Comment by skybrian
4 hours ago
It's written in anger, but I'm optimistic that this will eventually get fixed, and documenting bad experiences like this will help.
4 hours ago
It's written in anger, but I'm optimistic that this will eventually get fixed, and documenting bad experiences like this will help.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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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