Comment by skybrian
12 days ago
It's written in anger, but I'm optimistic that this will eventually get fixed, and documenting bad experiences like this will help.
12 days ago
It's written in anger, but I'm optimistic that this will eventually get fixed, and documenting bad experiences like this will help.
If you mean the buggy and badly documented process, sure.
But the complaint it builds up to is that instance-wide bans can ruin you when there are super big instances, and that's not something that can be fixed.
I see this as a mistake caused by really poor docs that should explain what to do and warn not to do the thing this person did.
It's also true that big instances have a lot of power and it's going to require a lot of growth of alternative instances to fix that, which will take time. At least it's possible, though. It's an intended outcome.
Any system that can ruin a spammer can also ruin someone who isn't a spammer, since the system can't tell the difference.
There's a bug about it, and it's already marked WONTFIX
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/3143
Peer to peer, not federation, is the way forward.
We should only build peer to peer social protocols.
Websites and communities should simply sample from the swarm and make it easy for non-technical users to post and consume. They should be optional and not central points of failure (or control).
{Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord} should work like {Email, BitTorrent, PGP}.
Bluesky and Mastodon are the wrong architecture.
The web, fancy javascript UI/UX, and microservices shouldn't be the focus. The protocol should be the focus.
A fully distributed protocol would dictate the solution to this exact problem.
Bluesky is designed the way it is because of scale. How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Bsky is designed so that the microservices themselves can be decentralized and so multiple different types of apps can be built on the same protocol/infra.
Obviously, it’s early days, and hopefully there is even more experimentation in the p2p space. But atproto architecture is a very fair experiment in this space. I can store my data on my own server, use a client app I wrote, subscribe to a specific aggregation/feed service I prefer, use the moderation list I want… all while still being connected to the larger protocol & network. It’s pretty neat.
> How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping?
Presumably by fusing the P2P and federated models together. There's no particular reason those two models can't coexist within the same protocol. It just hasn't been created yet.
Similar to how a good mesh networking implementation will make use a high bandwidth backhaul such as the internet if it's available.
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You invert the problem.
People want to build store and forward systems because that is their mental model of the problem. store and forward system are fine, and there are many advantages to them, but direct request systems scale much better. basically have each user fetch their messages from the locations they want rather than delivering the messages to them. think how the web works vs how email works.
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> How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping?
You design it with those requirements in mind? There’s no fundamental technical limitation at play here.
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You use routers as the beefy servers. Unicast, multicast, broadcast.
Unfortunately that means the implementation needs to reach all the way into the network layer.
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So I agree with you that they should work like email -- but I've always said that Mastodon is better because it is like email; aka the power is in the nodes.
What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? Genuinely curious because I also am super skeptical that ATProto brings anything that we really need.
The problem with centralized social media is that the admins have power over you. They can ban your account with no recourse, censor some of your posts (or some posts you want to read), or even post something from your own account that you don't approve of.
Mastodon doesn't change this, it just changes who the admins are. It lets a person under the jurisdiction of admin A interact with a person under the jurisdiction of admin B, which is better than fully-centralized X, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Your instance admin can still ban you with no recourse (account migration is incomplete, requires cooperation on both sides, and mostly exists to shut up Activitypub opponents who point these problems out). They're still just as (if not vulnerable) to government pressure as centralized social media, and considering that a single lawsuit could probably bankrupt most instances, I suspect they'd fold very very quickly. They can (and very often do) defederate from instances that post "too much nazi content", and if you disagree with the decision, there's again no recourse (you can migrate, but you won't get your lost relationships back).
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> What do you think is wrong about Mastodon?
The same problems as always. Allow federation and you get...
- federation wars and moderators conducting these wars using their own users as hostages - I left Mastodon years ago when some particularly dumb morons decided to do bitchfights regarding Israel / Palestine. No I'm not interested in your pointless squabble, but I do care when I suddenly don't see posts from a bunch of users without even getting a notification...
- Mastodon-specific, when you move your account from one instance to another (e.g. as response to above-mentioned BS) your followings and followers migrate - but all your posts and media do not
- spam, trolls and griefers abusing the system, up to and including sending around CSAM material that inevitably gets sucked in by your instance, making you liable in the eyes of the law
- security issues. Mastodon has been full of these, no thanks I don't have the time to be constantly on guard lest I be exploited from above-mentioned griefers.
- other instances not giving a flying fuck about moderation or abuse going out from their instances.
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ActivityPub supports a less compelling user experience for many people: you only have a partial view of the network (you won’t see all the replies to the posts of people you follow on other servers), no global search, etc
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Email is the prime example of federated communication. From protocol inception to painful expansion and aging protocol all until corporate apropriaton. But I still think federation is the way forward, absolute centralisation is bad I'll let you figure why, but absolute decentralization is also bad, limitations due to its nature, unusual working for most users... Meanwhile federation is right in the middle, and users already use it with email without even noticing!
Email is by far the least secure form of communication in common use right now. It's trivial to impersonate others over email, and every MTA that processes your email has access to the full contents, because they are never encrypted except in flight (and except by a few tiny disparate groups using PGP, and even these groups can't authenticate one another). And not for lack of trying, I should add.
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People often mention email as an example of federated communication, but the way email works in practice doesn't entirely live up to that ideal. Good luck getting your own self-hosted email server to send emails that actually reach anyone using a major email provider; they'll just be blocked as spam.
In practice, email is much less federated than it seems. A significant proportion of people are just using gmail. You probably don't have to include that many providers to cover a majority of people in the US.
I think federation has promise, but federation in itself is not a solution. Technical approaches do not address the more fundamental issue that, regardless of the mechanics of the system, big players will have more influence on its operation and evolution. Thus we will always need sociopolitical mechanisms to restrict big players.
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We don't need large scale social networks in the first place. The Discord model of small communities is the way forward. Keep groups small enough for natural human social rules to apply. Slows down global dissemination of information for sure, but that's what the news is for, and anything important will eventually travel between communities anyway.
I don't understand how you can seriously pose Discord as an alternative in this conversation as it's entirely centralized and full of all sorts of toxic behavior and failure modes.
Like at least suggest old school forums, IRC, or usenet.
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Yep. Once a system gets too large, its starts to break down and everything you do to make work ends up centralizing the process just like in real life. If you want things to work you keep it small and distributed.
I don't disagree, but I'm baffled that, with P2P as your preferred outcome, your orientation toward federated infrastructure is one of opposition rather than support. It feels philosophically confused to me; they're your natural allies, they're a step in your preferred direction and they have an instance of real world success (well, to a degree) which is important. Whatever theory of change motivates this form of criticism of federated services can't be one that's, say, intentional or strategic about outcomes. It feels more first principles.
One might also ask why P2P thesis statements only ever show up deep in the weeds in comment sections in response to the fediverse when logically speaking they would make just as much sense if not more in response to, say, any post about Facebook as a company or social media writ large, or business news about acquisitions, consolidation of web infrastructure into fewer hands, enshittification, or escalations of control over platforms.
Again, I'm fully on board with the dream of P2P but it feels like Buzz Aldrin criticizing Neil Armstrong for not doing enough to bring humanity into the space age.
I think supporters of P2P as "the one true way" perhaps don't realize that federation is just as peer to peer if your user count is 1.
The fundamental distinction between a communication network that is p2p and one that is federated is the storage mechanism.
For p2p the network itself is the storage, and as a participating node you connect and retrieve what is addressed to you while the amorphous data blob that contains said messages remains to float in the network. While for a federated network, the receiving node needs to be present on the network at all times to be able to access/receive the messages addressed to itself, after which the messages are absent from the network (to some degree or another).
Personally the overhead of having the network having to bear the weight of all its nodes data is too large to make it viable.
This is a flawed argument. If someone wants X they don't need to also support Y just because it's closer to X than other alternatives.
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Unfortunately, the swarm is 99.99999% advertisements for penis enlargement pills. How can a P2P system filter them out? A federated system relies on each admin to filter them out. A centralised system does even better, relying on a single dictator to filter them out. A P2P system requires every user to filter every spam message, together consuming far more effort than the spammer needed to send it.
You can centralize spam lists while still having the base communication protocol decentralized - that way people have the option on making their own decisions on whether "advertisements for penis enlargement pills" are really a problem - and let's be honest that's far from the only thing that gets moderated.
This isn't, and has never been a hard problem. Just pay for people's attention. People you follow don't have to pay, and make that transitive. Penalize people in your network who propagate spam by increasing the cost to get your attention.
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