For those scared of all the links, here's a simple summary from someone who runs a server with an instance of one of these applications.

* ActivityPub is just an open, flexible protocol for sharing content

* The fediverse is a nice, human friendly way to describe all the various services using activitypub to talk back and forth to each other. The value in this is that these projects are diverse, it's not all twitter clones. You have video hosting services like peertube, the twitter-esque sites like mastodon and pleroma, open source managed file stores like nextcloud, and all of them can chat if they want to

* these services are hosted by whoever wants to host an instance, and they choose who they wish to federate with and who they don't, this optional interoperability is really the key feature for the entire network and protocol

Mastodon, as a twitter replacement is good from a user perspective (except in 300+ comment threads) , but I'd strongly recommend Pleroma at this point if you intend to run your own instance. The software of the two is similar, but Mastodon is in a constant state of chasing new, usually niche or controversial features which have led to a lot of bloat in terms of both management tooling, setup, and hardware required to run it.

I had not heard of Pleroma before, it looks nicely lightweight:

https://pleroma.social

Checked out a random 'featured instance', first post is an image with "DOES IT FEEL LIKE THE ENTIRE WORLD FELL APART WHEN TRUMP LEFT?" in gigantic letters.

Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out...

It's like leaving Reddit for Voat, you'll just end up in the midst of the worst fringe groups because they can't exist on the main platform where normal people are.

For some cultural context:

If I had to sum up Pleroma's core audiences, it's right wing anime posters, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, privacy and selfhosting folks, terfs, people who like sharing Ukraine war footage and discussing war in general, and pornposters

If I had to sum up Mastodon's core audiences, it's twitter-hating antifascists, European techies, post tumblr fetish sites, lgbt folks, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, and pornposters

There's a lot of more random folks sprinkled throughout both, but these are definitely the most prevalent communities you'll run into just scrolling the network feeds.

Some communities are more right wing, and others are very left. You just need to look further. Most of the people on the fediverse chose to be there for many good reasons.

> Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out...

we need to let go of this mindset that there are undesirables in this world. there will always be a 'stable diffusion' seeking equilibrium between the places that censor and the places that dont, and the people impacted by those rule parameters will move to the places that dont censor, which will bring non mainstream ideals. Non mainstream ideals are the essence of what solves hard problems.

> there are undesirables in this world.

Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc. Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.

There's a big difference between:

> I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community.

and

> Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc.

Where pre listing categories and ideas that are explicitly wrongthink, versus people able to participate in a community following guidelines and an etiquette. It's not at all funny or surprising, that each community that adopts the latter, find the list growing until it's a niche community by exclusion.

The idea that any meeting place that says it's for "free thinking" or "all ideas" is a mistake. Most communities want to stick to some niche topic and use the "open" phrasing to try to grow any participation at all.

You won't get to the point where neo-nazis demonstrate inability to participate in a civil community following guidelines and etiquette. The mere tolerance of them will drive legitimate users away, people by large DO NOT practice freedom of speech. Ignoring that reality is an ideological fantasy, you either blacklist or will be blacklisted.

Yes. Normally, I do not think it has to be explicitly said, but this time it may be necessary. Speech that is not offensive does not require protection. If I say sun is shining, people will not try to deplatform me. Offensive ( and legal ) speech might cause that to happen. This is not acceptable and not part of the promise of this nation.

<< Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.

And this is where some universal standards are necessary. But right now it is just wild west of internal guidelines and moderator's mood ( FB level 3 violent rhetoric or whatever Orwellian language they used to describe it comes to mind ).

Parent is right. The idea of undesirables has to be let go. The public square belongs to everyone. Companies with a reach in billions can't pretend to not be a public square.

If it is a public square, then it is so because the majority of people choose to use it because of the controls and filtering and exclusion of "undesirables". If it's a company with a reach in billions that's because it provides, in its current form including filtering, a service that is valued (in attention time, if not dollars) by its users.

If one compels a Twitter to host things it has decided people don't want to see, why aren't we compelling the Kochs and Murdoch's of the world to support equally "leftist" positions? It's frankly an incoherent position that Twitter should be compelled to behave a certain way and yet Rupert can continue spouting his propaganda for literal generations unimpeded.

It's still an absolute dumpster fire regardless.

> If it is a public square, then it is so because the majority of people choose to use it because of the controls and filtering and exclusion of "undesirables". If it's a company with a reach in billions that's because it provides, in its current form including filtering, a service that is valued (in attention time, if not dollars) by its users.

I don't think that's the case, honestly, it's a pretty explanation, but people aren't on these platforms for that, they're on these platforms because it's where come critical mass was hit, and from that tipping point these apparati were ossified. And as they became a nucleation point for all of this, their volume grew, and with that so did the content - which is crucial if content generation on the platform respects the 1% rule. And that new content is what creates the feedback loop, which is also ostensibly directly proportional with the size viola, positive feedback loop to some arbitrary user saturation point.

For example, some Youtubers have discussed it, but relocation would be a huge investment, and quite a bit of their data would be lost because they don't have archives that run back to the inception of the channel. In much the same way reputation, clout, followers and et cetera would actually go through translation losses as someone or some company transitioned from A to B, and servicing two platforms is more difficult than one (which will likely not be lucrative). It's a huge moat.

>If one compels a Twitter...

What is the actual end of this? You're not eliminating these people, nor their opinions. You're alienating them. The best case scenario is a dialectic which ultimately causes them to question their viewpoint, not to reinforce it by arbitrarily castigating them and exiling them from the public discourse. In the case where some platform does remove them, they'll find another with less criticism - an echochamber - which, to wit, only stands to exacerbate the problem.

It seems less about some class of deplorables and more about their observers. As to their rationale, the primary motive I suspect, is profit via demographic sprawl, not some humanitarian concern. And this can be imputed to the individual as much as the corporation or institution. By my reckoning this is a hazard in and of itself because it's purely superficial and thus both misguided and misapprehended - one half of that becoming concrete realizations of naive intervention and the other setting some anti-human benchmark that doesn't actually make sense. And of course the feedback people and institutions read is from some extremely small proportion of the population so it's already set up for a form of extremity by default.

And is anybody really defending ultrawealthy individuals in such a way? I don't know anybody that really condones the idea that wealth should be able to have a hard and cheap translation into hard power as it does in this instance. And there's also the fact that Twitter is a legal fiction, whose foundation is rooted in not just the concepts of property rights outlined and enforced by the US Government, but additionally is accessed and deployed through a heavily subsidized technology that was previously publicly owned and developed with taxpayer dollars. The Kochs are private persons, period.

I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community. Given the paradox of tolerance, every community is faced with the binary choice between kicking them out or becoming nothing but them. (Like how a bar that is welcoming to Nazi patrons eventually becomes a Nazi bar.)

But if people who are engaging in good-faith discussions get banned or downvoted simply because they have different opinions or perspectives then I agree that this produces a damaging homogeneity.

Striking the right balance is critical but is also challengingly subjective, so I get why many people gravitate to extremes.

They're on a social media site, for chatting and expressing opinions - that's specifically not the paradox of tolerance. That, as Popper points out, is when speech and debate are given up in favour of violence.

When it comes to the "the utterance of intolerant philosophies" Popper suggested that "we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force". Specifically if:

"they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols"

Note that he is not simply claiming the right to suppress speech that directly results in fists or pistols. His argument was that maintaining a tolerant society requires suppressing even the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" that may give rise to that kind of violence.

Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing?

Or are you claiming that some subset of the philosophies currently being suppressed by social media sites do not rise to this level?

> and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols

That's a either a direct call to violence or it implies that violence has already been threatened or used via those weapons. Which means, as the preceding part of the the quote shows, that free speech has been eschewed in favour of violence:

> they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive,

Not to argue or listen is part of free speech i.e. freedom of conscience - I don't have to listen to you or anyone I don't wish to if I am free. But Popper uses the phrase meet us on the level, these intolerant people have chosen a different level where they will not allow certain argument to occur that is against their position.

So, when you say "utterance of intolerant philosophies" he is talking about violence or assault, and certain speech, actually threatening speech has been covered by the crime of assault for over a thousand years in English common law, which American common law has continued, and SCOTUS has provided particular exceptions to the US first amendment that line up with that (to be a threat a statement must be credible and imminent).

> Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing?

No, I'm saying that there's already a well defined level that Popper, common law, and the US constitution have all given and it's not this nebulous idea of anything that gives rise to something bad. If there are people writing credible and imminent threats of violence on social media because they don't like what's being said, that is what Popper was looking to suppress.

If a Nazi, for example, wishes to engage in argument without any such threat of violence, while arguing for National Socialism, that's fine by me, because it gives me the chance to destroy those arguments using my free speech. Those who are looking to suppress that are on the same level as Nazis and reveal their lack of confidence in their own ability to counter criticism of their position - just as a Nazi might - and hence, reach for violence.

> there's already a well defined level that Popper, common law, and the US constitution have all given

The "utterance of intolerant philosophies" does not solely refer to calls for violence or assault. As you point out yourself, that sort of speech had long been covered by the "harm principle" in common law and would have been entirely superfluous for Popper to rehash in the 1940s. In this and other writings he was clearly outlining a new class of speech and proposing a restriction on it.

> it's not this nebulous idea of anything that gives rise to something bad

That is also not what Popper described. There are clearly many things that give rise to something bad yet would not qualify as "intolerant philosophies" because their adherents are willing to conduct a rational argument and unlikely to resort to violence.

Of course people are free to reject Popper's argument and embrace the lesser constraint of the harm principle so that they can do things like debate Nazis on the internet. Personally I think there are some compelling arguments in favor of erring on the side of free speech. But we should be honest that this involves rejecting Popper's argument, not stretching it to mean whatever we want.

> Those who are looking to suppress that are on the same level as Nazis and reveal their lack of confidence in their own ability to counter criticism of their position - just as a Nazi might - and hence, reach for violence.

I do not understand this. Are you saying Twitter moderating Nazis is a form of violence?

> Mastodon is in a constant state of chasing new, usually niche or controversial features which have led to a lot of bloat

For those of us who haven't been following Mastodon closely, can you list some of these features?

(My own point of view is that in communication products, like in programming languages, creeping featuritis can be a symptom of poor overall design.)

The newest features I know of are a built in language auto translator, more fine tuned administrative controls geared towards specific members of other instances (something that's already fairly robust for both platforms), default instance wide progressive scrolling of large threads, support for editing posts.

None of these are earth shattering, but all of them are very contentious aside from maybe the admin features. In general, Mastodon aims to maintain twitter feature parity, which is why things like the translator and are added. The ActivityPub protocol also doesn't really support the idea of an edit directly, and many see it as the latest in a long list of steps of mastodon trying to own the protocol.

The progressive scroll / pagination vs load the whole thread thing is a constant front end argument within various mastodon/pleroma frontends and has been for years now. The problem is that unless you use one of the real minimal, 1337, hackerish frontends, threads with 300+ comments will send your RAM straight to frown town unless you have like 12gb to spare just for what is mostly static text.

It frustrates me that Jack seems to have genuine interest in this topic but seems to be totally averse to discussing Mastodon. It's hard to believe he's unaware of Mastodon, so we have to believe he thinks it's not the solution for some reason. But how could it not be? Why doesn't he just use his big name and significant influence to throw his weight behind Twitter's most successful open protocol competitor if he really wants this? None of it makes sense to me and I wish he would speak more plainly on the matter.

The problem is that he is trying to monetize the distribution of content. All his talk about decentralization is pointless, because he wants a system where there are gatekeepers, the only difference from Twitter (or Facebook/Google) is that in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol. It would be comical if it wasn't diabolical.

> he wants a system where there are gatekeepers

Does he? He says "it can't have an advertising model" and that it shouldn't be centralised.

> in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol

I don't see how that could in practise be done, and my reading is that Dorsey either doesn't want it or doesn't think it's possible (or both).

In practice you rally all of the Bitcoin HODLers who are "desperate" and on average have "decent" losses - and want Bitcoin to become popular again, and ideally for them, become mainstream.

This then incentivizes them to use only platforms and services that are integrated with Bitcoin (et al), in order to try to continue the charade that Bitcoin overall provides a net benefit, in hopes that its price, based on demand, reaches at least what they paid for it to begin with - but "hopefully 10x more!" However, it's described in part as Ponzi scheme as someone is always left holding the bag, and it will be the present moment wave who are most heavily holding the bag, who will then be more willing to rally and be a coercive group; it's like religion, or a cult, that you buy into - but where you not only have a profit motive, you're motivated to make back your losses too.

The problem is they've never actually been able to compete with non-Bitcoin platforms and services - and perhaps at its foundation due to the higher cost of using Bitcoin vs. just using the internet with encryption and other security protocol; let alone story after story showing the $ billions stolen in Bitcoin; from the beginning in Bitcoin-related startup pitch decks - you'd never see a price comparison slide for Bitcoin vs. current offerings.

This "army of HODLers" is however a potentially dangerous situation, as these are real people with voting power in democracies - and as I referenced above there was fairly early on an effort to "educate" politicians: how much the broader society be manipulated into adopting Bitcoin, simply through nudging of making it more normalized, all so the current HODLers can profit and pass the bag onto the next unsuspecting, misled laypeople? It only takes a single person with $ billions to $10s of billions to gain if this scheme continues, and who may already have $ billions of cash to spend say 50% of trying to manipulate to move it along strategically.

Re-reading this: a Freudian slip perhaps, I meant to say cohesive group - not coercive.

> He says "it can't have an advertising model" and that it shouldn't be centralised.

That does not contradict the idea that you can have gatekeepers: just make it so that the your "decentralized platform" requires payment for distribution of content and/or that it is not subject to any equivalent to "Common Carrier" rules. Sure, in theory everyone would be playing by the same rules, but in practice you'll be turning one single gatekeeper (Twitter) into many (Big Corporations, VCs, media companies, already established influencers), and everyone would presumably be paying a cut to whoever is running the distribution platform.

Sunk-cost fallacy with his indoctrination and vested interest in Bitcoin.

Jack, Twitter, having been invested in early by Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson et al, who also invested in Coinbase, CryptoKitties, Brave Browser, etc; USV believed they need to, or saw an opportunity to, basically create the whole ecosystem infrastructure for facilitating selling shovels during the "coin" rush.

Many years ago before Fred (at AVC.com) removed the Disqus commenting system - USV sold it off, so clearly Fred no longer had a financial reason to keep utilizing it - I would near daily engage in long-form conversation in the comment section with other experienced individuals of various domains and have engaging and mostly intellectual conversation.

Fred had valued that community, stated so many times and that it was invaluable to meeting many of the entrepreneurs he'd end up investing in - and where he regularly engage with comments. As soon as however he/they/USV started drinking the Bitcoin (Ponzi-MLM-like scheme) then there were people with the countering narrative, highly intelligent regular comments, narratives that all Bitcoin fanatics would have to ignore, avoid, dismiss in order to not shatter their ungrounded, uncriticially analyzed beliefs. Around that time Fred started getting eloquently articulated backlash, he heavily stopped engaging with the comments - and obviously avoided those critical and pointing out flaws, pitfalls, or ignored realities of the narrative they were following and propagating; and helping evolve, not to mention funding a lobbyist organization to "educate" politicians about Bitcoin and crypto-"currencies."

The SEC should have immediately attempted to put a hard stop to them - albeit a challenge with its decentralized nature, but they could have limited the layperson from losing $100,000s; I personally know a few relatively unsophisticated and unknowledgeable, gambling type people who lost large sums - and many who lost a few thousand; most I predict don't announce their losses publicly. Rather the SEC seems in bed with the VC-finance industrial complex, and it seems like their friends must have been set to make money not transaction fees - but also they likely were bought into the earlier or lower part of the Ponzi-MLM scheme, and so then they, as a decentralized "community" of "HODLers" could benefit and participate in essentially pump and dumps; at least "HODL" is the mantra, those making and not losing money of course weren't holding - they were selling, but depended in part on the manipulating the community to hold off from selling - so then they themselves could sell higher - but primarily for the price to artificially get higher and higher.

One young fellow I met ~7 years ago in the valley, having entered Bitcoin early, already had returns of over $40 million - to which he bought real estate with. He then used the rent money to continue buying Bitcoin during the troughs - as many people likely did - helping drive the relatively artificial-baseless price back up, making it continue to appear like there was higher demand than in reality. Rinse and repeat - sell high, buy low; transferring wealth weighted from the late adopters to the early adopters - the later adopters being left holding the bag of various weights depending on exactly when they "invested" in the scheme.

He may not be clear of Twitter enough to do something like this. I’m wondering if a public action like that coukd open him up to some legal jeopardy. Just a guess.

Yeah, seeing these texts where a board member discussed starting a competitor certainly raised my eyebrows

He also plainly stated that the thing he wants to start is a protocol, not a company, so it is hard to class it as “a competitor” in the traditional sense.

Does gmail compete with smtp?

> He also plainly stated that the thing he wants to start is a protocol…

Yes, but not that one. He wants a protocol he can monetize using various forms of Web3 grifts.

Your anti-cryptocurrency bias is blinding you to the fact that neither party to these conversations needs or wants any more money than they have presently.

When you're a multibillionaire and you're still building new shit from scratch, you build to build. Monetary gains are a side effect.

Bluesky performed a months-long discovery exercise of existing solutions and Mastodon was amongst them.

He said earlier that he wants to do it differently.

Which I totally understand, Activity pub is an absolute failure when it comes to user discovery especially when a user is using his/her own server, which is the whole point of the entire protocol.

> Activity pub is an absolute failure when it comes to user discovery

Yeah, finding out people who I want to exchange messages with is also impossible with IMAP, XMPP...

"User discovery" is not part of the protocol. It's part of the application.

Does Mastodon have measures vs bots and spam?, I think that's one of the issues they want to face for an alternative to Twitter.

Yes, it does. Mastodon heavily emphasizes its moderation features. Pleroma has some moderation controls but does something even more powerful with its MRF [0].

Lastly, if you want to have crypto/web3 to monetize the content distribution, there is Mitra [1], which is an AP-server being developed by ONE person and in less than a year has delivered more than the whole vapoware from Bluesky team has done since Jack announced it.

[0]: https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/mr...

[1]: https://mitra.social

Really interesting about Mitra!.

At least the Blue Sky stuff he pushed has been very clearly on a crypto/web3 focus.

My main issue with Mastodon is that your identity is tied to whatever instance you signed up with. So if I sign up at example.social I will be [email protected]. If the moderators ban me or the instance stops working I am losing all my tweets and followers.

Ideally you would sign up with your own domain ([email protected]) and point some dns records to whichever instance you want, this way you stay flexible and you own your identity.

There is a github issue for this that is open for 5 years but not much has been done https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668

It is actually very easy to move your identity along with follows and followers from one Mastodon instance to another. I did it a couple times to finally land on my own instance I have running on a Raspberry PI.

Identity is always an issue in a decentralized systems. DNS can be used but not everybody owns a domain name. Ultimately if you want to keep your identity over a federated network you have to rely on an identity provider : Government issued, centralized platform that act as Id Provider (facebook, github, google, etc). I'm not aware of decentralized provider, maybe in a blockchain, there are a lot of writings on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10848...

Well there's nostr

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

It solves this problem of being tied to a domain.

most federated projects work this way because of the homeserver model

There are also: GNU Social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social) and Friendica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica) both open source and based on OStatus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus).

He is talking about Bluesky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)

In this particular exchange, he is probably talking about BlueSky: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)

Can someone invite me to mastodon.technology? Email on my profile.

I like your earnest request.

I’ve followed mastodon for a while but have never known anyone else who uses it so didn’t get into a particular server. All the public servers didn’t really seem interesting to me.

So this seemed like a problem for me as a loner as the people I actually knew weren’t going to join.

Twitter, for all its flaws, is dead simple to join and start yelling.

Unless you dont have a telephone, like me. You get to sign up, then inevitably after your first tweet your account is flagged for review, requiring phone to interact further.

I don't have a phone, I'm Amish, I just wanted an account to see the 4th and 5th posts in a "twitter thread" someone posted to HN and it keeps locking the screen with a signup/login modal after I scroll to the 3rd tweet in the thread.

After a while I just wonder if I'm not the target audience and move on, found nitter.net so that's neat.

Are you trolling? How are you on hn if you're Amish? I mean you at least need a PC or smartphone.

You might look into what Amish life is actually like outside of movies. Most depictions in the media tend to at best be caricatures of our most conservative sects like Schwartzentruber Amish. Beachy Amish, Schwarzenau, even Mennonites have some conveniences; a computer is just a tool of my trade. Each community inside each sect will have its own Ordnung, which is just a mutual agreement on values and conduct when it comes to community. I like to joke with my English friends that we're the original neckbeards :)

Here's a good depiction of midwest Amish and the diversity in their communities. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEyPgwIPkHo7lOk-72-tX...

Replace `twitter.com` with `nitter.net`. There are browser extensions that will do it for you.

> Can someone invite me to mastodon.technology?

I find this very ironic.

Why is that?

Sent

Thanks a lot!

He is almost certainly talking about Bluesky. It was created by Twitter after all.

How long as Mastodon been out and still no one uses it?

Obviously a different approach is needed to replace Twitter. Mastodon is a dead end.

Mastodon won't replace Twitter in terms of user base, but it's definitely not going to die. Plenty of niches are active on it.