Re:The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of s*
by jillesvangurp on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @08:09AM
(#35886197)
Seems like a sane approach.
IMHO, any protocol that isn't signing content (like mastodon) is merely moving the problem. Signatures allow people to authenticate content and sources and allow people to build networks of trust on top of that. So bluesky is getting that right. Unsigned content should not be acceptable in this century.
Signed content immediately solves two issues:
- reputation: reputation is based on a history of content that is liked and appreciated by trusted sources that is associated with an identity and the associated set of public keys. You can know 100% for sure whether content is reputable or not. Either it is signed by some identity with a known reputation or it is not.
- AI/bot content could sign content with some key of course but it would be hard to fake reputation. Not impossible of course but you'd have to work at it for some time to build up the reputation. And people can moderate content and destroy the reputation of the identity and keys.
The whole problem with essentially all social media networks so far is a complete and utter lack of trustworthiness. You could be reading content by an AI, a seemingly bonafide comment from somebody you trust might actually come from some Chinese, Russian or North Korean troll farm, or you are just wading through mountains of click bait posted by "viral" marketing companies, scammers, or similarly obnoxious/malicious publishers. Twitter's blue tick is laughably inadequate for dealing with this problem. And people can yell whatever without having to worry about their reputation; which causes them to behave in all sorts of nasty ways.
Signed content addresses a lot of that. You can still choose to be nasty, obnoxious, misleading, malicious, etc. but not without staking and risking your reputation.
Mastodon not having a lot of these issues (yet) is more a function of its relative obscurity rather than any built in features. I like Mastodon mainly because it still feels a bit like Twitter before that got popular. But it's not sustainable. If a few hundred million people join, it will get just as bad as other networks. In other words, I don't see how this could last unless they address this. I don't think that this should be technically hard. You need some kind of key management and a few minor extensions to the protocol. The rest can be done client side.
That would be more productive than this rant against the AT protocol.
IMHO, any protocol that isn't signing content (like mastodon) is merely moving the problem. Signatures allow people to authenticate content and sources and allow people to build networks of trust on top of that. So bluesky is getting that right. Unsigned content should not be acceptable in this century.
Signed content immediately solves two issues:
- reputation: reputation is based on a history of content that is liked and appreciated by trusted sources that is associated with an identity and the associated set of public keys. You can know 100% for sure whether content is reputable or not. Either it is signed by some identity with a known reputation or it is not.
- AI/bot content could sign content with some key of course but it would be hard to fake reputation. Not impossible of course but you'd have to work at it for some time to build up the reputation. And people can moderate content and destroy the reputation of the identity and keys.
The whole problem with essentially all social media networks so far is a complete and utter lack of trustworthiness. You could be reading content by an AI, a seemingly bonafide comment from somebody you trust might actually come from some Chinese, Russian or North Korean troll farm, or you are just wading through mountains of click bait posted by "viral" marketing companies, scammers, or similarly obnoxious/malicious publishers. Twitter's blue tick is laughably inadequate for dealing with this problem. And people can yell whatever without having to worry about their reputation; which causes them to behave in all sorts of nasty ways.
Signed content addresses a lot of that. You can still choose to be nasty, obnoxious, misleading, malicious, etc. but not without staking and risking your reputation.
Mastodon not having a lot of these issues (yet) is more a function of its relative obscurity rather than any built in features. I like Mastodon mainly because it still feels a bit like Twitter before that got popular. But it's not sustainable. If a few hundred million people join, it will get just as bad as other networks. In other words, I don't see how this could last unless they address this. I don't think that this should be technically hard. You need some kind of key management and a few minor extensions to the protocol. The rest can be done client side.
That would be more productive than this rant against the AT protocol.