
Twitter to decentralize something - cdevroe
https://www.manton.org/2019/12/11/twitter-to-decentralize.html
======
rolleiflex
The problems with P2P is not problems of tech, they’re problems of incentives.
The tech exists and it’s mostly solved — it’s just that anyone who is capable
of building such a thing is not incentivised to do so, because that work could
be spent in more productive (i.e. money-making) endeavours than what will by
definition be incapable of making money since it explicitly decentralises the
concentration of power.

So if Jack wants you to come build it, and you’re a P2P person, you should go
work for him in even if you don’t like him, because he has both the
willingness to pay for it, and the broadcast power to make it mainstream. And
those are the main problems that needs to be solved, not tech.

I know this because I’m going through the same thing myself — I work on Aether
([https://getaether.net](https://getaether.net)), which is close to what I
think he is talking about.

If we want ourselves to solve this, and not rely on _@jack_ s of the world, we
need to find a way to make P2P into a viable business. For me, in the end I
decided to create a Pro version for use within companies, so that the P2P
version can be fully free of monetisation concerns.

~~~
buzzkillington
Thanks for the great project, it fixes the most egregious problems with
bulletin boards - which reddit and hn are just fancier guis for.

There's a lot to unpack about the issues of p2p monetization. Probably a few
books worth.

Before we get into the social issues I think the original sin of the internet
was that IP did not negotiate payments as part of the fundamental protocol.
Every layer above that suffers from the same.

This made sense in a government/corporate/university environment where the
protocols were invented, but not for the wider world. I'm not going to try and
give solutions because all of them are flawed in some way, but better than the
current system where only surveillance advertising and altruistic services are
viable business models.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Before we get into the social issues I think the original sin of the
> internet was that IP did not negotiate payments as part of the fundamental
> protocol. Every layer above that suffers from the same.

That isn't really what causes the problem. Payments don't need to be inside
the network layer of the internet.

The problem is that a digital payment system that works like IP routing
doesn't exist _at all_ , even independent of the internet. Existing banks
could implement it trivially -- you walk into the branch with $100 in cash,
give them the money and they give you a secret passphrase. Then the banks talk
to each other so anyone anywhere in the world who walks into another bank and
has the correct passphrase can get the money.

Except that there are laws against that. Know Your Customer laws that require
them to know who you are and know who the person you're sending the money to
is, even if what you're paying for is both legal and private. "Consumer
protection" laws that require them to allow you to reverse the transaction,
which means they can't just give the money to the other party, they have to
sit on it for a while.

The effect of these laws is to make small transactions between random
individuals incur prohibitively high transaction costs and subject honest
people to capricious denial of service attacks by risk-averse financial
institutions without effective recourse. It also makes people afraid to pay
for things they don't want an official record of them consuming, which
_specifically_ applies to political speech when your views don't align with
the party currently in office -- or the party who may be in office next year.

In other words, it interferes with people actually paying people for creating
content on the internet. That leaves the creators with only advertising to
support them, which implies central control by the ad network.

Fixing that requires a way to anonymously, irreversibly send small payments
with low transaction costs. Which is currently de facto prohibited by law.

~~~
buzzkillington
No there are no systems that can deal with the $1e-10 you will need to pay for
the usual packet. You don't care if someone scams you a thousand times, you do
care when someone scams you a few billion times, or when you're talking to
millions of people.

The cost of getting it wrong is so low on the internet that you can use the
most blunt statistics to still come out ahead.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> No there are no systems that can deal with the $1e-10 you will need to pay
> for the usual packet.

You don't need packet-level accounting. You need, for example, to be able to
charge $0.02/view for a video while getting to keep almost all the money, so
that a creator with 10,000 views/day can make a decent living. Then you offer
viewers a deal -- no charge if you host the video. Only a small fraction of
the viewers take you up on it ($0.02 is not a huge incentive), but a few have
unlimited data and are happy to get any price for something that costs them
nothing, or it makes them feel like good supporters to be distributing your
work, and that's all you need in order to have unlimited scalability and
negligible hosting costs.

> You don't care if someone scams you a thousand times, you do care when
> someone scams you a few billion times, or when you're talking to millions of
> people.

This system isn't supposed to be a savings account, it's for small
transactions. If there's significantly more money in your account than you
typically spend on small transactions in a month then you're doing it wrong,
and the amount in your account would be the upper limit on what you can get
scammed out of.

People would still keep the bulk of their money in a traditional financial
instituion that knows their name and can reverse transactions. But a payments
system that works differently than that should be able to _exist_.

~~~
buzzkillington
>You don't need packet-level accounting.

You absolutely do.

What you don't need is accurate and global accounting of packet transactions.
A simple cryptographic local ledger between each pair of routers will be more
than enough. The routers can then decide how the data is charged, or if the
balance isn't closed somehow, just start dropping packets coming from that
link. We are not talking about people doing videos - a largely vapid and
useless form of entertainment only propped up by legacy add platforms like
google because video adds are much more effective than text based ones - we
are talking about people running routers in the center of the network. Once we
have decentralized the lowest levels of the internet then we can start
thinking about the higher ones.

After all the choice between lord Google or lord Verizon isn't much of a
choice.

> Only a small fraction of the viewers take you up on it ($0.02 is not a huge
> incentive), but a few have unlimited data and are happy to get any price for
> something that costs them nothing, or it makes them feel like good
> supporters to be distributing your work, and that's all you need in order to
> have unlimited scalability and negligible hosting costs.

So again, the main business model is altruism with no way to actually monetize
the transport layer. Replacing the kings of layer 4 with the kings of data is
not a victory. It's just a different tyranny. One I don't see being much
better than the current one.

Only when you can make money in each layer of the network can the internet
truly be free (as in freedom).

>If there's significantly more money in your account than you typically spend
on small transactions in a month then you're doing it wrong, and the amount in
your account would be the upper limit on what you can get scammed out of.

Yes, that's why you shouldn't do it that way.

You don't spend 'money' you have agreements with your peers over how much data
they are willing to receive from you. The clearing process is completely
independent. Cash, cat pictures, happy feelings, revolutionary zeal. All are
acceptable currency if the owner of the router agrees with you.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> The routers can then decide how the data is charged, or if the balance isn't
> closed somehow, just start dropping packets coming from that link.

At this point you're essentially arguing that network neutrality is bad and
what we really need is the opposite of that.

Realize that in your system, it's Verizon and Comcast who have all the power.
They're sitting on millions of customers who have no other network path to
them, so they would get to charge monopoly prices to anybody who wants to
communicate with them, and the customers themselves have no other choice
because the incumbent ISP has a local monopoly (or the sort of totally
inadequate competition that DSL is now putting forth against cable/fiber).

And if you're paying for sending data but not for receiving it, it would give
ISPs all the more incentive to keep doing and increase doing the things like
selling highly asymmetric connections that upload much slower than they
download, which make it harder to create competitive P2P networks.

> So again, the main business model is altruism with no way to actually
> monetize the transport layer.

How is the network not already monetized? Is there some alternative to Verizon
and Comcast where you're paying no monthly fees, short of building your own
network like Google does? Even then you still have to pay for it, you're just
paying for land, labor and equipment instead of service.

You pay your ISP to get you to a peering point. That's monetized. The other
endpoint pays their ISP to get to the peering point. Also monetized. What's
left? The peering link? The actual cost of that is such a small percentage of
the total that you can round it off to zero, and people only really try to
charge for it when they're rent seeking because they have a monopoly path to a
large number of customers.

> Yes, that's why you shouldn't do it that way.

Because occasionally people who make bad security choices will be encouraged
to do better after suffering an uncovered loss of something like fifty or a
hundred bucks? That seems like a small price for having a payments system that
has low transaction costs and protects privacy.

> You don't spend 'money' you have agreements with your peers over how much
> data they are willing to receive from you. The clearing process is
> completely independent. Cash, cat pictures, happy feelings, revolutionary
> zeal. All are acceptable currency if the owner of the router agrees with
> you.

How is that any different than it already works? Anybody can configure their
network to accept traffic or not from whoever they like. What's missing is an
efficient method for clearing small payments -- but that's a general problem,
not anything specific to internet links.

------
dang
Submitted title was "Micro.blog founder on Twitter's bluesky project". That's
good information! but the place to add it is as a first comment in the thread,
not in the submission title.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22level%20playing%20field%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
cdevroe
Thanks I didn’t know that.

------
orblivion
I'm suspicious of motives here as much as anyone, but I think the issue of
policy enforcement (and policy itself) is very important here. It already
occurred to me that Mastodon and Gab were, despite being worst enemies,
together inadvertently creating a reasonable content meta-policy. Some people
want freedom of expression, some people want protection from objectionable
material. With ActivityPub, you can choose your gatekeeper, and still more or
less exist in the same social universe.

~~~
tom_mellior
> Some people want freedom of expression, some people want protection from
> objectionable material.

You make things sound far too benign. Where do death threads fall in this
classification, are they "free speech" or "objectionable material"? Where do
disinformation bot armies fall? There's a _lot_ more to content moderation
than just "that person doesn't want to see boobies or the f-word".

~~~
orblivion
Presumably most people don't want their life threatened so almost nobody will
pick an instance that allows that to happen. The few people who are interested
in posting death threats can go ahead and make a rogue Gab instance or
something, and every other instance will block them. They'll be their own silo
where super sketchy things go on until the feds decide it's time to step in
(since death treats are legally actionable). Such silo websites are already
possible without the fediverse (and by some accounts already exist), so my
model doesn't change anything here (assuming blocking is effective). (BTW even
Gab dot com would block that; they ban people for death threats and porn and
maybe even Doxing).

Disinformation campaigns? Well again, if you don't want to be misinformed,
pick your gatekeeper. Probably all the better. If somebody's going to protect
me from being misinformed, I want to know what their biases are. I don't trust
Twitter or Facebook; it's not a simple and objective task.

I think your point that this stuff is complicated is exactly my point. It is
complicated, and people have different preferences. No one company can be the
gatekeeper that satisfies the entire planet's preferences (at least, not under
the current models).

~~~
tom_mellior
Good points, thanks! I understand your point now.

------
taytus
They are dedicating 5 people to this project... I mean... full 5 people...
this is not a project, this is a charade.

~~~
wmf
Five people is pretty large for the first phase of a research project. If they
come up with something good Twitter can add more people later.

~~~
jrbuhl
It's bigger than the size most startups being with.

~~~
taytus
Except they are a multibillion-dollar public company with almost infinite
resources and reach.

~~~
batuhanicoz
And this team of 5 would surely have access to those resources.

------
jayd16
So like... Doesn't the open web exist? We have RSS feeds for subscription.

I guess we need a way to share things we've liked?

Retweets should be representable through RSS entries.

Hashtags are just searchable text.

~~~
alexmingoia
The IndieWeb ecosystem is already doing this with microformats2 + webmention
to support decentralized replies, likes, reposts, etc. with HTML blogs.

See [https://aaronparecki.com](https://aaronparecki.com) for an example and
[https://indieweb.org/friendly](https://indieweb.org/friendly) and
[https://indieweb.org/Webmention](https://indieweb.org/Webmention)

------
Ericson2314
They should just use ActivityPub. Sure it has problems, but federating with
their biggest decentralized competitors would signal that they are serious.
Improving the protocol can come next.

------
lxe
Blockchain is probably not the best (or maybe even the worst) solution for
decentralized messaging.

~~~
zadler
The blockchain isn’t a messaging hub, it’s more about identity management

------
viburnum
The want to keep ad revenue and outsource moderation.

~~~
mratsim
Isn't Twitter ad revenue actually super low compared to the infrastructure
costs?

------
marknadal
Open Source has generated $Trillions in value creation over the last few
decades.

Twitter is fighting to stay relevant, they dropped to Top 35 website from Top
14 in last several months.

This is an opportunity for them to become a global standard, and that is worth
it.

The most important piece is that they can scale when they pull it off. I've
been working on decentralized tech for a while (I run
[https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun)) and can say it
takes a lot of attention that most projects (dare I say "blockchains") have no
scaling abilities at all.

------
viraptor
> If Twitter is hoping to outsource curation to shared protocols,

I don't think they would ever do that. It would be really dangerous to
implement and would possibly expose an unfiltered stream of partially illegal
content.

I mean, can you imagine "validate if this is an unsolicited dickpic", or
"verify if this is a dox attempt", or "verify this is cp"? This is one area
that can never be exposed to non-employees.

~~~
dmurray
It's almost certainly done by non-employees now, through contracting
arrangements. While it's possible the unfiltered stream never leaves Twitter's
premises or Twitter's computers, and the individual contractors sign an
agreement directly with Twitter, it's only one step removed from just sending
your stream to the service and getting back an annotation.

~~~
viraptor
Yes, they have contacts/agreements with the parties that get access. Whether
that's full time employees or contractors, I don't think that changes the main
issue. They will never expose that information to the public.

------
gatestone
What's wrong with NNTP? At least as a starting point?

~~~
pmlnr
There's nothing wrong with NNTP. It's exactly what they'd need. Trouble is
developer memory: people don't read back on technology, and thus, no trendy
dev remembers NNTP in the container era.

------
rahuldottech
I have a question, what is it about blockchain that's so attractive to every
new idea nowadays?

New social network? Blockchain!

New news platform? Blockchain!

I get what blockchain is. I get how it's used in cryptocurrency transactions.
But will someone please explain why it's being incorporated into industries
that always have done (and IMO can continue to do) just fine without it?

I skim through this [1] list, and see no clear benefit to incorporating
blockchain into most/all of these? Most of them seem to be using it as 'secure
database' or something.

[1]: [https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/11/20-real-world-
uses...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/11/20-real-world-uses-for-
blockchain-technology.aspx)

------
xmly
What you really need is an open database.

That is all.

As long as data is stored in Twitter managed database, it would never work.

~~~
russian_bot
can you define "open"?

~~~
code-is-code
mongoDB with default credentials

~~~
egfx
Dang beat me to it

------
dgellow
It’s an experiment to explore a distributed Twitter. People read way too much
into those tweets. It seems clear that they will evaluate existing projects,
and technologies and make their own decisions.

More competition in this domain is a very good sign IMHO.

------
andy_ppp
Twitter to embrace and extend a decentralised system and bend it to their own
will using their incumbent position.

------
pwinnski
This seems right. Twitter is not engaging in this in pursuit of real openness,
and the end result--if anything--is unlikely to be better for twitter users.

------
dm33tri
Attempts to decentralize are so decentralized. Still only TOR and Eth are
somewhat functioning.

Let's see what Telegram Open Network will offer.

------
m463
People want "the cloud" so they don't want to be responsible for things. Is
this the same thing?

~~~
rjbwork
People want the cloud so that they can be responsible for things at the right
level of abstraction. Nobody wants to maintain a server with a message bus and
a bunch of individual applications that communicate on it.

Just set up AWS EventBridge (or Azure EventGrid), or any of a dozen other
options that don't require you to administer a server. And then use AWS
Lambda, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Zapier, etc, etc. Don't maintain a
server that runs a bunch of apps.

We care about what we're managing, and care about being responsible for it, we
just want to manage it at the right level of abstraction. Let the cloud
provider manage and be responsible for the hardware.

------
0xdeadb00f
No mention of ActivityPub, Mastodon or Pleroma?

------
RRRA
How has IPFS evolved lately?

