Social Web Foundation launches, supported by Vivaldi | Hacker News Reader

Social Web Foundation launches, supported by Vivaldi

vivaldi.com

57 pointsZacnyLos49 comments

Vivaldi is one of the dozen supporting orgs, so why link to their blog instead of the original annoucement that mentions all of them? https://socialwebfoundation.org/2024/09/24/launch/

Even after reading through this it is not clear at all what is it! "Something-something-fediverse"

There are literally bullet points to list what the Foundation will do.

...and a giant mission button in the menu.

These bullets?

> educating general and targeted audiences about the social web

> informing policy-makers about issues on the social web

> enhancing and extending the ActivityPub protocol

> building tools and plumbing to make the social web easier and more engaging to use

Maybe I need more education about the social web but these tell me very little about what is actually going to be done.

This stuff was probably human-written, but that actually makes it worse. At least the AI has an excuse.

Another related link was submitted earlier at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41636491 if it helps.

Archive link please, doesn't seem to open.

I see Meta is one of the founding supporters.

Is Meta not the absolute antithesis of privacy? The complete polar-opposite of what people have tried to achieve with the fediverse? One of the main things they are trying to move away from?

Seems like a very strange decision here - "letting the fox into the hen house".

Meta runs Threads which has ActivityPub support

I'm more knowledgeable about Lemmy than Mastodon but It's a misconception that the fediverse is more private

The decentralization forces some things to be fully public, such as your likes, who upvotes what etc

Plus from a legislation standpoint, you lose some of your rights out there - like the right to be forgotten. It's impossible to enforce GDPR on ActivityPub.

It's a weird middle-seat where on one hand, the fediverse won't start asking you for your name or to get a picture of you holding your ID, but on the other, at least when Facebook trains its models on the stuff you post, they'll tell you about it in their user agreement.

I don't see why right to be forgotten is fundamentally incompatible with Fediverse (or other social web 4.0, idk the name)? For example, there could be a central server where you publish some credentials along with a request to be forgotten, and all instances must (if they want to comply with the law) check there from time to time (this would happen automatically of course) and erase associated content. Or you could ask to be forgotten to your instances and it would message all relevant instances of your wish to be forgotten, which then is their own duty to comply. It doesn't seem like an insurmountable issue.

I think the same thing, but it only takes a temporary instance whose goal is just taking your data and selling it to a broker then shutting down to defeat it

Yes, but in any case the data is already public, or at least most of it is. I think if we truly desire for privacy of posts then the SWF/Fediverse should be looking at a different access model, and maybe some encryption methods (for example you could whitelist who can decrypt your data).

There's also the legal approach: keep data public but forbid usage for unauthorized purposes. Then at least the big public companies might not put their hands in it (at least not directly). But it could still be leaked and widely used by nefarious or shady actors.

In any case I think a more well thought out or just better informed distinction between public posts and private ones would be very useful (it appears currently in Mastodon you need to have a 'locked account' to post followers-only posts; I don't know if data goes to other servers for private posts?). If you post something anyone can see on the internet, there's a significant limit to how much the law or any technical solution could protect you. The right solution for sensitive data on the internet is to make sure only a select few can see it, for now.

(I believe this problem is can actually be solved using something like a Web of Trust (but more formalized/automated than WoT is currently): you'd trust accounts and then you can build a graph where trust is a function of distance (trusted node distance). This web of trust could be useful for a number of distributed protocols. The only catch is it requires much more user interaction and education.)

Zuckerberg has said many times he is a huge supporter of the fediverse.

Because (a) it keeps regulators off their back, (b) they can monetise content generated in other apps and (c) it keeps the competition on a level playing field which plays to their strengths.

Can you point me to three times Zuck has said he's a "huge supporter of the Fediverse?"

Related: "Holy Hell, the Social Web Did Not Begin in 2008" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41644267

I have to agree with that post. The only objective of this foundation seem to be the advertisement of the term "social web", I guess because they found "fediverse" to not be marketable enough.

The web doesn't have to be "social media" to be social, and federation doesn't make it any more or less social, it's just federated. The web have always been social, way before "social media" came along.

Words have meanings, and taking over them for personal and economical gain doesn't add anything, only subtracts.

I love the web more than anything, and I'm tired of people using advertisement campaigns to try to poison people's minds for their personal agendas. Your crypto-crap is not the third version (?) of the web. And your flavour of social media is not the social web.

Of course, I think crypto is useless and social media have been detrimental to society, so I might be biased.

I've noticed that Twitter is the only platform that gets any real widespread support for alternatives in the fediverse. I never liked Twitter originally, and I don't like mastodon now. I want federated Instagram and Facebook, but that would require that people I actually know are on these services and not strangers on the internet.

Closed-source Vivaldi. They shout privacy but collect and store your data. You can’t trust these people.

https://mastodon.social/@designer/113198144562226848

If Vivaldi cared, it wouldn't be proprietary.

Vivaldi does what MozDon’t?

Just a PSA, that you really shouldn't be using Vivaldi or any closed source browser. As we know, companies that start off privacy/ethically focused (take Mozilla for example) eventually turn evil and start spying/tracking their users.

Vivaldi will eventually start doing this, and you'll have absolutely no idea because it's entirely closed source. No one knows what mischief they get up to.

TL;DR; Don't sign into your bank with Vivaldi

That’s right, the hill to die on is the browser’s openness.

Not your OS, not your firmware. Not your hardware. It’s the browser

Thanks for raising closed hardware too, and I presume you are talking about the Intel ME (backdoor spyware [1] that Intel puts into all their chips via their closed source proprietary firmware). It's a complete blackbox, other CPU that no one knows entirely what it does, but has full access to your main CPU/memory/computer, and allows it to be remotely controlled by anyone with Intels signing keys.

We need to open this too, or at least be transparent, and your points on closed firmware/hardware is really important.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

Intel ME is disabled and neutralized on my Librem 15.

You can never truly be sure as it's can't be entirely removed. There has to be a little bit remaining, just the first few modules or the machine will shut down after 30 minutes, but the Librem 15 is a beautiful machine and Puri.sm are really awesome.

It's a hill, I don't think anyone said it's the hill.

'Try to detect benefit cheats.'

Or wait till the 1st one surrounded a mountain successful at a hight of 3,5km

;-)

As a cat of nine lives, there are many hills I intend to die on

whataboutism is a logical fallacy.

>take Mozilla for example

I thought Firefox was open source?

That's not it, Mozilla decided to leave the fediverse and has been loading Firefox with AI and opt-out tracking features. All while still being funded by Big G.

> Mozilla decided to leave the fediverse

did they? their mastodon instance at mozilla.social still seems to exist.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41572137

They recently announced that it'll be shutting down.

https://mozilla.social/@mozilla/113153943609185249

I'm assuming they left the fediverse because it ended up not being a huge success, and not because they suddenly pivoted against decentralization.

mozilla is spying/tracking users now?

Yup [1]. They've basically left their core mission and just sell out now.

1. https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-fea...

Things are more complex than that. Yes, they're engaged in creating an ads measurement technique that is actually very private (read the specs). No, they're not making money out of it. Yes, they've done a terrible job at explaining that to users.

Giving non-zero bits of information to advertisers is the opposite of private. They won’t stop using other methods of tracking, they’ll just use these bits as a part of your fingerprint.

AFAIK it gives advertisers aggregated data on the performance of the ads, such as "23% of the clicks on the ad end up buying the product". I would be enlightened to hear how this can be used as part of my fingerprint.

The absolute best case is that it doesn’t actually help advertisers track users, so it’s net-zero to users: advertisers will still track us through other means, but at least Firefox doesn’t help them do it. If any part of the process leaks non-zero bits of information, it’s actively detrimental to privacy; otherwise it’s just not helpful to anyone other than advertisers.

This also involves trust. The party doing aggregation has access to non-aggregated information and is able to sell it. As far as I understand, currently this party is ISRG, which has reasonably good reputation and probably won’t sell it. I don’t trust Mozilla to not silently add other aggregation providers though, as they did with this option itself. I’m also not sure that this data doesn’t pass through Mozilla servers, and I very much don’t trust Mozilla with it.

To summarize my thoughts,

1. There’s no evidence that “PPA” improves privacy in any way;

2. You have to trust centralized third parties doing the aggregation, and the full set of parties you need to trust is not completely clear;

3. The only party who obviously benefits from “PPA” is advertisers, which tracks with the fact that the protocol was designed with heavy involvement from Facebook: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks...;

4. So it’s at best neutral for users and at worst is actively detrimental.

Except, there's the possibility that if this worked, companies wouldn't need to track users, and considering the hassle it is (at least in the EU), they will prefer using these non-invasive methods _instead_.

And this possibility seems to be why Mozilla engages in it. You might think it's not going to work, but from this to attributing malice to Mozilla's intention there's a long way.

> there's the possibility that if this worked, companies wouldn't need to track users

I don’t buy it. “PPA” don’t allow for targeted ads, so it does not functionally replace tracking. It’s an additional statistical tool made for advertisers and designed by advertisers.

> from this to attributing malice to Mozilla's intention there's a long way

Silently sending (non-aggregated, aggregation happens later) user data to third-party servers is enough to attribute malice.

Since you are also mentioning Mozilla, what browser would you recommend instead?

Brave is solid. Opensource with some nice features

Such as web3/cypto/bullshit

Which are Opt-In. It doesn't hurt to have optional features for people who want them.

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