I'm not against subscriptions per se, but I do think a one time entry cost is really all that's needed to achieve many of the desired effects. I'm probably in the minority as someone who'd rather pay $10 one time to enter a community once than $1-2/month to maintain my participation, though. I'm just personally tired of feeling like I'm paying a tax to construct something that may one day be good, rather than buying into a decently polished product upfront.
And even if it works, there will still be carry-over of many of the problems we've seen with centralized social networks.
It's oxymoronic. Our communication was developed in highly developed hierarchies for a reason: continual deception, deviance, anarchism, perversion, subversion always operating in conflict and in contrary to hierarchies.
Language is not self-organizing, signaling is not self-learning it self-regulating. The web opened the already existing pandora's box of Shannon's admittedly non-psychologically relevant info theory and went bust at scale.
"Startup engineer" believes the solution to decentralization is a startup, what a shock. We look forward to your launch.
If I were to build something like this, I'd use a services non-profit model.
Ad-supported apps result in way too many perverse economic incentives in social media, as we've seen time and time again.
I worked on open source decentralized social networking for 12 years, starting before Facebook even launched. Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.
I disagree that federation is "specifically political decentralization" but how so?
You claim that decentralization makes all of the problems of mainstream social networking worse and more intractable, but I think most of those problems come from the centralized nature of mainstream social media.
There is only one Facebook, and only one Twitter, and if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad. If you don't like the way moderation works with an instance, you don't have to federate with it, you can create your own instance and moderate however you see fit.
This seems like a better solution than everyone being subject to the whims of a centralized service.
| if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad
It's important to note we're optimizing for different things. When I say third-order social effects, it means the way that engagement algorithms and virality combine with massive scale to create a broadly negative effect on society. This comes in the form of addiction, how constant upward social comparison can lead to depression and burnout, or how in extreme situations, society's worst tendencies can be amplified into terrible results with Myanmar being the worst case scenario.
You assume centralization means total monopolization, which neither Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or anyone has been able to do. You may lose access to a specific audience, but nobody has a right to an audience. You can always put up a website, blog, write for an op-ed position at your local newspaper, hold a sign in a public square, etc. The mere existence of a centralized system with moderation is not a threat to freedom of speech.
Federation is a little bit more resilient but accounts can be blacklisted, and whole nodes can be blacklisted because of the behavior of a handful of accounts. And unfortunately, that little bit of resilience amplifies the problem of spam and bots, which for the average user is much bigger of a concern than losing their account. Not to mention privacy concerns, which is self-evident why an open system is more difficult than a closed one.
I'll concede that "worse" was poor wording, but intractable certainly wasn't. These problems become much more difficult to solve in a federated system.
However, most advocates of federation aren't interested in solving the same problems as I am, so that's where the dissonance comes from.
When almost everyone has access to something and you are singled out and denied that access (without due process), then there's a problem, discussions on the definition of monopoly notwithstanding.
You can try to fix that by ensuring the process is fair and transparent, or by changing the market so that there is no single entity whose services almost everyone uses.
And maybe users have a right to not be deleted without cause, despite it being a private platform. Maybe scale means that they have to play by different rules.
But what if the answer is reducing reach so only explicit followers can see what's posted? Do users have a right to being algorithmically boosted? Do they have a right to a wide audience? People who have had their reach reduced on instagram or twitter don't seem content to accept that but I don't see an argument against it.
In a federated system, spam and bots are a huge problem. One way this is handled is a shared blocklist. Something I toyed with was a propagated list like DNS to handle this problem, which would go a long way, but would also mean that being blocked by a highly trusted node could mean being blacklisted by the fediverse. This has already happened in a soft way when Gab was mass defederated. As the fediverse grows, automated tooling is necessary. Even if people have a right to contest being blocked, what's the reasonable mechanism for getting unblocked in a massive federated system?
That's not to say Fediverse-style moderation would solve this. I don't really know what the solution is for algorithmic feeds. Personally I'd rather go back to lightly-federated or unfederated forums, but that idea seems sadly unpopular.
Especially when engagement is the primary metric, which incentivizes our worst attention-seeking behavior. Well thought out, nuanced posts get lost in the ether. Hot takes, trolling and extreme positions get pushed to the top.
Reddit and HN mitigate this somewhat with the downvote system, which is hardly perfect, but at least means negative feedback is not given a positive weight in rankings.
Even in a federated system, you can be blacklisted although it does take more coordination and work.
i2p and writing to the blockchain are an attempt to deal with that through permanence, but those are not without their own (serious) problems.
Payment processors underpin ad systems and they have strong leverage to pressure ad buyers and can pull your ability to make those sales. That's on top of the advertisers themselves having strong positions on what kind of content they want to advertise beside.
Everyone has to pay for servers somehow. Especially at scale. And doing that without payment processors is difficult. Crypto has not proven itself to be something consumers will use.
In all reality, the solution to as much free speech as possible on a social platform is to limit reach. If people want to broadcast to millions or even billions, then of course that will come with limitations and restrictions. Everyone has to balance the varied interests required to achieve scale. Limiting individual reach means more potential freedom for users.
Something like OAuth means that you can give different levels of private data to different actors, based on what perms they request.
Then you just have whoever is holding your data anyway (it's gotta live somewhere) also handle the OAuth keys. That's how the Bluesky PDS system works, basically.
Now, there is an issue with blanket requesting/granting of perms (which an end user isn't necessarily going to know about), but IMO all that's missing from the Bluesky-style system is to have a way to reject individual OAuth grants (for example, making it so Bluesky doesn't have access to reading my likes, but it does have access to writing to my likes).
If I have 100 followers on 100 different nodes, that means each node has access to (and holds on to) some portion of my data by way of those followers.
In a centralized system, a user having total control over their data (and the ability to delete it) is more feasible. I'm not saying modern systems are great about this, GDPR was necessary to force their hands, but federation makes it more technically difficult.
I don't really see my posts remaining in people's RSS readers after deletion as a problem. It's a fundamental property of information distribution as far as I am concerned.
But even then, that means there's resistance, but that's not the same as things being technically impossible. In federated systems, a delete is not a delete. It can't be because there's no way to confirm deletion on nodes you can't control.
And I understand your perspective as a realist on deletion generally, but that's not most social media users understanding when they're told they can control their own data, which is a common selling point of federation.
A centralized system which is properly incentivized to completely wipe all data associated with an account will be able do so, but a federated system can't.
I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.