lorean_victor

tbf I mentioned the www era decentralisation mostly.

but I agree. as mentioned earlier, actually the fact that decentralisation has happened multiple times before, while convenience was kind of against it, is the reason I think it will most definitely happen again as well. I'm even assuming it won't be far off by considering similarities in some respects to the situation before two other large-scale decentralisations we've observed (www and apps), though of course that is the same as predicting when the next platform shift will occur and that's not someone can claim with meaningful precision, IMO.

yes I think that'd be a great addition. any publisher can, optionally, introduce a hub for their feed, so people get realtime update of their content, and even a social hub, where other authors reacting to their content can use to notify them (and ease the aggregation of these "reactions"). I suspect that can lead to a situation where there are a few hubs and social hubs that anyone can use for their choosing.

even for me, as a long time software engineer (who has worked devops before cloud and docker times), its not "hard" but it is "non-trivial" and can get "costly", while publishing my static blog is waay waaay easier (and hence doable).

I mean look at email again. how many people, even technically proficient people, setup their own email server? we've mostly just accepted google's dominance in the area and are ok with them even leveraging it to impose sometimes ridiculous rules of who can send email to whom and how it will be presented. why should the fediverse end up differently, if the basics are quite similar (if not a bit more complicated)?

thats an interesting perspective. I am personally much in favour of reducing unnecessary interdependence in society, specifically to big corps: google can really screw me up just because they provide an email service for me. questions that come to mind though:

- why would someone do that? its not hard, it can be made easier, but what would be the tangible, low-level gain for people to do that? I can think of examples like safe storage of photos and documents (my old dad already does that, he buys hard disks and stores stuff), easy and safe sharing of stuff in the home (airdrop does this tbh), and secure smart home controls. but I can't generalise the pattern to properly understand the underlying benefit here.

- in communications, there is an issue of trust. like how can I trust email coming form a new personal server, to not spam or scam me? I think that can be solved separately though, just can't formulate the solution clearly in my mind atm.

I wouldn't characterise the history of the internet as having started with "everything decentralised". if I'm not missing something, it was completely the other way around.

introduction of general populous to the internet was through internet gatekeepers like aol or msn, with unimaginable convenience (and centralisation). that convenience lost, in the end, to the world wide web, where a ton of single individuals could set up a website and reach other people across the internet. some of the big central giants of today got born out of this transition (and some were instrumental to it, namely google).

something similar happened to smartphones. ios was intended to be a closed off gatekeeper. people jailbroke it, and apple caved in and opened the system up, allowing anyone to provide services (apps) on it. similar to the www transition, we had a period were you could easily find popular apps made by a single programmer. this decentralisation also basically enabled most centralised social and messaging services of today.

so I see it more as a cycle: in stable times, convenience causes a drift towards further centralisation. when there is a platform shift, established players lose their defensive power, some essential operational costs drop drastically, resulting in a sudden decentralisation: tons of small (mostly individual) players can now enter the market and gain prominence through it. the market then stabilises, thriving players shrink in number and grow in size, and become the convenient, centralised corps of the future, only to be similarly shaken by market forces that allowed them to exist in the first place.

are we close to such a shift now? I think so. current version of the internet is clearly starting to rot and drown in noise, while we are the cusp of new heights of information processing and accessibility through LLMs, while also thriving to push the boundaries of the information we circulate (AR/VR). but who knows.

fair. but I'm assuming you need such expensive (and as a result, centralised) services regardless. a small part of content discovery is "who has reacted to my content", take the case of tiktok, in which a strong content discovery mechanism helped it soar through the ranks. I suspect without such a mechanism the system won't succeed either way (as the fediverse is suffering rn), so its a problem that we will have nevertheless (same as the problem we have with search engines).

I am sorry I couldn't aptly understand you.

did people migrate from twitter / reddit to discord / slack? That's an interesting phenomena if it has happened that I wasn't aware of, do you have sources I can read up on it more?

anyways, my point was that "usability in general" is not the key (reddit has famously terrible interfaces, for example). it is being really usable on the core functionality it should provide (like having tons of content to discover, and getting your content to tons of other people, in case of social media) is what matters.

exactly.

I admire this vision, and also appreciate the fact that you quoted "just" to underline a recognition of how much of a fundamental shift this is :D

thanks for the pointer!

I wouldn't. I also wouldn't think about a decentralised email solution, or a decentralised messaging service. doesn't make sense.

as for publishing my own blog though? nah I'd really rather a decentralised system where I can host my own blog wherever.

and yes I do realise most people don't care about that, and yes I'm not sure if they'd care about other benefits of decentralisation as well or not, but its not like there is nothing there that would affect them.

its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable?

as a content consumer I would love to be somewhere where there is engaging content and content discovery. I go to mastodon, my feed is empty and the search doesn't work. I bounce.

as a content publisher, I would go wherever the audience is. I go to mastodon, users have a hard time finding me, no one gets my stuff. I bounce.

now I (personally), as a consumer, hate the fact that I need to follow people at least on 3 platforms to get their content proper. as a publisher, I (again, personally) hate the fact that I am forced to at least partition the discussion on my content. but I'd tolerate these pain points for content / audience, because the main role of a social media is to give me content / audience. being nice and not having all these pain points is secondary.

what do you mean by "content-centric-networking"? perhaps I have some reading to do.

the "allure of large companies hoarding all the data" might be a factor independently though. I personally believe a proper content discovery service is key to any form of decentralisation, and that is, as far as I can imagine, highly dependent on centralised entities amassing and then processing large amounts of data. I mean we sold our data to Google and in return got the current decentralised web where anyone can make a website and get traffic if the content is good enough (or SEO-hacky enough).

thanks for the thoughts.

1. I suspect something like Google, indexing feeds instead of websites, and also mapping what is a reaction to what, perhaps. something that makes a bit suspicious about the potential of this though, is the fact that we've had nice rss readers for so many years and none have embarked on something like this, although I think there was a huge potential if they could properly index youtube channels / podcasts for example (all already on rss). would love to find someone in feedly or inoreader teams to ask more.

2. its not only about self-publication / self-distribution though. this is already affecting normal users, to the extent that it resulted in a few break-aways from twitter (none successful of course), and even the whole twitter management changing and attempting to capitalise on the desire. none of this is enough (or is ever going to be enough) to really force big social media to meaningfully change on its own, but situations where we have a stable market dynamic that constantly produces disgruntled costumers who are still locked in the system without much choice, the change typically ends up happening through regulatory intervention (I mean that's their job), so yeah this point might be more relevant from a regulatory perspective rather than a direct market force.

and no worries. if I wanted only nice comments I would've only shared the post with friends or on linkedin / threads. the value, for me, is in these discussions, even if the language sometimes gets a bit spicy.

how, though? I doubt we had an easier method than opening your phone and just typing a few sentences in a text box, or just "liking" or "reposting" something.

it has downsides though. I am constantly jumping between twitter, reddit, spotify (for podcasts) and youtube to see the content and latest updates from the same people. when I want to share something, I should think where should I post it, is it more technical? then reddit and HN maybe, though on twitter I do have some technical people following me too. is it social / political? then its twitter, so on. then I find myself reading and discussing political posts on reddit which are screenshots of posts on twitter or vice versa. I don't know how much pain this is truly, but the unnecessary walls between these communities is indeed a pain point, both as a consumer (I need to check people on multiple places) or as a publisher (I have to partition the discussion to say the least, if not the audience in total).

as for mastodon / bluesky / whatever, the main issue to me seems to be lack of content and content discovery. which is weird, since every youtuber, podcaster, subreddit, all of HN and medium, etc. is technically on RSS, and even more can be easily put on RSS with cheap bridges. but instead of unifying and enhancing all this existing shared content streams, we've broken off with new protocols and created separated and isolated communities.

agreed. it won't be a performance gain at all.

but I suspect aggregating / indexing / etc. still is going to be the most resource consuming part of a push-based system if you want your content discovery to not be limited to two-way interactions, which means the gains of a push-based system, in terms of performance, shouldn't be that much (I suspect the main gains will be in realtimeyness instead).

the system doesn't need to be completely pull-based though. I don't even think most modern RSS readers are fully pull-based, don't they support WebSub?

the main point is to separate publishing and distribution, making publishing far more accessible and decentralised. for that to happen, I guess, from a publisher's point of view, the system should be pull based. of course we can have hubs and relays to add pull-based mechanisms to ease the load of the system.

p.s. even in that case, strictly speaking, yes a pull-based system, or even a hybrid one, will always require more work than a fully push-based system.

I see your points (though I don't fully agree). Most of these relate to a "central search and discovery service". this doesn't need to be coupled with the rest of the network functionalities (posting content or interacting with content), which I personally believe is better fully distributed (for similar reasons to what you mentioned). We've done this for the internet as a whole (anyone can bring up a website on their own, search engines will discover and index it, but the search engine space is as centralised as it gets), so I believe we can do it for more "social" content as well.

no worries, I have worked as a product manager for a few products that "the real world" seems to care about, and I fully understand your sentiment. that's even why I've dedicated the last segment of the post to basically "who cares?" (I suspect some "real people" might since they can get everything in one place instead of having to follow people in 6 different places, but not sure how strong of an incentive that is).

also having had the privilege of observing a few products that have found "real world" usage, I actually believe that "nerdy passion" is key, though of course without considering USABILITY and CONVENIENCE (as you've put it), it wouldn't get far.

You are right I'm sorry. I wasn't notified that anything discussed on these forums should be exclusively about whatever "the real world" cares about at least one bit (preferably 8 bits or more I guess?).

Ah the nerds, when will we understand, indeed.

I think that's an issue of tools at your disposal to create content (including comments) rather than their distribution model (e.g. pull vs push). If your main method of saying stuff is through a blogpost, ofc you'll end up in the situation you've described. If the tools at everyone's disposal are textboxes that just work, people will use that.

yes it is a federated system by design. doesn't mean it is not a limitation though.

to give you an example: in case of email, though it is not that difficult to host your own server (and even if you are a small startup you'll most probably do so without much effort), in the end basically Google decides on "who is an accepted participant in the network". If Google deems you spam, you are spam. If Google deems your authentication emails "promotion", for most intents and purposes, you are "promotion" and your users will miss your emails.

that, I feel, is an inherent limitation of any federated system, specifically one whose design is really inspired by email.

> I don't see how that follows.

as you've mentioned right after.

> work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomized way independent of new posts appearing).

it was quite easy for a small team to crawl and index a good portion of the internet, enough to become the de facto gateway (talking about Google).

it was similarly possible for a relatively small team to crawl a good chunk of the available internet and train some of the most sophisticated "algorithms" we've seen on them (talking about Open AI).

if there is an incentive, this problem can be solved. if this was actually a hard problem, most current social media companies wouldn't put so much effort in restricting crawling to force everyone through restricted API access (look at Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or Facebook, as examples).

I've got to disagree on this point. I am a firm believer in "democratisation" of anything, including "publishing content that many other people will see".

this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc).

of course, that means posting and spreading "worst in people" is also easier (as is spreading spam, etc). this aspect I feel has nothing to do with the "social" part of these platforms, any form of lowering the entry barrier would have caused more terrible things to be published and spread (maybe with different extents, but not essentially different).

p.s. you might find this interesting if you haven't seen it already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t

I do recognise the fact that such "aggregators" would be hugely centralised (if not outright monopolised, like the search engine space). however, maybe I'm wrong but I don't see the federated model succeeding without such services either, so I think of "need for centralised content discovery" as an independent problem, honestly.

thanks for taking the time to read through it regardless. I wrote this as a brain dump, and shared it mostly with the intent of learning more about the topic (which thanks to this thread, I already have), so I feel it is ok if it doesn't change the life of billions of people.

the last part of the post, however, is dedicated to assessing whether such an idea would have any real bearing on, as you've put it, "the population", or not. I've tried to list potential benefits to the average user, if such a decentralised platform was ever built. since you are interested more in such evaluations rather than technical contemplations, I'd like to hear your feedback specifically on that part.

https://gist.github.com/loreanvictor/bddd8824c744024d338e935...

you don't need a CDN or even a DNS to host your blog (though most probably you'd use them). you will still be at the mercy of registries to have an IP address other people can find, but I think practically speaking it is not far fetched to consider this a "distributed system" (for most use-cases anyways).

looks quite interesting, I wasn't aware of that. it seems like a nice hybrid solution to pull/push problem (relays can push if they choose to, clients just publish and pull).

I should say though, that upon first look, I wish it was built on top of some already existing standard (like rss), as it could get a great headstart in terms of content already circulating in the network that way.

the thing is, with no intermediaries involved, more specifically, without any proper "search engines" (or "aggregators") involved, the network will suffer greatly from a content discovery problem regardless (as the fediverse currently is, IMO).

with presence of such services, the problem of comments (and reactions in general) can be solved too. if a poster is ok with engaging with potentially hostile content, then they can get reactions to their posts from aggregators that aren't heavy handed on moderation. if they don't want to bother with such interactions, then they can choose safer aggregators. if they want, they can only pull reactions from feeds they are already subscribed to, similar to private posts on twitter.