[HN Gopher] The case for the decentralization of online forums ___________________________________________________________________ The case for the decentralization of online forums Author : viksit Score : 118 points Date : 2023-06-10 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (viksit.com) (TXT) w3m dump (viksit.com) | olh wrote: | Flarum got a grant to make it federated like Mastodon. | | https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2... | viksit wrote: | this is a really interesting point, thanks for pointing to it. | Flarium to me competes with discourse in many ways, vs say, | Reddit. | | one of the biggest challenges to this model (IMO) has been that | there is no "subreddit" or "stack exchange" model for | discovery, or for communities to build their own "spaces". | | my post comes at this from the perspective of - what would it | take to create a decentralized "reddit", complete with | subreddits etc. your comment makes me realize that I can do | better in addressing this point! ty! | rambambram wrote: | And then at the end of an article with nice ideas for an open | web, there's a link to a Twitter account. Viksit.com has an RSS | feed (which I follow now, with my own website that works perfect | on an open web), but there's no mention anywhere, also no RSS | logo anywhere. Strange, haha. | viksit wrote: | haha touche. i rolled this site myself via gatsby and forgot to | add the RSS icon - thanks for pointing this out. | imtringued wrote: | The problem with online forums is the need for moderation. | Decentralisation doesn't make moderation irrelevanty in fact it | becomes more relevant because people have to store other people's | data and trust me you don't want to store everything. | marginalia_nu wrote: | A big reason forums centralized in the first place was the | maintenance cost. I don't see anything has changed in that | regard. | | Reddit and similar solved it through economics of scale. | blantonl wrote: | How did they "solve" it, from a business sense? Don't they | readily admit that they aren't profitable? | marginalia_nu wrote: | Neither were the forums of yore, to be fair. They were mostly | run by volunteers. | samsquire wrote: | I'm starting a decentralised blog network | | I want people to create GitHub repositories for their blogs and | just post to README.md in reverse chronological order. | | Then email me your blog repository URL or reply here and I'll | create a curated list of blogs. | phas0ruk wrote: | If the platforms revenue doesn't come from ads, where does it | come from? | [deleted] | rsync wrote: | We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, web1.0 | forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most valuable | and enriching forums currently online. | | What's wrong with HN ? What's wrong with metafilter ? What's | wrong with letsrun or doom9 ? | | The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big | businesses. | | If you can let go of the economics there is no technical - or | usability - hurdle. | | We know this because we're _already doing it right here_. | ilyt wrote: | Well, there are fundamentally 2 problems here: | | * someone needs to pay for it | | * whoever is doing and managing that can turn bad and want | more. | | How do you solve that to be immune to the reddit/stackoverflow | disruption ? | | Even if it could be covered by donations it there is still | problem of any inevitable management of it deciding to push it | in direction different than community wishes. | | > We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, | web1.0 forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most | valuable and enriching forums currently online. | | Not web 1.0. Usenet and mailing lists(mostly) died for that, as | did many "traditional" forums. | | > We know this because we're already doing it right here. | | Ok, now look up who is paying for that. | jjav wrote: | > someone needs to pay for it | | This is centralized thinking. In a decentralized open | protocol system, everyone pays for their own way, but it's | very cheap at an individual level. There's no central "it". | | > Not web 1.0. Usenet and mailing lists(mostly) died for | that, as did many "traditional" forums. | | I'm on several email groups where I've been a participant | since the very early 90s. Every so often there's the "oh have | you seen this new shiny thing, let's move to that!" | | Every single one of those new shinies have disappeared, but | the email group lives on. | | Why? Because email is 100% decentralized, nobody owns it, | there's nothing to own. It's an open protocol. So it lives on | forever. | | Also, I still read Usenet on most days, just like I've been | doing since the late 80s. It's alive (if not very active) | because nobody owns it. | | I wish we could collectively learn these lessons. Centralized | systems cannot exist for very long. | edgyquant wrote: | Hacker News is in the same camp as any of the big platforms- | it's entirely subsidized by a billionaire VC or it would not | exist the way it does. | jjav wrote: | > Hacker News is in the same camp as any of the big | platforms-it's entirely subsidized by a billionaire VC or it | would not exist the way it does. | | Do you know the operating costs of HN? How can you judge it | takes a billionaire to subsidize it? | edgyquant wrote: | It's literally a pet project of Paul Graham, a billionaire. | That was my point. | hayst4ck wrote: | Hacker news is a platform ultimately subsidized by a | billionaire. | | A billionaire is choosing to be a responsible owner/patron of | this platform, but ultimately this platform answers to him. | | HN is a "good king" platform, our king has invested in public | works that we benefit from and we appreciate it. | | Hacker news is good insofar as it accomplishes our kings goals | which align with our own, but we still have a king, even if he | is a benevolent one. | jjav wrote: | > Hacker news is a platform ultimately subsidized by a | billionaire. | | It doesn't take a billionaire, even if it happens to be the | case. | | It would be fascinating if they wished to publish the | operating costs, but even without that, IIRC the hardware was | quite minimal. | Miraste wrote: | There's nothing wrong with them, but reddit's size lets it | gather a lot of extremely specific knowledge that, were all | subreddits separate forums, would be lost. Sure, many of these | communities are strong enough to run their own infrastructure, | but more of them are not. | PrimeMcFly wrote: | Before Reddit, almost immediately before, that's what Usenet | was for. Google kind of ruined it by hijacking it with | Groups, then Reddit took over. | | Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet. | janoc wrote: | Usenet was literally decentralized before this was even a | buzzword. | PrimeMcFly wrote: | You're right. When I think of 'decentralized', and what I | meant, was something offering anonymity and resistance to | takedown orders, which are things it didn't have real | protection against. | ilyt wrote: | And a way to fight spam. You don't _want_ users to be too | anonymous, else someone can just post bullshit with zero | ways to fight it. | PrimeMcFly wrote: | Well, we just need a way to have reputation, basically. | It shouldn't be karma, but it needs to be something that | doesn't require linking to a real life identity. | jjav wrote: | > what I meant, was something offering anonymity and | resistance to takedown orders, which are things it didn't | have real protection against. | | Who would you issue a takedown order on a Usenet post? | Remember it's peer to peer distribution. There is no | central repository. | shagie wrote: | Anonymity isn't necessary desirable for the people | running the servers - it means extra work for people | attempting to moderate the content on their instance. | There are numerous other discussions about why a lack of | moderation is often a bad thing for people running the | servers. | | Take down orders are resisted by having it sufficiently | decentralized. It may be possible to take down one | server, but taking down every server (even trying to take | down every NNTP server in today's world) is a significant | effort. | | Usenet is a perfectly acceptable decentralized system for | sending messages to each other and the world. | | Stand one up with the groups that I'm interested in and | I'll point my copy of trn at it. | PrimeMcFly wrote: | Anonymity is key in the sense that it shouldn't require | linking to a real life identity. The same way now I can | sign up for reddit 'anonymously' for example. There | should be some reputation, some kind of check the person | is human, maybe other things, but there needs to be the | freedom to post separate from a real life persona, | without fear of being doxxed. For so many different | reasons. | | Usenet, I think, has a strong hierarchy structure rather | than just being a 'web', although it is that as well. So | if the takedown order is directed at a server in high | enough position, it is essentially removes it from all of | Usenet - and it's not just takedown orders, but actors | with the ability to remove content unilaterally. | | Usenet really isn't sufficient simply because of how old | it is. We can do much better, and I believe there are | already numerous superior systems that exist but simply | have not been adopted yet, likely due to ease of use | and/or lack of need, the former can be improved, and the | latter will happen naturally. | jjav wrote: | > Weed need a decentralized equivalent to Usenet. | | That is ... Usenet. That's exactly what Usenet is (not was, | because it's still there, even if not many people use it. I | still read it on many days.) | bsder wrote: | Usenet _was_ decentralized, and Google (amazingly) didn 't | ruin it. Dejanews was the last man standing and _they were | going bankrupt_. | | Nobody wanted to pony up. It's that simple. | | Nowadays, a bunch of people have gigabit to their house. | Colo is $400/mo for a cabinet and gigabit. 3U servers are | under $500 and probably under $200 if you dig. I can go on. | | You could resurrect Usenet _easily_ , but nobody is doing | it. Why? Because _it 's a pain in the ass_. People forget | that a lot of the early internet stuff relied on a bunch of | people providing free labor (generally at universities) to | keep it all afloat. | PrimeMcFly wrote: | Huh, I thought Groups was after Dejanews. | | Usenet was decentralized, but not in the current sense of | the term IMO. When I think of 'decentralized', and what I | meant, was something offering anonymity and resistance to | takedown orders, which are things it didn't have real | protection against. | | I think the free labor issue could be circumvented by | users having their own killfiles, and a fediverse | approach of only syncing with 'good' servers. | endisneigh wrote: | You're having this discussion on a marketing forum. | shagie wrote: | From the ending of "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" | (discussed most recently at | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 ) | | > The people using your software, even if you own it and pay | for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. | And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very | quickly. | | > That's part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of | community--"community leads to content, which leads to | commerce"--never worked. Because lo and behold, no matter who | came onto the Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to | talk about things that weren't Clairol products. | | > "But we paid for this! This is the Clairol site!" say the | sponsors. Doesn't matter. The users are there for one | another. They may be there on hardware and software paid for | by you, but the users are there for one another. | pessimizer wrote: | I don't understand what this is for. The result of the | forum not serving its purpose for Clairol is that Clairol | destroys the community, deletes every conversation ever had | on it, and the people who participated on it never speak to | each other again. | | Forum members only have "rights" under some definition of | rights where they grant you absolutely nothing. | krapp wrote: | It's wild how many things Hacker News is the exception to, | just because it has that quirky 90's charm. | CPLX wrote: | HN would not fit into any definition of centralized discussion | forums I would use. | | To my mind HN is in that classic genre of single focus | communities with a deep history of being the place to go to | discuss topic X. | | It fits in next to sites like flyertalk, woodweb, | bodybuilding.com and a million more. | | I think the web was definitely better when every topic had its | own little community and if Reddit imploded tomorrow and that | happened again I would be thrilled. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | HN is centralized. It all sits on one server run without a | declared public mandate of openness like Wikipedia. A | decentralized fora would be Usenet which is designed as a | federation of independent servers storing and exchanging | data. | CPLX wrote: | I understand the technical point being made but it seems to | be missing the point. | | Why isn't it good enough to have a whole bunch of | idiosyncratic privately run discussion forum communities | spread across many different websites and servers and so | on? | | We had that before Reddit and many examples still exist, it | seems like it was closer to the ideal than Usenet ever was. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | Because such systems are brittle. Bespoke forums | disappear and their archival status may be incomplete or | hard to search. We have nearly all of Usenet preserved in | multiple places. | gman83 wrote: | I think something like Wikipedia could potentially be a | decent model for an centralized but open version of reddit. | Have donation drives to keep the servers running once a | year, and have something like the five pillars & an open | license to ensure the project won't be rug pulled from the | community. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars | CPLX wrote: | I guess. Wikipedia has a very distinct and string | moderator culture though. Do we want like every single | online forum to take a similar approach? | | I think a ton of random different communities with quirks | and different approaches is the best option of all. | pessimizer wrote: | > The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big | businesses. | | HN isn't a business at all. It only loses money, and in return | generates some sort of goodwill or authenticity for its owners, | who are extraordinarily wealthy. All problems can be ignored if | we can always rely on rich people to give us what we want. | notatoad wrote: | and in this case, rich people who have become rich by driving | exactly the sort of inexorable growth and commercialization | that leads companies down the path reddit has taken. | nkozyra wrote: | Well a decentralized forum network doesn't preclude people | participating solely in their favorite nodes. | | Hard to let go of concepts like FIDONet from decades ago. There | was merit there, just not enough technology to do it right | then. | | If it's more of a protocol like IRC or Usenet, it could work | very well for both small and large communities. | | I think mastodons biggest mistake is pigeonholing a Twitter | replacement. | jjav wrote: | > The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big | businesses. | | Exactly that. A community communicating can't be the huge | profit center that a corporation needs it to be, without it | being ruined. | | > We know this because we're already doing it right here. | | Exactly. | justsomehnguy wrote: | > What's wrong with HN | | Can't buy ads for a hot... single AI farms in your area. | janoc wrote: | The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow | solves the problem. | | It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or | whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that | things actually _do cost money to build and run_. | | Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and | very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the | various efforts to monetize the content, lock down APIs and push | in your face ads happen. | | The VCs that were paying for Twitter or Reddit aren't willing to | do that forever - and neither of the companies are actually | making profit or even not making a loss. Whether that is because | the business is poorly run or some other problem is secondary but | unless they start to make money somehow, they will close down at | some point. It is _that_ simple. | | The article - like most that spout these 'decentralization solves | everything' (same like blockchain/crypto/web3/metaverse/etc.) | mantras completely ignore this problem or handwave it away. As if | a decentralized system ran on fairy dust and unicorn poop and | didn't need to pay for servers, electricity, wages, etc. Sorry, | but that's not how the world works, folks. | | If you don't want to pay money for a service then that leaves the | operator with either ads - or has to pay it out of their own | pocket. No "defi" or "fedi" solves that - only makes things maybe | more resilient when one operator goes bankrupt or rogue. But the | rest still have to pay their expenses somehow. | | Also the entire premise is BS - as if online forums were somehow | centralized and everyone was prevented from running their own | server and community, using their own rules (no "censorship" or | "cancel culture"! Yay!) and money (a-ha!). Reddit, Twitter, | Facebook etc. aren't the only places where one can have a | discussion or post information. | digitallyfree wrote: | If we look at this from a technical perspective, what is the | cost of running such a service? | | Something like Facebook obviously costs a lot more to run, as | it stores photos and video and also provides each user with an | individually generated feed. In contrast HN is rather | lightweight and basically serves mostly static cachable content | to all users. I believe it was stated somewhere that the entire | HN comfortably runs on a 64GB 4/8 bare metal server. On the | extreme side I host my personal static web site on my home DSL | connection fronted by Cloudflare, as the CDN does all the work | and the bandwidth used is minimal. | | To the people running these new communities the software cost | is low as they're based off an open-source service of choice | (Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.), and as we saw on Reddit moderation can | be done by volunteers. Are the remaining costs for admins, | hosting, etc. feasible for a non-profit with some user | donations? And can we create more efficient platforms with a | plainer style that will minimize the server and electricity | costs? | viksit wrote: | (author here) | | your point is well taken. in the article, one of the main | reasons i say that while it's important to not get caught in | the crypto jargon - it's also important to not ignore the | technology paradigm behind it. | | giving people an incentive to run a server by the populace that | uses it is a well defined and well known way to run | decentralized services. staking and validating are concepts | that have gotten very sophisticated - but the end result of it | doesn't need to be a "crypto token" bag holders madness. it can | just be USD or USDC. | | one can imagine a world where server hosts stake a sum of | money, and may lose it if communities that start there run amok | in some way. the users of the system also stake money for | privileges (say, like discord nitro - for nicer emojis and | reactions). | | this pool of money - if it can run discord - can run | decentralized services. | | better still - it allows for a pool of money to give those who | do community work and engagement a way to get incentives. | | lastly - rather than ads, businesses could give end users the | cost of their CAC that would otherwise go to instagram or | reddit. | hayst4ck wrote: | The core problem with decentralization is anonymity at scale. | | Creating an account per decentralized unit is a high cost. | Fighting abuse of a platform on the scale of decentralized | units rather than the platform as a whole is a very high | cost. How does a decentralized platforms perform against an | adversarial attacker (spammers/nation states/etc)? | | You have addressed the idea of centralization by talking | about what it does well, but you have failed to address what | decentralization does poorly. Namely, turning O(1) problems | into O(N) problems. | | How do decentralized organizations handle conflict/how do you | prevent schism? | | Email was very decentralized, but spam never got dealt with | until email was nearly entirely centralized on gmail. So why | could e-mail never successfully fight spam before | centralization? | | I don't think your post attempted to explain the forces that | led us towards centralization in the first place and what the | benefits of that centralization were. | | I don't think decentralization is obviously better or worse | than centralization, I think there are a series of tradeoffs | that make different styles of platform better under different | contexts. I think a "good king" centralized platform will | beat a decentralized one until it doesn't (which is what we | are experiencing right now), which means that during the | reign of the "good king" the cost of decentralization is | higher and therefore unappealing. | hooverd wrote: | Greg (our hypothetical admin here) doesn't have YoY growth | targets to hit. He just needs enough money to keep the servers | running. He hasn't got millions in VC funding/debt. | NoraCodes wrote: | > Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - | and very few people actually want to pay for it. | | Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few | - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars | a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users. | | The problem is when people want to make a _profit_ on their | internet community. Then, no amount of community support is | enough, because nobody wants to donate to your investors. | VWWHFSfQ wrote: | The "fediverse" is a already absolutely overrun by bots and | spam. Mastadon sites in particular. Nobody is running one of | these things for longer than a few months until they just get | tired of dealing with it. | janoc wrote: | >Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a | few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few | dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from | users. | | And that is somehow invalidating what I have said? Sure, if | you have 10 users then your costs are going to be negligible | and you can probably sustain it from your own pocket or | donations. | | But good luck running a larger/popular service like that. | There are reasons why the more popular Mastodon servers had | to stop accepting new users after the Twitter/Musk fiasco - | it was simply not sustainable for the one-man operator crews. | edgyquant wrote: | Seems like a failure of architecture or deployment on | mastodons part. If you want your service to be both self | hostable and widespread you have to make the self hosting | just work. | colinsane wrote: | > things actually do cost money to build and run. | | how much does HN cost to keep running, again? didn't Stack | Overflow notoriously run on hardware not that different from | what some passionate devs keep in their home? | | the hardware is cheap enough that the BoM cost angle is | debatable today and will only be less true over time. the other | costs (time commitments) fall into well-known buckets: | moderation, and development. Reddit, Discord, etc are already | moderated by unpaid users. lots of open source development | already happens without money or an expectation of any return | on capital. | | you're sort of implicitly denying that bbforums and such could | ever be a dominant mode of online community, despite that at | one point they _were_. if community aggregators (Reddit) is | what displaced many of those independently-run forums, then | today's federation is something of an attempt to force that | role back open and allow independently-run forums an even | playfield. | veave wrote: | You can't compare HN or SO to reddit because they were | written by technically competent people who wouldn't dare use | python server-side. | anothernostrich wrote: | What if you could run your node on a raspberry pi in your | closet, and interact with thousands of others doing the same | (at the cost of a static IP address)? | | https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/65.md | Kudos wrote: | The Irish Mastodon instance is very well funded for a volunteer | effort https://opencollective.com/mastodonie | janoc wrote: | That doesn't really say much. I have never said that _no_ | such thing exists or that running on donations /as a | collective can't be done. | | But it is rather an exception than a rule, esp. at the scales | we are talking about (e.g. Reddit or Twitter), with world- | wide audiences with varying legal and financial regimes. | | Look at newspapers. Look how many people actually bought | subscriptions to popular services like Twitter, Instagram or | Facebook - vs how many are using them for free. | waboremo wrote: | Agreed, we need to be honest about which problems we are | actually trying to tackle. | | Decentralization doesn't tackle the "how do we long term | maintain a social network" problem. No decentralized protocol | does. Which means, ultimately, these servers are slowly being | turned off by their owners in 10 years or whatever the case, | and we're back at it with "how do we solve the current problem | of online forums disappearing?" | amykhar wrote: | I wonder if something like "The Well" would work these days? | Start a Reddit/Digg kind of place to share on specific topics, | but charge a few dollars a month to belong. No ads, no | tracking, just a place to share stuff with ohers. | bnralt wrote: | That's an issue, but I don't think that's the main issue. | There's plenty of ways around that if the will is there. Worst | case scenario you could just create an old-school mailing list. | Everyone has the infrastructure for that already in place, and | plenty of close communities were built around them ~30 years | ago. | | However, there's two big things standing in the way: | | 1. The vast majority of the population - I'd say at least | 99.99%, probably more - is only interested in jumping on the | next big thing. People who liked and enjoyed being part of | mailing list communities, handcraft html webrings, AIM, self- | hosted forums, MUDs, etc. would probably be happy to go back to | those if they were suddenly popular again. But when they went | out of popularity in favor of current social media trends, | everyone jumped ship. Everyone's following the crowd. | | 2. Online communities tend to not place any limits on output, | so a few hyperonline individuals dominate the conversation (and | in cases where moderation occurs, have methods to control the | community). Hyperonline individuals don't tend to be the best | socialized ones (people with healthy lives aren't spending all | day on the internet). | than3 wrote: | That's flawed in a few ways. | | With regard to #1 | | The vast majority of the population are seeking to fill some | need when they get online. Its not about popularity, | popularity only provides exposure. | | Its whether that need is being satisfied, both at the time | they choose to jump ship, and continuing on into the future. | Also, almost everyone born after the 90s has been | indoctrinated prior to the age of reason that they can go | online and find anything they might need, addiction triggers | and other psychological traps await. There is also, as | always, the ever present coercion through concentration of | business sectors into a few entities who play shell games and | limit your agency and choice. In some places you can't apply | for college anymore using paper, its all digital and digital | systems break when they aren't properly designed for | resilience; these result in less opportunities acting as a | filter and coercively limiting those who fall into the | implementation cracks with no other choice. | | #2 is purely normative, and neglects abuse which may include | jamming communications or something more subtle but still | malign. This view is filled with supposition, and makes broad | over-generalizations, its non-sequitur. | rcarr wrote: | This is fundamentally the problem. Far too much money is being | extracted from the system by landlords and banks (via | mortgages) for no productive labour rather than being spent on | actual productive things like internet forums, the actual cost | to produce food without subsidies etc. | | When people have more money to spend because they're not paying | half their take home pay on rent or a mortgage, they're | generally more amenable to paying for things. | | The other half of the solution, is that most tech companies | have got to stop trying to become ridiculous never ending | growth machines like Facebook, and just become boring utility | companies. No one needs Facebook to do all the shit it does - | it just needs to be a digital yellow pages. No one needs reddit | to be flashy - it just needs to function as a forum. Keep the | price low (e.g an hour of minimum wage in whatever country | you're accessing from for a month for a no ad version) and you | will get people signing up. | hayst4ck wrote: | The money is being extracted through limiting housing supply | and lack of infrastructure investments that support high | density (efficient) housing. | | Increasing housing supply means decreasing homeowner capital | and harming the major investment vehicle of a generation. | That's politically untenable. Sadly, the pain will be felt by | us and our children until we are able to exercise political | power, which will require harming our parents retirements. | Maybe the answer is renters unions, how many people can the | police evict at once? | | Young people don't understand their rent is high because they | don't vote or exercise political power. | hooverd wrote: | Unfortunately it's much easier home owner bloc to close | ranks and oppose something than it is for young people to | maybe, just maybe, get in a good candidate who would change | something. Going to those crucial 2 pm on a Wednesday | meetings is a lot harder when you're not retired. | elwebmaster wrote: | This comment is spot on. 100% of the reason for high | housing costs is western governments' limits on supply. | People need a place to live, that's the reality. If supply | is artificially suppressed, prices will keep rising as long | as old housing ages (and what can stop aging?) and | population continues to grow. | hayst4ck wrote: | > and very few people actually want to pay for it. | | I think this is a core assumption that I'm not sure I believe | in. | | Works for the public deserve public (distinct from government) | funding. There are many things that say "if you don't give us | money, we can't continue to exist." | | "We need enough money to function" is a completely different | sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments." | | Reddit's enshitification[1] is a function of needing to please | investors. Many people are very happy with old.reddit.com, yet | reddit paid for ux devs to implement dark patterns because | that's what investors demanded. | | I don't _want_ to pay for signal, but I pay for it. I don 't | _want_ to pay for Wikipedia, but I pay for it. I don 't _want_ | to pay for my local radio stations, but I pay for them. I don | 't _want_ to pay for my politicians to represent me, but I pay | for that. I don 't _want_ to pay my taxes, but I 've traveled | enough to see what happens without government institutions. | | I think people are willing to sacrifice money for purpose. | Reddit and twitter were great free speech platforms before | billionaire malfeasance. These platforms threatened | authoritarians world wide. That is purpose I think people would | financially sacrifice for in both external funding, and loss of | income. | | I think it is pretty clear that the next great social media | platform will be a 501c3 and they will ask for money in the | same way that radio stations do. | | [1]https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys | waboremo wrote: | And now we get to actual solutions: public funding. But it's | something a lot of people don't want to admit. We skirt | around the issue, this relies on donations, that relies on | the goodwill of the owner, all of it to ignore the fact that | what we really want is public funding for crucial software | such as forums/social networks (and hosting them). | hooverd wrote: | Mr Biden please send me money to host a Lemmy instance. | [deleted] | nordsieck wrote: | > what we really want is public funding for crucial | software such as forums/social networks (and hosting them). | | Maybe some people want that. Your "we" is putting in a lot | of work. | [deleted] | robinsonb5 wrote: | > "We need enough money to function" is a completely | different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors | investments." | | It's almost as though the large-scale abandonment of old- | skool small-scale, independent domain-specific web forums in | favour of huge centralised platforms was a mistake... | | (Just out of interest, can anyone give me an idea of the | typical running costs of, say, a phpBB or vBulletin web forum | with a couple of hundred users?) | elwebmaster wrote: | Mostly it was just the cost of the domain since there was | free hosting all over the place. You could also just run it | in an old PC in your bedroom, not sure how much electricity | that used as I was not paying electricity at the time :) | but mostly the problem is simultaneous users, 100 users is | ok as long as they are not all making requests at the same | time. Anyways, with modern frameworks it would be | practically free. | | But the SEO and marketing costs to get any kind of traction | these days are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. | That's the real reason we can't have decentralized | communities anymore, the big guys have formed oligopoly. | They control the market and prevent any competition by | owning user attention. | justinlloyd wrote: | * * * | karmakurtisaani wrote: | You have a premise that the web site has to cost a lot of | money. I keep wondering if Reddit-like aggregator could be run | such that | | * The founders take minimal amount of VC money to get things | running | | * There is no self-hosting of anything unnecessary | | * Everything is hosted on-premise (not sure if this would cut | costs in the long run) | | * Serve the users the least amount of ads to make it worthwhile | | So basically run a decent service that you can sustain for | decades. You won't become an IPO billionaire, but maybe get a | humble couple of millions. | | Perhaps it can't be done, and enshittification is the only way. | In that case, I don't see any other way than decentralisation | run by donations to get us something decent. | EuAndreh wrote: | Why not email and mailing lists? | | Past all email limitations, a simple mbox archives everything. It | works offline, is decentralized, etc. | throwaway420690 wrote: | [dead] | moneywoes wrote: | How does moderation work with decentralization | throwaway420690 wrote: | [dead] | viksit wrote: | great question - something i've been thinking about a lot. | | my framework is, | | - moderation needs two levels (top level and grassroots) | | - top level - has to come from communities that are not in an | "accepted" list which shouldn't be allowed to form. (the usual | suspects like hate speech, CSAM). one way to think about is | having community server owners "stake" some sort of investment | and risk losing it in case communities on their servers get | banned. this would happen for instance if you run a server for | this protocol, and someone on your server creates a community | against policies set by the protocol steering committee. | | - grassroots level - moderators are those who actively | contribute to the community, can be elected, have audits on | their logs, and can also be incentivized for their work (eg, | given a "salary" every month) through that staked fund we | talked about earlier. | | ultimately, no one is doing any of this free and we should | assume that monetary incentives in some way that are aligned | with the community's have to be factored in. | flagrant_taco wrote: | > top level - has to come from communities that are not in an | "accepted" list which shouldn't be allowed to form. (the | usual suspects like hate speech, CSAM) | | Even this becomes tricky because you first have to make a | common list of banned content and define the lines between | what each category of content is. Sure a huge majority of | people would like to see CSAM on the list, but they | definitely won't agree on what is/isn't CSAM in their opinion | | I've recently been working through whether any level of | content centralization is possible without the fundamental | challenge of moderation. If anyone can follow me by consuming | content I post to my own site then the main questions are | around discoverability. If I'm posting content to a server | and service that someone else is directly responsible for, | even if federated, they have to consider moderation and the | array of different content laws globally. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | Sorry, I don't buy it: | | 1. Regarding the monetization scheme, nobody has ever gotten | anything to really significantly work beyond advertising. Yes, | there are some niche solutions that can support a dev team of | maybe 1, but at the end of the day most people aren't willing to | pay with anything except their time. | | 2. Social networks that don't have at least some level of top- | down moderation always seem to turn into complete cesspools that | fail. You could say reddit relies on their volunteer moderators, | and that's totally true, but even these moderators must abide by | rules, reddit has terminated numerous subreddits in the past for | breaking the rules, etc. | | I think people should fundamentally accept that humans can't | "self organize" at a very large scale on the Internet. I think | the reason for this is that anonymity (and I obviously see the | irony in me posting about this) completely breaks our normal | human systems of "checks and balances". I honestly think Mike | Tyson said it best: "Social media made you all way too | comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in | the face for it." There are just too few downsides to being a | complete asshole or troll online, where in the real world there | are natural consequences for acting that way. | viksit wrote: | totally agree with you on (1). no model that isn't advertising | has worked so far. but there are other ways and I think we | truly owe it to ourselves as a community and society to try | them. | | i've spoken to maybe 10 folks who are reddit moderators. every | one of them does it for the fun - but if they could be directly | rewarded with something more than "internet karma points" - | they would take it, and feel good. | | to your second point - 100% agreement there. | | I mention the grassroots moderation in another reply on this | thread, but the concept of a subreddit and the control of its | creation is a very important one to consider. I don't think | this problem has been solved, but I have some theories on how | it could be done. | | by making those who start a subreddit having to put a "stake" | in the ecosystem after they hit a particular threshold - and | having everyone who has a stake be able to vote on their future | - seems like a reasonable way to do it. | swayvil wrote: | 1) Agreed. Here's are 2 alternatives. Make it so cheap that it | doesn't matter. Distribute the hosting. | | 2) Gotta quibble. I've seen (on reddit) plenty of top-down | moderated cesspools. And several totally hand-off utopias too. | I think the trick is 1) a subject matter that touches no nerves | 2) a high enough bar for entry/respect that excludes the | average riffraff. | | Also we need a way to punch people in the face over the | internet. Best I can think of is everybody gets a permanent | dossier, publicly shared, that records all your good and bad | deeds (and your judgment of good and bad too, for weighting). | This makes assholish behavior muchbmore detrimental to a happy | online social life. | viksit wrote: | re (1) - how do you think about doing (1)? one of the biggest | challenges in hosting this is who pays for the electricity in | running the machines! | | re (2) - I wish we had a way to do subjects that touched no | nerves on the internet. | | that said - an identity system which keeps track of your | activity (anonymously, pseudonymously, or real identity) is a | great suggestion and something we've implemented in our | protocol. | andreygrehov wrote: | I think decentralization is important. | | Many centralized forums these days have their own "narrative". It | could be of a political or economical nature. For example, each | moderator on Reddit is biased towards what should and should not | be published on "their" sub-reddit. | | Here on HN unconventional wisdom is not welcomed either. Posts | get easily downvoted to the bottom and then visually suppressed, | hinting other readers: "hey, look, this opinion is not important, | feel free to either ignore it or downvote". This visual | suppression is, imho, a subconscious manipulation. Why nudge | readers toward a certain direction? Let everyone decide on their | own. | | The current standard is "agree with me or you're a white | supremacist tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and a nazi". | Alternative opinion is akin to a crime. | | Twitter is moving in the right direction (unconventional wisdom). | There are very few bots left (barely see any). Irrespective of | your political spectrum, nobody's going to ban you. Everyone is | welcome on the platform. Twitter is about to start sharing ad | revenue with content creators, which is a fantastic move in my | opinion. | | Lack of moderation brings everything into a balance - a self- | organized chaos which is the closest thing to what our everyday | lives are. | Berticus12 wrote: | Moderation and ownership should go hand and hand. Moderators in | Reddit essentially have fake sweat equity for their efforts. | There has to be a better model and I think decentralization is | key. | janoc wrote: | You forgot to say why and how exactly. | | A decentralized network won't magically remove the need for | moderation or make the job less onerous or more attractive to | do. Only now the server/instance owner is not only paying for | the hosting out of their own pocket, now they are (also legally | in many cases!) responsible for the content moderation too! | | What a win! That totally makes it super attractive to do. | pessimizer wrote: | We need more tools that encode the decision making methods of | deliberative bodies, and allow groups to moderate themselves. | They should be distributed-first. The only method that we use | so far in software is dictatorship. | | edit: I think that the Community Notes function of nu twitter | is a serious step in the right direction, and there should be | more academic discussion about how processes like that could be | implemented best, or even updated on the fly to match the | changing desires of users. | mikece wrote: | Couldn't ActivityPub be used to as the protocol for this without | any modifications? I don't see a logical difference between the | structure of Pleroma/Mastodon conversations and a message forum | aside from how the UI is presented. If someone took the UI of | phpBB but used ActivityPub as the data source it should Just | Work(tm). | viksit wrote: | great point. IMO, there are a few things that are needed at the | technical level for a system like this to work. | | - identity - a common id system across the whole system that | supports all existing means (think oauth based) | | - a mechanism to sign your messages to prove that you truly | were the poster (since there is no longer a central authority | to validate that) | | - a mechanism to store these messages and get them in real time | (this is where activitypub can be super handy) | | - a way to search / index these messages for retrieval | | - a way to create a feed of activity that uses some algorithm | for ranking | | - a way to discover other forums / communities | | so while activity pub serves well for one aspect, the other | ones aren't quite there yet to be used in a decentralized | fashion. | mnd999 wrote: | This is just Usenet. Everyone used to use it and it still exists. | armchairhacker wrote: | Decentralization is important because you need a point of reach | in case you get cut off from the centralized platform or (more | likely) it gets taken down. Otherwise you're cut off, or a group | is cut off and dissolves. | | But word spreads around pretty easily, and even though most | forums are centralized, there are a lot of forums. Many | centralized platforms = a decentralized platform, because people | connected to multiple will share messages across channels. | | The biggest issue is like, in the Reddit debacle, many | communities are likely to be hurt or even destroyed. And it will | be hard to re-form them and get near the same amount of | popularity | [deleted] | dv_dt wrote: | Not to say there should be only centralized solutions, but there | are tradeoffs. The case against decentralization is that | moderation and resisting network attacks can be non-trivial | amounts of work. Many newspapers shut down their forums for lack | of being able to form a quality level of conversation forum | without a massive amount of work. In the case of reddit, a | subreddit could share the work of building common moderation | strategies and tools, increasing the quality accessible. | Ironically, reddit killing their third-party api, kills some of | their centralization advantages in this respect. | | Sharing common work is possible in decentralized forums, but only | with somewhat standardized interfaces. Of which activity-pub and | mastodon et al are sort of just on the starting path. Every forum | choosing among a myriad of forum interfaces makes other | subdomains of the same solution harder to coordinate and mature | vs centralized. | viksit wrote: | (author here) | | this is a great point, thank you for posting it. | | i've been researching this problem for a year now, and came | across some interesting technical and social povs on moderation | and network attacks. | | - moderation: my pov is that large companies with teams of | moderators (such as twitter or facebook) wont and cant scale to | varied moderation policies across the world. so the task of | moderation has to be boiled down to the communities themselves. | the question then is - a) how do you prevent a moderator from | getting power hungry, b) how do you incentivize them to do the | work and c) how do you make this auditable and provide recourse | mechanisms? for all of this, open access to an API to build the | right tools is super important as you said. and having this | done on a protocol is the only real way to scale it imo. | | - network attacks: we've done a lot of work in approximate | solutions for sybil attacks. using verifiable delay functions | (VDFs) as a way to order messages, and having them stored on | multiple locations (eg arweave) in append only ways gives a lot | more resilience / provides a way towards solutions here. | than3 wrote: | I'd like to add that looking at sybil attacks as just a | network attack would be a mistake. | | These type of attacks apply broadly at many different levels, | for example the minimum thresholds for amplification/de- | amplification can be significantly lower than the 51% that's | normally attributed by definition to these type of attacks. | | Any decentralized moderation system would run into issues | with a sybil attack distorting reflected appraisal within a | community. Some benefits of such an attack might be dropping | the post out of view/delisting it, using generative ai to | create harassing/malign responses attacking volunteer | psychology (where they stop contributing/volunteering when it | costs them). | | Useless/mindless generative chatter that is akin to jamming a | communications channel, but indistinguishable by most people | which in the absence of a clear signal causes isolation | (thanks AI). | | Some of these challenges also don't have a good answer | because they are fundamental problems where a solution would | break automata theory/determinism. So you are left with only | a bad, potential liability from an approximate solution. | | Most propaganda and political warfare focuses on attacking | various parts of communications with the intent to either | isolate, or destroy/debase personal identity, which is | largely determined by reflected appraisal. | | Once isolated, with their belief system destabilized it makes | people vulnerable and does dangerous/weird things to people's | psychology. This has been known for quite some time though | hasn't gotten much attention outside certain academic | circles, and by quite some time I mean roughly generally | known between the 1920s-50s. | | The main driving component was formalized under the Sapir- | Whorf Hypothesis (1929), though it was in common use by | governments prior to that. | | Since most social media already has these issues (but they | don't communicate about them in public regularly if at all), | internally they do recognize these issues and take a Signals | and Systems approach, but the result is as you've seen. | | If you cant exceed parity vs. competitive solutions you wont | be able to increase marketshare/market penetration. | [deleted] | nunobrito wrote: | On that article, decentralization only means going back to early | 2000's with small hosted forum sites or something still | centralized like Mastodon. | | Technology truly moved far in the meanwhile. At the moment the | only protocol that goes beyond expectations is Nostr. | | Over there it doesn't matter where your data is hosted and there | are zero blochains. The only thing that matters is your private | key (identity) and with that you can always write wherever | someone is willing to accept your writings. | | Quite a novelty paradigm, worthy of a true sucessor to Usenet. | throwaway420690 wrote: | [dead] | seydor wrote: | we have tried decentralization and it doesnt work because the | internet is no longer in its baby state. People reminisce of | those rosy times where only a few select highly educated people | were online but this is not going to be the case ever again. | Trust is not a solved problem | | The best we can hope is we can build AI-moderated content systems | where the AI is subject to some form of self-governement by the | community by e.g. voting among possible moderation models. Adding | humans into the mix always invite uncomfortable gatekeeping and | political issues | naravara wrote: | > People reminisce of those rosy times where only a few select | highly educated people were online but this is not going to be | the case ever again. | | It doesn't need to be. Forums can just be unfriendly to people | who don't meet the standards for discussion. They can do this | overtly, through moderation that shoves out low value | contributors, or more subtly through design choices and | cultural factors that discourage low tier posting. | flagrant_taco wrote: | I've never quite wrapped my head around where decentralization | ends and federation begins. | | What's really the difference between the two? Is it a question of | degree, or in this example is it only decentralized if | individuals in the network own their own content? | pessimizer wrote: | Don't worry about definitions. Explain exactly what you're | discussing, then introduce the technical term as a shorthand. | Even if people had a previous understanding of that term, | they'll know what you're talking about, which is all that | matters. | | I associate arguments about the meaning of the word | "decentralization" with pseudo-arguments about how _nobody | wants to run a server_ that require "decentralization" to mean | that everybody has to run a server. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-06-10 23:01 UTC)