Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users? | Hacker News Reader

Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?

blog.paulbohm.com

65 pointsbohm68 comments

The tricky bit is kind of hand-waved away here:

> throw The One Ring (Twitter) back into the volcano from which it was forged

What does content moderation and that whole thorny problem look like on this new system? I don't want to hang out in a bar with a drunk nazi and his buddies screaming at everyone.

Yeah, it's tricky and there are all kinds of difficult considerations and tradeoffs and it's all quite imperfect, but for any new platform, I want to have some idea of how they imagine it all working.

Author here. You get to have all the moderation, filtering, etc. that is implemented on the servers you use.

I'm sure there will be servers that very closely try to approximate what Twitter is/has been doing. Servers also can share any and all information needed to effectively moderate.

So it’s closed source Mastodon?

I don't expect it to stay closed source. But there are significant differences to Mastodon. Just to give one example: Mastodon server admins actually can read your private messages. Also Blue Sky's approach to data portability and how to implement filtering/indexing is more developed. It might be personal preference, but I prefer AT Protocol's approach where the servers have less powers, and the users have more power. A lot of little design decisions add up to a qualitative difference.

Weird I haven't seen this idea:

Microblogging shouldn't have private messages. Let people have a profile and a link to an email address or similar and be done with it.

I'm not sure why a service designed to publicize things so that everyone can see them ALSO chooses to take on "private messages." I get that's how the big money incumbents see it, but I feel like less would be more here.

I'm fine getting private messages on platforms but I do not want to put out my email for the general public to contact me. That information is also far more dangerous to put out than just messaging me on a platform. Yes you could just create an email for that purpose but I feel most people won't do that.

I would imagine Twitter server admins can also read your private messages if they really wanted to since Twitter doesn't use E2E encryption. Am I unaware of something/Is there a reason to believe differently?

Yes, another reason to move away. Although Elon has also stated that he's tasked Twitter engineers with working on implementing E2E encrypted DMs.

The remaining Twitter engineers break the API every 2 days and are slowly dismantling a functional UI into an incoherent mess that doesn't load most of the time.

I have absolutely no confidence in any e2ee implementation that would be served from twitter.com and trusting Elon or anyone that still claims to speak for Twitter on any security guarantees it offers would be foolish. They also recently broke the API for their "circle tweets" which is supposed to let you create private tweets that only go out to a subset to your followers, and stay private to everyone else, but of course that ended up not working anymore and they ended up in your profile.

I'm not sure how they actually go about doing that though. Unless of course you enter your key and decrypt client side, which I suspect the majority of users won't like.

There is nothing stopping this from being implemented in ActivityPub too, and in fact there are already pub/pri keys there to do this. However you still need to trust that the instance you are on and the one your are communicating with play by the rules.

With Twitter, I can at least assume the admins don't give a fuck about the average user. On Mastodon, an admin will be serving far fewer users and might actually be motivated to snoop on someone they know.

Mastodon needs to at very least change its terminology if it ever wants to be taken seriously. As funny as it is for people to be "tooting" out whatever happens to be in their head in that very moment no one wants to be known as a "tooter" who "toots" frequently.

This was already changed two years ago: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

>In this PR, the publish button still says "Toot!" but it's worth thinking about as well.

This is one of many PRs that removed the references to "toot" over the years.

Tooting aside (it's a silly enough term as it is) Mastedons never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.

"It's a decentralized social platform where you sign up to individual..."

Yeah they're already asleep. The average person doesn't give a damn about that, and they sure as hell arent about to jump through a poor UI experience and extremely badly worded terminology to sign up to it.

Let's not kid ourselves. Average person isn't reading anything that is on the sign up page. There exists some magical break point when people start to switch over and after that the sign up page can be blank and people will move there.

It is completely different matter if that point will ever be reached.

> Mastedons never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.

Email's never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.

"It's a decentralized communication platform where you sign up to individual..."

Email had a real world counterpart. In that sense it was easier to explain because you could start from traditional mail and use that to explain emails.

Mastodon and its relationship with the fediverse is indeed complicated to grasp.

"It's Twitter, but set up like email where you have multiple servers, but they can all talk to each other"

That wasn't very hard at all.

'what's a server?'

Is this actually a problem? I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of people who use the internet have a good enough idea of what a server is that even if they're dead wrong about how one works it isn't terminology that would be confusing to them.

Vast vast majority don't even know what their router is, let alone a server.

The internet (or cloud, if you prefer, mostly the same thing) is just a bunch of computers connected to each other. "Servers" are the big ones in the middle that handle stuff like email and youtube videos

this is not THAT hard yall

The average person uses _email_, bear in mind. They don't know or care how it works, but they use it.

Is there any difference between tooting and tweeting really?

Other than that "tweeting" is what birds do and "tooting" is term for farting and slang for snorting cocaine? Well, isnt that enough?

Whenever I hear someone "tooted" on Mastodon I just imagine them farting while high on cocaine.

Yes. "toot" sounds far less refined than "tweet". Is it completely subjective? Yes, but if enough people think so, "it is so".

That's a good thing, some of the worst cultures on Twitter are based around taking it too seriously...

If you just want to communicate with your friends why not use some IM service like Discord or IRC?

You can use verified domains as handles

The comparison to email (SMTP) is telling.

I'm old enough to remember how SMTP almost collapsed beneath the first wave of spam in the nineties. These days, it's effectively centralized by an ogliopoly consisting of Gmail, Outlook, AWS, and whatever Apple calls its iCloud offering. If, like me, you run your own `maild`, you basically have to work incredibly hard to keep the ogliopols happy. You are always one bad DKIM keypair away from death. And the system is set up like this because, back when it was truly decentralized, it nearly collapsed. Centralization saved email. As much as I hate the ~ Big Corporations ~, they have preserved my ability to send and receive email.

And what's more, I'm old enough to remember how NNTP (usenet) did, in effect, collapse, despite Google's attempts to rescue it.

The dream of somehow doing away with: central banks; central social media; central servers, etc. is deep in the Internet's DNA.

So is the pragmatism that comes from having tried all that.

It is not that bad, there is many "mid-size" players like FastMail, ProtonMail, Yandex, Baidu, Zoho, GMX, Gandi, and heaps more.

It's not that bad at all - that's my point. I use protonmail and for some other addresses, I self host.

But it's the self hosting that showed me how much I live and die by the Big Ones. And yes, they set and drive policy for the whole system.

You better believe I pay attention to my Gmail bounce rate.

I don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this.

A server can’t really charge its users. I and most people would probably not pay to help support a server. Twitter works because most people who actually interact on it don’t pay.

And the source of Twitter’s woes is honestly because the company has never been profitable (unlike Facebook, Google and so on which did).

Also, requiring a domain name to have an alias? So this service is just going to be a community of sysadmins and web developers?

The simplest/best way I could think of is for users to be paid for their messages. You post something insightful, funny, worthy of attention, other users decide to pay you 0.00whatever USD. The problem then becomes that we haven't actually solved micro and nano-transactions in these 30-something years of HTTP over TCP connections [1].

[1] RFC 8905 - The 'payto' URI Scheme for Payments, https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8905.html

> I don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this.

I'd pay something for it. The way the author describes it I would have a 'Small-World' server. I'd be willing to pay $5-10 per month to connect that to a 'Big-World' server. After that I'd expect the costs to scale with the size of my 'Small-World' server. As long as that's based on resource consumption rather than some kind of per-user scheme I think it would work fairly well.

The biggest issue for me would be setting up and maintaining a server. I don't really want to do that and a hosted service for it probably skews towards costs that are more than I'd be willing to pay just to be connected to the network.

> Also, requiring a domain name to have an alias? So this service is just going to be a community of sysadmins and web developers

e.g. mastodon

there's no requirement to get your own domain name. when you sign up you automatically get a yourname.bsky.social domain.

Um, ever heard of email?

There's a lot of consideration of if we could, and previous little of if we should. Unmoderated sites inevitably become breading grounds for harassment and worse, especially as more mainstream platforms get better at driving this content away. I would be terrified to live in a world where kiwifarms and its ilk cannot be shut down

Have you considered that maybe de-plaforming people on the fringe and forcing them into their own private silos actually ends up boosting their message?

When you try to be the goody two-shoes and block anything and everything that could potentially be offensive to someone you just make controversial opinions more intriguing. At least I want to see what the big fuss was about and determine myself it such banishment was actually justified and more often than not it feels like too hash of a punishment, which in turn makes it more likely that I go look for the next banished person's shit and so on.

One can then easily get directed to one of these silos where there are no opposing arguments at all. At least when someone acts out on a public forum majority of users can rein them back in line and avoid further indoctrination. However this last part is hard pill to swallow for most, since they don't want their own bad opinions to be called out.

I mean, it's worth _considering_, but it does not appear to be true. See reddit; reddit has gone through a number of waves of banning abominable subreddits. In general the result is that the most extreme members create a nightmarish reddit clone which no-one else cares about, the rest disperse.

How would you know when the very existence of these new silos is hidden from you?

This is like saying "our model recognizes 99% of the AI generated images", but it leave out that you don't know the actual amount since when your model does not recognize that an image in the wild was generated by AI you dont know that it was generated by an AI.

... I mean, it's not hidden at all. If you want (you probably do not; they are astonishingly obsessive and horrible) to find the alternative reddit clones that people fled to when fatpeoplehate or the Nazi subreddits or the worst of the TERF subreddits or whatever were banned, well, they're right there, they are not a secret.

> When you try to be the goody two-shoes and block anything and everything that could potentially be offensive to someone

This is intentionally trivializing the actual approach and making it seem as arbitrary and low impact as possible. I certainly wouldn't support a ban on "everything that could potentially be offensive" and I haven't seen a proposal for one. I do support a ban on violent far right extremist movements on social media platforms though, because they coherently use these platforms as a venue for harassment, recruitment, and messaging.

The "marketplace of ideas" ideology or "don't feed the trolls" tactic don't actually work in practice. It's the sartre quote. Having a public policy debate with, for example, an ethnonationalist is a victory for the ethnonationalist in itself. They don't have to "win" the debate, they've won by getting you to have it in the first place.

Bans do work. Reddits used to have a serious problem with extremist antifeminists and literally, self-identified neonazis brigading semi-related posts in other subreddits. Banning the extremist subs had a huge impact in reducing it! You don't have to give people a forum to self-organize against your other users.

Or like, what is milo yiannopoulos up to these days? His influence and reach shriveled into insignificance after he got banned from everything a few years ago. The idea that the best way to combat extremism is by discussing it with extremists is a particular ideology. It is not a pragmatic goal- or result-based approach to moderation, or an abstinence from making ideological decisions about moderation.

Deplatforming people doesn't boost their message though. You don't get the Streisand effect when its 1000 trolls instead of one famous person. Also the free market of ideas just hasn't proven effective at stopping harassment and worse. There's nothing illogical about what you've said, but the real world data just doesn't support your conclusions.

I assume you’re terrified, then, because said farm hasn’t been shut down and apparently won’t be.

I mean yeah, it's a scary time to be a queer person. Lots of our rights and protections are under attack now in ways they weren't 5 years ago. I hadn't heard that kiwi farms was back up, that's deeply disappointing.

OP here. I don't expect these servers to become unmoderated. I think a lot of them will moderate as strictly or stricter than Twitter currently is.

This is something I said, but didn't explain well in the thread about Bluesky using domains as handles. You did a much better job of explaining it in your article. Being able to adjust the moderation rules to fit specific scenarios is useful.

I also think the use of domains could have a significant impact on the quality of online discourse because building a good reputation on a domain and having that transferable anywhere on the internet is a lot more valuable than a handle that's only usable within the silo of a single company.

Sub-domains add another layer where the owner of the top level domain has incentive to make sure they're not bringing bad actors onto the network because moderation could be enacted against the base domain, not just individual sub-domains.

Domain based attestation could also drive significant change. Imagine a system where spending money at a reputable company gave you a digital token / receipt that you could attribute to a domain (aka identity) as a way to attest to that domain being a good participant.

The attestation wouldn't cost anything beyond what you're already spending, but it's valuable because it demonstrates you're spending real money somewhere and attributing it to an identity. That doesn't scale well for bad actors running millions of bots because someone like me might have thousands of dollars of spending per year that I can attribute to my reputation or the reputation of someone I've had a good interaction with and bots can't throw that kind of money away. IE: It's a good indicator that a domain / identity isn't a bot, spammer, jerk, etc..

Oh interesting, so all the content is out there but each user gets to decide how what they see is moderated?

Why?

The vast majority of people aren't interested in terrorising minority groups, or anyone, or enacting violence of any kind on any people of any kind.

While situations like that, and sites like that are an important issue, they're not the type of issue that spirals wildly out of control and takes over the world if left unchecked.

It doesn't mean they should be left unchecked - any such negative outcomes are horrific and awful and should be minimised as much as possible.

But it does mean we don't need to feel terrorised by them, which is good - as we'll make calmer, more rational and, so, better decisions about them.

5% of the population is diagnosable with severe personality disorders that lead to anti-social behavior. Approx 1% have NPD, a bit over that have diagnosable psychopathy, and there are several other disorders to round out that 5%. They aren’t going to “terrorise” people so much as troll, manipulate, disrupt, abuse. Any specific form of attack is often only a means to an ends.

The vast majority of people (95%) are not like this, however if you cannot police those 5%, then your platform will be the playground of the malcontents. Moderation is a non-negotiable for any social platform.

Short answer: if it could it would already be.

First, no one wants to move away from the "real" thing. The alternatives are there and there, even things line NOSTR where you own your own identity and not a server.

Then, and most importantly, the fact that users do not make the rules is part of the appeal of twitter, even if users themselves do not recognize it. It forces the most dissenting people together on the same platform. If they had to agree on rules, then either everything would be banned, or islands of incompatible moderation policies would form.

> Having all the data of the entire network on all the Big-World Servers. That's what you need to do if you want to crunch the data, make it searchable, and provide algorithms that help you discover new content and new people to follow.

How is this all possible if the data is encrypted? Also, what’s the economic incentive for building and maintaining the software that runs on the servers?

The posts and likes are all public. Some servers can charge users, and will likely have more resources to improve their offerings that way.

> A centralized service runs on computers wholly under control of a single entity. They can change, monitor, amplify and bury all information. They can read your private messages. They can delete content, promote other content, and even impersonate you.

Apart from reading your private messages, does that mean you still need to trust that the server you’re connected to isn’t doing all those other things?

Nope. You own your keys, and you can switch to a different server instantly while retaining both your username and your followers. They can't impersonate you because they don't have your keys. They can't ready your messages because they don't have your keys.

It's a bit more complex underneath (e.g. the are light-clients that you can entrust with part of your key), but that's the gist.

I can't find it so I gotta ask: does Blue Sky integrates with mastodon instances and support ActivityPub?

Nope, AT Protocol is not compatible with ActivityPub.

But what are the differences? Does Blue Sky use another protocol just to be deliberately incompatible with existing federated networks?

Could mastodon instances theoretically be made compatible with AT Protocol anyway, and federate through both it and ActivityPub?

What you're thinking of is called Nationalization, and they do not like it here.

Coming up next on Hackernews: Should Twitter be owned by anyone other than its users? (jacobin.com)

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Do you have an actual critique of replacing centralized companies with decentralized protocols?

Such responses are typical from those emotionally invested in the perpetual Twitter schadenfreude brigade. They are too emotional to have an objective answer at the moment.

The main difficulty is the network effect which Twitter has entrenched for decades. We're talking about 220M+ active users on the platform. Daily.

I’m as annoyed as the next person at those looking to see the new twitter fail, having said that I simultaneously love the idea of new things challenging the status quo. Decentralization is somewhat a core tenant of the hacker ethos so I don’t think it is strange to see that reflected here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com