Comment by prisenco

Comment by prisenco 4 hours ago

11 replies

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Having worked on the problem for years, decentralized social networking is such as tar pit of privacy and security and social problems that I can't find myself excited by it anymore. We are clear what the problems with mainstream social networking at scale are now, and decentralization only seems to make them worse and more intractable.

I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.

Gigachad 25 minutes ago

Yeah kind of agree. Decentralised protocols are forced to expose a lot of data which can normally be kept private like users own likes.

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  • EnglishMobster 18 minutes ago

    Dunno necessarily if they are _forced_ to expose that data.

    Something like OAuth means that you can give different levels of private data to different actors, based on what perms they request.

    Then you just have whoever is holding your data anyway (it's gotta live somewhere) also handle the OAuth keys. That's how the Bluesky PDS system works, basically.

    Now, there is an issue with blanket requesting/granting of perms (which an end user isn't necessarily going to know about), but IMO all that's missing from the Bluesky-style system is to have a way to reject individual OAuth grants (for example, making it so Bluesky doesn't have access to reading my likes, but it does have access to writing to my likes).

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    • prisenco 16 minutes ago

      In a federated system, the best you can do is a soft delete request, and ignoring that request is easier than satisfying it.

      If I have 100 followers on 100 different nodes, that means each node has access to (and holds on to) some portion of my data by way of those followers.

      In a centralized system, a user having total control over their data (and the ability to delete it) is more feasible. I'm not saying modern systems are great about this, GDPR was necessary to force their hands, but federation makes it more technically difficult.

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johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

It's unfortunate, and I don't necessarily want to say decentralization isn't viable at all. But I only see decentralization at best address the issue of scraping. It's solving different problems without necessarily addressing the core ones needed to make sure a new community is functional. But I think both kinds of tech can execute on addressing these issues.

I'm not against subscriptions per se, but I do think a one time entry cost is really all that's needed to achieve many of the desired effects. I'm probably in the minority as someone who'd rather pay $10 one time to enter a community once than $1-2/month to maintain my participation, though. I'm just personally tired of feeling like I'm paying a tax to construct something that may one day be good, rather than buying into a decently polished product upfront.

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JuniperMesos an hour ago

If I have to pay you to access a service, and I'm not doing so through one of a small number of anonymity-preserving cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Monero, then the legitimate financial system has an ultimate veto on what I can say online.

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  • prisenco 6 minutes ago

    It does if you don't pay to access the service as well, because the financial system is the underpinning of their ad network.

    Even in a federated system, you can be blacklisted although it does take more coordination and work.

    i2p and writing to the blockchain are an attempt to deal with that but that permanence, but those are not without their own (serious) problems.

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krapp 3 hours ago

>I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.

"Startup engineer" believes the solution to decentralization is a startup, what a shock. We look forward to your launch.

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  • prisenco 3 hours ago

    I'm a consultant that builds for startups. I'm not an entrepreneur myself.

    If I were to build something like this, I'd use a services non-profit model.

    Ad-supported apps result in way too many perverse economic incentives in social media, as we've seen time and time again.

    I worked on open source decentralized social networking for 12 years, starting before Facebook even launched. Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.

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    • krapp 3 hours ago

      >Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.

      I disagree that federation is "specifically political decentralization" but how so?

      You claim that decentralization makes all of the problems of mainstream social networking worse and more intractable, but I think most of those problems come from the centralized nature of mainstream social media.

      There is only one Facebook, and only one Twitter, and if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad. If you don't like the way moderation works with an instance, you don't have to federate with it, you can create your own instance and moderate however you see fit.

      This seems like a better solution than everyone being subject to the whims of a centralized service.

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      • prisenco 39 minutes ago

        To clarify, I don't mean big P Politics, I mean political in the sense that each node is owned and operated separately, which means there are competing interests and a need to coordinate between them that extends beyond the technical. Extrapolated to N potential nodes creates a lot of conflicting incentives and perspectives that have to be managed. And if the network ever becomes concentrated in a handful of nodes or even one of them which is not unlikely, then we're effectively back at square one.

        | if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad

        It's important to note we're optimizing for different things. When I say third-order social effects, it means the way that engagement algorithms and virality combine with massive scale to create a broadly negative effect on society. This comes in the form of addiction, how constant upward social comparison can lead to depression and burnout, or how in extreme situations, society's worst tendencies can be amplified into terrible results with Myanmar being the worst case scenario.

        You assume centralization means total monopolization, which neither Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or anyone has been able to do. You may lose access to a specific audience, but nobody has a right to an audience. You can always put up a website, blog, write for an op-ed position at your local newspaper, hold a sign in a public square, etc. The mere existence of a centralized system with moderation is not a threat to freedom of speech.

        Federation is a little bit more resilient but accounts can be blacklisted, and whole nodes can be blacklisted because of the behavior of a handful of accounts. And unfortunately, that little bit of resilience amplifies the problem of spam and bots, which for the average user is much bigger of a concern than losing their account. Not to mention privacy concerns, which is self-evident why an open system is more difficult than a closed one.

        I'll concede that "worse" was poor wording, but intractable certainly wasn't. These problems become much more difficult to solve in a federated system.

        However, most advocates of federation aren't interested in solving the same problems as I am, so that's where the dissonance comes from.

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