We are oriented to think that way after ~15 years of the algorithmic engagement-maxi world of Twitter. It always looks like there's a lot happening all the time but look deeper and it's a bunch of people offering their weak takes on hot topics to build their brand.
What was the last thing you remember being must-see sfuff on Twitter?
But I do agree with you, being away from the noise has been really freeing for my mind
The Russia circus last weekend made for some pretty good near real-time intrigue. That being said, I don’t care what crazy thing is happening…I’m not creating an account to hear what’s being said on “The Global Town Square ™”
In theory, Twitter should be that real-time news feed from these kind of events, but it doesn't actually work. Signal-to-noise ratio is just very low.
I never cared about algorithmic engagement.
Before (and during) the engagement Twitter:
- has everyone you needed there, centralised
- has search, where you can find people and topics you care about
Mastodon has none of that: you have to know which server to join and how to find people and topics. Centralization always beats distribution in convenience.
It's kinda like the "I don't care about politics" stand. You might not care, but the institutions you interact with every day certainly do.
This is extremely useful
(Note: I'm of the opinion that fediverse-style federation in the context of forums is merely a nice-to-have; the web is already naturally federated, and people should not feel bad if they want to save money/tech complexity/administration complexity by settling for ordinary self-hosted forums.)
Is there a reason for this, though? Need to be able to iterate on features quickly? Maybe not being able to tackle various complexities with the total available resources? Or maybe federation is just inherently expensive?
Why couldn't we have an alternative written in a more performant language/runtime with maybe things like lower quality images/videos or something?
Because performance was not a concern when it was designed - or it could be that it was designed for small communities, and therefore not possible to scale-up cheaply. One of the problem is the caching of pictures from the different instances connected (if I remember correctly) which makes the data storage requirements go up very fast
Is that the best way? No clue. But I'm glad to chip in.
Instead, it feels like the current Fediverse demands that I make a blind choice to entrust not merely a copy of my content but also my whole future identity to whatever of these current instances looks the most stable/trustworthy at first glance, hoping my choice will be good for 1-5-10-15 years. It's stressful, and then I look into self-hosting, and then I put the whole thing off for another week...
AFAICT I would need to set up a whole federated node of my own in order to get that level of identity-control. Serious question: Is there any technical limitation preventing the admin of an instance from just seizing an particular account and permanently impersonating the original owner?
In contrast, I was hoping/expecting some kind of identity backed by a private asymmetric key. Even if signing every single message would be impractical, one could at least use it to prove "The person [email protected] has the same private key that was used to initialize [email protected]."
"bsky.app" works as a web client for the official "bsky.social" instance, but it also works with the instance I self-host (or any other spec-compliant instance). Likewise, 3rd party clients work with the official instance, and also with 3rd party instances.
However, no key-stealing could possibly happen right now in any case because... the PDS ("instance") holds your signing key - the client never even sees it. Having the server hold your signing keys is very user-friendly, but of course not ideal for security and identity self-sovereignty. In general, the security model involves trusting your PDS (just as you trust your mastodon instance admin, or twitter dot com - the improvements are centered around making it easier to jump ship if you change your mind).
Client-signed posting is something that's not even possible right now, but I believe it's somewhere on the roadmap. If it doesn't happen some time soon I'll be implementing it myself. (I'm writing my own PDS software)
But yes, the protocol does have a fair bit of trust of your PDS built in. But that's inevitable for decent UX—imo the crypto craze proved that basically no one wants to (or can) hold their own keys day-to-day. If you want to have a cryptographic protocol that the average person can use, some amount of trust is necessary. The AT Protocol artfully threads the needle and finds a good compromise that is a (large) improvement over the status quo, in my opinion.
Maybe your point of view is outdated?
People love to reinvent the wheel and claim it's a whole new thing. No ideas on the web have really been innovative since the bubble popped. The innovation has all been on delivery and execution (not wanting to discount any of that).
Secondly, signing every message wouldn’t be impractical at all, I don’t think. We’ve had the technology to do this for a long time and it’s very simple. What we don’t have is good key management. For average users, this would have to be something provided by their devices (phone or the Secure Enclave in your Mac or whatever) - managing keys and the web-of-trust shamozzle are the main reasons why encrypted email for everyone never took off.
So as long as both your source and destination support account transfers, you can usually switch and even seamlessly bring along most of your followers without them noticing.
No idea about your admin question. All bets are likely off with a bad admin. If you want actual cryptographically guaranteed communication, that doesn't exist in a usable form (except for Secure Scuttlebutt, and that's reeeeally stretching the "usable" part)
But none of your content goes with, and that's really terrible because it gives a lot of power to petty-kingdom jackass admins.
AT Protocol is heartening because maybe they've got a good solution to that.
(It's technically possible to edit the links in the posts you exported yourself before importing, but technically correct isn't the best kind of "correct")
You can pay for that service, but you have to administer the instance, and it’s not able to reuse the servers RAM for multiple domains; it’s not like email where spam management is built in.
Doesn't federation require admins of both instances to agree to federate?
If so, I could imagine it not scaling for larger instances that could receive 100+ federation requests a day.
Further, you would have to repeat this step each time to encountered a new instance you wished to participate on.
Is my understanding of the federation process correct or have I totally missed the mark? :D
My recommendation was much like MX records for email, so you can use a hosted server under your own identity.
The promise is that one can not only transfer the identity and all personal data across instances of a single service, but also across different services (imagine from mastodon to Lemmy).
Sadly, it never caught on.
This is why I want domains as identities to succeed. I want to own my handle on every platform, but I don’t want to self host.
Decoupling identity from social is a good idea but you can't just migrate the key storage to a single custodian entity. There'd need to be a multiple custodians to ensure the same power imbalances didn't reappear in a different form (e.g. Google owning everyone's logins).
All that is needed is a to create your local identity (e.g. like storing fingerprint biometrics on your laptop) and a clever way to sync between physical devices (e.g. through bluetooth).
We're in this weird situation where people don't want to be responsible for managing their own data/id, but can't trust others to do so for them.
I was toying with an idea/protocol where:
1. You add a TXT/CNAME that points to a trusted "authentication provider".
2. When you try and login to a website that supports the protocol, it checks the DNS record and redirects you to your provider.
3. You then "prove" that you own the domain to the provider - how this is done would be specific to each provider, but one possible method could be by providing a signed message that can be verified vs. a public key stored in a DNS record.
4. The provider redirects you back to the original website with a token.
5. Finally the original website consumes this token by sending it in a request to the provider. The response contains the domain as confirmation of the user's identity.
This approach removes the need for self-hosting as users can point and setup their names with third party providers.
Users can also trivially switch to a different/self-hosted provider by changing the CNAME.
Communities could also allow direct registration by hosting their own provider instance and pointing a wildcard subdomain at it: (i.e. *.users.ycombinator.com).
Users could then sign up to said provider using traditional email/password and claim a single subdomain: (i.e. tlonny.users.ycombinator.com)
Thoughts?
Though what you described is just a regular federated identity workflow, except autodiscovery through DNS (though that is already a thing for some)
Current spec drafts at <https://github.com/WebOfTrust/keri>.
I have been using Twitter more often lately as I really don't care about what they do to their APIs or whatever, and it's honestly improving lately.
Most of the people I followed before were clearly left wing. After Musk takeover a lot of them left the platform. Plus the algorithm now pushed more right-wing content in the home page. I wouldn't mind if it were real people discussing valid talking points. The problems are 1) they are all coming from blue check mark accounts, 2) most of it are clearly misinformation, and 3) you can tell most of these tweets and replies are troll and bot accounts. It's just annoying.
Musk boosting his own tweets in the feed was annoying. Had to unfollow him.
I use Twitter via mobile website, and it breaks more frequently than before.
Overall, it's become like Musk's other product, Tesla. It over promises and under delivers. It's not reliable anymore. As a 2x Toyota owner I cannot stand products that are results of crappy engineering. So there you go.
Edit: one more thing: it used to be that I could go to the trending hashtags and get latest news in a second. It's not the case anymore. Case in point: yesterday France was trending. I saw the tweets and got the impression that some member of minority community has committed mass stabbing or rape again. Because the Twitter results were brigaded by right wing blue check mark accounts spewing anti immigration propaganda. It was not until I read a BBC article that I realized what happened was complete opposite, police executed an immigrant at a traffic stop.
Twitter has lost almost all of its core values under Musk. It's just sad.
The majority use-case requires centralization, which is subject to the network effects that constitute 95% of Twitter's value. Great that it works for you and some others, but it cannot work for most.
It's like twitter and reddit but 15 years ago (and by that I mostly mean it's janky and full of bugs. Just like the web was 15 years ago!)