leaping up, but not dropping either. That also seems to be what the more in-depth statistics here indicate: https://the-federation.info/mastodon

I'm not saying that you're any more wrong than the idea that federation is currently "in vogue", but it doesn't seem right to suggest that this is something that is in decline, either.

Maybe you could argue that in the face of increasing numbers of adoption of social media more generally? Are we steady-stating there too, though?

What is the evidence of this recession?

What is the evidence that it's "in vogue"?

The only major events in the fediverse from the last several years to have any cultural impact is the rise of federated porn after the Tumblr exodus, and the rise in federated white nationalist forums after Trump got banned from Twitter. The fact that federation is becoming popular among pornographers and fascists is certainly not backing up the assertion that federation is "in vogue".

Well you know, without the “back” part of “coming back”

"Creating an account per node is federation working as intended."

Ok well that isn't convenient, like at all. So it's basically a non starter for me.

"Federation is coming back into vogue"

Federation is absolutely not in vogue, and never has been vogue. Not even close to it. Where in the world did you get that idea?

> "Creating an account per node is federation working as intended."

That's misinformed. You need an account on an instance where you want to publish videos (although maybe publishing to a federated channel is supported now?), but you only need one account to consume content. In fact, you don't even need to use a Peertube account, as the protocol is based on ActivityPub so most clients (like Mastodon) will be able to receive updates from peertube channels you follow.

> Federation is absolutely not in vogue, and never has been vogue.

email is federated. WWW is federated (src/href). They are two of the most widely-used protocols. So federation is not exactly hyped because most people don't even realize they're using federation, but it's certainly useful and popular.

> I don't see a single instance which trustworthy enough to devote my time too

Then you could make one with some friends/colleagues or a local non-profit you're involved with. Peertube is federated software: it encourages deployment in existing human circles rather than global discovery of random stuff.

In education circles, i know Peertube is part of the apps.education.fr suite of free-software apps for teachers, but i don't know of practical use-cases. I assume it's useful to group class levels into separate channels so students can see the videos you showed in class from home.

> I have to create an account for each tube, no thanks.

No you don't. The protocol is federated so from your Mastodon/Peertube account you can follow any Peertube channel on the condition that your instance has not blocked federation with the remote one.

> Clicking "English" still brings up non english listings, furthering the difficulty of using the app.

This is a specific to the project homepage advertising many instances in many languages. But on well-moderated instances the language flags should work just fine, at least for local content... the problem is with admins/submitters not setting language flags properly not with the software itself. The project homepage could definitely use more manual curation, but that would be a full-time job in itself for a project that's developed by a handful people financed by a medium-sized non-profit (Framasoft) and crowdfunding.

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