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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

I know more about this than most, but I’m still confused about how I’m supposed to deal with federated social media. I have a Threads account. I have a Mastodon account. Then Threads added federation. What am I supposed to do with each account? They have different posting histories, they can’t be merged, but if I post the same thing to both of them, I’ll be repeating myself. Am I supposed to discontinue using one of them? If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. It’s a mess.

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This is why centralized social media took off. It is easy to understand and use.

Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.

I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media?

Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.

> I know people like to compare it with email

There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first.

I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.

IMHO: profiles (personas, aliases, alts) are orthogonal to federation.

I once thought personas were critically important. Something like Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But 1) I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to prevent deanonymonization and 2) USA govt didn't protect our privacy, so there is no market for a privacy preserving stack.

Keeping the accounts separate seems like an extremely mandatory feature to me. If I had multiple Google accounts I would absolutely not want any information leakage from one to the other.

Just give me P2P social media and put me in the swarm. BitTorrent for Reddit and Twitter.

It shouldn't matter what servers are anywhere. It should all be eventually consistent for some agglomerated cluster sampling of the world. Make the content immutable and ephemeral. People that care to archive it will.

Federation is silly and is part of the problem. Plus it creates more little fiefdoms.

I'll subscribe to my own filters if I care, and my agent will handle the rest.

Well you can run your own ActivityPub Server/Client and subscribe (and thus federate) with anyone who hasn’t explicitly blocked you from federating with them. Bridge that with AT and you can see and interact with whatever you want on the Fediverse.

I don't think this approach will work for most people. Assuming the Bluesky firehose is 50GB/day, that's a massive amount of data to have to download just to filter for the handful of events a person might actually be interested in. My phone barely goes through a couple GB per month!

But perhaps for efficiency I should rent a server to do the filtering on the cloud and then sync it down to my phone? Well then why not instead consume from a server which already did most of the filtering that I wanted? And now we get back to something like usenet, or the modern day fediverse.

how i would make it work is you'd only download actual bits you care about, the rest can be handled by indexers you pay for to help you sort it out

I guess this is when it gets fuzzy. A true peer-to-peer social network would mean that every node has to be able to get everything and also be able to share whatever it has with every other node. If every participant on this kind of social network was required to maintain their own "seedbox", then it implicitly limits access to only people with means.

But if there were hubs funded by groups of interested people that allowed those folks to share the cost of "seeding" and in return only "leech" the information they care about... then isn't that essentially the same kind of decentralization that already exists on the fediverse? The way I understand it, instances are set up by communities of people with similar interests and those instances are configured to only propagate a subset of the events that their community is interested in.

how i solved for this was reciprocal pinning so any node owns all their data (personal log) + whoever they follow (mutual follow reprocity) last x content (indices so its easy to get last n, or last since xyz) and so anyone can decide exactly what they keep or not on their node and thus share by simply following or not (maybe two level, so you can choose to not pin people you follow) heh, smt like that

anyways the idea is very much to do like bittorrent or kademilia but for social media posts i need to research more the fediverse before building anything tho

That's more or less what atproto is, except the indexer is called a relay and provides the data directly. Currently bluesky is providing their relay for free, but I don't believe there's any reason they couldn't make it paid in the future.

yeah they had an outage in 2024 i think or was that registrations only?

Boy, those of us that remember Usenet are probably getting deja vu…

Eternal amnesia.

I've spent a bunch of time in this space, and there are some really interesting options (SSB, matrix, etc).

They all have awkward tradeoffs which lead most people to use one of the centralized networks.

In the end, I return to whatever system has the people I want to interact with; I get very little out of social media unless they are present.

I actually tried to vibe-code this, not finished tho

You're describing ZeroNet.

It has ZeroTalk as a Reddit-like thing, ZeroMe as a social network and ZeroBlog as a Twitter-like thing.

https://zeronet.io

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroTalk

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroMe

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroBlog

> Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.

That's news to me, as a Mastodon user. I just scroll my homeserver's default feed and get stuff from all over the internet.

no, you get the subset your homeserver administrator decides to rehost

Which in my case, includes stuff from all over the internet. I don't think anyone's feed includes everything from the internet.

To add: not even a centralized service includes everything from the internet.

I don't think that's a good way of stating it. You get the posts from the people anyone on your server follows. An admin can block or silence accounts, or run a relay, but these are edge cases.

An admin can decide to unfollow a bunch of instances and as a user you have no recourse.

you can say "hey could you refollow those instances"

you could throw more money into the instance's tip jar to make it easier for them to decide to rehost a larger part of the data firehose - that may not be the entire reason they defederated from an instance but it may be part of it

you could move to another instance whose admin's choices are more in line with yours

Other social networks can ban people I follow and I have no recourse.

True, so it's not an improvement. I guess it is even worse because when they unfollow an instance they may ban hundreds of users just because there are a few problematic ones.

At one point I had 2 accounts. One was on my phone and one was on my laptop. I was in the process of moving to the one on my laptop (I know migration exists, but I'm weird and didn't want to do that). Anyway, I was on my phone and saw a post with my one account from some other federated server. When I went on my laptop I couldn't find it. I figured it might just need to propagate. I waited days... nothing. I've seen behavior like this a lot. You're not seeing a problem, because you can't know what you don't see.

If you're just scrolling a bunch of random stuff, you might not care. But what if we want this to be like old Facebook, where you follow people you actually know? Am I going to miss wedding and birth announcements? Party invitations? Other important life updates from friends and family?

You could criticize the modern algorithmic feeds on platforms like Facebook for not showing some of these things as well, if they don't think it will engage you enough, but at least the post is there and available. When I ran into that issue between my 2 accounts, I looked for the post specifically, I had the ID... it simply wasn't available to me.

I just commented above, but it's really more like being a student at a university. You can enter all the buildings with your student ID. You can be friends with people in other dorms and enter the building. Even though you're an engineering student you can take classes in the economics or theater or applied science schools.

Though, IMO Mastodon not the better of the fediverse platforms, but I don't love microblogging social media. But it's all going to end up being like Linux. Some people tried it once, didn't like it, and then 10 years from now it'll be totally different and everyone will wonder where it's been all their lives.

I use Lemmy, and while federated social media might seem like this up front, a good comparison is dorms and classes at a large university.

Every dorm/housing and school program has its own vibe and attitude. Your student ID gets you in to all of them, but you live in one dorm building in particular, let's call it Jones Tower. There might be some seeming overlap between buildings - maybe Dinkley Hall and the Rogers Building both have Engineering floors, but they're not the same at all. You can cross-list classes between the geology department and theater school and gerontology, that's cool. You can have friends that live in Dinkey Hall and the Blake Apartments, and they can all go anywhere they want.

Is it a mess? Not really. Is it as plain and one-size-fits-all as single-story high school like Facebook? Not at all. Does it take time to understand how to sign up for a cross-listed class? Sure. To some it's worth it to be there, and plenty drop out because it's not for them, and that's fine. IMO, the benefit is the barrier to entry. It's not for everyone and doesn't need to be.

Threads added federation, but only Mastodon servers are connected, and not all of them - this is like Threads is the private medical school across town that lets grad school students from the Fediverse Uni come over for specific classes.

Really though is this a real world issue? Tombstone one and use the other. No reason to quit just because you don’t have perfect agency. Post both if you want, people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.

> Tombstone one and use the other.

Like I said:

> If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post.

> people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.

When people post the same thing to Facebook and Twitter, those posts don’t end up in the same feed. They do with federation and Threads / Mastodon.

well, the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. and therefore if that is a concern you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. federation only works if everyone that you want to reach is in it.

> the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated.

It is federated for the people that want it. It’s a setting.

> you need to treat your thread account as not federated too.

But it’s federated for some people and not for others, so there isn’t a single behaviour I can take that consistently works.

I am having trouble imagining the failure mode you are trying to avoid.

It sounds like threads implementation of federation is broken. What effects does toggling that federation setting on or off do?

Like if someone is following “duplicate” accounts of yours and therefore would see double posts, that person can unfollow one. Still double work for you that kind of sucks.

Scuttlebutt had some work done on publicly declaring two identities as the same, I wonder what that would look like for posts. Like a post-id or simple equality comparison or hash could work server side or client side.

Right so your quibble is that part of your audience is not portable, not that federation makes posting harder. You either maintain a centralized service account or you don’t. That hasn’t changed with Meta services. It is Threads that doesn’t allow for portability.

Further a tombstone would point users to the new account if they choose to continue following you. This can be done in a post and your bio.

How bad is it that your two accounts end up in the same feed? By your own admission Threads is a different audience.

So, is the problem that you have accounts on both networks. You would be OK with just posting to both accounts, but for people who have the federation toggle on, they’ll get a duplicate view of your posts?

That actually does seem annoying. You probably can’t do anything about it, but it seems like it would be extremely easy to fix on the platforms’ sides. Since you are intentionally trying not to have people get dupes of your posts, they could just add the ability to tag a post with some identifier, then not show posts that have the same identifier, and rely on you tag your posts appropriately (and an obvious feature would be to automate that tagging and include it in the various “share to <other platform>” buttons).

If I’m interested in following you why would I subscribe to both your Threads and Mastodon account?

I don’t know. Maybe they post different types of content on each network, but there’s some content that they post to both.

It'd be nice to have an HTTP 301-equivalent forwarding option + verify control via hashing.

E.g. one could make a special post on the "continuing" feed, then tag the "killed" feed with 301+hash for auto-redirects (and/or dedupe)

One thing I like about Mastodon and Bluesky (and Twitter before 2023) is that most of it can be read without having an account, so users can ignore all federation features and just treat them like old school websites.

The fact that they have different implementation details that is not so important to me, though personally I replicate all my posts for readers who prefer one place over another.

Threads didnt even up properly federating. Its only 1 way, so from Mastodon you can follow people on threads if your instance hasnt blocked it (it probably has) and from threads you cant follow anything in the fediverse. You also need to enable a setting ot make your account followable.

Think of them like different social groups.

Interop, standards and nature of ATproto brings ability to build different applications. for example you can easily build analytics on top of ATproto, like this one https://www.graphtracks.com/stats/bluesky/graph/rudyfraser.c...

How is that different from posting the same thing on Facebook and Twitter?

One of these gives you ultimate control (mastodon / AT) if you want it (you can host and own the domain) or the ability to ride along with your choice of admin.

The others do not give you any choice you buy the service from them and accept their terms (and presumably, virality, which you came for)

Those are the trade offs

None of that addressed any of the issues I have.

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