Hacker Remix

Decentralized Syndication – The Missing Internet Protocol

142 points by brisky 1 week ago | 94 comments

glenstein 1 week ago

While everyone is waiting for Atproto to proto, ActivityPub is already here. This is giving me "Sumerians look on in confusion as god creates world" vibes.

https://theonion.com/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-god-c...

echelon 1 week ago

These are still too centralized. The protocol should look more like BitTorrent.

- You don't need domain names for identity. Signatures are enough. An optional extension could contain emails and social handles in the payload if desired.

- You don't need terabytes of storage. All content can be ephemeral. Nodes can have different retention policies, and third party archival services and client-side behavior can provide durable storage, bookmarking/favoriting, etc.

- The protocols should be P2P-first rather than federated. This prevents centralization and rule by federated cabal. Users can choose their own filtering, clustering, and prioritization.

viraptor 1 week ago

> Nodes can have different retention policies, and third party archival services and client-side behavior can provide durable storage, bookmarking/favoriting, etc.

That's completely achievable in AP. Most current servers use reasonable retention, extended for boosted posts.

MichaelZuo 7 days ago

Then it is a bit strange why it wasn’t designed to be ‘BitTorrent-like’ from the beginning as the parent suggests.

immibis 1 week ago

There's no known way to make this work well yet, but feel free to invent that. Until that happens, federated is mostly the best we have, because most people don't want to be responsible for their own servers.

P.S. ActivityPub is a euphemism for Mastodon's protocol, which isn't just ActivityPub.

FireInsight 1 day ago

Isn't this Nostr?

RobotToaster 1 week ago

Isn't this ipfs?

remram 1 week ago

I would love to have an RSS interface where I can republish articles to a number of my own feeds (selectively or automatically). Then I can follow some my friends' republished feeds.

I feel like the "one feed" approach of most social platform is not here to benefit users but to encourage doom-scrolling with FOMO. It would be a lot harder for them to get so much of users' time and tolerance for ads if it were actually organized. But it seems to me that there might not be that much work needed to turn an RSS reader into a very productive social platform for sharing news and articles.

James_K 1 week ago

This interface already exists. It's called RSS. Simply make feed titled "reposts" and add entries linking to other websites. I already have such a thing on my own website with the precise hope that others will copy it.

remram 7 days ago

At some level yes, but I would like to be able to de-duplicate if multiple people/feeds repost the same article, and it would need a lot more on the discovery side (so I can find friends-of-friends, more feeds from same friend I follow, etc). Like a web-of-trust type of construct which I see as necessary with the accelerating rise of bots on all platforms.

James_K 7 days ago

Deduping can be done on the reader end. As for a web of trust, you can put a friends list on your website.

remram 6 days ago

Sure, as long as I'm willing to do the 90% missing bits manually, RSS does everything else automatically. /s

There is a major discovery problem and saying "out of scope" does not make it go away.

James_K 6 days ago

I'm not simply saying that discovery is out of scope, but that it's an actively harmful feature. The computer has no good metric to judge what is shown to you. I think the old ways are much better, that is you hear about something if a human decides to share it with you. This process seems impossible to automate and the effects of trying have been very detrimental.

That said, the web has already developed a solution to this issue. It's basically just indexing. It's a very valuable technology, hence why Google got so much money from doing it.

remram 5 days ago

I don't want it automated, I want the tool to help. I don't need it to pick feeds and follow them, but being able to lists what other feeds are splitting off of feeds I already follow, or find the feeds being reposted to me, ... would be helpful. This can be built on OPML, this can be built on RSS, but your notion that we already have everything we need does not resonate with me.

You don't have to get all defensive about RSS, I think it's fantastic technology, but it is missing a few key components to be a replacement for social media in a meaningful sense. I know you know this, because you are here on a social media site right now instead of reading OP's feed. Whereas I don't want to ever leave my reader and instead consume news and recommendations and comments from my friends (of friends) right from there, instead of using gameable/botable centralized platforms with topics and moderators I don't control or trust.

My vision is not clear I know, I hope I can find time to prototype (or at least spec out) what I mean some time soon.

James_K 5 days ago

The key thing any social media platform needs is users. I know very few people who have an RSS feed and none of them use it to repost content.

fabrice_d 1 week ago

That looks close to custom feeds in the ATProto / BlueSky world.

edhelas 7 days ago

XMPP XEP-0060 Pubsub is doing that :)

I wrote a specific XEP for the social part https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0472.html

And it's implemented in Movim https://movim.eu/

AndrewDucker 6 days ago

This is pretty-much exactly what I use Pinboard for.

openrisk 1 week ago

Its not obvious to me that what is missing here is another technical protocol rather than more effective 'social protocols'. If you havent noticed, the major issues of today is not the scaling of message passing per-se but the moderation of content and violations of the boundary between public and private. These issues are socially defined and cannot be delegated to (possibly algorithmic) protocols.

In other words what is missing is rules, regulations and incentives that are adapted to the way people use the digital domain and enforce the decentralized exchange of digital information to stay within a consensus "desired" envelope.

Providing capabilities in code and network design is ofcourse a great enabler, but drifting into technosolutionism of the bitcoin type is a dead end. Society is not a static user of technical protocols. If left without matching social protocols any technical protocol will be exploited and fail.

The example of abusive hyperscale social media should be a warning: they emerged as a behavior, they were not specified anywhere in the underlying web design. Facebook is just one website after all. Tim Berners-Lee probably did not anticipate that one endpoint would succesfully fake being the entire universe.

The deeper question is, do we want the shape of digital networks to reflect the observed concentration or real current social and economic networks or do we want to use the leverage of this new techology to shape things in a different (hopefully better) direction?

The mess we are in today is not so much failure of technology as it is digital illiteracy, from the casual user all the way to the most influential legal and political roles.

miohtama 7 days ago

> The deeper question is, do we want the shape of digital networks to reflect the observed concentration or real current social and economic networks or do we want to use the leverage of this new techology to shape things in a different (hopefully better) direction?

Here is a book on the topic - Compliance Industrial Complex;

https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...

It's about anti-policies (anti hate, anti money laundering, etc.), securitization of governance (private companies create and enforce what should be law) and pre-crime, using technology to do this instead of addressing underlying social problems.

pessimizer 7 days ago

> If you havent noticed, the major issues of today is not the scaling of message passing per-se but the moderation of content and violations of the boundary between public and private.

Are those the major issues of today? Those are the major issues for censors, not for communicators.

pluto_modadic 7 days ago

yes, moderation is an issue that doesn't scale. therefore, many technologists ignore it in favor of "oh, fancy serverless architecture". priority should be on building moderation and tools like reply controls (e.g. only mutuals), shared inboxes (for friends to assist cleaning out hate mail), mod appeals and the like. It's a thorny issue that involves /listening/ to community organizers, who go through pains with poorly written software to try to keep a community civil.

openrisk 7 days ago

Are spammers and scammers "communicators"? How about organized misinformation campaigns? In what kind of deeply sick ideological la-la-land is any kind of control of information flow "censorship".

nunobrito 1 week ago

NOSTR has solved most of these topics in a simple way. Anyone can generate a private/public key without emails or password, and anyone can send messages that you can verify as truly belonging to the person with that signature.

They have hundreds of servers running today by volunteers, there is little cost of entry since even cellphones can be used as servers (nodes) to keep you private notes or keep the notes from people you follow.

There is now a file sharing service called "Blossom" which is decentralized in the same simple manner. I don't think I've seen there a way to specify custom domains, people can only use the public key for the moment to host simple web pages without a server behind.

Many of the topics in your page are matching with has been implemented there, it might be a good match for you to improve it further.

brisky 1 week ago

Can NOSTR handle 100 million daily active users?

nunobrito 1 week ago

Your question rephrased: "Can EMAIL handle 100 million daily users?".

The answer is yes.

NOSTR is similar to emails. They depend on nostr/email providers and aren't depending on any single of them, what exists is a common agreement (protocol). The overwhelming majority of those providers are free and you can also run your own from the cellphone.

Some providers might become commercial like gmail, still many others will still provide access for free. Email is doing just fine nowadays, NOSTR will do fine as well.

Groxx 7 days ago

This is all necessarily true of any "protocol". It is absolutely not true that every protocol scales efficiently to 100 million active users all interacting though, so it is basically a meaningless claim.

E.g. ActivityPub has exactly the same claims, and it's currently handling several million, essentially all interactable. Some parts are working fine, and some parts are DDoSing every link shared on any normally-connected instance.

nunobrito 6 days ago

That isn't an argument either. Emails have difficulties too, it doesn't mean a restriction on scale.

Groxx 6 days ago

Email has some social scaling problems, but the technical scaling side is almost perfect - you push to the destination. Adding more destinations doesn't increase cost, and it splits the load.

Contrast this with e.g. Secure Scuttlebutt (under a normal setup). Adding more people to the connected graph (implying also a more densely connected graph) means exponentially more traffic and more storage for each member, due to the friend-of-a-friend proxying built in. It doesn't take long at all to reach the point where a normal internet connection can't keep up, and you fall farther and farther behind.

Mastodon falls somewhere in between - adding servers mostly splits load when you add instances, but caching behavior grows linearly and tends to happen simultaneously ~everywhere, and it doesn't take long before it's beyond what hobbyists can handle. It even affects outsiders, due to preloading link previews, which is a core privacy decision that's arguably part of the protocol.

Where does nostr fit in? Because "a protocol" describes ^ all of those. It's a mostly meaningless descriptor, beyond "probably not tied to a single company" (but not more than "probably").

nunobrito 5 days ago

Now that is unfair. You are pointing out flaws at Mastodon and Scuttlebutt and then applying the same tag to NOSTR without being correct.

NOSTR is the same as Email on that regard. You push a note to the destination (relay) and adding more destinations doesn't increase the load, it splits the load.

There is no centralization at NOSTR, there is no mandatory record of who sends who and what. It is just like email, send it over and let the receiving parties do whatever they want with it.

In fact, it goes beyond email to the point that you can write a NOSTR note on a piece of paper and still be certain that the note was written by a specific person and is unmodified.

Groxx 5 days ago

I'm just pointing out that "it's a protocol" describes nothing useful.

>NOSTR is the same as Email on that regard... [etc]

This is useful information :)