Twitter to decentralize something

https://www.manton.org/2019/12/11/twitter-to-decentralize.html

by cdevroe • 7 years ago

173 88 7 years ago

pwinnski• 7 years ago

This seems right. Twitter is not engaging in this in pursuit of real openness, and the end result--if anything--is unlikely to be better for twitter users.

rahuldottech• 7 years ago

I have a question, what is it about blockchain that's so attractive to every new idea nowadays?

New social network? Blockchain!

New news platform? Blockchain!

I get what blockchain is. I get how it's used in cryptocurrency transactions. But will someone please explain why it's being incorporated into industries that always have done (and IMO can continue to do) just fine without it?

I skim through this [1] list, and see no clear benefit to incorporating blockchain into most/all of these? Most of them seem to be using it as 'secure database' or something.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/11/20-real-world-uses...

xmly• 7 years ago

What you really need is an open database.

That is all.

As long as data is stored in Twitter managed database, it would never work.

russian_bot• 7 years ago

can you define "open"?

MS90• 7 years ago

lol @ this screen name and question combo.

By open we mean everyone gets full permissions, tovarisch!

code-is-code• 7 years ago

mongoDB with default credentials

eeZah7Ux• 7 years ago

ActivityPub

dmitriid2• 7 years ago

And a few petabytes of open storage.

And a few open data centers to handle the load to the database and to the storage.

miohtama• 7 years ago

Tardigrade from Storj is the closest thing in production to solve decentralized data storage: https://tardigrade.io/

The user pays the storage cost upfront. However it is suitable only for file like content, not mutable content like databases AFAIK.

ficklepickle• 7 years ago

Weird. I'm wearing one of their shirts that I got from a convention!

hliyan• 7 years ago

What you really need is an appropriate UI layer over email: https://medium.com/hackernoon/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-n...

MayeulC• 7 years ago

The Matrix protocol is more or less an open, replicated database. E-mail is similar in some ways, but:

1: it doesn't define enough metadata ("this is an image", etc)

2: it doesn't handle backtracking well, if one of the recipient servers misses a message (servers are just supposed to retry a given number of times).

3: it has no security/authentication concept.

All of these could be bolted on regular e-mail, but calling it e-mail at that point would be a travesty, and we might as well call that a new protocol. And if we are writing a new protocol, we might as well take a few liberties to address the shortcommings of the first (one could argue against the last part).

im_dario• 7 years ago

Fun bit: "BCC is not possible". Actually, a BCC e-mail would be an ad.

rolleiflex4• 7 years ago

The problems with P2P is not problems of tech, they’re problems of incentives. The tech exists and it’s mostly solved — it’s just that anyone who is capable of building such a thing is not incentivised to do so, because that work could be spent in more productive (i.e. money-making) endeavours than what will by definition be incapable of making money since it explicitly decentralises the concentration of power.

So if Jack wants you to come build it, and you’re a P2P person, you should go work for him in even if you don’t like him, because he has both the willingness to pay for it, and the broadcast power to make it mainstream. And those are the main problems that needs to be solved, not tech.

I know this because I’m going through the same thing myself — I work on Aether (https://getaether.net), which is close to what I think he is talking about.

If we want ourselves to solve this, and not rely on @jacks of the world, we need to find a way to make P2P into a viable business. For me, in the end I decided to create a Pro version for use within companies, so that the P2P version can be fully free of monetisation concerns.

dmitriid2• 7 years ago

P2P is not really solved. Not to the true satisfaction.

For example, there are tens of millions of images uploaded to Twitter daily. They all have to be stored, and then retrieved for nearly arbitrary tweets and arbitrary users.

All this content has to be stored somewhere and retrieved fast enough to be useable.

dreamcompiler• 7 years ago

Storing images in multiple, decentralized servers and making them available to arbitrary users instantly? Pretty sure that's a solved problem. </IMG>

lowkeyokay• 7 years ago

PiedPiper solved this

buzzkillington6• 7 years ago

Thanks for the great project, it fixes the most egregious problems with bulletin boards - which reddit and hn are just fancier guis for.

There's a lot to unpack about the issues of p2p monetization. Probably a few books worth.

Before we get into the social issues I think the original sin of the internet was that IP did not negotiate payments as part of the fundamental protocol. Every layer above that suffers from the same.

This made sense in a government/corporate/university environment where the protocols were invented, but not for the wider world. I'm not going to try and give solutions because all of them are flawed in some way, but better than the current system where only surveillance advertising and altruistic services are viable business models.

nradov• 7 years ago

Payment is far too complex and abstract to contemplate building in at layer 3 (IP) of the network stack. Even in some idealized alternate history it would have never worked, and probably still couldn't work today.

AnthonyMouse3• 7 years ago

Before we get into the social issues I think the original sin of the internet was that IP did not negotiate payments as part of the fundamental protocol. Every layer above that suffers from the same.

That isn't really what causes the problem. Payments don't need to be inside the network layer of the internet.

The problem is that a digital payment system that works like IP routing doesn't exist at all, even independent of the internet. Existing banks could implement it trivially -- you walk into the branch with $100 in cash, give them the money and they give you a secret passphrase. Then the banks talk to each other so anyone anywhere in the world who walks into another bank and has the correct passphrase can get the money.

Except that there are laws against that. Know Your Customer laws that require them to know who you are and know who the person you're sending the money to is, even if what you're paying for is both legal and private. "Consumer protection" laws that require them to allow you to reverse the transaction, which means they can't just give the money to the other party, they have to sit on it for a while.

The effect of these laws is to make small transactions between random individuals incur prohibitively high transaction costs and subject honest people to capricious denial of service attacks by risk-averse financial institutions without effective recourse. It also makes people afraid to pay for things they don't want an official record of them consuming, which specifically applies to political speech when your views don't align with the party currently in office -- or the party who may be in office next year.

In other words, it interferes with people actually paying people for creating content on the internet. That leaves the creators with only advertising to support them, which implies central control by the ad network.

Fixing that requires a way to anonymously, irreversibly send small payments with low transaction costs. Which is currently de facto prohibited by law.

holler• 7 years ago

thanks for sharing, I just went through your docs trying to understand the architecture and realized that by nature your system has to erase data after a certain period, otherwise individual nodes would end up retaining potentially large amounts of data. Is that correct? Could a flood or gossip based system have full message history without ending up grinding to a slow halt?

rolleiflex4• 7 years ago

Yes, this is in fact a privacy feature - the data is gone 6 months after its last reference. In other words, we garbage collect for you so that you won’t end up dealing with a post you wrote when you were 14 10 years later, out of context. It’s sort of like the right to be forgotten.

That also makes it relatively unsuitable for long-term storage of stale information. Active communities will last, but archived ones with no new content won’t, and eventually be gone.

michaelsbradley• 7 years ago

Incentivisation is a problem that's faced by many decentralized technologies.

For example, one of the problems with Ethereum's Whisper protocol (decentralized messaging) has been that nodes aren't incentivised to process messages. There are other problems too and some efforts are being made to generally improve the tech[+].

[+] https://vac.dev/fixing-whisper-with-waku

rch• 7 years ago

Halfway through reading your comment I was going to mention Aether as a counterpoint. It's a great project that I'm happy to support even if I don't use it as often as I'd like.

rolleiflex4• 7 years ago

Thank you! Your support is very much appreciated.

(Context: I have a Patreon here: https://patreon.com/nehbit)

I generally try to only charge it on the months I push a new release on, and otherwise keep it paused. I’ve found that’s a good way for me to not stress out when my ‘day job’ gets too hectic.

hanniabu• 7 years ago

Cryptocurrency/blockchain is a great to power incentives and pay for development. I currently an paid this way to work on a self-sufficient project that operates in this manner. (We don't rely on any fundraising funds as with the more common projects you're familiar with)

dang• 7 years ago

Submitted title was "Micro.blog founder on Twitter's bluesky project". That's good information! but the place to add it is as a first comment in the thread, not in the submission title.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cdevroe• 7 years ago

Thanks I didn’t know that.

taytus3• 7 years ago

They are dedicating 5 people to this project... I mean... full 5 people... this is not a project, this is a charade.

wmf• 7 years ago

Five people is pretty large for the first phase of a research project. If they come up with something good Twitter can add more people later.

jrbuhl• 7 years ago

It's bigger than the size most startups being with.

gshulegaard• 7 years ago

I mean depending on seniority of the team hired that represents at least a million dollar (maybe more) per year investment.

I don't want to over sell it, but that kind of investment in something which is unlikely to yield revenue from a public company is at least unusual.

adventured• 7 years ago

If they immediately tasked 20 or 50 people to the project, it would be far more absurd than starting with five. Ideally a project like this starts out from a small team and is given more resources only when it's needed.

taytus3• 7 years ago

Trying to change the paradigm about how the planet connects and share information is an incredibly challenging task.

At twitter's scale, 5 people are a team you put together to decide if they are going to migrate to X library/framework for an internal tool.

This is not a task where you want to be frugal in terms of resources.

blowski• 7 years ago

5 excellent people is more likely to yield a successful project than 1,000 mediocre ones.

buboard• 7 years ago

i know right? they only needed one

JohnJamesRambo• 7 years ago

How many people made most of the tech innovations we enjoy now? Depends on who those five people are. Could be the next Bill Gates, Woz, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, and Bezos on the team.

dependenttypes• 7 years ago

Could be the next Bill Gates, Woz, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, and Bezos on the team.

I certainly hope not. While these were successful it does not mean that their projects were good or that they contributed for the good of mankind rather than for its downfall.

tsukurimashou• 7 years ago

adding more people to a project will most of the time make things worst, I'd rather work with 2 very competent people than having a team of 20 mediocre ones.

m463• 7 years ago

People want "the cloud" so they don't want to be responsible for things. Is this the same thing?

rjbwork• 7 years ago

People want the cloud so that they can be responsible for things at the right level of abstraction. Nobody wants to maintain a server with a message bus and a bunch of individual applications that communicate on it.

Just set up AWS EventBridge (or Azure EventGrid), or any of a dozen other options that don't require you to administer a server. And then use AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Zapier, etc, etc. Don't maintain a server that runs a bunch of apps.

We care about what we're managing, and care about being responsible for it, we just want to manage it at the right level of abstraction. Let the cloud provider manage and be responsible for the hardware.

viraptor2• 7 years ago

If Twitter is hoping to outsource curation to shared protocols,

I don't think they would ever do that. It would be really dangerous to implement and would possibly expose an unfiltered stream of partially illegal content.

I mean, can you imagine "validate if this is an unsolicited dickpic", or "verify if this is a dox attempt", or "verify this is cp"? This is one area that can never be exposed to non-employees.

dmurray• 7 years ago

It's almost certainly done by non-employees now, through contracting arrangements. While it's possible the unfiltered stream never leaves Twitter's premises or Twitter's computers, and the individual contractors sign an agreement directly with Twitter, it's only one step removed from just sending your stream to the service and getting back an annotation.

viraptor2• 7 years ago

Yes, they have contacts/agreements with the parties that get access. Whether that's full time employees or contractors, I don't think that changes the main issue. They will never expose that information to the public.

dgellow2• 7 years ago

It’s an experiment to explore a distributed Twitter. People read way too much into those tweets. It seems clear that they will evaluate existing projects, and technologies and make their own decisions.

More competition in this domain is a very good sign IMHO.

orblivion3• 7 years ago

I'm suspicious of motives here as much as anyone, but I think the issue of policy enforcement (and policy itself) is very important here. It already occurred to me that Mastodon and Gab were, despite being worst enemies, together inadvertently creating a reasonable content meta-policy. Some people want freedom of expression, some people want protection from objectionable material. With ActivityPub, you can choose your gatekeeper, and still more or less exist in the same social universe.

tom_mellior2• 7 years ago

Some people want freedom of expression, some people want protection from objectionable material.

You make things sound far too benign. Where do death threads fall in this classification, are they "free speech" or "objectionable material"? Where do disinformation bot armies fall? There's a lot more to content moderation than just "that person doesn't want to see boobies or the f-word".

Vinnl• 7 years ago

In this context, I think they meant "free speech" and "objectionable material" referring to the same things, but by different groups. So death threats would fall under both: Gab would allow them, most other Mastodon communities wouldn't. People (or law enforcement agencies) can then choose their gatekeeper.

orblivion3• 7 years ago

Presumably most people don't want their life threatened so almost nobody will pick an instance that allows that to happen. The few people who are interested in posting death threats can go ahead and make a rogue Gab instance or something, and every other instance will block them. They'll be their own silo where super sketchy things go on until the feds decide it's time to step in (since death treats are legally actionable). Such silo websites are already possible without the fediverse (and by some accounts already exist), so my model doesn't change anything here (assuming blocking is effective). (BTW even Gab dot com would block that; they ban people for death threats and porn and maybe even Doxing).

Disinformation campaigns? Well again, if you don't want to be misinformed, pick your gatekeeper. Probably all the better. If somebody's going to protect me from being misinformed, I want to know what their biases are. I don't trust Twitter or Facebook; it's not a simple and objective task.

I think your point that this stuff is complicated is exactly my point. It is complicated, and people have different preferences. No one company can be the gatekeeper that satisfies the entire planet's preferences (at least, not under the current models).

andy_ppp• 7 years ago

Twitter to embrace and extend a decentralised system and bend it to their own will using their incumbent position.

lxe• 7 years ago

Blockchain is probably not the best (or maybe even the worst) solution for decentralized messaging.

zadler• 7 years ago

The blockchain isn’t a messaging hub, it’s more about identity management

jayd16• 7 years ago

So like... Doesn't the open web exist? We have RSS feeds for subscription.

I guess we need a way to share things we've liked?

Retweets should be representable through RSS entries.

Hashtags are just searchable text.

alexmingoia• 7 years ago

The IndieWeb ecosystem is already doing this with microformats2 + webmention to support decentralized replies, likes, reposts, etc. with HTML blogs.

See https://aaronparecki.com for an example and https://indieweb.org/friendly and https://indieweb.org/Webmention

marknadal• 7 years ago

Open Source has generated $Trillions in value creation over the last few decades.

Twitter is fighting to stay relevant, they dropped to Top 35 website from Top 14 in last several months.

This is an opportunity for them to become a global standard, and that is worth it.

The most important piece is that they can scale when they pull it off. I've been working on decentralized tech for a while (I run https://github.com/amark/gun) and can say it takes a lot of attention that most projects (dare I say "blockchains") have no scaling abilities at all.

viburnum• 7 years ago

The want to keep ad revenue and outsource moderation.

mratsim• 7 years ago

Isn't Twitter ad revenue actually super low compared to the infrastructure costs?

Ericson2314• 7 years ago

They should just use ActivityPub. Sure it has problems, but federating with their biggest decentralized competitors would signal that they are serious. Improving the protocol can come next.

RRRA• 7 years ago

How has IPFS evolved lately?

gatestone• 7 years ago

What's wrong with NNTP? At least as a starting point?

pmlnr• 7 years ago

There's nothing wrong with NNTP. It's exactly what they'd need. Trouble is developer memory: people don't read back on technology, and thus, no trendy dev remembers NNTP in the container era.

dm33tri• 7 years ago

Attempts to decentralize are so decentralized. Still only TOR and Eth are somewhat functioning.

Let's see what Telegram Open Network will offer.

0xdeadb00f• 7 years ago

No mention of ActivityPub, Mastodon or Pleroma?

Twitter to decentralize something

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