Trust in Musk or go federated with Nextcloud Social | Hacker News Reader

Trust in Musk or go federated with Nextcloud Social

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31 pointsdoener74 comments

I honestly wonder if these various social networks / Twitter clones are solutions in search of a problem. Do most people really care to comunícate with each other in this manner any more? What’s the point?

It seems to me (anecdotal, so I’m interested in your views) that the use-case for reasoned argument has moved to podcasts and substack and the use-case for group comms has moved to discord. Meanwhile, feed-style networks, which were always junk food disguised as nutrition, have been displaced by TikTok, which is more like digital crack.

If you don't understand the internet was meant to be decentralized then what are you even doing here?

I agree in the decentralization mantra (though cryptocurrencies have not been a good public representative of the concept thus far), but this is the exact opposite of what you want to do to attract people to your cause.

"What are you doing here, believing in centralization, on a centralized news site?"

I don’t think the parent’s tone was good for discussion, but HN is literally all links off to other sites with some meta-discussion, it’s not “centralized”.

Could almost say the same thing about twitter. It’s mostly short quips and links to longer-form content.

If someone tries to argue that Twitter isn't centralized, I don't think they really understand what centralization means.

Twitter links out to content all the time - is that decentralized? Where's the line?

- It's hosted on servers presumably operated by a centralized entity (YCombinator/AWS/etc)

- It has moderation centralized to a specific set of people (which is weird sentence construction but I had to fit centralized in there for the point)

- Post content (even links), comments, accounts, etc, are stored in a centralized database (might be sharded or whatever, but you get the point, the control is centralized)

- It has a domain name and DNS records that are centralized to ICANN/whoever-hosts-the-dns

Centralization, to me at least, is about how content is delivered, not about how likely the product is to bounce you to an external source.

HN isn't just links. It's also discussion threads. It is centralized in that these links and discussions don't happen in some abstract cloud that's not strictly limited to this instance managed by our BDFL

Right, I mean more that it’s not actively trying to keep people on-site by eg hosting the content, it’s a jumping off point to the rest of the decentralized internet. But it’s not a federated service, its hosting is centralized. Two different aspects of centralization.

Aside from pushing the boundaries of the posting guidelines[0], you've perhaps inadvertently raised an important point.

OP's post is an observation of the real world: the inter-related evolution of technology and humanity's use of it. That use isn't primarily driven by system architecture. It's sociological, commercial, political, emotional.

The conception of the fediverse was itself a sociological and commercial response to social media power being vested in too few commercial entities. The distributed nature of it isn't cost free: there is no single "Mastodon" that everyone signs up to. It remains to be seen whether federation is a net winner, or whether the incremental usability friction prevents large scale adoption.

None of that is first-order technological. The underlying internet may well be federated, and it's eminently possible to create federated services on top of it. Email is perhaps the signiature example. But _just being_ federated is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful adoption. Witness the very centralisation that the fediverse is a response to.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Both social and technological aspects are ultimately intertwined. The way technology works necessarily shapes the way it's used, and users in turn shape the direction that technology evolves in. Fediverse architecture encourages different kind of usage from centralized platforms and it will evolve in a different way based on the direction the users take it in.

One difference we see already is that Mastodon has instances focused on specific topics. There are instances focusing on art, news, tech, functional programming, and so on. Federated approach is showing itself to be much more conducive towards smaller communities focused on niche interests.

Meanwhile, I contest the claim that Fediverse is being centralized. In fact, server admins actively ensure that this doesn't happen by closing registration when too many users end up flooding to a particular instance.

Furthermore, the fact that servers are maintained by volunteers via donations means that there is a limit on how many users each instance can support in terms of cost. Once again, this creates incentives towards further federation to amortize costs.

Finally, the terms of success need to be defined to talk about success in meaningful terms. I would argue that Fediverse is already successful because it has millions of users producing content, it has lots of developers working on the tech powering it, and a sustainable model for running servers.

At this point the Fediverse has shown itself to be sustainable and will be around indefinitely. It will likely outlive every commercial social media platform that's around today.

I like Mastodon. Twitter is a black-hole of influencers and hot-stuff personalities trying to eke out a follower or advertising dime. Mastodon is more focused on enriching interaction (rather than infinite scrolling) and it achieves this with a chronological timeline by-default, with zero random 'recommended' content. It sucks all of the ego-driven nastiness out of the equation and lets you return to a comfortable feed.

For me twitter solve a very practical problem. I like to read stuff from everywhere, from substacks to YouTube channel to regular old mainstream media. But not everything they produce is of interest to me so I need a way to filter and get to read only relevant stuff.

Twitter is my tool to do that. For example I follow a person that once a week write a post like “top 10 things that happened the week in china”. That is as much as I need to know about that. I follow 3-4 person that talk about the war in Ukraine. Sometime they post articles from MSM, sometimes translate stuff from telegram channels, sometimes they debunk some propaganda found online.

I wouldn’t be able to do all of this by myself.

This used to be the job of newspapers but it works only if the newspaper line is the one that you like

> twitter solve a very practical problem. I like to read stuff from everywhere, from substacks to YouTube channel to regular old mainstream media. But not everything they produce is of interest to me so I need a way to filter and get to read only relevant stuff.

It's a terrible substitute for Google Reader.

It's a good enough replacement for IRC.

I wouldn’t say terrible. In some thing is worse in others much better. For a number of reasons it is easier to find new account to follow, follow them for a while and unfollow if necessary. This makes my twitter account much more “fluid” than goggle reader was, allowing me to keep it more up to date and interesting.

On the other side, twitter ha much more noise that you have to learn to ignore

I dislike Twitter, but I think it's more than junk food. Its merits are about speed.

When something happens it's not a thing yet. It's mere phenomena. It takes processing by at least one human to be a thing, with associated words, that you can talk about. And when it comes to the collective consciousness, there's a similar dynamic at play.

You have maybe 24 hours, maybe less, before the narratives settle down into "what happened" and "an alternative view of what happened". Twitter's design is such that it lets you watch and potentially participate in that process in real time.

There are a lot of problems with letting it be your only source of news, but if you decide to do that anyway you'll notice that the rest of the news sources are two days behind you. Like you already heard about that thing, and you know how it got that way and saw glimmers of how it could've been a different way.

In some sense, Twitter decides what makes it into the other information sources because information spreads across it faster than others. By the time somebody's bothering with a long form post on substack, Twitter has already decided that it's newsworthy.

It's the quantum foam from which real news condenses. It's first-mover advantage for narratives.

The primary use of Twitter is for leading voices to speak. It's the 'blue checks' speaking and everything else is just chaff.

Researchers, CEOs, diplomats and some people with relevant information basically emit relevant information.

That's quite a different use case then most that are offered.

Twitter is not a P2P thing, it's a 1-N thing and many of those '1s' need the blue checkmark.

In order for another network to gain value, they need to bring over a critical mass of popular voices.

Once upon a time, I was on Livejournal. So were all my friends. Then they started vanishing, leaving only auto-posted collections of cryptic fragments of their halves of conversations they were having on Twitter.

Eventually I finally got on Twitter too. It was okay for keeping up with what my friends were doing. Not great, forcing everything into the arbitrary limit of 140 characters long after the "it fits in an SMS" requirement was dead was annoying. But it was okay. Kinda like having an IRC channel where you were the one who decided who showed up.

And then it became a place for political argument, because that Increased Engagement, and Twitter was constantly chasing that as a way to serve more ads in between the conversations with my friends, even though the doubled post limit of 280 characters was still fucking horrible for any kind of discussion much beyond "u suck" "no u".

Mastodon is a replacement for the reason I actually went to Twitter in the first place: I can go there and see a bit of what my friends are up to, with links to other projects. I would be happier if they were moving towards something longer-form but they are not. I've adjusted the post limit on my own instance to ~7 and it's pretty nice.

Fair enough, and I’m glad you’re getting value out of the experience. But I’m talking about the broader culture. Where is it, and where is it going? It seems to me like it’s moved on, and that the things you like about Mastodon are niche. To put it another way, it seems like a lot of the energy being poured into decentralized alternatives are focused on the past.

> Communication is too important and sensitive to be controlled by a few.

Wasn't it controlled by a few even before Musk decided to buy it? Where I live, the supreme court controls all the content and user accounts from all major social networks, Twitter included. It takes literally 5 minutes to a single judge to suspend or cancel any user account and its contents.

In the old days there was IRC, which:

- anyone could spin up a server

- servers can link together, scalable

- it's pretty much the absolute minimum you need on top of TCP to implement a chat, so extremely lightweight and a server can literally handle 10s of thousands of users

- anyone joins any server they want

- decentralized

- works over dial up

- mature ecosystem

- decades of time to work out kinks and issues

- 7000 engineers? I can set up a server in about an hour.

Has drawbacks but just saying, the future is in the past.

Yes, but it was the anointed few in control of Twitter before. Key difference.

What is the difference between "the anointed" and musk?

The ones who built it instead of bought it?

People were buying and selling Twitter before Musk came along though.

What makes them different functionally? That doesn't sound like it means anything to me, just one of them came in later than the others

I'm not saying it's the way it should be. Just a perceptual difference -- a perceptual epoch.

So it isn't actually different, it just seems different?

Exactly. And seeming different has a huge impact on how people interact with it. Behavioral response is one category where perception matters most. I don't see how Musk loses the chaos monger robber baron perception. He literally bought it.

> It takes literally 5 minutes to a single judge to suspend or cancel any user account and its contents.

Where on earth do you live?

Since this is HN, if you have your own domain you should give the fediverse a try.

Try to set up an instance of mastodon, you don't need that much hardware if you are only setting it up for yourself. The official documentation is straightforward and easy to follow along.

The fun part is once you set it up you can interact with other people on other nodes, the more people you discover the more things you suddenly start to discover, I was trying this out for the past few days and honestly it feels like discovering the web for the first time. So many interesting people so many interesting topics.

Pleroma is easier to set up and demands fewer resources. Looks a lot more like Twitter and has the Mastodon frontend built in, too!

Be careful and don't use your real name on a Pleroma instance if you work in an industry sensitive to the culture war

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9708

As someone out of the loop about Pleroma, why do some people associate Pleroma servers with nazis?

They're just dredging up old beef for some reason. Very, very early on Pleroma was popular with people who found the general anti-fascist stance of early Mastodon instances offensive and chose Pleroma, so it kind of became The Fascist Platform for a time until a wider range of people chose it for its lighter resource use. That post is from 2019. The poster later worked on Pleroma for a while, so it's safe to say things changed. Three years is a long time.

I see, thanks.

I did the same and am pretty happy with the end result, but be warned: the official guide requires you to install a full Ruby dev kit to run an instance, with Docker being available but poorly documented (as configuration requires running separate commands rather than just writing a file).

It's not hard, but if you're like me and you don't like polluting your server system with all kinds of dev tools in the global space, you may need somewhat of an understanding of Docker to get everything running smoothly.

One thing to note is that if you're going to be the only one using your server, you may want to enable single user mode. It's a mode for the Mastodon frontend that's optimized for deployments with a single user account.

For those considering the switch, I also recommend checking out https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive and setting up an instance. With your Twitter account you can register for an API key and then mirror all the Twitter users that aren't on the Fediverse yet! It's unidirectional but as most Twitter users seem rather passive anyway, this can make the transition rather easy.

To prevent others from using your keys and quota, you can safely limit ingress to BirdSiteLive to only your Mastodon server. You end up with proxied tweets only visible to users of your server.

As an existing NextCloud user, with plenty of personal data in my self hosted instance, this does absolutely NOTHING to inform me why the FLYING FUCK i want to risk exposing my NextCloud to the internet with these new social media related features, no discussion of how important security is, no emphasis on how I can trust NextCloud with being a public web accessible server the public can access and simultaneously trust my most personal of self hosted data to the same server.

I want things like this to help people control their own data, it’s important for these projects to exist lest the future be ruled by or entirely dependent on big corporations… but when your existing business is building the tool(s) I trust with the data I trust no one else with… do a fucking better job not making me dismiss shit like this as “crap I’d have to run a second server to be able to use”

Because my life is busy enough I barely have the time to manage my one self hosted NextCloud at home… if you make this one micron harder I’m just going to say “Fuck it“ and use a different isolated tool for running my own fediverse server. And I say this as someone building my own personal social site aggregator based tool. Do. Not. Make. It. Hard. To. Trust. You.

I agree this feature isn't really wished by the userbase, and they could spend development resources better, but like everything in Nextcloud this will be just an app that you can disable with a click, so no reason to rage about it.

Nobody is telling you to make your server public. Configure it the way you want. Naturally you won't be able to use features like this if you don't make it publicly accessible.

So not fully familiar with Mastodon, are they basically saying, they will add a new NextCloud feature, which lets you turn your NextCloud server into just another Mastodon server. Which means you can join the Mastodon uh... 'universe' and your tweets would be under `youruser@yournextcloud.example.com` ?

I assume some kind of public presence would be required though, since a NextCloud server can run on an internal only space.

« Fediverse »

The protocol that allows to federate is called "Activity Pub". Mastodon is just an implementation of it that looks like twitter, similar like how peertube is an implementation that competes with youtube. And this NextCloud Social is another implementation of Activity Pub

Think of it exactly the same way as email. You have different servers with users on them, and they can all talk to each other using a common protocol called ActivityPub.

The really interesting part of all this is that different types of platforms can focus on different kinds of content while allowing users to talk across platforms. For example, Pixelfed is an Instagram clone, PeerTube aims to be a distributed YouTube, Lemmy is a federated Reddit clone, and so on.

Thanks to using a common protocol it's possible for users across these platforms to communicate with each other. It's possible to follow content, reshare it, leave comments, etc. So, instead of having a bunch of walled gardens you have an actual ecosystem of different platforms.

And I think that open source and non profit hosting is fundamental for this model to work. Commercial social media platforms have an incentive to prevent users from sharing content to other platforms because they're locked into a zero sum competition for users with them.

On the other hand, Fediverse is a positive sum game where more users on the network means more content for everybody. There is no incentive to keep users locked in on your particular platform.

This is a huge advantage from user perspective because you don't have to juggle a bunch of accounts on different social media sites just to follow content there.

> Thanks to using a common protocol it's possible for users across these platforms to communicate with each other. It's possible to follow content, reshare it, leave comments, etc. So, instead of having a bunch of walled gardens you have an actual ecosystem of different platforms.

I can understand why you believe this, because it's part of the ActivityPub marketing, but it simply isn't true. ActivityPub is extremely loosely defined, and the protocol it builds on, ActivityStreams, places no limitations on the type of data that is transferred.

What this means is that in practice you can only federate with other instances of the same software as your homeserver without degradation. It's very hit or miss. The best cross implementation communication comes between Mastodon and Pleroma, but Mastodon is more popular and implements a number of other protocols in addition to ActivityPub, so to keep up Pleroma actually matches their API, not the protocol.

The other implementations that you mentioned mostly federate among themselves.

Sadly this undoes many of the benefits you've listed. You do very much need a Lemmy server account, a Pixelfed server account, a Mastodon account, etc, if you want everything. And you have to pick a homeserver each time, and it isn't easy.

>I can understand why you believe this, because it's part of the ActivityPub marketing, but it simply isn't true. ActivityPub is extremely loosely defined, and the protocol it builds on, ActivityStreams, places no limitations on the type of data that is transferred.

I'm literally using ActivityPug this way right now. I follow Pixelfed and PeerTube accounts as well as Lemmy feeds using my Mastodon account right now. The developers of all these platforms are actively ensuring that they are interoperable.

I really have no idea what you're basing your claims on here. You can use your Mastodon account right now to follow my Pixelfed @yogthos@pixelfed.social and subscribe to my feed. You can even leave comments and I'll see them on my Pixelfed.

ActivityPub can in theory only federate with a whitelist of servers or remain entirely closed off. You don't need to make your account public, but I don't see the advantage of using ActivityPub if you're going to stay private.

Your activity would be posted under @username@nextcloudserver.com, yes. I believe Nextcloud has had ActivityPub features for collaboration for a while now, I suppose building in a social network interface is just the next step.

Since this i s HN, I can be this boomer and say: We survived with blogs, forums and IRC. Without a problem.

Dear, friends, your "convenience" and "dopamine" habits created monopolies which normalized surveillance to the point of no return, and literally are giving away data and your future to the algorithm overlords.

The results of this immature behavior are the pillar on which WEF and other billionaires are building "the fourth industrial revolution" where you will have literally zero value in the production chain, you will eat whatever they tell you and play it "safe" in the name of your "positive" social score.

So I say it again: Find the way to decentralize, create new habits, throw away your phones and fancy toys and start working for humanity and against the dark patterns of today's pharaohs.

Outside the tech bubble, the real world is waiting patiently and asking for your help. Transhumanism is not the future of humankind.

It seems Mastodon and NextCloud don't seem to understand is that the only people still using Twitter are people who want to be outraged, and people who want to be outraged but claim they only follow people tailored to their interests ("I only follow tech people!")

There are plenty of people who just use twitter for art or science or what have you. They, by their very nature, won't be what you see the most.

There's a lot of outrage in those niches too.

On the contrary, the people I've recently seen leave Twitter were all waiting for the network effect to lessen. Switching communication stacks suck, especially if not everyone you want to follow is on your new stack.

I've set up my own BirdsiteLive instance that only my own Mastodon server can access, but it's slowly seeing less and less activity as people switch over to Mastodon or something I can't bridge.

Plenty of people are going to keep Twitter as their cesspool, but it'll be a while before everyone who wants to switch has switched. Musk's behaviour and the following downward trend for Twitter is still recent news, it's only been a few weeks.

There's still plenty of left-wing tech people on Twitter, althought they recently created their Mastodon account. I think they're waiting for the final nail in the coffin (a big outage ?), which may or may not come. And I'm on Twitter to follow them. Outrage is mainly not part of my feed unless those same tech people start ranting on Musk or what have you.

We've been told for ages, implicitly by FAANG algos and explicitly by people who misread research, that we prefer to be outraged.

Very Online (TM) people with large Twitter followings like Marcus Hutchins are coming to realise that it made Twitter a compulsion, and given an alternative are willing to ditch the Skinner button [0].

Compulsion and addiction is different from desire or pleasure. When we're offered meaningful alternatives, people often find more peace and happiness when they adopt them.

[0] https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/109368403091846997

I wished facebook death in 2014. It didn't happen, all my friends are still there. I don't want to socially isolate myself more, it's peaceful but at a significant cost. I become pessimistic about bad things will disappear.

When our customers' marketing departments want in to the "Fediverse" with company-branded usernames, this is what I'm going to recommend.

How big will his market be? I theorize it will be the same population whom moved to Canada back when Trump was elected. Maybe smaller because of network effects.

I think you’re right that the market for this is probably pretty small. But more so because these federated solutions won’t replicate the addictiveness and vitality of Twitter.

I think the big thing that’s missing when comparing people leaving Twitter to people who said they’d move to Canada is switching costs. Like it is a heavy lift to move countries, much less so to stop using one platform and start using another.

I deactivated and deleted Twitter last week and added it to my filter list in ublock. Most of the accounts I was following already have a Mastodon presence, though YMMV depending on your personal interests.

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