Kypetzl

Willy

@Kypetzl

  • he/him

one more cute disaster… it’s hard here in paradise

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Kypetzl
@Kypetzl
dante
@dante
vogon
@vogon

over the past few days you can imagine that a lot of computer guys over on twitter have been envisioning futures of social media

and I think that, in general, if you conceptualize of an idealized future of social media as a "technology" or a "protocol" rather than an "organization" or a "society" you are already thinking about it in the wrong way

this post directly inspired by a guy who talked about how the future of social media MUST1 be immutable and have verifiable personal identities

  1. emphasis his, probably inspired2 by years of reading RFCs3

  2. RFC 2119: "MUST: This word, or the terms 'REQUIRED' or 'SHALL', mean that the definition is an absolute requirement of the specification."

  3. which are, themselves, merely a semi-standardized format in which people can write open memos describing a system to each other, so you think he'd be smarter than this

vogon
@vogon

extremely tangentially related: you cannot* build a scuttlebutt-style decentralized social network with private blocking

(* it might be possible but it would require you to be extremely clever with public key cryptography and probably invent a new secret-sharing primitive1)

a friend of mine discovered scuttlebutt2 a couple nights ago and lamented that one of the properties of the protocol is that blocks are publicly known -- but, as I told them, if you think about it, there's no way to build a social network with no trusted authority where blocks are enforceably invisible to others!

you can do it on mastodon (which has trusted authorities, but they're smaller) -- but with scuttlebutt, you have to ensure that every node on the network knows which nodes not to relay messages between. at the very best, this means that if you have four nodes on the network owned by Alice, Bob, Eve, and Mallory, Alice has to tell Eve that she doesn't want her messages relayed to Mallory, and therefore Eve can tip Bob off to the fact that Alice has Mallory blocked.

  1. you could also do it with remote attestation and sealing all of the protocol's traffic to only be readable by clients which agree to keep shtum about who has whom blocked, but trusted computing is its own 10-ton bag of worms

  2. disclaimer: scuttlebutt is a cool idea! I don't dislike it at all, I just think it's got some limitations that make it poorly suited to replace everything existing social media is used for

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vogon
@vogon

tyyyyyyy

footnotes were one of those things that @jkap and I originally realized we had added to cohost almost by accident and then realized that we would be using them constantly because we have a similarly parenthetical writing style

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widr
@widr

kind of a really dumb idea, taking absolutely the wrong lessons away from the challenge of trying to decouple poster identity from the server on which it is found

i also have thought a lot about this problem and worked a lot towards it and if the thinking isn't that this is a secondary problem arising from the solution that also needs to be solved you're going about it wrong

immutability is very easy to do and has a lot of incredibly useful properties. deleting data is the harder problem to solve. if this weren't true why has so much blood and sweat been poured into memory allocators and filesystems, bozo?

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mcc
@mcc

So the thing is, I don't want to live in a society. Like, I don't think I want to solve the problem of how to make a discussion network that can incorporate everyone, because there are people I just flat don't want to be in the same network of. I want to live in some kind of Cohost-style treehouse with my fun friends I trust and never have to worry about interacting with homophobes.

But that part is actually kind of easy to get, because small communities are easier to build than big ones, so from there a question comes up: How can I get the benefits of society without having to live in it? If I'm in my treehouse and I make a cool image or I make a post promoting a video game I made I want to be able to set it free like a bird into the parts of the Internet where the people who might pay me money for a video game are. If someone is posting really cool stuff in another community I want to be able to follow it without actually having to join their community which might have Republicans in it. In other words what interests me is how to enable interactions between or across communities rather than how to create one big community. And that is... not exclusively a technical problem, but it's more of a technical problem than the problem of Replacing Twitter, there's a technical component to it and that part isn't quite solved. (ActivityPub ["RSS with push notifications"] was supposed to be the solution but somehow instead of turning into a means of throwing content between social networks it just turned into a social network, and I'm not completely certain what went wrong there.)

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mcc
@mcc

Actually, I really liked Google+, and I think it might have both become successful and solved some of the problems of the Twitter peak era if they hadn't started making rapid, arbitrary and damaging changes six months to a year in.

Apparently the project lead for Google+ was someone who'd been hired away from Facebook, and he brought with him a lot of damaging Facebooky ideas (like the "real name policy"). I wonder how it might have gone with slightly different leadership.

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