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Prediction: Any distributed social media (like Mastodon) that gains mainstream popularity will share the same fate. Sure, you'll be able to host your own Mastodon instance, but 99% of people will be on the top 10 hosts and they won't peer with you.

I think the only way to make distributed social media practical is to have an extremely inexpensive turnkey self-hosting solution for the average person. A Chromecast-like device that they plug into their TV that backs up all their photos, plays music, and also hosts a Mastodon instance. Some kind of very friendly backup solution where you make an "emergency contacts" list, and the device encrypts all of your data and stores it on your emergency contacts' devices as a backup, and vice-versa.

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cough XMPP federation cough

Not only did Facebook and GChat refuse to peer with little players, they refused to peer among the big players too. We could have had something like IRC for the masses, peered chat servers with bring-your-own-client. Instead, we waited decades for iMessage to get Android support which only happened long after everyone moved on to IG, Messenger, WeChat, etc.

Email is probably one of the last great open[ish] distributed systems we’ll ever see. There are just too many incentives to build walled gardens instead.

I'm not sure what the competitive edge could be to not wall garden. It's always going to be more expensive to try to work with those who don't work with you.

Going the self-host route, I'd still want a service of some sort so I didn't have to maintain it myself. Almost like an evergreen program that self-hosts my data and synchronizes and backups and transfers anything and everything.

Everything would be accessible outside of the program as local human readable or viewable files where possible. That'd be the best way to be non-walled garden.

Does this give credence to cryptoeconomics?

> I'm not sure what the competitive edge could be to not wall garden.

If only one entity does it, as far as I can imagine it is only a marketing statement to appeal to a niche demographic - people who care about it from an ideological standpoint.

If more than one entity does it, it could lower the bar for critical mass. Instead of having to get enough people on your platform to start benefiting from the network effect, you only have to get enough people on your platform and platforms that you have bidirectional integration with.

It's actually fascinating to see the re-emergence of "vines" but as parts of other apps. With the explosion of Tiktok, every platform decided to make their own version - YouTube Shorts, Facebook/Instagram Reels, etc.

Really, a format should be created (e.g. file.[short|vine], etc.) that could be then edited by any editor and viewed by any viewer, and all that you'd need to do to copy a YT short to a facebook reel is to copy the file itself to each platform.

It's literally the same exact concept over and over again, just wall gardened instead. So much wasted development time doing the exact same thing.

> I'm not sure what the competitive edge could be to not wall garden.

I've had several email providers die since the 1980s. Each time it was a major disruption in my life. The last time, I coped by mostly dispensing with email whenever possible. Like most people I have a "good" email address for important things, that I check weekly, and a "garbage" email address I only bother to check when I have a need to.

Hosting my own mail server, not subject to some provider's ideas of filtering, or simply vanishing in the night, would make email more attractive. But the festering mess that SMTP email evolved into isn't just something you can set up in an evening. It's not even a hobby. It looks pretty much like at least a part-time job. Weighing the options, I don't really need email that badly.

Exactly. GChat supported federation at the start, but they removed it later due to spam and other challenges [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11795658

matrix.org has entered the chat

XMPP doesn't even support E2E encryption out of the box. It's as outmoded as IRC.

Lots of XMPP clients support E2EE/OMEMO out of the box now. If you think XMPP is outmoded you should try it again some time. I recommend Conversations on Android.

The problem with email is that identity and authentication are an afterthought. Don't forget that (in theory) it is possible to get any email server to relay a message for you. Newer protocols do not have these kind of problems.

indeed, my ISP only recently closed their open relay for all customers

I remember back in the day having to change your SMTP settings whenever you travelled to whatever the ISP was where you were staying. then you could finally send email from your @homeisp.example email

If it was only open to their customers, that’s a closed relay, and typical for an ISP.

>Don't forget that (in theory) it is possible to get any email server to relay a message for you.

That would be an open relay. That is simply not something that mail servers do anymore. If one was to deliberately set up an open relay, one would find that their email server was blacklisted pretty much immediately.

but then they just start a new relay.

I don't think so, I believe open relays are virtually extinct. People rarely run MTAs those days, and default configurations are quite protective. And if someone still manages to mess it up, they're gonna get famous with all the RBLs in days if not hours.

I self-host my mail for over 17 years. Most of the spam I'm observing those days comes from hacked/broken websites (sometimes it's probably some stolen SMTP credentials, sometimes sent from the server directly). Legit domain name, SPF and even DKIM present, looks totally legit in this regard - only stopped by RBLs and content filtering.

What was the original intent of open relays? Why allow emails without authentication?

> What was the original intent of open relays? Why allow emails without authentication?

Store and forward.

Do remember that email was THE great federated protocol.

The goal of a mail server was to get your email "at least one hop" closer to your destination. And that wasn't an easy task.

Servers came online and went offline. Users logged in and out. Connections came up and went down. IP wasn't the only transit. DNS? Oh, the hosts file? Even higher things--thing DECnet and Janet.

Email was barely functional most days. Your best bet if you weren't an Internet God and weren't able to write your own super complicated sendmail.cf was to know a sysadmin at a node who had an Internet God and ask him if you could forward emails that you couldn't handle to their server.

> Why allow emails without authentication?

Because the people on the 'net were generally not bad actors back in the day, so we would you need to lock things down?

Hmm, now the internet is a dark forest. Leave anything open/visible, and all the bad actors immediately swamp you.

Email would be so amazing were it not for the spam problem. In the early days you’d just send a mail to your computer and your address was yourlogin@yourdomain and mail just ended up on your machine in a folder. Relays were like p2p networks. It was actually beautiful in its simplicity and in a perfect world with everyone being good actors could have been incredible.

And it was, back when any hint of "commercial use" could get your machine booted from the mail routes and usenet. After Cantor and Siegel, it was every spammer for himself.

Open relays were offered in the spirit of cooperation that was characteristic of the early internet.

Unfortunately, greedy people soon jumped in to take advantage of this generosity, resulting in a tragedy of the commons.

John Gilmore used to run an open relay, and I used to get spam from it. He was really stubborn about promoting the freedom of the spammers over the peace and quiet of the poor recipients. He eventually got shut down, still complaining.

http://www.toad.com/gnu/verio-censorship.html

Open relays were a thing in the early 90's. I remember a friend of mine relaying email through 20 different servers, bang-path style. Any open relays today would immediately be used for spam, so they just don't exist, at least not for very long.

On Mastodon, I believe it's currently somewhat backwards from this. The largest instances are filled with Japanese anime porn, and the smaller instances end up blacklisting them.

Anecdotally, this has happened every time I've set up any kind of social media instance / discussion forum / BBS (back in the day!) / whatever. It immediately gets consumed by people who use it to host porn, and then all the intended users leave.

Have you considered creating a discussion platform where people can't post images, URLs / things that would be URLs if you added a URL scheme to them, ASCII-armored baseN-encoded anything, etc? For 99% of the discussion you want on the platform, text is all you need. For spammers and people who want to host porn, text alone is useless.

Plenty of spammers rely on text, though. A good chunk of my spam folder is text only.

Likely text containing URLs, though, which your email client likely helpfully auto-formats into links. Which is why spammers would bother. They need you to go visit something to make money.

There are types of bulk unsolicited email/web-comments which involve text without links, but they aren't spam per se; they're (the initial bait emails for) scams.

(And the usual solution to scam postings on forums, is to prevent people from sharing any off-forum contact details, except maybe via forum private message. No Nigerian prince is going to run their whole scam through the forum; they want/need to convert you ASAP into having a non-intermediated conversation with them. So they won't bother with any forum where they can't stuff their email address / Telegram handle / etc into each post.)

I've been itching for an experiment; might be fun to make a modernized BBS system for people to deploy.

If you're not spontaneously flooded with hentai, how do you even know your internet is working?

Japanese anime porn is not something that would trigger a banwave. A few posts from Trump, however...

Well, one of them is rotting the moral fabric of the country, and the other is just some hand drawn people having sex.

I was reading these tweets today confirming that this is already happening in Mastodon: https://twitter.com/Gravecat/status/1518598015396818944

If anything, their story is more likely than not showing that the centralization is not going to happen. If the users of the instances were the ones doing the segregation (due to some tribal/cultural divide), then you'd end up with a small number of highly polarized instances.

But if this is only a fight between admins, the intuition is that we would end up with the big instances constantly losing users to smaller ones (created by those breaking away from the bad admins) who would then federate among themselves.

This thread matches my experience with Mastodon and Diaspora*. It's fine if you are happy to live on individual instances and pretend that other instances do not exist, but they are not so great if you want a global audience. In this sense, they are more like the random disjoint online forums of the early 2000s, and not so much like the large monolithic social networks that people have come to expect.

Sounds like discord without voice and with easier linking. It does seem like forum approaches are becoming more common. I've heard that groups were the only part of Facebook with a lot of activity, but I'm not on that platform.

Even a magic dongle isn’t going to work. People don’t want to buy things, let alone sysadmin their own television.

I’d love a world where data was truly distributed and federated, but unfortunately, the barrier of entry is too high. Because of this people will start hosting nodes for people. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but network effects will take over, and we’ll be back where we started.

Look at git. It’s distributed in all the right ways, but almost everyone uses github.

The web is decentralized, but the same few websites dominate to the point that people — even people on this very site — think that you can’t post a video except to YouTube.

Disagree. If the authentication mechanism are available from the get-go, it could work.

Unless you can reliably tie a user to their real-life identity, authentication isn't useful in this case. If a spambot tries to peer with my instance, it's not super helpful to know that their accounts will always be the same spambot and not a different one.

Identities could be signed by a centralized authority, which would have the same desired effect as centralized hosting without the drawbacks.

A person is not required. A reputation is required.

In a digital world, with no financial penalties, it's easy to build reputation with 'spurious' transactions and exhaust that reputation for one "Large Evil Event" and rinse and repeat.

I noticed a lot of German sites don't peer with anyone who has the exact same rules (as in almost literally the same) as them. I was surprised to see such kind of box-thinking in a protocol that's been designed to be as open as possible.

I assume this is unavoidable. The only solution are protocols where the network is owned and stored in the data (cryptographically) rather than in the servers. Then the servers apply censorship and rules over the data, but you can still rebuild any conversation chain as long as you connect to enough servers that don't censor it instead of requiring 1 server to keep all the network relationships.

This also allows authors to seamlessly switch servers without losing audience or at least being able to recreate it very easily.

That's another problem: Moving your account to a different server in the fediverse. Which is indeed not possible currently.

Perhaps some kind of blockchain would be a solution? (No, I'm not trying to appeal to tech investors, I actually think it might offer just the solution here :P )

nostr (https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr) seems to be a minimal possible solution. It doesn't seem to be much in use though, so I guess once that happens a few issues will come up.

I hope matrix can avoid this fate. The federation can of course be limited, but currently it seems like most users are federated. And they have plans to combat spam etc. https://element.io/blog/moderation-needs-a-radical-change/

> Any distributed social media that gains mainstream popularity will share the same fate.

The experience behind this predated peer-to-peer electronic cash and related developments. You may be right, and it may still be too soon. But problems can be solved.

I don't agree.

There is no technical solution for people being assholes.

Well OK there is - turn off computer or server :)

> But problems can be solved.

Looking at the 30 years and millions of dollars poured into making email work, the evidence seems to be against this

One idea I've had is what if the protocol were designed in a way that a server can't be scaled too much, thus forcing lots of small servers to federate instead of having single entities running a large server with tens of thousands of users.

Arguably, your prediction is even a feature, not a bug.

The right to peer implies the right to not peer.

Agreed. I suspect most users have been tricked into thinking they want massive, global social media platforms.

(1) People are turning their noses up at Mastodon because all of Twitter isn't already there and because you'll be cut off from instances that aren't federated with yours.

(2) People are worried about "all of Twitter" becoming more people than they would like. There are communities they'd rather be cut off from and words they'd rather not read.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. Unfortunately, very influential companies that have figured out how to game our attention have tricked users into thinking they want something they don't.

> The right to peer implies the right to not peer.

No? Even if you don't want to force smaller instances to peer (which generally makes sense) you can apply more strict requirements to huge instances that contain a significant portion of the population.

> I think the only way to make distributed social media practical

The only technical way maybe. You could always legislate that large enough networks MUST peer.

Just because at one time the majority of users are federated, a market/threat force can enter any time that would drive users to centralised solutions.

If it's so easy to self host, surely attackers will host thousand of those instances and spam you.

PoW has been the best solution so far.

Can you give me an example of a PoW-based social network or chat application which has been more successful than conventional alternatives like Mastodon?

I am hardware stupid, but I have thought about this exact solution for so long. I hope someone figures this problem out!

General observation: no matter how distributed you make a system or protocol, it eventually becomes centralized.

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