Technology

69350 readers

3065 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

2368

Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy (www.404media.co)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

416 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Distributed (and zero configuration needed), but with centralized development. Federated is not good enough - separate instances may lag behind in versions, or their admins do something wrong, and user identities and posts are tied to them.

Ideally when an instance goes down, all its posts and comments and users are replicated in the network and possible to get.

A distributed Usenet with rich text, hyperlinks, file attachments, cryptographic identities, pluggable naming\spam-checking\hatespeech-checking services (themselves part of that system).

It was a good system for its time, first large global thing for asynchronous electronic communication.

OK, if you are, you don't pretend, and if you pretend, you aren't. And if you talk about someone somewhere probably designing something, then you are not making that something closer. I'm tired of typing things in the interwebs people either already know and agree with, or won't take seriously.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Ideally when an instance goes down, all its posts and comments and users are replicated in the network and possible to get.

Federation allows this, no? Provided your instance is old enough to have federated with the content in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Instance A goes down, you can't post as your user registered on instance A.

With cryptographic identities it's possible that instance A should be up only when you are registering your user. It's even possible with some delegated rights to another A user that only that user should be up when you are registering your user, the instance itself - not required.

I'm against the whole idea of federation like in XMPP or like in ActivityPub. It's stone age. It requires people to set up servers. It ties users to those servers. And communities are unnecessarily ties to servers. And their moderators.

Ideologically Retroshare looks nicer, for example.

You need to have messages, containing all the data I've described (who messages whom or who messages which communities and time of a message should be used to reduce the amount of data, ahem, stored and transferred by nodes, and also messages should list their dependencies, like - if you are giving some user some mod rights and taking them away a few times in a row, you need to know what the previous message was and the one before it), and shared storage. Shared storage here kinda breaks the beauty, because storage is finite and in fact probably those machines contributing it would function a lot like instances, replicating only communities they want.

Above that messages layer there'd be the imagined social network itself. I suppose it comes down to CRUD signed by user, user signed by an instance root or better a user delegated that right by an instance root. So everyone can send CRUD messages on anything, but what of all this the client considers depends on what they trust and the logic of processing rights. DoS protection and space conservation here are a case of dependency management, kinda similar to garbage collection.

Then entity types - I guess it's instance (people like that crap), community (I think this can be many-to-many with instances, instances are used for moderating users, communities for moderating posts), user (probably a derived user, from what I've heard but not understood about blind keys), public post (rich text with hyperlinks to entities by hash, everything is addressable by hash), blob (obvious), personal message (like public post, but probably encrypted and all that).

OK, dreams again

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm thinking of starting a friendica node for my city. I feel that a big problem with federated apps is that the audience isn't local enough; it's usually mostly tech-oriented people and doesn't have enough local services.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That is a great idea, but friendica may be too clunky for most people. Diaspora is good but doesn't use activitypub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I agree.

Of course, today Friendica is the most suitable software for managing local communities, thanks to the support of Activitypub groups and event calendars, in addition to the possibility of managing accounts shared between multiple users.

However, it must be recognized that it is a cumbersome and counterintuitive interface. If you want to create a project of this kind based on Friends, you must plan for continuous support from the administrators.

At the moment I would not exclude Friendica, but I would also evaluate other solutions:

Lemmy

It is not a social network and users cannot follow other users but can only follow communities. However, it is probably the easiest software in the Fediverse and is made specifically for creating communities.

Mbin

The interface is still dramatically confusing, but users can also follow other users. If it were possible to modify the interface and make it more pleasant, it could be a great option.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

All we need is people at this point. Still way too many people on Reddit and they've gone downhill significantly since the push for monetization

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Reddit became an outrage factory for me in ways that other social media doesn't. Facebook et al would push political news at me that was meant to piss me off, but Reddit suggests me nothing but videos of people being assholes in public, cutting each other off in traffic, getting into fights, etc. It's like clockwork orange or some shit. I like that here, I can set my default algorithm to only subs (are they called subs?) that I subscribe to, in chronological order only.