
Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media - andreigheorghe
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106
======
mathnmusic
They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that
reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for
future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon.

In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub
events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that
reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub client. Implementation was easy and
the data model is quite easy to understand.

ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter
could have been.

[https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/](https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/)

[http://activitypub.rocks/](http://activitypub.rocks/)

~~~
espadrine
Three reasons why not: operational, business, and technical.

Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the
standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen
as embrace-extend-extinguish.

Business: it would contribute work to their competitors.

Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.

~~~
jakelazaroff
This is doomed from the start, then. There’s no way for them to work on an
open standard without leaking features or contributing work to their
competitors.

~~~
espadrine
It depends on what goal you see being defined.

I see one public and one private:

Publicly, organize social engagement. As long as they are at the helm, and at
the forefront of tech innovation, they won't have issues on that goal.

Privately, diffuse regulatory pressure. If unlike Facebook, they can share
blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for
political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter. It is the
whack-a-mole approach, similar to BitTorrent vs. Napster.

~~~
RussianCow
> If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't
> singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls
> to break up Twitter.

I don't buy this. Nothing is going to change from the user perspective, and
almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open
standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this
will change the public and political perception of social media websites
whatsoever.

~~~
mistermann
Maybe I misunderstand the scope of the technical details, but if the
underlying flow of messages across social media was _forcibly_ abstracted to a
universal master hub, then could not individual clients (or sub-platforms) not
then exert control over capabilities (filtering, censorship, etc) that is
currently controlled entirely by the individual social media platforms who
_own the networks and userbase_?

> and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this
> open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see
> how this will change the public and political perception of social media
> websites whatsoever.

I would argue this is a side-effect of the current state of affairs -
obfuscation during studies and testimony (what little takes place), but mainly
the inability to demonstrate superior implementations.

I'd rather we don't give up without having actually tried anything.

EDIT: Although, I could easily agree that this is simply a disingenuous
smokescreen to buy time and mitigate legislative risks. In fact, I'd bet money
on it.

~~~
RussianCow
> Although, I could easily agree that this is simply a disingenuous
> smokescreen to buy time and mitigate legislative risks. In fact, I'd bet
> money on it.

To be clear, this is roughly what I'm arguing. In theory, I openly welcome
Twitter and Facebook adopting an open standard and giving users the option of
easily moving their content to another service, but I don't think it will pan
out that way in practice due to the current state of affairs. For one, brand
recognition is very powerful, and I think Twitter knows this and is banking on
momentum keeping users on their platform regardless of the technical ability
to move to another service. Also, most people simply won't understand the
implications of this standard or why they should care. ("Why would I use XYZ
when I can just use Twitter/Facebook?")

------
floatingatoll
Twitter and Facebook and Google and others share one common concern that, if
addressed, would see their staffing budgets massively reduced (and thus
profits increased):

Human moderators.

Each grudgingly uses human moderators to squash the worst of the problems on
their platform, and does a terrible job of it. Each underspends on human
beings, using contractors without sufficient mental health care to ensure
their well-being as they sift through our online sewer pipes.

Google outsources YouTube moderation to third-parties: the Content ID system
is a labor shifting device designed to force the labor cost of enforcement
outside of Google’s responsibility.

Twitter ended political advertisements rather than spend the human cost
required to moderate them, and is now proposing a decentralized platform where
Twitter is no longer responsible for content moderation for other platforms.

By doing so, they can continue to act as your “aggregator” of individual (RSS-
like) Twitter accounts, so that they can continue showing you ads based on the
data they harvest from you and your feeds — while outsourcing responsibility
for moderation to others.

This is an effective strategy for increasing profits and if implemented
correctly will permit mass layoffs of most of their content moderation
workforce. This will also vastly increase the prevalence of abuse, racism, and
other societal ills that infect Twitter with its underpowered moderation
today.

Props to Twitter for identifying a way to externalize the cost of civility
while continuing to profit from the resulting cesspool that will ensue.

~~~
specialist
The problem is online social networks. There is no fix.

Any medium supported by ads is toxic. This predates online social networks.

Any news feed (recommenders) is intrinsically toxic. Such feedback loops are
just outrage machines.

It's highly doubtful that likes and ratings can be redeemed either. I'm fresh
out of goodwill, so I don't care to try.

So what's left? The graph. Maybe that could be useful.

Meanwhile, it's hysterical that anyone tainted by Twitter imagines they have
anything constructive to contribute. Now were he to completely renounce the
whole effort, acknowledges it's deleterious impact on democracy and society,
turn it off, and beg for our forgiveness. Well. That'd be a good start.

~~~
floatingatoll
Would a social network, where every post is moderated, have the same issues?

~~~
specialist
Very good question.

Moderation is the only known effective solution. Some times.

FAANGs and others abandoned human moderation because it "doesn't scale".

So what? When did we decide that scale was more important than civility?

\--

I also have questions.

What is the feedback loop? For every medium, every style of communication?

How do we break those loops into discrete steps? Then where can we add
friction? To slow down the negative psychological and sociological
pathologies.

Defuse, disable those dopamine hits we all get from these social interactions.
Maybe even figure out how to make it a positive feedback loop.

~~~
floatingatoll
Google decided scale was more important than civility when they positioned
text search - Pagerank - as a competitor to curation, rather than as a
beneficiary of curation.

We used to have curated content indexes with human moderators guiding them -
in print, Yahoo/DMOZ, AOL keywords, web rings, LiveJournal. Those required
significant human labor compared to algorithmic text searching, and were not
able to scale as rapidly as content creation tools did.

Was that lack of scaling a problem? No, not necessarily. Some percentage of
people enjoy curation (thus Pinterest) and we could have celebrated their
efforts and given them top billing in search.

Instead, we “democratized” search by harvesting all of those human rankings
and feeding them into a machine algorithm that produces seemingly better-than-
human results. Unfortunately, in doing so they did not highlight whose
curation led to content being shown, and so curation became less popular over
time.

Unfortunately, that curation is what led to Pagerank being so valuable.
Without it, spam and liars and malicious activities have infected all “search”
and “ranking” systems. Without human curation distinguishing “valuable” from
“unevaluated”, search does not scale either.

We did society great harm when we sidelined curation, and no amount of
machine-learning algorithms will heal that wound.

~~~
specialist
Amen.

Recommenders, like bureaucracies, are misanthropic (anti-human).

The rules are meant to remove human judgement. While denying the baked in bias
and dysfunction of the imposed ruleset.

Per Goodhart's Law, they arbitrarily state some things are worthwhile &
meaningful, and everything else are not.

Black boxes which thwart inspection, transparency, accountability,
explanation.

\--

Forgive me for flogging this horse; I do have a point.

Also missing from online social networks are the concepts of fair and
impartial adjudication.

Curation, adjudication, transparency, accountability... I'm sure we're
omitting many other missing features. Because we're too close to the problem.

Going meta meta here: the common trait of all these "regulation arbitrage"
unicorns is they profit by the destruction of our society's laws, checks &
balances, social norms, and so forth.

~~~
floatingatoll
Can adjudication be impartial with regards to civility?

~~~
specialist
I mean impartial in the sense that the adjudicators (judge, jury, arbiters,
moderators, whomever) are not beholden to the publisher. So a third party.
Like our court system is supposed to be.

IMHO, there's not enough daylight between ombudspersons and their paymasters.

I have no fixed opinion for standards of civility. I'm just trying to capture
the notion that some dialog, rhetoric is out of bounds, as determined by the
intended audience (context).

------
mathgenius
"the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal,
and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention"

I really wish I could hack on the youtube recommendation algorithm. It seems
to be tuned for zombie viewing pleasure, and totally not for finding
surprising new content. Even just having several "personas" would be a big
help.

~~~
save_ferris
Totally agree. The lack of configurability around recommendations is really
frustrating. So often, the next video that plays is something tangentially
related to what I'm watching, but still not what I want to watch.

I'd love a feature that defaults the next video to the newest unwatched video
in a given channel or something like that, but we all know why it won't be
built.

~~~
BlueTemplar
People don't immediately disable next video autoplay?!?

~~~
ibly31
He didn't say anything was auto played. Just the next recommended video.
YouTube always highlights one, it's at the top of the list

------
Arathorn
For what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes
here - complete with relative reputation systems ([https://github.com/matrix-
org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos...](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-
doc/blob/msc2313/proposals/2313-moderation-policy-rooms.md)) and an open
standard ([https://matrix.org/docs/spec](https://matrix.org/docs/spec)) and
even an open governance process and foundation
([https://matrix.org/foundation](https://matrix.org/foundation)) - and with
work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix.

Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some
opportunity to join forces on this.

~~~
pat2man
But Matrix is mostly built around chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter. I would
assume any new system would take some parts of Matrix and some parts of
ActivityPub but not the entire thing.

~~~
Arathorn
We built Matrix to synchronise any kind of comms data - we just call the
primitive a “room” rather than (say) a “pubsub topic” or whatever more general
term. You can absolutely build microblogging on top of Matrix; there are
already a few toy examples already.

~~~
hobofan
Really glad you mentioned that!

I was looking into building something on top of SecureScuttleButt, but didn't
like some of the opinionated choices in it (same goes for ActivityPub).
Looking at Matrix spec, the two seem to be somewhat conceptually similar, and
Matrix seems to cover my needs. Never even thought to consider it before, but
it might actually be a really good fit!

~~~
asymmetric
What were the choices you didn’t like about Scuttlebutt?

------
kick
While it's probably just an extension of Jack's obsession over blockchain,
it's a bit interesting that you'd have to use Twitter to apply: there are a
few truly-decentralized/or federated solutions that have been proposed and
have an active userbase, and the authors of the good stuff don't tend to be on
Twitter.

For example, one of the people working on one of the most prominent pieces of
software implementing the ActivityPub specification has proposed/is ~close to
releasing a reference-implementation of one [a non-AP distributed protocol],
which seems to solve most of the issues that Twitter would need to solve for
privately-scoped posts (a major problem with most federated and decentralized
social media), with plans to ~eventually get around to solving publicly-scoped
things:

[https://socially.whimsic.al/notice/9p6cjMLaIZxtCKyNto](https://socially.whimsic.al/notice/9p6cjMLaIZxtCKyNto)

(Pleroma doesn't really do per-user threading, so the responses to the
original post are mixed in with the author continuing the original thread.
Reader beware, etc.)

~~~
robobro
OCAP is such a needed feature. One of my concerns with Twitter is that it's
essentially _unsafe_ \-- while safety is a tricky thing to guarantee in
decentralized networks, OCAP makes serious steps towards addressing the
problem.

------
phoe-krk
Isn't this called ActivityPub and hasn't this been working well for the last
couple of years?

~~~
mactavish88
Exactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just
endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization?

Are there genuine technical shortcomings in the ActivityPub standard that
Twitter's engineering team has identified? Why not talk about that and
contribute improvements to the standard?

Are there shortcomings to being part of the standardization process in the
W3C? Then talk about that and make the processes better.

Is it that he needs his name stamped on a new protocol? I'm not sure we can do
much about the terminal egotism of the ultra wealthy and its pernicious
effects on our society. Solving this will take a tremendous amount of
collective effort.

~~~
M2Ys4U
> Exactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not
> just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization?

Dorsey follows the Mastodon twitter account - he knows about it.

~~~
capableweb
Although knowing Mastodon doesn't mean you know ActivityPub. If I recall
correctly, Mastodon didn't implement ActivityPub in the beginning but started
recently (within last couple of years)

~~~
gargron
Mastodon launched in November 2016 and fully switched to ActivityPub in
October 2017.

------
jitl
How could they avoid mentioning ActivityPub? This already exists! This goal is
full of double-think.

~~~
masukomi
ActivityPub isn't decentralized. It's federated. There's a big difference.

That being said, solutions like Scuttlebutt, DAT, & IPFS are decentralized, do
work, and do have social networks.

~~~
zmzrr
What's the difference between decentralised and federated?

~~~
bilbo0s
Federated has some, perhaps different, individual or organization in charge of
each server to which users are able to connect. There may be hundreds of
different individuals and companies hosting and controlling different servers.
All of which could either choose to communicate with each other, or not. Each
of these servers would have, perhaps, millions of users who would then be
beholden to the regulatory whims of the individual or organization controlling
the server they join. An example would be Mastadon.

In a completely decentralized architecture, every client would also be a
server. And every client could, potentially, connect to every other client. So
every user is beholden only to himself. Other users would be free, of course,
not to connect to that user, but the user could post whatever s/he wanted
without fear of being cut off. There is no good example of this architecture
out there right now.

Basically with Mastadon, you can be cut off. With a hypothetical completely
distributed social network architecture, you can't. (Well, maybe your ISP
could cut off your internet connection? But that's a whole other issue.)

~~~
BlueTemplar
> In a completely decentralized architecture, every client would also be a
> server. [...] There is no good example of this architecture out there right
> now.

BitTorrent ? Git ? Bitcoin ? (They can _also_ become centralized if there's a
will, see Pirate Bay / Github / MtGox.)

------
egfx
I operate an open source standard called Shareable Tweets
[http://2fb.me](http://2fb.me)

A service designed to get tweets to a larger audience. But Twitter banned the
account that was working to put this standard into practice @shareU

Ironically Twitter has been, historically; the most restrictive force in
social media.

~~~
schmichael
MCC did a great job bringing up Twitter's awful record on open APIs in a
reply:
[https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1204807272226082817](https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1204807272226082817)

While I'm all for open standards and protocols, Twitter has proven itself
hostile to 3rd party developers. Even if their proposals are good Twitter has
a long way to go to prove themselves trustworthy participants in open
networks.

~~~
egfx
Yes exactly, instead of being open they’ve consistently shut the doors. You
have no idea the lengths I’ve been through to keep that service up. In fact
the technology decisions by the guy charged with leading this effort (CTO)
have been more restrictive as of late not less. For example the web UI is now
totally obfuscated server rendered code in effect nullifying any chrome
extension that wants to work on top of it.

If anyone is interested I wrote a piece about democratizing social media
[https://medium.com/@shareU/we-built-this-
city-2cb97437942f](https://medium.com/@shareU/we-built-this-city-2cb97437942f)

------
Kye
The Mastodon project Twitter helpfully provided a list of existing projects
that are robust and already fairly popular.

[https://twitter.com/MastodonProject/status/12047748080153272...](https://twitter.com/MastodonProject/status/1204774808015327232)

Mastodon has a number of instance and user-level boundary controls, like image
muting for porn and sex work instances, that let people still federate with
instances that could be trouble without that boundary. It would keep a
hypothetical Twitter.com instance from causing what happened when AOL brought
millions of people online.

~~~
rapnie
Here is a long list of AP projects in various stages of development:

[https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/watch...](https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/watchlist-
for-activitypub-apps)

------
riffic
Jack is building his own Fediverse.

I think Twitter should whitelabel its application and sell 'instances' to
media, publishers, government agencies, and other organizations who would
benefit over control of their namespace. G Suite seems to be a good model to
follow.

What I'd really like to see would be a focus on nonprofits and grassroots
political candidates, such as a NationBuilder for the Fediverse.

------
Teknoman117
I'm curious about their motives here.

One of the massive "troubles" that social media has been having to deal with
in recent years is the whole fake news problem. (in quotes, because it also
has driven social media engagement, and thus revenue from ad impressions up,
so from a business perspective it's a boon with the right narrative)
Admittedly, it isn't a new problem, it just it's perceived impact has grown to
the point of catching the public eye.

Twitter's response is that they're banning political speech entirely, to try
and get out of the fake news domains that people care the most about.

Now, they're pushing a decentralized social media system that by it's very
definition will be hard to control content on. In being a client for said open
standard, they are certainly free to block whatever comes in that suits their
fancy, but to me, it feels more than they're using this as a way to shift
blame with regulation looking like it's on the horizon. It'd be an awful
conveinent excuse to say "but Mr/Mrs/Miss regulator, we're just an aggregator,
other entities are responsible for this content."

Maybe they really do believe the best approach to combatting this is to serve
as a principled (by someone's definition) client of a sewer of public content,
or maybe this is a strategic move to shift responsibility. I wonder which
it'll be...

~~~
dgellow
> Twitter's response is that they're banning political speech entirely, to try
> and get out of the fake news domains that people care the most about.

Twitter doesn't ban political speech, what they will stop accepting are
political ads.

~~~
Teknoman117
You're right, I don't quite recall what I was thinking at the time.

------
kick
To those of you pushing for ActivityPub:

Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate
the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, the biggest piece of
software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the
only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it
(Pleroma).

AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped content, relying on a
lot of trust for every party involved. This gets broken frequently, and has
had consequences so far on networks implementing it (like half of them are
incompatible implementations, so I think it's completely fine to say
"networks").

The specification itself is far too ambiguous. Here's a post by a maintainer
of Diaspora explaining this part further:
[https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-
to...](https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to-rule-them-
all.html)

So let's assume you can get Twitter to implement ActivityPub perfectly to-
spec. Great! It doesn't work with literally any pre-existing ActivityPub
software, and users' DMs and are more or less public, with users' private
accounts literally being public.

I use AP daily, and while it's fine for technical users with a reasonable
understanding that anything they post is public, putting naive users' data at
risk has never and will never be acceptable; pushing AP will harm everyone.

~~~
djsumdog
I've contribute to Mastodon and run an instance. Yes, it's very silly to think
you can use Activity Pub for non-public things .. but isn't that going to be
true of ANY distributed social networking protocol?

Direct point-to-point we can make secure (relatively) yes. You can run your
own e-mail server, setup up PGP keys, and once you make it through that
usability nightmare, you now have secure e-mail (if you trust your hosting
provider) that will probably get dropped as SPAM 1/3 of the time when
e-mailing anyone on Google/MS/Yahoo.

There's an interesting case where Mastodon and Pleroma respect and forward
delete requests. Say you have a thread started on BigInstanceA and I reply
from PersonalInstanceB. Someone from IAC replies to the same thread and B sees
it, but A can't because C is banned from A. The reply gets dropped. You now
have two conversations not in sync.

Say A deletes the original. B gets the delete request, but C never does, since
it's a banned instance from A's perspective and doesn't exist ... even though
it has a full copy of the deleted thread.

Deletes are truly fucking silly in the AP world. As much criticism as
Zuckerberge gets (and deserves), back in the day he just wanted everything
public, and I'm kinda for that too. If I post something online, it's never
personal. If I need to talk about something personal, I call a friend, or text
them, or meet them in a bar or plan my next vacation to be in their city. Real
conversations don't happen in this space.

~~~
bjt2n3904
Perhaps ActivityPub is struggling because it tries to be too much. If it does
well at being Twitter, why must it also be Signal messenger? I don't use DM's
much at Twitter, if that feature wasn't a part of AP/Mastodon, I wouldn't cry!

That comes across in delete requests. There's no way to guarantee that a
server would honor that request. I don't think a blockchain style solution is
needed -- just don't try to offer things that are impossible to offer.
(There's this idea that AP/decentralized will be Nazi-free... what a ludicrous
promise! Although, perhaps that's more an expectation of the users than the
protocol authors...)

~~~
kick
The protocol itself is aimed at being universal, so it's inherent to the
protocol.

------
woadwarrior01
“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves” - Lenin

------
panarky
ActivityPub? Who cares about what JSON schema gets adopted?

Much more interesting is the why, not the how.

#1 reason to decentralize:

 _" Centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading
information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too
much burden on people."_

#2 reason:

 _" The value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and
removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention.
Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can’t
choose or build alternatives. Yet."_

#3 reason:

 _" social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on
content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than
conversation which informs and promotes health."_

~~~
auiya
> "social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on
> content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than
> conversation which informs and promotes health."

This seems to run anathema to the concept of social media platforms being run
by for-profit companies. Monetization absolutely mandates the need for
controversy and outrage, as opposed to social welfare.

~~~
larnmar
That’s the thing, I’m not really sure it does. Never-ending social media
political flamewars increase engagement for a few people but drive others
away.

Personally I deleted my twitter account and barely use Facebook any more for
this reason. If there was a fun happy version of these networks that showed me
stuff I wanted to see rather than stuff that annoys me, I’d use it.

------
LockAndLol
> Instead he pointed to the principle of decentralization, and key
> technologies, such as blockchain, as the solution.

Ah... so that's how he's going to get the funding: [https://external-
preview.redd.it/CypLdP3MLDVm15Lwm1f-M98gyMh...](https://external-
preview.redd.it/CypLdP3MLDVm15Lwm1f-M98gyMhcUkj9_yd0CfOpZHw.png?s=10fd0161fb48dfe7393aa8d62873b88baeec91f3)

Why else would you need to insert a blockchain into the solution? Scuttlebutt
([https://scuttlebutt.nz/](https://scuttlebutt.nz/)) is already one possible
solution and they wouldn't have to reinvent some new protocol.

~~~
ChristianBundy
It's worth mentioning that Secure Scuttlebutt uses a signature chain, which
provides many benefits of conventional blockchains without forcing a consensus
(which is the part that requires "mining"). My experience with SSB has been
very positive.

------
Angostura
Mastodon, anyone? [https://joinmastodon.org](https://joinmastodon.org)

~~~
kick
Mastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible
protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).

~~~
Gaelan
The terminology I've most commonly seen used is this:

Centralized = One central system runs everything (i.e. Twitter, Facebook)

Decentralized = Multiple central systems run everything, but they talk to each
other and you can build your own (i.e. email, Mastodon/ActivityPub)

Distributed = No central system at all (i.e. Bitcoin)

~~~
miguelmota
> Distributed = No central system at all

I can have a single non-distributed computer system and have that single
computer be decentralized by having the programs it runs be done through
achieving consensus. Your definitions are a bit off because Mastadon and
Bitcoin are both distributed and decentralized systems.

------
sonofgod
yay, blockchain. :(

[https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766085037248512](https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766085037248512)

"Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more
viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and
durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but
the fundamentals are there."

~~~
treelovinhippie
All blockchains fundamentally do not scale. Global universal consensus and a
global centralized datastore (ledger) is an anti-pattern found nowhere in
nature.

If the Twitter team go for a blockchain stack, they're doing so for the mass
surveillance and control feature.

P2P is the way: see Holochain, Scuttlebutt etc.

~~~
nenolod
Actually a hybrid approach is the way. Nobody wants to wait hours to download
GBs of new gossip to get started. Streaming the gossip is necessary to make
the technology viable.

------
d--b
How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation?

It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.

~~~
buboard
I m surprised every time i see people here _asking_ for the evil that is
censorship.

Dorsey wants a decentralized system exactly because he won't be held liable
for not censoring people. It makes sense business-wise and it's a win-win for
humanity.

Twitter has become a trigger-happy-people-fest because each group knows they
can weaponize censorship against each other. With systems that are uncensored
, nobody complaints, e.g. people don't make a fuss that email is not
censorious enough

~~~
ookdatnog
All moderation is censorship, to some degree. Even a voting system like HN's
has censorship-like qualities: it is specifically designed to make unpopular
comments less visible than popular ones. And that is fine, I wouldn't want to
only have forums or social media with zero moderation.

Censorship only becomes a problem when it is _unavoidable_, that is, you
cannot choose to live outside of some entity's censorship influence. This is
where things get complicated when you have giant entities like Facebook or
Twitter, which are for many people difficult to avoid (and there certainly
isn't an alternative to them).

The problem arises when these entities need to choose which messages to show
you. Even without putting any conscious bias in this algorithm, there is a
system there which prioritizes some messages over others in a completely
opaque way, which is often game-able (bad-faith actors can abuse the system to
spread their propaganda, for instance). So moderation is not merely necessary
but _unavoidable_, simply because there is more content than you can be
presented with, and unfortunately the huge power of moderating large social
media networks rests in the hands of a handful of engineers.

Decentralization is an interesting solution here because it would make the
social graph and the recommender system separate entities, with clients being
able to choose which recommender/moderation system they subscribe to. The need
for censorship wouldn't be gone, but with people being able to choose their
own censor, the massive power imbalance is not quite as bad.

~~~
larnmar
I think censorship is no longer censorship when it happens purely on the
client side, it’s just filtering. As long as the tweets all continue to exist
out there somewhere, someone can write a client to display them.

This will, I predict, make a lot of people unhappy because “omg there are Nazi
tweets on my blockchain” but personally I’m happy with it.

------
jellicle
Seems like Twitter is looking to embrace, extend and extinguish Mastodon, etc.

This is good, in a sense - means Twitter is feeling the competition. But any
open source developers out there should trust Twitter just as far as you can
throw them.

------
wufufufu
I think Jack's ideas usually should be _new_ companies and not changes to
Square or Twitter. I also am disappointed that Vine was shuttered when TikTok
is basically the same thing and now is a massive social network[1].

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/01/instagram-vs-
tiktok/](https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/01/instagram-vs-tiktok/)

------
0XAFFE
This sounds more like Scuttlebutt[1] than Mastodon.

[1] [https://scuttlebutt.nz/](https://scuttlebutt.nz/)

------
M2Ys4U
I'm willing to bet this is a reaction to a the Indian exodus from Twitter to
the fediverse

~~~
dajohnson89
could you elaborate? or provide a link?

~~~
M2Ys4U
Sure:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-
india-50343054](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-50343054)

[https://qz.com/india/1746734/angry-twitter-india-users-
are-m...](https://qz.com/india/1746734/angry-twitter-india-users-are-
migrating-to-mastodon-in-thousands/)

[https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/mastodon-happening-
in...](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/mastodon-happening-in-
india/article29924141.ece)

[https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/indians-
leav...](https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/indians-leaving-
twitter-join-mastodon-what-is-it-how-does-it-work-1617030-2019-11-08)

[https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/social-n...](https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/social-
network-mastodon-suspends-assam-police-account-6123408/)

------
jacquesm
Twitter, the company that started out with an open API which attracted lots of
developers who then got kicked off once the company figured out what worked.

Good luck with your 'open standard'.

------
buboard
NNTP FTW!

He's CEO of twitter and Square. His plan is for square to be at the center of
decentralized payments via cryptocoins. Africa will be a huge place to start,
as the incumbents in the west will sabotage any such effort

------
rvense
Why build anything? Just[0] make Twitter a Mastodon instance.

[0] Haha

~~~
david_draco
Would Mastodon be able to handle the load of Twitter?

~~~
rvense
I extremely doubt that. For a long time Twitter couldn't handle the load of
Twitter...

~~~
zmzrr
Before they rewrote their RoR stuff in Java.

------
JoshMandel
This can also seen as Twitter getting out ahead of
[https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s2658/BILLS-116s2658is.pd...](https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s2658/BILLS-116s2658is.pdf)
(press release at
[https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/10/senat...](https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/10/senators-
introduce-bipartisan-bill-to-encourage-competition-in-social-media)) -- which
would call for NIST to define:

 _model technical standards by which to make interoperable popular classes of
communications or information services, including—_

 _(1) online messaging;_

 _(2) multimedia sharing; and_

 _(3) social networking_

(And all within 180 days ;-) No small feat.)

------
thisisbrians
Cool idea, sure. Maybe they should have had the marketing team look at the
banner image before going live. Definitely undermines the perceived legitimacy
of the effort in my opinion:
[https://twitter.com/bluesky](https://twitter.com/bluesky)

~~~
arthurcolle
I love that little creature. Why don't you?

~~~
save_ferris
I personally get really strong uncanny valley vibes from that thing. I might
dig a cartoon version of it, but that banner image seriously creeps me out.

~~~
arthurcolle
I don't even think it is a real animal, it looks like a capuchin monkey or
something. Anyone know what species it is?

~~~
kixiQu
it's an art doll (like a puppet)

------
thosakwe
Why not ActivityPub?

~~~
false-mirror
because it's not built on crypto, and Jack wants to control a new coin a la
Libra

~~~
robobro
why does Twitter need to be built on crypto? Ugh.

This brings to mind the (truthfully) quite useless Minds.com social network.
Twitter doesn't NEED a blockchain. Just look at Pleroma, Mastodon, or Gab to
see p2p twitter replacements that are blockchain-free.

------
walt74
Interesting. Twitter early kicked open standards in the nuts, so I understand
everyone who's sceptical to say the least. But if they manage to detangle that
ugly mess that is the Fediverse this could be a real and good step into the
right direction.

~~~
Kye
No one should trust them to do it without making it favorable to them and
their business model. Microsoft was just the first to get caught and punished
for embracing, extending, and extinguishing in the new century. The pattern is
as old as time.

------
onreact
Ah, the impact of Mastodon - the decentralized Twitter-alternative. I highly
recommend it.

You can even run an instance yourself, just like you run WordPress.

------
laksmanv
Does anyone on HN have an interest in building a decentralized social network
together? I've been thinking about doing this for a while now. Feel free to
shoot me an email laksman [at] stanford [dot] edu

~~~
80386
What's the problem with existing ones? And why do social networks draw so much
attention relative to other social platform patterns, like forums?

I've been thinking for a while that there should be something like a
decentralized omni-Reddit. I liked forums, but people don't want to use them
anymore, because there are too many different signups and too many different
notification streams/etc. on too many different sites to bother with - so if
you had something like Mastodon for forums, that could mitigate that.

But it seems like a consensus has set in that Facebook/Twitter-like social
networks are the One True Model, and very few people are interested in things
like forums anymore.

~~~
kixiQu
Always love boosting other people's open-source projects:
[https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy](https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy) "A
link aggregator / reddit clone for the fediverse."

------
nathanvanfleet
I am worried that ultimately this means that the twitter of the future will be
something where people can't be deplatformed. It's been pretty effective in
the past to deplatform some outrageous individuals who have stoked racial
hatred and violence. They get deplatformed, and their audience disappears.
There are a lot of places where hate speech is illegal. And I know that
Twitter has had huge problems when called to censor things and making it
completely decentralized would allow them not have to.

Also it's weird but Jack follows Cernovich.

~~~
dcolkitt
Even if you think the current usage of deplatforming has been positive, it
poses a huge black swan risk. If our major communication platforms expose a
centralized censorship mechanism, that becomes a deliciously tempting target
to be leveraged by authoritarian regimes.

Even if I trust the Twitter mod team, what's to stop tomorrow's jack-booted
thugs from shooting the Twitter team and seizing control of the servers? I'd
much rather we as a society move to decentralized censorship-resistant
networks while we still have the freedom to openly build and advocate for
them.

I really doubt that banning Hitler's social media accounts in the 1920s would
have done anything to stop the Nazi rise to power. Whereas in the 1930s, rest
assured that centralized platforms would have made the Gestapo's life a
hundred times easier.

~~~
darkwizard42
Then people stop using Twitter...

The solution to your problem is quite simple. The network will die off.

------
eitland
Now if we could get

\- a few proper web frontends (and especially one like Google+),

\- groups (like Google+, WhatsApp, Telegram)

then this would start to look seriously promising.

I'd happily pay a 20-40 bucks a year for that and (if Telegram didn't exist) a
bit more to get a hosted but private instance for my extended family.

(That said I have been experimenting with hubzilla this year and it seems
seriously promising but all instances seems to be locked down really hard or
doesn't acvept new members and testing on my own instance alone doesn't really
give me a feel for how it works in practice.)

------
tingletech
I thought at first by "kick off" they had banned a competitor.

------
buboard
the choice is pretty obvious, whatever mastodon uses

~~~
philpem
That would be ActivityPub.

------
captainbland
A team of "up to five" \- is this actually a serious effort? I get that five
strong minds can do quite a lot but from a corporate strategic point of view
this is a minnow, surely?

------
p0la
What does that mean in terms of responsibility to take bad content content
down? Seems like this would allow them to argue fake news is not their problem
anymore. They are just a nice interface to visualise stuff that is stored in a
decentralised way, outside of their direct control. Also I guess it means you
can cut this AWS bill by like a lot. And it feels like it gives a very clear
path to direct monetisation.

------
bjt2n3904
I'm cautiously optimistic. Twitter has been been making some bad decisions
with content moderation, and has abandoned the idea of being the "Free Speech
Wing of the Free Speech Party". Decentralization should restore that...

...should. That notion could disappear really fast if Twitter gets to decide
who can run an instance based on their belief systems.

In the mean time, it's an interesting case study of what happened to Wil
Wheaton when he tried to join a Mastodon instance. Already, even in these
comments, people are expressing concerns about how Twitter will be able to
maintain control over "misinformation and abuse".

That's the whole point of decentralization guys. It's impossible to moderate
Twitter without being authoritarian and creepy. Bail on the concept of
controlling others, and delegate that power to the end user by means of
improved blocking tools.

If decentralization is going to work, we have to abandon our desire to control
others with a centralized authority, and accept that responsibility as our
own.

~~~
akhilcacharya
“Free speech” twitter alternatives exist, and invariably turn into cesspools
(see gab.ai).

~~~
larnmar
Is gab really a “cesspool”? I just looked at it for the first time. The way
people talk about it I was expecting /pol/ squared, but the parts I could see
without making an account seemed surprisingly normie, more reminiscent of
instapundit than Stormfront.

~~~
ratsmack
Gab is a good site and has been vilified by the rage mobs that only want to
hear one side of any issue. And like many sites, there will always be the
fringe lunatics, but that is what free speech is all about.

------
dchuk
I wonder if he realizes how terrible Twitter is for long form writing and
publishing like this when he does it. It’s always baffled me why they haven’t
removed the character limit entirely and instantly become the largest
networked publishing platform that’s ever existed over night.

~~~
buboard
i like the character limit. Twitter is a telegraph office, not a magazine. he
kinda has to use these threads himself, because it's his company. Hopefully
his new system will suppport dual "excerpt/full text" publishing, because i 'd
hate my feed to be full of 3 page articles instead of TL-DRs

~~~
robobro
it made more sense when mobile phones operated via SMS rather than 3g/4g/wifi,
but it doesn't make a lot of sense now to have the character limit. What do
you actually gain by capping posts to 240 characters per message? People seem
to primarily use Twitter to communicate and forcing people to break a thought
into multiple posts adds nothing to the experience.

"Twitter is a telegraph office" \-- but should it be?

Look at ATOM/RSS, they are telegraph offices too, yet they don't have
character limits. ActivityPub services like Pleroma also are "telegraph
offices" without strict character limits yet they don't seem to suffer for it.
In fact it's much more pleasant to use Pleroma for this reason, you have the
freedom to express complete thoughts.

~~~
buboard
> What do you actually gain by capping posts to 240 characters per message

brevity? it s a virtue

------
verdverm
ActivityPub?

------
turdnagel
In my mind Twitter’s streaming API (user feeds) _was_ the standard. I
understand there were technical reasons for shutting it down, but is there any
reason they couldn’t rearchitect it and have eventing with the same format?

------
Nasrudith
Decentralization first came to mind as a "try to pawn off the hosting costs"
as a motivation but I can see trying legal zones to try to adapt to the
multiple conflicting legal requirements and demands because countries would
never agree on "neutral international business rules". It is certainly
rational and often of questionable legal fairness to expect otherwise.

I am not happy with the balkanization involved in that concept - part of the
beauty of the internet is a disregard for the globe's petty fiefdoms and their
ability to literally divide and conquer.

------
jstewartmobile
Old Jack seems a little wild these days--like some of that Paul LeRoux / John
McAfee outlaw energy has entered his soul.

Will keep my fingers crossed.

------
ilaksh
I think that most monopoly technology companies now expect decentralized
systems to challenge them eventually.

So its smart to try to build and promote something that is decentralized but
also allows them a profit model. It also makes sense just from an
architectural standpoint in terms of scaling. I think Ethereum offers at least
a chance they may do both of those things.

------
techlaw
Yes, protocols, not platforms -- but BigTech cannot be involved beyond
funding. We've already been down their road.

------
crabasa
Honestly... I've never wanted to embed an image in HN more than now. Lucy
pulling the football away from Charlie Brown says what 1000 words cannot.

[https://giphy.com/gifs/football-prank-
Ou18ZgE49Fss0](https://giphy.com/gifs/football-prank-Ou18ZgE49Fss0)

~~~
dgellow
Could you elaborate? I checked the gif and don't understand what you mean.

~~~
crabasa
[https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+screws+developers](https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+screws+developers)

------
shotashotashota
Unless its open source and everyone can contribute, decentralized enough that
everyone can set up their own networks, then its just another company trying
to make long term investment in their company I am not going to trust Jack,
any company, on any single person on anything.

~~~
ainiriand
Apparently they want to create a distributed ledger using something akin to a
blockchain. If that is the case then they can benefit from transactions going
over their network but I doubt that it will be open source. Maybe the code to
operate a node will be open sourced but just that.

------
faitswulff
Is there anything wrong with targeting GNU Social and/or ActivityPub for
Twitter's use case?

~~~
kick
Mastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible
protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).

Further, GNU Social still doesn't implement AP. This is largely because AP is
very annoying to implement, but also because GNU Social sucks.

------
dang
The "Protocols Not Platforms" article that he references was discussed here a
few months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059)

~~~
Advaith
Thanks, this was a great discussion to go over.

------
NetBeck
I wonder how much user engagement would decrease if a CAPTCHA was needed to
read a tweet. I think a big percentage of accounts are bots either trying to
gauge sentiment, or push groups further to their respective political corners.

------
The_rationalist
How much is this in intersection with the
[https://datatransferproject.dev](https://datatransferproject.dev) currently
also supported officially by Twitter.

------
tomaszs
We have a lots of great initiatives these days: wt.social, brave, twitter+.
Monopoly stopped not being evil. Puts shadow on the Internet. But there are
still people who believe. Who try to save it!

------
seph-reed
I'm kind of tired of Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, Cisco,
Oracle, and all the other big names.

Do we really need a billion dollar company to figure this out, or is it just
an advertising issue?

------
askvictor
The cynic in me thinks that by adding yet another open standard into the mix,
this will ultimately help in preventing any open standard from gaining
critical mass, thus keeping the status quo.

------
Porthos9K
I'd say they should use ActivityPub[1] instead of wasting time on their own
incompatible solution, but quite frankly I don't want Twitter federating with
Mastodon. We get our fill of chuds with anime avatars thanks to Pleroma, and
don't really need or want Twitter around because decentralization won't make
it any less of a digital sacrifice zone[2].

1: [https://activitypub.rocks/](https://activitypub.rocks/)

2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_zone)

~~~
hnuser77
For those unfamiliar with this situation: Pleroma is an ActivityPub server and
frontend written in Elixir and designed for low resource consumption, somewhat
of an alterative to Mastodon. One or two of the most prominent early Pleroma
instances had very sparse moderation policies, leading some to associate
Pleroma with trolls and far-right users. Today, most Pleroma instances
prohibit hate speech, harassment, and so on. Of course, anyone is free to make
their own Pleroma or Mastodon instance with whatever rules and federation
policies they like, and the most "chud-filled" instance in the entire
fediverse (Gab) is running a Mastodon fork, not Pleroma.

------
TomMckenny
Wisely so: eventually two autocrats are going to pressure him to remove the
other for policy violations. Better to decentralize than collect Interpol
warrants.

------
tuukkah
There are multiple ways they could decentralise, Mastodon-like or not. I bet
the prime requirement is securing a business model for Twitter.

------
EGreg
To be fair, Twitter did pioneer oAuth back in the day, and now everyone uses
it... worked better than Meebo’s xAuth

------
robobro
Gosh I hope they buy pleroma. Compared to mastodon and gab it's objectively
the best decentralized Twitter.

~~~
robobro
Pleroma is light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi; its primary web interface is
inspired by Twitter but it also includes the classic Mastodon interface at
[https://host/web](https://host/web) endpoint. It's very easy to set up and
run. It's also compatible with anything that works with Mastodon via
MastodonAPI (bots, desktop clients, mobile clients such as FediLab).

Definitely the best ActivityPub software on the market!

------
quirkot
It's RSS. Twitter invented RSS.

~~~
robobro
Old Twitter even included RSS for user profiles & hashtags I believe, much
like how Pleroma provides ATOM feeds for user profiles and hashtags/search
queries.

------
kashprime
They should use RSS; Youtube, Medium and most blogs already generate RSS feeds
for their content.

~~~
paulgb
Am I mixed up, or did Twitter at one point have RSS feeds? I also distinctly
recall XMPP support circa 2008.

~~~
hugey010
You're right, I remember, not fondly, parsing that XML for mobile.

------
M2Ys4U
I'm willing to bet this is a reaction to a the Indian exodus from Twitter to
the fediverse

------
Advaith
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Twitter seems to be going w/
the ethos.

------
ummonk
This is huge. The problem for any federated initiative is that most of the
users are already on established social media platforms. If Twitter adopts an
existing protocol (or creates a new one that others can join on), then new
services can be compatible with Twitter's massive user base.

------
voidfiles
RSS?

------
PleaseHelpMe
dear mod, this is a dup of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780)

------
davefp
How do you write a tweet that cribs the ideals of existing federated social
media projects (Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, Write Freely etc.) without at
least acknowledging their existence?

Also: Relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

------
malvosenior
Twitter has repeatedly demonstrated that they are not a developer friendly
company and that you should never build anything on their APIs. Since day one,
they've done nothing but crack down on 3rd party development and peel away
access.

They are the last company that should be trusted to develop an open standard.

~~~
techlaw
Well, maybe second-to-last.

~~~
HJain13
You can't just say that and not tell who you think is last

~~~
majormjr
It's going to be Oracle.

~~~
frogpelt
Obviously, it's Facebook.

Because there has to be one giant tech company that everyone hates and
Microsoft lost interest in the position over 5 years ago.

~~~
MrZongle2
From this thread the only conclusion I can draw is that Twitter is in the
_bottom five_. Which is bad enough.

~~~
alexis_fr
But it looks like a ranking where one can only rank at the bottom. Who is the
company most loved by developers? GitHub? Stripe? Atlassian? SalesForce? Each
of them has done something wrong at some point, and it may even be the sign of
management’s ability to get rid of cruft, even if those choices don’t make us
happy.

------
deegles
So now instead of a focused team of experts detecting and removing
disinformation campaigns, each user will have to figure it out on their own or
hire a service to do it.

~~~
banads
Good, then people will be more inclined towards independent critical thinking

~~~
M2Ys4U
Good luck with that

~~~
banads
Better long term odds than having 1,500 people do it for 321,000,000 (MAU)

------
phoe-krk
Duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762780)

~~~
Kye
The one you linked is the duplicate by an hour.

~~~
phoe-krk
Correct - thanks.

@dang: would you consider merging the two threads together?

------
thinkloop
> A third-party Twitter client might be prettier and more functional than
> Twitter’s own client — shout out to Tweetbot! — but it certainly would not
> be more profitable.

I never understood this, why can't the API/firehose serve ads that would be
presented in the 3rd-party apps?

Additionally 90% of users would naturally gravitate to the default app
regardless, leaving 3rd-parties for cool/interesting/advanced/innovative use-
cases. I still feel this was a mistake - not as some hippy idealogue - but
from a ruthless capitalist perspective. This was their like button.

------
nkkollaw
Great, another standard for social media!

------
jokoon
The core problem will be privacy.

I think it will not be difficult for anybody to siphon that data, and I don't
know how one could prevent it, and it would be nice to see it done without
complicated solutions. I think twitter could be biased.

I don't know if a law like GDPR would prevent it. If it doesn't, there should
be law forbidding entities to gather data.

------
miguelmota
Decentralized non-blockchain social network and messaging protocols that have
existed for years:

\- Scuttlebutt

\- GNUnet

\- Secureshare

\- Fereenet

\- ZeroNet

\- Retroshare

\- Diaspora

\- Mastadon

\- Matrix

\- Cabal

------
ryanmarsh
I can't help but think there is nothing altruistic about this.

------
marban
When in Africa...

------
trollied
Sounds like a plot from Silicon Valley :)

Twitter PiperNet?

------
RubberShoes
Is he aware PiperNet didn't work after all

------
Arathorn
For what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes
here - complete with relative reputation systems ([https://github.com/matrix-
org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos...](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-
doc/blob/msc2313/proposals/2313-moderation-policy-rooms.md)) and an open
standard ([https://matrix.org/docs/spec](https://matrix.org/docs/spec)) and
even an open governance process and foundation
([https://matrix.org/foundation](https://matrix.org/foundation)) - and with
work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix.

Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some
opportunity to join forces on this.

~~~
dang
Can you please not post duplicate comments to HN? It lowers the signal/noise
ratio of the site and creates a headache when we merge threads, like we did in
this case.

If two threads are so much the same that you want to post the same comment to
both, that's a strong indication that they should be merged. Sending us a
heads up at hn@ycombinator.com is a forcing function to make that happen.

(Parent is a duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763925).
We merged the replies from here to there.)

------
choiway
Does he have the Pied Piper USB key?

------
OzzyB
“There's an old saying on the Internet — that says, fool me once, shame on —
shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”

~~~
gkoberger
I know it seems like Bush forgot the quote, but in reality he likely realized
halfway through he didn't want a soundbite of him saying "Shame on me".

~~~
ndarwincorn
This retconned history of the mistake that's popped up in the last few years
is bizarre. No one thought this at the time.

Bush tripped over his words all the time. It's much more likely that than a
calculated move (that backfired btw, it's been his most famous quote since the
day he said it.)

~~~
1shooner
Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?

~~~
mr__y
it depends on how much is brazilian

------
pretfood
Ha, I knew it wouldn't take long for web 2 to get in on the web 3 act.

------
dmead
I don't understand how this solves anything. What can stop shitty people from
joining and posting content to any of this?

~~~
deweller
Nothing will stop unwanted posts. But crowdsourcing moderation could
theoretically give you a cleaner feed.

