Having worked on the problem for years, decentralized social networking is such as tar pit of privacy and security and social problems that I can't find myself excited by it anymore. We are clear what the problems with mainstream social networking at scale are now, and decentralization only seems to make them worse and more intractable.
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.
If I have to pay you to access a service, and I'm not doing so through one of a small number of anonymity-preserving cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Monero, then the legitimate financial system has an ultimate veto on what I can say online.
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.
It's unfortunate, and I don't necessarily want to say decentralization isn't viable at all. But I only see decentralization at best address the issue of scraping. It's solving different problems without necessarily addressing the core ones needed to make sure a new community is functional. But I think both kinds of tech can execute on addressing these issues.
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.
For the record, people working on decentralization should not stop working on it. For myself, I have moved on to other approaches with different goals, but it's a worthwhile endeavor and if anyone ever cracks it, it'll change the damn world. And the people working on it understand exactly how difficult it is, so nothing I say is news to them.
But everyone should be clear-eyed about it. It's not a panacea, it's complicated on much more than a technical level and it's already incredibly complicated on a technical level.
And even if it works, there will still be carry-over of many of the problems we've seen with centralized social networks.
How do you decentralize a network that relies on dictionary semantics, the chaos of arbitrary imagery, basics of grammatically sequence signals?
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.
Dunno necessarily if they are _forced_ to expose that data.
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).
In a federated system, the best you can do is a soft delete request, and ignoring that request is easier than satisfying it.
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.
The ability to fully delete your posts on any platform is an illusion anyway, as e.g. a local politian found out.
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.
That's not entirely true. The big platforms yes, but that's a combination of economic incentives and technical challenges at scale (such as moving data to cold storage).
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'm a consultant that builds for startups. I'm not an entrepreneur myself.
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.
>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.
To clarify, I don't mean big P Politics, I mean political in the sense that each node is owned and operated separately, which means there are competing interests and a need to coordinate between them that extends beyond the technical. Extrapolated to N potential nodes creates a lot of conflicting incentives and perspectives that have to be managed. And if the network ever becomes concentrated in a handful of nodes or even one of them which is not unlikely, then we're effectively back at square one.
| 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.
> 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.
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.
Sure but I'd argue there's a much greater chance of a subscription service having a fair and transparent process because you are the customer versus an ad-supported service because the advertisers are the customer.
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?
I can see it from the point of view of e.g. a politician, where reduction in reach has a direct impact on the number of votes they can expect. Disadvantaging one is as good as giving advantage to the rest, and in the context of politics that would be problematic even if a court ordered it.
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.
Right and I'm not a fan of algorithmic feeds at all. Social media users broadly are happiest with a basic chronological feed composed only of who they follow. That's why every social media platform starts with that, then adds algorithmic feeds when they want to attract advertisers and after they feel their users are "locked in" enough.
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.
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.