Protocols, not platforms

https://allenbrunson.com/posts/protocols-not-platforms/

by allenbrunson • 4 years ago

101 75 4 years ago

allenbrunson.com

riffic• 4 years ago

Eugen Rochko is doing an "ask me anything" now in the Mastodon subreddit if anyone is curious.

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109546596477513691

allenbrunson18• 4 years ago

yep. good stuff! this is all new to me. eugen seems like a good steward of his platform.

agluszak2• 4 years ago

Right about the time a product achieves a near-monopoly, some genius product manager decides it is time to tighten the screws. Make search just a little bit worse, so the company can make more from ads. Make the user’s experience just a little bit worse, to increase engagement, and make more money from ads.

That's exactly why capitalism must be regulated.

notwokeno• 4 years ago

IMO capitalism isn't the problem, non-free software is.

We actually had chat interoperability between all the major social networks/email providers via XMPP and that ended about when the iPhone came out.

lucideer• 4 years ago

We actually had chat interoperability between all the major social networks

No we didn't - XMPP is a federated protocol & none of the major networks ever supported federation. The XMPP protocol came with a lot of decently implemented open source packages that helped those companies get their chat systems off the ground & to a point where they could lock them in. Supporting federation from the beginning would've made that lock in much more difficult, so it wasn't in their interest. i.e. a capitalist disincentive.

Capitalism is the problem, you're just doing your best to find excuses for it elsewhere.

allenbrunson18• 4 years ago

you know what they say: capitalism is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones. i am at a loss as to what would work, here.

(edit: whoops, democracy, not capitalism)

agluszak2• 4 years ago

Nitpick: they say it about democracy. Capitalism is (hopefully) not a form of government (yet).

I'm not saying that we need a completely different system. We need more regulation. Stronger FTC in the US, more anti-monopolistic policies everywhere. Prevent big corporations from locking in their customers/users and creating walled gardens. Use open technologies in state administration[1]. Release publicly-funded code as open-source[2]

Basically implement everything Electronic Frontier Foundation[3] and Free Software Foundation Europe[4] have been advocating for since forever.

That would be a radical change, yes, but not a revolution and cOmMuNiSm.

[1] https://element.io/blog/bundesmessenger-is-a-milestone-in-ge... [2] https://publiccode.eu/ [3] https://www.eff.org/ [4] https://fsfe.org/

ambientenv• 4 years ago

"as to what would work" ... that's because we, the collective we, have not spent any sincere time and effort to find other ways. Capitalism in it's various incarnations and disguises has worked extremely well for just the right amount of people. Those days are coming to an end, and unlike, say, the laws of physics, we can adopt new beliefs, values and ways of doing things that benefit the collective we. Finance is basically made up as we go as it is.

commandlinefan2• 4 years ago

why capitalism must be regulated

It is regulated, pretty heavily, and we still get shrinkflation. I'm not even sure what sort of regulation you could propose that would protect against that - you don't seriously believe that this doesn't happen in communist economies as well, do you?

luuuzeta2• 4 years ago

I can’t say that Twitter was exactly an exception to this rule, for me. I never liked it enough to contribute my own content to it. I do like its userbase enough to have spent many hours reading it, over the last couple of years. That all came to a screeching halt in the last month or so, when it was acquired by a tyrant.

Oh my hyperbole, what would we do without you?!

Then came the exodus from Twitter, due to the tyrannical new owner. Many of the voices that I have come to appreciate the most are leaving. In particular, the ones with the highest morals were the first to jump ship. As well they should! If you stay on Twitter, the way it is now, and continue to contribute your content to it, then you are saying that you approve of the tyrant-in-chief banning reporters for writing about things that make him look bad.

Oh my hyperbole! It's interesting to see the dichotomy between people who think Twitter was a safe haven and people who think it was a hellhole.

And you can both support that Elon Musk shouldn't have been so trigger happy banning reporters without a clear policy in place AND that doxxing should earn you an instantaneous and permanent ban.

allenbrunson18• 4 years ago

hey, here's an opportunity to respond to a thing i've seen going around a lot.

in one respect, elon musk and i agree: the twitter bots that follow airplanes around are egregious and in poor taste. i would be fine with twitter having a policy saying that they are off-limits.

... but that's not at all what he did. his approach was erratic, scatter-shot, and full of post-hoc rationalizations. it's that sort of gaslighting and lying that is the real problem, not being against plane-tracking bots.

commandlinefan2• 4 years ago

when it was acquired by a tyrant

Especially grating when you consider the previous owners were far more tyrannical for a much longer period of time.

luuuzeta2• 4 years ago

Exactly! I stopped reading when I reached that paragraph. I cannot take anyone pedestalizing journalists and leftists in general as "the ones with the highest morals" seriously, despite all what was going on with Twitter. After all it's not like it cannot be disproven quite easily.

- Opaque moderation (at least more opaque than the current one)

- Banning and shadowbanning users despite admitting the administration admitting they didn't violate company's ToS

- Soft banning users regularly so they could build a case to outright ban them once and for all

- Collusion with some three-letters agencies (see Twitter Files) to censor speech, bury newsworthy stories, etc

- Journalists were treated as a separate class above regular users.

gambler2• 4 years ago

When your revolution against "platforms" is led by people who host all their code on GitHub and have a public LinkedIn profile, you're not paying attention to your surroundings and will inevitably be taken advantage of.

allenbrunson18• 4 years ago

i host, like, maybe two percent of my code on github. what's there is just for show. and i am no great fan of linkedin, that is for sure. same with facebook. but i am not quite such a big deal that i can afford to ignore all of those big bad platforms. i am not quite ready to go live in a cabin in the woods, in other words.

gambler2• 4 years ago

So, in essence, you don't have anything meaningful to respond with. You're perfectly fine with using centralized platforms when it's convenient and their ownership aligns with your ideology. You might say you don't like them, but you like them well enough to put links to them on your personal website.

allenbrunson18• 4 years ago

(i stole the title from mike masnick. if he's upset about that, i would be happy to credit him, or change it.)

TheMagicHorsey• 4 years ago

People should also check out Bluesky and Nostr. Both are open protocols for social media.

allenbrunson18• 4 years ago

agreed. if either one takes off and leaves mastodon in the dust, i am happy to support the winner, whatever that turns out to be.

distcs9• 4 years ago

Yes, Mastodon is more difficult to use than whatever social media platforms you are on now.

What about Mastodon is more difficult to use? Isn't it just choosing a server, typing its URL, signing up for a new account and then you are ready to post?

The UX does not look any more difficult than Twitter either. Both support search, hashtags, following people, creating lists, retweets (called boost in Mastodon), commenting. The UX looks and behaves similarly too. So why do people say that Mastodon is more difficult to use?

jacooper4• 4 years ago

Choosing a server is incredibly confusing for the average joe

distcs9• 4 years ago

The average joe can just sign up for https://mastodon.social/ can't they? How is it really more difficult than signing up for Twitter or Facebook?

shanebellone2• 4 years ago

My name isn't Joe, but it all looks sketchy to me.

allenbrunson18• 4 years ago

i agree with that! i solved it the way you're supposed to deal with new technology, i think: i lurked for awhile. read accounts from other mastodon users, to get a feel for things.

allenbrunson18• 4 years ago

argh, if only it were that easy. if you try to follow someone who is not on your instance, there is a whole rigamarole you have to go through. likewise, if you try to interact with a post, but you're viewing it on somebody else's server, rather than your own.

this is a price i am more than willing to pay, for the first-ever social media phenomenon i feel good about participating in.

distcs9• 4 years ago

if you try to follow someone who is not on your instance, there is a whole rigamarole you have to go through.

Can you be more specific? What rigmarole did you have to do ?

For me, I just hit the follow button on anyone I like and it just works, even if they are on different instance than mine. Their posts now show up on the page my instance serves me. Same for commenting or boosting posts of other people on other instances. I just hit the boost button and it just works. Commenting also just works. What did you have to do to follow someone on a different instance?

turmeric_root2• 4 years ago

agreed. i've been on masto for 4-5 years now and while i do understand why this is a pain in the ass that doesn't make it any less annoying.

turmeric_root2• 4 years ago

So why do people say that Mastodon is more difficult to use?

- the contents of a thread differ depending on which instance you are viewing it from. replies from users that your instance is not subscribed to are not shown, so you need to view the thread on its origin instance in order to see the full thread context. on my instance lots of federated posts appear to have no replies, while on their origin instance the posts have dozens or hundreds of replies.

- - side note: this is why i don't recommend asking a tech support question if you're on a large mastodon server, you'll get flooded with identical replies for days from helpful people who think no one else has answered your question.

- search results also differ depending on which instance you're using. hashtag search only applies to the federated timeline, so if I tell you to check out #coolthing we may have completely different results, or you may not even see any results.

- poll results, post favourite/boost counts aren't replicated in real-time between instances, so they vary between servers. when a poll ends you'll get a notification from the origin server with the final results but until then you'll just see votes that come from your instance.

- pinned posts for users from other instances don't always federate, so again you need to view user profiles on their source instance to be sure that you're seeing pinned posts.

- mastodon 4.0 introduced post editing, but replication lag across fedi can range from hours to days. it's not uncommon for someone to edit a post and get confusing replies because the edit hasn't been propagated to other instances.

- if you get linked to a mastodon post in the wild, you need to copy-paste it into your instance's search bar to interact with it.

- post deletion takes a while to propagate, and certain server implementations ignore deletion requests. this can be confusing when both you and a person on another server are discussing someone's profile.

imo mastodon makes more sense if you see it as a distributed system that achieves eventual consistency with an SLA of a few days. that is understandably confusing for most people.

jacooper4• 4 years ago

(As long as I am ranting: what the hell is up with billionaires, anyway? Quite a few of them have accumulated more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes, but still they want more. It’s disgraceful.)

I mean its more like equity than real money they can directly spend.

Also most of their wealth is in companies that are no where near worth their marketcap, such as Tesla which isn't even close to VW in sales, yet somhow is worth more.

So once the hype dies down, or the founder sells enough stocks, the market cap is going to take a nose dive for sure.

And as rich as elon is, we have seen how he is putting Billions into twitter, so they can spend it, just not in normal lifetime stuff.

bin_bash3• 4 years ago

Economics Explained did a great video on the topic of how diversification is a big problem for some billionaires: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ

seanhunter• 4 years ago

I have met and worked with a few billionaires now and they all had one thing in common which I think explains some of this well.

Firstly, they spend the _vast_ majority of their time with enablers, fluffers and sycophants fulfilling their every whim, constantly telling them how great they are and how brilliant all their ideas are etc. It's bad for anyone's ego to have only that sort of feedback. Someone once told me that because people are scared of giving powerful people bad news his theory of the organisation was a tree of monkeys. When you look up all you see is assholes and when you look down all you see is smiling faces. Well billionaires are at the top of most trees and so all they hear is good news and all they see is smiling faces. That means they become disconnected from reality to the point of seeming unhinged to the regular mass of people.

Secondly, the billionaires I have met hang out a lot with other billionaires or similar ultra-rich folks. They are envious of people even more rich and successful than them until you get to the very top and there they are paranoid about losing their status to others on the rise. This makes the first phenomenon more acute and they radicalise each other. You can see this in the DMs that were published between members of Elon's circle leading up to the twitter acquisition. All sorts of people were telling him how brilliant a job he was going to do at twitter and how his idea of taking an axe to the org chart etc was the a surefire recipe for success.[1]

[1] Check this out and you'll probably cringe like I did https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...

carapace2• 4 years ago

One of my favorite jokes from the Simpsons: Homer and Mr. Burns are chilling in the rocket house

Homer: Mr. Burns, you're the richest man I know.

Mr. Burns: Ah yes, but I'd trade it all... for a little more.

- - - -

people are scared of giving powerful people bad news

Robert Anton Wilson called it the "Information Disease": people lie to those that have the power to hurt them, so hierarchical systems are controlled by elements that perforce have bad information.

distcs9• 4 years ago

Its decentralized nature makes some things a lot more difficult to pull off than its competitors.

Help me understand one thing about Mastodon. We choose a Mastodon server to create account. What is decentralized about it? Doesn't choosing a server make it effectively centralized? I choose mastodon.social. What is there to stop mastodon.social from a change of ownership that makes it fall in the hands of people who take user-hostile decisions?

I know we can create a new account on a new Mastodon server and move all the followers but that's about it. We can only move the followers. We cannot move our post history. So when I choose mastodon.social or any Mastodon server, am I not putting all my eggs in one basket again?

serverholic2• 4 years ago

Yes. Also whoever runs the server can read your DMs.

This is also true of big social networks however those companies usually have access controls that prevent employees from accessing private data. Some random mastodon server isn’t going to have that.

bin_bash3• 4 years ago

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. I'm not familiar with Mastodon's architecture but I highly doubt DMs have E2E encryption—so the server maintainers must be able to get to DMs.

Correct me if @serverholic is wrong here.

allenbrunson18• 4 years ago

my mastodon account is less than 48 hours old, so i am not the best person to answer this. i will say this much, though: anything i write that i feel has value will always go onto a site that i control. currently, that's my blog with my name on it. if i'm forced to move to a new mastodon instance, i won't lose much.

loudmax2• 4 years ago

You should consider linking to your Mastodon profile in your blog. I didn't see it in that post, or in your "About" page.

loudmax2• 4 years ago

You created your account with mastodon.social. My mastodon account is with techhub.social. So your eggs are in that basket, but my eggs are in a different basket and others' eggs are in yet more baskets. You can argue that all of your own eggs are in one basket, but not everybody's eggs are in that one basket.

Some narcissistic infantile billionaire could buy out mastodon.social and burn it to the ground, but the rest of the Mastodon network moves on. You'd have to relocate, which is a pain, but you're not relocating at the same time the rest of the world is relocating. Decentralization is resilient, not bulletproof.

Andrew_nenakhov4• 4 years ago

Doesn't it make it effectively centralized?

The word you are looking for is federated. Different Mastodon servers comprise a so-called federation, so servers belonging to it can exchange data between each other. There are many federated protocols, for example, email and xmpp are federated. Some server owners choose to not be part of federation, or refuse to connect to some specific servers in a federation. That's what happened to Gab a few years ago.

distcs9• 4 years ago

The word federated makes total sense. Thanks! The word decentralized was written by the author of the OP, not by me and that's why I needed to ask the folks here if Mastodon is really decentralized. Your comment clarifies it for me. So thank you!

zimpenfish• 4 years ago

We cannot move our post history.

At the moment. There's good reasons why not[1] but those can be worked around if people come to consensus[2].

[1] Because it's a push system, you'd have to re-push all those posts from the new account and that's not even necessarily the same set of people they were pushed to in the first place, etc.

[2] e.g the re-pushing can be obviated by having servers rewrite their local copies of statuses to the new account ID on receipt of an "A is now B" message. Obviously you'd need to make this unspoofable, etc., but the theory seems sound.

carapace2• 4 years ago

If you are unfamiliar with Mastodon, you will no doubt wonder what the big deal is. How is this one going to be any different than its slimy competitors?

I think it's important to remind people that Mastodon isn't a "competitor" to proprietary social media, it's an alternative.

No one cares whether you use Mastodon or not-- I mean people do care, they like you and want to interact with you, that's not what I'm getting at. I mean that no one is getting paid or not if you do or don't use Mastodon. In other words, there's no stock ticker for it, there's no investors, no executives, no marketing dept., etc. It's just folks talking to each other, on their own terms, over the Internet.

It's a totally different thing than Twitter. They only superficially resemble each other in some of the UI.

gemmy• 4 years ago

If you're looking for a social protocol that is even more decentralized than federated sites like Mastodon, have a look at Nostr. Every user account is just a public/private key pair. When you create a post, you sign it with you private key and the post is stored on a relay server. Anyone can run a relay server.

I find Nostr much more exciting than federated sites, b/c it uses decentralized ids. You never have to worry about losing your social graph due to a federated server admin shutting down their server or banning you.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

Protocols, not platforms

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