'Social media should be built on protocols, not platforms' says Mastodon CEO | Hacker News Reader

'Social media should be built on protocols, not platforms' says Mastodon CEO

techcrunch.com

30 pointsMRPockets5 comments

Social media as a decoupled virtual public space can't both exist and protect our individual rights and the implicit dependencies that culminate in retaining a certain level of rational thought, at least not at the same time.

Any communications platform that allows a many to one interaction, with the ability to obscure the source (you), is a danger to democracy.

By raising the noise floor, or manipulating sentiment in a inconsistent way, in such platforms, you can manipulate on a grand scale individual perception by distorting reflected appraisal. Its a fundamentally harmful and destructive process.

You do also however need anonymity at the same time, and there must be cost. Competing interests guarantee that this will never be possible in a centralized system. The feedback relationship which is distorted, and distorts itself, will run off the rails.

Human moderation doesn't scale, and AI moderation can't determine unique meaning, and hallucinates, distorting reflected appraisal in the process, isolating (through punishment), and removes agency.

We need to appropriately secure our communication platforms from these subtle but corrupting outcomes that are brittle and lack resiliency measures.

Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42681976

I agree, but I feel this is a bit rich coming from Mastodon which is notorious for depending on a load of custom ActivityPub extensions for server to server operation, and just having an entirely separate REST API not based on any open standards (beyond JSON/HTTP) for its client to server comms.

I used to run a non-Mastodon Activity Pub server and it never really worked. There’s a reason why everyone just uses Mastodon, at which point who cares if there’s an open protocol.

Have you given ATProto a look or try? Thoughts?

Yes, I believe ATProto is a much more mature approach, that is solving much more fundamental issues. The criticism of "it's not federated/distributed" feels unfounded, the argument against VC funding seems unnecessarily zealous (if the protocol works it doesn't matter, so critique on this basis is in bad faith). I think Bluesky also seem to understand that the protocol will at least for a while, live or die on the content that is there, and Mastodon doesn't come out well in this regard.

Activity Pub itself is... a bit boring? And maybe that's a good thing? I tried implementing it though, and it's very unsurprising to me that a) Mastodon is the only game in town, b) why they use custom extensions and semantics, and c) why none of the other interesting content types are being used in any substantial way.

I think Mastodon/ActivityPub is a local maximum based on a 2010-2015 understanding of what social networks are/need, and that ATProto and Bluesky represents a realistic 2025 era understanding of the social web, with plenty of scope for advancement and staying current in a way that I doubt Mastodon can ever do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com