> A centralized service runs on computers wholly under control of a single entity. They can change, monitor, amplify and bury all information. They can read your private messages. They can delete content, promote other content, and even impersonate you.
Apart from reading your private messages, does that mean you still need to trust that the server you’re connected to isn’t doing all those other things?
Nope. You own your keys, and you can switch to a different server instantly while retaining both your username and your followers. They can't impersonate you because they don't have your keys. They can't ready your messages because they don't have your keys.
It's a bit more complex underneath (e.g. the are light-clients that you can entrust with part of your key), but that's the gist.
This is something I said, but didn't explain well in the thread about Bluesky using domains as handles. You did a much better job of explaining it in your article. Being able to adjust the moderation rules to fit specific scenarios is useful.
I also think the use of domains could have a significant impact on the quality of online discourse because building a good reputation on a domain and having that transferable anywhere on the internet is a lot more valuable than a handle that's only usable within the silo of a single company.
Sub-domains add another layer where the owner of the top level domain has incentive to make sure they're not bringing bad actors onto the network because moderation could be enacted against the base domain, not just individual sub-domains.
Domain based attestation could also drive significant change. Imagine a system where spending money at a reputable company gave you a digital token / receipt that you could attribute to a domain (aka identity) as a way to attest to that domain being a good participant.
The attestation wouldn't cost anything beyond what you're already spending, but it's valuable because it demonstrates you're spending real money somewhere and attributing it to an identity. That doesn't scale well for bad actors running millions of bots because someone like me might have thousands of dollars of spending per year that I can attribute to my reputation or the reputation of someone I've had a good interaction with and bots can't throw that kind of money away. IE: It's a good indicator that a domain / identity isn't a bot, spammer, jerk, etc..
Author here. You get to have all the moderation, filtering, etc. that is implemented on the servers you use.
I'm sure there will be servers that very closely try to approximate what Twitter is/has been doing. Servers also can share any and all information needed to effectively moderate.
I don't expect it to stay closed source. But there are significant differences to Mastodon. Just to give one example: Mastodon server admins actually can read your private messages. Also Blue Sky's approach to data portability and how to implement filtering/indexing is more developed. It might be personal preference, but I prefer AT Protocol's approach where the servers have less powers, and the users have more power. A lot of little design decisions add up to a qualitative difference.
Microblogging shouldn't have private messages. Let people have a profile and a link to an email address or similar and be done with it.
I'm not sure why a service designed to publicize things so that everyone can see them ALSO chooses to take on "private messages." I get that's how the big money incumbents see it, but I feel like less would be more here.
I'm fine getting private messages on platforms but I do not want to put out my email for the general public to contact me. That information is also far more dangerous to put out than just messaging me on a platform. Yes you could just create an email for that purpose but I feel most people won't do that.
I would imagine Twitter server admins can also read your private messages if they really wanted to since Twitter doesn't use E2E encryption. Am I unaware of something/Is there a reason to believe differently?
The remaining Twitter engineers break the API every 2 days and are slowly dismantling a functional UI into an incoherent mess that doesn't load most of the time.
I have absolutely no confidence in any e2ee implementation that would be served from twitter.com and trusting Elon or anyone that still claims to speak for Twitter on any security guarantees it offers would be foolish.
They also recently broke the API for their "circle tweets" which is supposed to let you create private tweets that only go out to a subset to your followers, and stay private to everyone else, but of course that ended up not working anymore and they ended up in your profile.
I'm not sure how they actually go about doing that though. Unless of course you enter your key and decrypt client side, which I suspect the majority of users won't like.
There is nothing stopping this from being implemented in ActivityPub too, and in fact there are already pub/pri keys there to do this. However you still need to trust that the instance you are on and the one your are communicating with play by the rules.
With Twitter, I can at least assume the admins don't give a fuck about the average user. On Mastodon, an admin will be serving far fewer users and might actually be motivated to snoop on someone they know.
Mastodon needs to at very least change its terminology if it ever wants to be taken seriously. As funny as it is for people to be "tooting" out whatever happens to be in their head in that very moment no one wants to be known as a "tooter" who "toots" frequently.
Tooting aside (it's a silly enough term as it is) Mastedons never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.
"It's a decentralized social platform where you sign up to individual..."
Yeah they're already asleep. The average person doesn't give a damn about that, and they sure as hell arent about to jump through a poor UI experience and extremely badly worded terminology to sign up to it.
Let's not kid ourselves. Average person isn't reading anything that is on the sign up page. There exists some magical break point when people start to switch over and after that the sign up page can be blank and people will move there.
It is completely different matter if that point will ever be reached.
> Mastedons never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.
Email's never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.
"It's a decentralized communication platform where you sign up to individual..."
Email had a real world counterpart. In that sense it was easier to explain because you could start from traditional mail and use that to explain emails.
Mastodon and its relationship with the fediverse is indeed complicated to grasp.
Is this actually a problem? I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of people who use the internet have a good enough idea of what a server is that even if they're dead wrong about how one works it isn't terminology that would be confusing to them.
The internet (or cloud, if you prefer, mostly the same thing) is just a bunch of computers connected to each other. "Servers" are the big ones in the middle that handle stuff like email and youtube videos
Such responses are typical from those emotionally invested in the perpetual Twitter schadenfreude brigade. They are too emotional to have an objective answer at the moment.
The main difficulty is the network effect which Twitter has entrenched for decades. We're talking about 220M+ active users on the platform. Daily.
I’m as annoyed as the next person at those looking to see the new twitter fail, having said that I simultaneously love the idea of new things challenging the status quo. Decentralization is somewhat a core tenant of the hacker ethos so I don’t think it is strange to see that reflected here.
You can build a robust bus system, government run and not expected to make a profit, for example. You can have registered cabs. You can have rental bikes (bonus if they are electric assisted). If you can make sure scooters don't litter the walkways, that works as well. If you already have the infrastructure in place, perhaps trams or subways are a good thing.
We could expand busses to be able to travel from city to city. Same thing with trains: Make them run on time and expand. Busses, however, use the most extensive existing infrastructure and would likely be more cost-effective in most areas.
Not all "busses" need to be large, though. In some areas or at some times of day, a 15 passenger van might be enough. We could have bonus points if we changed school bus laws so that we don't have a duplicate bus system that leaves busses unused for much of the day.
In the US, one could take a sliver of the military budget (where there is plenty of waste) to pay for it.
Uber left Denmark after they decided that they have no interest in adhering to the relevant regulations. We still have trains, commuter trains, subways, busses, bikes, scooters, taxis and cars. People still can get to places and fairly conveniently.
One might argue the consumer doesn't get access to products that could be superior due to incumbents choking out innovators (like saplings trying to grow in a forest below mature trees blocking out the sun).
Interesting! Not a bad idea given there will likely be more stem cell based treatments available in the future. The cost benefit analysis seems to make sense to me.
Ok translation: Ivermectin, a safe and well-tolerated bacteria-derived insecticide already used in humans, can kill mosquitoes. By feeding humans ivermectin, mosquito populations can be reduced, which in turn reduces spread of the malaria parasite which is transported via mosquitoes.
