I think that decentralization has to be the solution. Having a handful of websites run by megacorps was not how the internet was meant to work. The fediverse around ActiviyPub is looking very promising. Mastodon is the most prominent service using it, and it has millions of users now. The experience is strictly superior to Twitter in my opinion. And there's no single central server on the network making it much harder to censor and manipulate Mastodon than centralized networks. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries.
Mastodon also allows for account verification, where the account can reference a specific website that's owned by the user. So, if a reputable source wants to have a verified account they can link it up with their site.
I've mentioned my similar thoughts in another comment on hackernews but will repeat them here.
I think ActivityPub & federation looks like promising due to cost of cloud hosting going down every year. Thus allowing self-hosting to become easy and affordable for a lot of people.
However there are other trends that need to continue for federation to succeed.
- Continued competition in cloud hosting market not just in US, but globally
- Automation & simplification of monitoring, upgrades, and security patching
- Reducing the complexity of the federation software. Mastodon and Pixelfed are great, but I feel like the feature creep can make them difficult to maintain while self-hosting. Less software complexity = less upgrades, less package dependencies, less security issues
I'm going to make a bold prediction, but I think at some point within the next 2-3 years you'll see one of the incumbent commercial social media services white-labeling their application for organizations, much in the same way Gmail, Google drive, Google docs, etc is white-labeled as G Suite. It will probably implement the necessary federation protocols (ActivityPub) and provide an on-ramp to the fediverse for those not looking to "self-host" per se.
I'd use mastodon more, but the people I want to follow are all on twitter, is there an easy way of forwarding tweets from twitter to mastodon, or setting up an account that follows twitter users?
That's always the problem with novel networks, reaching critical mass.
Though I can't see why a #deletefacebook sort of campaign couldn't snatch users away from the incumbents. It might just need enough influencers to switch exclusively to the new platform.
The Fediverse is approaching 5 million users across its various implementations; the Mastodon software itself hosts about 3.8 million with nearly 2800 servers:
This is a genie that can't be placed back inside the bottle. With ActivityPub being a W3C recommendation, things are looking fantastic for this ecosystem.
Yeah that's fantastic growth. I completely agree that the genie is out of the bottle now because with so many users there's a sufficient population of technical users who will develop, maintain, and host ActivityPub based services. And things will only keep improving from here on out as more people keep joining the fediverse, and in turn making it more appealing for new users.
It seems like there's an even simpler solution that doesn't require bootstrapping a totally new network.
To me, it seems like Twitter serves two closely related but ultimately distinct core purposes. One is publishing. It basically hosts content on a globally accessible network. Two is identity. A person's Twitter handle is an authoritative record of their identity. A person knows that any tweet on the @wikileaks handle came from someone Wikileaks authorized to use the account (barring some sort of hack).
Twitter's censorship and enforcement ability mostly relies on the identity side. It bans you from continuing to publish under your previously, globally known Twitter handle. Creating a new sock puppet account is trivially easy. Even the best of IP bans is clunky and easy to work around. We all know if Wikileaks wanted to open a new handle, there's really nothing Twitter can do to preemptively stop them. They can only react with a game of whack-a-mole.
The problem is that this poses a coordination problem between publisher and consumer. Wikileaks' readers have to somehow discover and verify Wikileaks' new handle/identity. But think about how this dynamic changes if the identity function is off-loaded from the publishing function.
Imagine an unauthorized client that overlays on top of vanilla Twitter. Instead of subscribing to Twitter handles, you subscribe to cryptographic identities. Participating Twitter publishers cryptographically sign their tweets, proving their identity. The overlay client regularly scans the entire site's feed to discover any new handles using a known signature. If Twitter Inc. bans your handle, just fire-up one of your sock-puppets and all your overlay subscribers seamlessly re-point to the new handle.
The best part is this approach is backwards compatible with vanilla Twitter. You can keep using your pre-existing Twitter handle, and vanilla Twitter subscribers don't see any difference. But if you're afraid of potential censorship, you can encourage readers to gradually adopt the overlay system.
What stops Twitter from installing the client and using it to auto-ban any new account that has the same cryptographic key?
Also, if you have an overlay network to distribute mappings from keys to Twitter handles, why don't you just add the ability to distribute tweets and cut Twitter out of the picture?
You are trying to solve a social and legal problem with technology.
We all know if Wikileaks wanted to open a new handle, there's really nothing Twitter can do to preemptively stop them. They can only react with a game of whack-a-mole.
And that's what they do. Avoiding a ban by creating a new account is already against the terms of service.
Imagine an unauthorized client that overlays on top of vanilla Twitter. Instead of subscribing to Twitter handles, you subscribe to cryptographic identities. Participating Twitter publishers cryptographically sign their tweets, proving their identity. The overlay client regularly scans the entire site's feed to discover any new handles using a known signature. If Twitter Inc. bans your handle, just fire-up one of your sock-puppets and all your overlay subscribers seamlessly re-point to the new handle.
So then Twitter (or a motivated investigator) runs the overlay network as well and gets the new account automatically identified.
Mastodon also allows for account verification, where the account can reference a specific website that's owned by the user. So, if a reputable source wants to have a verified account they can link it up with their site.
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