I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.
Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?
If anything, the transparency of a social media post is much better than, say, private emails that can be buried and ignored.
I have seen plenty of toxic comments on "official" announcements that allow comments that the official entity doesn't actually read. I'm happier with no comment than with toxic comments.
* A police report is a legal document.
* A tweet can be removed by either its poster or by the platform's operator after it's been posted, while only the police can make a report disappear.
* You can tweet at someone anything you want and they don't have to accept it to receive it, while the police can refuse to accept an unfounded report. An insurance company might require a police report be filed before accepting a claim, but it would not accept a tweet as a substitute.
Right now RSS is, for the vast majority of the public, a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to hear it.
Views exceed interactions by orders of magnitude.
Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)
Also, liking it signal that other people were interested in the post. I don't global likes are useful for likes from people you follow are important.
Finally, replies mean can see interaction from people you follow. If you follow interesting people, you see interesting discussion.
With social media, it isn't possible to read everything, I know I used to try to read my whole Twitter feed. There needs to be some way to filter than just time when you looked. I think the current algorithmic feed is bad because it tries to show other stuff instead of ordering things that want to see.
If you want likes, or views, or reposts, then you will have to "engineer" your post in such a way that it gets more attention. Not sure if that's always beneficial.
The problem is with Twitter and others is that they now have algorithmic feed. That means posts get seen globally and clout metrics are valuable for reach. Comments also get clout so get lots of drive-by ones and less discussion.
If someone has an RSS reader with feeds from some news sources, official channels issuing announcements, etc - that's great, but does anyone consider that "social media"?
(Of course, you can believe that social media is bad and you don't want it, but that's a different question)
Otherwise, there’s absolutely utility to interacting over social media. We’re doing it right now!
We're talking about marketing here. Shouldn't it be conversions or awareness or something?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's goal is not to be "the" hub. It is a middleman that takes you to other websites that implement it. Be it twitter (on shakey ground), Your own website, or a game server (in theory). Anything that implements it and sends out messages can be caught by any number of clients made on top of RSS.
Asking for interactivity from an RSS Feed is like asking for interactivity from an email. The goal is to point you towards other content that may or may not be interactable. The RSS is simply there to consolidate all your feeds into one view.
Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed. And they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.
And I explained why that response is a bit nonsensical. Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.
>they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.
1. Thars overly presumptuous. Social media didn't give them a real choice.
2. You don't need an account for every blog. Not even for interacting. I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing. If you really want to like stuff sure. But that's not anything different from today.
>Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed.
Sure, Bluesky shows they don't have to but the service can still be successful. As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.
How's thst different from using something like Feedly? It's juet a different app view.
It does take it away. The current status quo has (1) a feed of content and (2) two-way interaction between poster and commenter in the same place. Switching to just RSS inherently takes away (2)
> Social media didn't give them a real choice.
Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.
> I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing.
People didn't but I doubt most people running blogs want to deal with anonymous comments. You already get so much spam and unhinged content when you require a signup.
> As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.
Part of it sure, but it also involved other layers to compensate for the parts that are lacking in RSS that users have come to expect.
Can we say that people choose to get addicted to addictive stuff?
And using other non RSS parts is fine again, RSS isn't a social media. It's a way to help aggregate content. You keep claiming to know how RSS works but demonstrate that you feel it's some competitor instead of a commodity.
And yes, the powers that be "won" becsuse they were at war with the idea of people not having all their time dedicated to their feed. Users "chose". to be manipulated becsuse their choices were taken down, weakened, or taken hostage. Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.
Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them. Further, it's a known problem for both of those sites that people will not read the article and instead riff of the title. I'd wager the final 50% of every article could be removed and it wouldn't significantly change the comment sections here.
> Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.
Yes they did, they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour. The alternatives just aren't good enough.
Yes. And you can use RSS feed to do the same thing, either liking to a reddit comment section or actually reading the article and not bothering. Same structure except you're not limited to Reddit's servers.
>they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour
They lost choice and decided using the worst choice was better than moving off of Reddit. I guess if enshiftification is "choice", They did indeed choose. I chose to walk away.
And it's why I hate centralizafion. Because it reduces you down to two choices per owner. Their way or the highway. If you instead managed an RSS feed of a dozen websites and Reddit removed its API, your daily feed may be smaller but your browsing habits would not change. I can still interact with the other 11 sites as much as I want and not need extra time trying to figure out what's out there.
My point is that (a) many people have not despite the cess pit Reddit and other sites have become, and (b) RSS is inherently incapable of replacing the experience because it’s a pull only mechanism.
Mastadon based itself on ActivityPub, not RSS.
We’ll see if the long term forces that consolidated and entities Twitter and it’s ilk will do the same to Mastadon instances. Cause I’m still not convinced that the general public is willing to or ready to run their own servers
The users. You can put your news on RSS and approximately nobody will read them. Or you can put them on twitter and it will reach people.
This is true even now when the management of the bird app is seemingly hellbent on destroying the site. It was even more true when the decision was made.
I guess we can hope (or work) on an RSS based future, but the key thing to achieve is users, and then the rest will follow.
Issue is that the bird app doesn't want this middleman between them. They want all the users' attention.
Picking a reader means making one or more choices (for your phone, laptop, tablet whatever), adding a feed is several steps, and it is easy to get overloaded with too many boring items (and too few interesting ones) because curation is left to the end user.
Centralized social networks require no choosing of readers, let you add an info source in one click, and ensure you have neither too few nor too many interesting items -- for some value of "interesting" -- regardless of how many entities you follow.
I love RSS and decentralization but creating a smooth, user friendly experience with such tools is a major unsolved challenge.
But after that, it is at worst pasting a link into your client, or clicking a button if the site gives proper attention to it. Not that much more friction than following someone on any centralized platform.
Already, we talking about some other service that accumulates the history and provides search, history, etc. That and many other things (likes, replies, quotes, etc) are all things users expect (rightfully, IMHO).
While orgs/people simply issuing announcements should ideally provide an RSS feed, that type of content is a tiny part of "social media".
Their website! Now get off my lawn! :p
Getting around that requires some heavy and expensive scraping (compared to a lightweight API to hook into), and as we're seeing right now companies are at each other's necks in real time over scraping.
Back to crushing reality, that's also why I'm a huge RSS fan. your feed should be based on websites you want to follow, not what the website's algorithms want you to follow. RSS puts the control back to the user while giving 95% of the convinience of a centralized platform.
I.e. police.gov should just dashboard this for you using location services.
If Bluesky did ActivityPub, that will federate Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. There are tools for posting to old social media, we will probably see tools for the new ones. Should be easier since protocols are more open.
I would have assumed this one. What's the downside?
RSS in the large is a nightmare. My agent YOShInOn lives on the wrong side of an ADSL connection and has all its RSS fetching done by
which I like operationally. I'm following about 110 RSS feeds which cost 10 cents/month each. I like having a simple AWS Lambda that puts the notifications in SQS and then fetching them at my convenience later. It's a steal for a feed from MDPI that has 1000+ papers a day or arXiv or The Guardian but not affordable to follow 2000 independent blogs which I would like to do. The poll and poll and poll some more and poll again and maybe poll too fast and waste resources and other times poll too slow and not only get content late but miss it entirely situation is just not cool. I could write an RSS poller but it would be slowing down my internet connection or adding to my cloud bills and would need maintenance.
It was created more than a decade ago.
both bluesky and mastodon also emit RSS feeds
RSS feeds peaked with 6% adoption in 2005 (this is not an exaggeration - actual statistic). It's been all downhill from there. RSS is more dead than IE6; which is still being used to this day to control older industrial equipment.
No, I don't want a portal with a little box for every feed I follow.
No, I don't want a listing like an email client.
No, I never want it to show me a piece of content twice unless I ask for it. (e.g. as David Byrne says: "say something once, why say it again?")
Yes, I expect to subscribe to more RSS feeds than I can read entirely so I expect it to learn my preferences like my YOShInOn agent does. In a cycle of a few days, YOShInOn might find 3000 or so articles in RSS feeds and it chooses 300 to show me which I thumbs up or thumbs down. I knew such a thing was possible when I wrote this paper
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/
but now it is not only possible but easy.
Maybe it exists, but I have not encountered a situation where I could not access a podcast with RSS.
The problem is that it's very hard to justify spending money to accomplish this when Twitter/X/Bluesky/Threads/etc. is offering the service for free.
Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should be able to make their own instance that they can control and plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.
I think the central question is how people can collectively own a node and organize its decision making. Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's feudalism.
Email is far from perfect, but good enough and its federated nature means it's reasonable for institutions to use it as a default mode of communication and authentication.
What exactly is the alternative to federation? Is it possible for everyone to be their own admin?
In any case, under feudalism serfs didn't have the freedom to choose and switch their feudal lord as they saw fit.
I also believe it. I don't want to have to subject myself to the X dumpster fire or sign away my data to Facebook just to receive communications from my local police department or child's school.
These ‘federated’ systems are just recreating feudalism in cyberspace.
Edit: Well even worse in some ways, since it’s not like a majority of the ‘gentry’ and ‘nobles’ could challenge and seize control of e.g. a Mastodon instance from the owner.
Or worker owned, or shared ownership (basically 1/3 capital, 1/3 workers and 1/3 local council, ratios are not usually that, it is often 60% for the capital owners, but you see the point)
Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/)
And Bluesky is a publisher and a client?
https://atproto.com/specs/atp#protocol-extension-and-applica...
For consumers that just want to write posts and get comments, there are many platforms out there. http://threads.net is an example of one.
Again as I have already said, it's like requiring a blogger to write an elegant static site generator. Who cares that the Wordpress backend is messy and bloated? Only on HN will you find this fetish about an elegant backend when you are merely a user.
If the blogger just wants to write a blog and doesn't care about anything else, they can just use threads, or keep on using twitter, for that matter. But for some reason, this hypothetical blogger has decided that they don't want to use Twitter. They don't have to write their own static site generator, but in moving off Twitter, they're going to be exposed to some of the details behind the scene. If they're not an anti-intellectual, this hypothetical blogger can do some light reading to get up to speed.
When you want to reach people you go to where the people are. You fish where the fish is. It is that simple. People did not join twitter because the police was posting there, the police post on twitter because that is where they can reach the people.
That I can agree with. Usually what I have seen, at least where i live, is that no public body used it exclusively. They still had a website, they still talked with journalist, talked with radios, used flyers, whatever was appropriate in each situation. (Or at least they tried, not saying everyone was getting it always right.)
I've been annoyed over the years because (not having an account) sometimes Twitter won't let me look at Tweets. Hopefully none of them contained useful info.
These public entities post _exclusively_ on Twitter as if it's the public square. It's not and it shouldn't be. The argument is not about how easy it is to create a Twitter account.
To be fair, that is what ActivityPub is - less simple syndication.
It can just talk to your Mastodon server, which as the article notes is very easy to set up on Coolify/Digital Ocean, etc
When everyone Broadcasts, info explodes, no one hears anything. And as a reaction, they shout louder and louder or increase the number of times they repeat their message. This compound the absurdity of giving everyone Broadcast capability even further.
When you use the word commons you dont even realize the commons never had Broadcast (1 to All messaging) for Free.
Technically we can give everyone a radio transmitter that support Broadcasting. But no one allows that anywhere on the planet ever since Claude Shannons Theory of Information came out. Because it clearly shows us everyone can not broadcast simultaneously.
Even the human body with more cells and more signalling going on than the entire dumb internet does not give every cell broadcast capability.
It was my understanding that Mastadon has _far less_ javascript than Twitter, not more.
The UI for mastadon always seemed far cleaner, more performant, and importantly - capable of actually loading, compared to twitter
Essentially, anytime something is shared from twitter I simply ignore it, because it may take a good 40 minutes to figure out the workaround to view it, compared to Mastadon which 'just works'.
Have you tried running a server? Even a single user instance is a resource hogger.
Not sure if there is really anything attempting to implement essentially Twitter with this model or not? I would be interested though if someone has run across or is working on a system like that.
Things do not need to be publicly owned or distributed to be useful to society.
- PDS are websites with an RSS feeds, each a publisher
- Relays are WebSub hubs aggregating many sources into a central host
- App views, labelers, Feed Generators, whatever are subscribers being alerted when a new entry is received, making their internal sauce. They're also hubs for pushing content to any step that comes after
- PDS are at the end, subscribers of labelers, app views and feed generators. They make their internal sauce to have a nice social-oriented UI.
A properly decentralized, boring-tech Bluesky can take this form. Steps are additive, not all of them are needed
1. A single, simple server that can receive and emit RSS feeds. Emission of RSS feeds must be able to include content from received entries. Directly subscribe to the people you want to follow, you're done. Social readers <https://indieweb.org/social_reader> do something like that with indieweb formats.
2. A network of WebSub hubs to more efficiently get and distribute everyone's content. superfeedr.com is one of them, https://switchboard.p3k.io/ is another one, but we need many more. Also RSS feeds need to have a server-side that sends a notification to the hub when something is published. Having hubs make searching and having a general view easier. In fact we already have something like that, it's called Planets <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)>
3. Any filtering can happen on top. "People with blue hair", "Posts without tuna in them", any algorithm is anyone's to build
All the layers already exist, but like any social endeavour it's all about the network effect. Having a simple thing to install where you can post, follow and search will make wonders
Having seen this process of creation sustaining & decaying happen again and again, I totally get why you would feel this.
And I forgive you for applying the thinning broadly like this, casting insidious doubt widely like this.
But that's not what Bluesky is doing. Some links; first their o.g. app-lead (is that still right?),
> The network should outlast the company. Imagine if the Web died when Netscape or Yahoo did! It's strange to even think that. The same should apply to social networks.
https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lau2bgyolc2g
(Or see 18 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012757)
And ((new) board member) Mike Masnick & (founder) Jay Graber on protocols not platforms, 9 months ago (pre Mike on the board),
https://bsky.app/profile/mmasnick.bsky.social/post/3kjtmw4m6...
Steve Klabnik has a post, How Bluesky Works, that talks about what Bluesky is. Yes, right now a variety of the layers of At Protocol are run by BlueSky alone. But the data can retain its integrity even if they fail, the network & data is by design open & transparent to all & transferable, and it's all based on protocols. https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work
This hypothesis that everyone else has been rug pulled & so BlueSky will too defies a ton of very hard careful work that Jay began when she very specifically worked to make sure BlueSky could be independent, to make it based on protocols.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 | https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds
My opinion is that their ATProto is better than ActivityPub b/c account migration and global search among other things
A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.
Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.
Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.