With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back Toward the end of 2022, we joined the masses of people leaving Twitter for Mastodon. The fact that Mastodon, building on some earlier ideas for federated social networking, is a decentralized approach, has renewed our interest in, and hope for, the decentralization of the internet. When Larry and I kicked off Systems Approach …
"Personally I'd argue that Usenet fits the bill perfectly, but you're right."
Even Usenet has sorta been borged into a few very large providers. Few, if any, ISPs run a news server these days, something they pretty much all used to do. Many ISPs don't even offer email nowadays, and if they do it's often a branded gmail or similar. Likewise, webspace. ISPs aren't real;y "service" providers any more. The are ICPs or Internet Connection Providers.
The current situation where a social media account only works for one type of social media is ridiculous. Samsung mobiles can be used to call Apple mobiles, appliances can be used regardless of electricity supplier, and fossils fuel powered cars made by Ford are not limited to Ford petrol or diesel.
This is because the businesses that supply these products and services are forced by legislation to adhere to industry standards.
It's long past time for the same to happen to social media, and ActivityPub offers a suitable industry standard. With mandatory ActivityPub support, a Facebook user could follow a Twitter account, and so on. One social media account would be enough, and advertising could be inserted after the feeds were built into a timeline - for those who had not paid to be ad-free. Different users could choose their provider based on things like the algorithms used to build the timeline - real competition based on something else but FOMO
It's time we let our politicians know.
I rented a villa in America recently and the rooms had these TVs which had a Samsung streaming service baked straight into the user interface that you couldn't remove and was shoving ads in your face everytime you opened up the interface. It was like they were trying to compete with cable / terrestrial and the likes of Netflix / Prime / HBO / Disney + by forcing their own service front and centre.
Don't they know that the best way to compete is just to have some content?
Sigh. We've gone and got our month of Netflix for the year. We do this about once a year, in winter, to catch up on "everything" the family cares about. If you take that limited subset, minus what's 'gone from Netflix' (and that includes "Netflix originals" that just weren't), there's literally nothing new after a year of being off the service.
Whole household is complaining that they're out of stuff to watch after a mere three days – it's not just me!
Looking in to what's gone, and why former "Netflix originals" could even possibly be gone, I'm learning that the providers are basically fragmented into uselessness, now. Anything for which the rights are sought-after goes to whoever owns those, which, from a consumer's point of view, may as well be random – and everything even a little bit older or more esoteric just dissappears and goes nowhere because there's nobody willing to pay or fight for the rights to serve it and, when newer stuff gets taken by the lawyers, the back-catalogue is always affected.
The inevitable heuristic is that *if* it is new and in vogue, it's exclusive to a service you don't have. If it is old or niche, it is nowhere at all.
Torrenting is probably on the increase after a decline when Netflix/Amazon used to be quite good and there were no other streamers. Now, it seems every studio/TV channel/Producer has their own streaming service. Too many to track down, let alone subscribe to. Maybe in 10 years, they'll all get bought out or merged into a couple of "big boys" again and it'll become usable.
For years I torrented because whoever owned the rights to whatever I wanted to listen to or watch couldn't be arsed to make it available to me in any sane manner. There were a brief enjoyable time in which I could get what I wanted above the board and I was happy to pay for it. The pendulum has swung back, and I'm back to torrenting.
> This is because the businesses that supply these products and services are forced by legislation to adhere to industry standards.
Not quite, they choose to adhere to these industry standards because customers wouldn't buy their products if they didn't. Apple could easily make a device that can't call Samsung phones (like the iPod Touch, which only supported WiFi so did Facetime fine but no phone calls). Same way that Ford could sell a car that required specific fuel. Wouldn't make any business sense for them to do it though.
The methods of coercion vary but they are there.
Taking mobile phones (the subject of the last two decades of my day-job) the coercion is imposed on the operators. So, in order to be permitted to run a mobile phone network, you must use equipment that is verified against certain standards - in most of the world, 3GPP.
If you live in the USA, the 3GPP requirement comes from the FCC. If you live in the UK, it is OFCOM. And so on.
The voice calling processes provided by 3GPP are based on telephone numbers at the origin, and only IMEI at the destination. So the calling user equipment has no way to know the IMEI of the destination UE, and vice versa. That means neither end has enough information to exclude rival manufacturers.
In your country there will be some government body that grants licences to operators and it will impose standards like 3GPP.
In the same way standards are imposed on your electricity supplier for voltage, frequency etc. And there will also be standards for selling motor fuels.
There should also be standards for social media, and ActivityPub is the obvious candidate
Wouldn't transport/network layers be more analogous online standards? It doesn't seem necessary or desirable to go too far up the standards tree when the general Internet standards are ensuring everyone is broadly able to access and choose their social media provider(s), as far as authoritarian governments will allow.
The issue for me is interoperability - something that is good for humans but not desired by corporations. Like it or not, social media has become a public service, and it is time it was regulated like one.
ActivityPub could form the basis of that regulation and introduce true competition in the social media domain
The problem with interoperability is that social media companies provide different services. Twitter provides short text and pictures. TikTok provides short videos which I don't think are publicly linkable (not sure as I don't use it, but I haven't seen links directing me there). YouTube provides long videos which are more easily linked or embedded. I'm not exactly sure what Facebook does. Instagram is about pictures, and I think at least some of those are designed to be limited to specific people and disappear after some time.
It isn't always the case that something a social media company does has an analogous action elsewhere. Try posting a tweet to YouTube, for example. Requiring them to have some interoperability when their services aren't compatible doesn't make a lot of sense, and I'm not sure how you can deal with that except by having a collection of social media companies that all do the same thing in a nearly identical manner. Mastadon's setup, though federated, provides one service, which social media as a whole does not do.
I'm all for decentralized services, but it's not always possible or desirable to mandate it. Sometimes, it might be better to let people adopt them on their own as long as the option remains available to them, regulating only to prevent the destruction of the option.
Someone (it might have been Cory Doctorow) described the landscape of social media as something along the lines of five walled gardens that are filled with screenshots of the other four platforms because they refuse to acknowledge each other's existence. It's quite apt.
What I find very interesting, and is touched upon a bit in this piece, is that one day the current implementation of the Mastodon service (or the Mastodon reference server) is no longer satisfactory and someone might build a newer social network using the ActivityPub protocol. That makes sense and is to be expected. The interesting bit will be that, just like you can currently follow someone's PixelFed or PeerTube account with your Mastodon client, you can follow the old Mastodon accounts or servers from your the new network. You could even decide to import all your old posts into the new network. That is truly something that was impossible in the old Silicon Valley/BigTech model of walled gardens *.
* There are people who have imported their old tweets into Mastodon but it requires a lot of tinkering (for instance so your Mastodon server doesn't tell all your contacts about a new post for every single one of your old 50,000 tweets that you're importing).
... and half of those screencaps originated from Tumblr, which is experiencing a resurgence in usage due to the implosion of twitter and tumblr's own relaxation of what they define as 'porn' and the addition of user-selectable tagging for more risque content.. :)
Mines the one with the shoelaces in the pockets that I stole from the president. ;)
...
...
...
On one hand, I'm gobsmacked, because if I can get federated feeds on my existing tumblr, that'd be awesomesauce. (I realize that's the other way around from what you stated, but still... that would be a massive win for a platform that everyone keeps saying is dead/dying, and where even it's own userbase calls it a hellsite from some of the long standing.. quirks of the UI.)
On the other hand, I can see a whole host of issues presenting themselves from that; it's bad enough that the pornobots are still a problem, but this might be a whole 'nother drum of worms...
Easy change of server is nice, but not having to think about that would be even nicer. I predict the rise and rise of ActivityPub apps which get better and better at seamless use across instances so that the user need neither know nor care about that service-layer tech. Server admins will eventually have to get used to the idea that their immediate "users" are actually the users' apps.
Meanwhile I see that Mathstodon has forked and implemented LaTeX on their web interface (Yay! No more MathML presentational subset). So yeah, join in the fun.
Well a couple of things, the original developer moved to Germany when he was 11 according to Wikpedia, so I kinda doubt his allegiance to Puti bear is that strong.
Mastodon itself is open source, so if you have reason to distrust the code, inspect it. The servers themselves aren't controlled by the company that handles the source with the exception of mastodon .social and mstdn. social, that's the whole point of ActivityPub, every federated server is part of the same network. If those two servers were found to be doing anything nefarious the other servers could just block them and people could just move their accounts somewhere else. If you don't trust any server, install your own on a VPS. You could even join pixelfed instead and follow mastodon accounts from there and Mastodon servers would never see your posts, only users who follow you would.
LMAO. What's to say you are not on a server run by the kushners? You don't know who's server you are on, or who runs these things. You are telling me it's safe like you did facebook, and twitter, and google, and apple, and microsoft. GIVE ME A BREAK ALREADY. Decentralization? You mean like CRYPTO? yeah... NO. It's all criminals. Go ahead and plug into your virtual "reality" and call it a night already.
I think you may want to check out reality first, or at least confirm you're on the right dosage.
First off, you're talking about social media which is PUBLIC, so worrying about who has access to your posts is IMHO a somewhat pointless exercise.
Secondly, if you want that level of assurance I wonder why on Earth you'd use social media at all.
Thirdly, you can also approach this in the very much time and aggrevation saving option that many people prefer (including yours truly): don't use it. Simple.
And Happy New Year to you too, btw.
Dude chill
If you have a solution, throw it
On the table.
None of this is safe. That is why you learn to code and implement security process. Don’t complain, build something.
Years ago oracle said they had a hack proof database server. 48hs later they were eating their words.
Nobody can be trusted, including 'Omnipresent'.
It's the end of the world.
And then I woke up: it's a cloudy, damp morning, my wife wants to go back to sleep, the children have all gone home after Christmas, the birds are raiding the feeding station, and the dog needs a walk.
Have a great day everyone, and may we all find some wisdom about life - including Omnipresent.
I've some issues with all this Mastodon and Twitter brouhaha.
I admit that I'm not an user of either, nor any other social network, so I may be missing something and I will be gladly stand corrected if somebody explains it to me.
First of all, I agree that Mr Musk is doing quite a big mess on Twitter, it really looks like a teen that just discovered Ayn Rand and is throwing tantrums all around.
Said that, the big (legitimate!) criticism thrown against him is that he's killing moderation, platforming back a lot of very objectionable people with very objectionable agendas, allowing the spread of disinformation, killing the user-verification system that made sure people "of interest" where who they said they were and so on.
Sure, there are also the problem of him censoring instead those he really did not like, and the reasonable fear under such a tenure Twitter may fold quite soon leaving everybody that relied on it stranded, but these are only a part of the problem.
Now, we hear that the decentralized Mastodon is the way to go. Buuut unless I really missed something, Mastodon do not seem to offer any real solution for the entire first batch of problems. Instead, it seems to be designed to never allow a proper solution of the first batch of problems: by its very nature, any attempt to moderate, control, verify, may be only limited to some instances.
sure, right now the people moving to it will find a better environment, because until now Mastodon was a small environment populated by generally technically competent users.
But that's easy: any environment can be relatively pleasant when populated by small crowds of technically competent users passionate about a specific topic, see the old times usenet.
The problem is managing a largely anonymous crowd of users.
Now grifters, scammers, spammers and so on are largely absent from it, but lets see what happens as soon as most of the public move there: predators follow their preys, unless something keep them in check.
It's the same story as the web3 the authors cite, or really most of current day populism: essentially, it's people hating the "System" rules, and then rediscovering *why* those rules were imposed in the first place, after centuries of trials and errors.
ActivityPub servers are moderated by each instance owner but they only need to moderate their own users not every user, they also have the ability to stop federating with any other instance, effectively blocking every user there from contacting their users. Individual users have the ability to do the same.
Honestly though, most of the problem with Twitter/Facebook/etc. is from trends and algorithmically promoted content. Everything on Mastodon/Pixelfed/etc is chronological, so there's less chance or incentive for trolls to pile onto one post because it'll be gone in 5 seconds.
Moderation is still a huge challenge to tackle, but it's not one gigantic brick wall with federated platforms.
I hope I will be wrong with my issues with this problem... as I said, I don't really bother with social media personally, so maybe these counter measures will be sufficient.
But I already knew about them, and I currently don't think they will be.
Please note, I'm not saying that the "big corporation" way is the one that would work instead, or that Twitter like it is is fine, or even was fine before the Muskalypse.
Social media are simply going to be a mess whatever solution we find, because of how people work, because of the payoff of spreading disinformation and taking advantage of people biases and fears and desire for social validation and identification with celebrities and all that.
This mess is going to be hard for volunteer workers to deal with, when on the other side you have people motivated by profiting from a large batch of vulnerable "preys".
And to have non-volunteers, you need to have, at least in our current society, a profit-generating plan to pay for their work.
I can hope that altruism will scale, but I don't think it will.
Honestly, if social medias are really so fundamental for so many people (not that I see the appeal), I think they would need to be... socialized!
I think in many situations, like financial markets, public health, safety standards and so on, we need a system were rules agreed upon are imposed for the safety of the collective. With all its failings, a government is the way to do this: sometimes this government will be wrong, sometimes it will do shady things on its own, but still, it's the way we chose to organize all of our activities, with check and balances that evolved over history to address most of the failure modes.
If the government is an oppressive one, or malfunctioning, the government needs to be changed, and that's a different matter entirely, with different problems of its own, but this does not mean that setting up a system independent from it it's a good idea.
To make a simile, we can see all the horrors of purely privatized healthcare, but we don't propose as an alternative to it a free-for-all federated network of volunteer-based clinics where everybody can go and practice medicine regardless their competence, and using whatever substance they think will work as medicines.
Would this means opening an enormous can of worms of possible abuses? Of course, and of course it will be abused... like it is being abused anyway right now.
But at least would be abused by an institution that, by design is accountable to it's population.
And if this institution is currently not accountable, well, it's something its population should change anyway as soon as possible for reasons much more serious than being entertained.
What you're missing is that moderators have two levels of moderation available to them. If someone is on my server and using their account to grift people, I ban them. That is them gone. Problem solved for my users. If they are on someone else's server and the someone else in question won't ban them I de-federate my server from theirs. Now my users are protected from that user and from any other grifters that are allowed on the same server. A lot of admins share details of dodgy users and dodgy instances, so those decisions can be propagated across the wider network quite easily. It's not trivial, but it seems to work quite well.
The big challenge is that this process s built on a huge amount of volunteer labour, which is currently going without recompense and I think there will end up needing to be some solutions for that; I suspect a lot of servers will move to a paid subscription basis of some kind (probably on an "if you can afford it" basis) just to cover volunteer time and server capacity.
Basically, Mastodon will be fine until the "Everlasting September 2.0" event, when the Great Unwashed decide it's the next big thing.
That's why the current Social providers ate frantically messing about with AI moderation,as it just needs too many moderator-bodies to keep up with the onslaught of messages.
> Now my users are protected from that user and from any other grifters that are allowed on the same server
And all the non-grifters that are allowed on the same server.
There are possibilities for all sorts of interesting power dynamics in this setup. Anyone need a thesis subject?
An example of the defederation that has already happened is with the Gab social network which by all accounts is a nasty far-right cesspool using Mastodon. Most other instance have not federated with them, so while the spreading of poison within Gab continues unabated, at least it doesn't get to spread to anyone that doesn't seek it out.
The problem is managing a largely anonymous crowd of users.
That isn't the actual issue. As we're about to start up a rather large platform we have indeed looked at the issues you mentioned which boil in essence down to the fact that for most setups, being anonymous also means being unaccountable.
Which is why we will probably the only setup who isn't worried about offering social media: we know who is on our platform. Users will have the right and ability to post anonymous, but WE will know who they are, and can so encourage better behaviour as we can tie consequences to bad behaviour (and given our membership, being thrown out as ultimate measure is powerful enough to make most contain their inner idiot).
The reason we can do so is simple: we run a members model (very defined, limited group), and we have conciously decided to avoid any revenue stream that depends on advertising. Ergo no need to lure people in with controversy (I get the feeling that on some platforms, trolls merely exist to promote aguments so people see more ads while replying), no need to watch for ads with a dodgy payload and all the screen real estate available to the user which makes mobile use a bit easier too.
The problem with "free" is that running a service still isn't to the provider: people have to get paid, your hoster wants money too - somehow you still have to pay for it all (something Twitter never quite managed, and with Musk it got dramatically worse). IF you then rely on advertising, your next problem is to control the people on your platform. If you do not, the price is that the decent users you want will exit so you do need to keep an eye on it. If you want an example of what happens if you do not, have a look at Twitter right now - as far as I can tell, that's heading faster to the ground as a 2018 737 Max, this time actually due to pilot error..
The Mastodon tuning notes basically say you have to spawn as many processes / threads as you expect concurrent requests. And each thread is going to be occupied from the time the request is received until the response is sent back. So if you're a big server, e.g. mastodon.social, you need to be running a lot of processes / threads on a server with honking amounts of memory just to keep up with activity.
The reason for this is is written as a Ruby on Rails app and it's not using async IO where less threads could handle more load. Twitter also started as Ruby on Rails but it just doesn't scale so it had to be rewritten and refactored to obtain the performance it needed to function.
So the idea of federated servers seems okay but the scalability of each instance is a big question. I could see that there will be a desire to move chunks of the work onto async IO in other languages that are more performant and fit for purpose than Ruby is.
That is indeed an issue. Don't forget, however, that the Mastodon reference server was essentially built by two people over six years with the tools and expertise that they had.
There is an interesting thread from late 2021 or early 2022 somewhere on Masto where people are speculating why Truth.social (which is built on the Mastodon reference software) wasn't launching even though they said they had 1.5 million people on the waiting list. Eugen Rochko, one of the Mastodon developers, suggested it may have something to do with the required expertise to run servers with that many users. The expertise to develop the heavy lifting services required to handle millions of concurrent users is concentrated in a handful of big tech companies, the average startup dev never gets to work with those scenarios, never gets to build those skills, never gets to discover in practice what works and what doesn't.
That may now be changing due to the Mastodon hype. There have never been so many eye-balls on the Mastodon code from experienced people as there are now. There are ex-Twitter people who are sharing their experience with running these massive services (from infrastructure to UX, from moderation to onboarding) with the Mastodon community. There is even a special Mastodon instance for former Twitter staff, Macaw.social.
I suspect that gradually bits get replaced for better performance. It should, for instance, be feasible to rewrite 'Sidekiq' (the Mastodon process responsible for queuing all the connections that send and receive posts from other servers) from the ground up in a more suitable language. It could be tested on some more experimental Mastodon instances for a bit (just like some instances have a tendency to be slightly ahead on beta versions while others play it safe by being slightly behind 'stable') before it get replaced in the main implementation.
That makes me wonder: is there actually a social media package right now that could replace what Twitter does in a proper global volume?
I think there's not even a paid-for package that does, so I'm guessing some people are frantically re-engineering Mastodon so it is a little bit less resource hungry. I don't envy them, I have the feeling the way it works was a pretty fundamental design decision..
That makes me wonder: is there actually a social media package right now that could replace what Twitter does in a proper global volume?
First define your problem. Usenet used to work pretty well. Simple hierachy and system to add to that hierachy. Relatively easy to find interesting groups, eg sci.* or uk.* along with the alt.swamp. But like many social media solutions, it perhaps didn't scale. Initially it was relatively self-moderated and often had a low SNR, but that changed as the Internet population grew.
Problem with the 21st Century Internet seems to be who gets to moderate, and why. If that's heavy handed, 'free speech' and rational debate is stifled. That seems to be the main social/political issue around the Twitter war, where there are fears that the ability to moderate have been lost. That, I think is the biggest challenge. Mastodon seems one solution, ie create your own instance, moderate it as you wish, and if you want to turn it into an echo-chamber, that's the operator's choice. But that can still lead to a fragmented, Balkanised Internet, which isn't necessarily healthy. It already exists though. On some subjects where there's a high SNR and high trolling (in the modern sense), people have just created their own solutions where debate can happen in a more civilised manner. But that's also a danger, because extremists also take the same approach and the debate is far, far less healthy.
Bruce,
Thank you for your cogent writing on this topic. I'm not in the IT world, but the tools you discuss here are essential infrastructure for an improving civics framework.
I also want to thank the commenters here who represent such a significant talent pool and work so hard to get the rubber on the road.
We continue to bang politicians and bureaucrats on the head in the world of civics, policy and regulation. The best tools still need regulatory curbs for the corner case users of them. Even simple speed limits need fines or even jail to make them effective.
Know that the other parts of the puzzle are being attended to and 2023 looks like a bit more progress will be made.
Cheers,
Paul Lock
Founder
the GCHRD
Mere months have passed since twitter refugees with nowhere to flee have entered the fediverse. Now that there are people fleeing in droves there are some who intend to prey on them by creating parallel standards of social media decentralization like Bluesky - funded by VC money - instead of iterating and extending the work and philosophy of ActivityPub like the Spritely Institute.
I believe there won't be long until those who wanted a more friendly experience will move again from the fediverse to the twatterverse. Those who are bombarded daily with toots demanding Quote Retweets by 3-months-old users will applaud the move. Me, I'll be sad to see people trade openness for convenience again, however toxic that might be. Here, take my data.
So I haven't used Mastadon = genuine question.
I join some random local mastadon and they allegedly federate some government servers. How do I know that they have linked to genuine government servers, or either deliberately or were duped into linking to fake ones?
If I want to be sure that SEC / CDC / NOAA messages are genuine do I have to sign onto only federal gov Mastadon (and how do I verify them?) or do I just assume that a sufficiently famous Mastadon server with millions of users is careful enough
Over the last 20yrs or so, I've tried many forms of social media... Myspace, Friends Reunited, Facebook, Twitter and Google+
Out of all of those, Myspace was great, but shitty interface and horrible design... but algorithm free.
Friends Reunited was ok, for reconnecting with people you eventually realised to lost contact with for a reason.
Facebook, was just a shitshow from the start. Joined in 2007 because of work, deleted in 2008, rejoined in 2011 because friends complained, deleted in 2012 because so called friends kinda toxic and the entire platform was just a toxic wasteland of shit, misinformation and propoganda... oh and the ads of course.
Twitter... just more shit different name. used it in 2012 for a few months, stopped for 3yrs, used for a few weeks, stopped for 3yrs... used for about a week... deleted in 2018.
Google+... now that was a good one... no ads in your face, no obvious tracking and pushing of misinformation at you... for the first 4yrs it was great. Then Vic Gundotra left and it was mismanaged into oblivion, they stripped away core features and reduced it's functionality... driving people away.
So I was left with nothing to use that didn't cause me issues, didn't invade my privacy, didn't sell me as a product..
I discovered mastodon last year... I'd tinkered with diaspora for a while after G+ went offline for good, but didn't enjoy it as much because of the same old cliques and bullshit you get. But Mastodon is different... if you find the right instance/server to call home. I'm on a UK based one and have got around 400 followers already.
I've made good friends, it's a great way to socialise... I don;t limit myself to a specific topic... you don;t get endless divisive and horrible subjects thrown in your face because there's no algorithm controlling it.
You get to choose what you see... and once you free yourself from the bile that is everything else... once you have a place free from the division and hate. It's refreshing, liberating and enjoyable.
Now I know at some point... some one will come along and say something along the lines of 'it's a ghost town'
Those people are... well... idiots who don't understand what social media really is. The types who shitpost links for likes without ever actually engaging with anyone. Just an endless stream of crap, blindly hoping that everyone else will do their jobs for them and publicise whatever brand of crap they're pushing.
Decentralised social media... gives you what you are willing to give it. Put in the effort and be rewarded... shitpost links and never engage with anyone else and see them complain about the lack of followers/boosts and so forth.
When you treat people like people... they respond and treat you the same.
I never gave a crap about Twitter. Now I have decentralized my indifference and moved it to Mastodon.
Agree 100% that open standards are important. If history is any guide, though -- where there is money to be made from using a standard, there is more money to be made by "extending" the standard to force user lock-in. Sadly, this will probably be the fate of ActivityPub.
I went cold on Mastodon when I realised most servers were one man operations. Even some of the servers I found that were owned by business names were one man businesses. So what happens if that one man drops dead or ends up in a coma for six months? The server will be a billing cycle away from locking all users out of their accounts and data, potentially for good.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
