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.
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.
Business: what kind of work would contribute to their competitors? On the standard? Well, 90% of open standards (invented number) was created by for profit companies. On libraries and services, why would it?
Technical: implementing global search on the www as a whole is also impossible.
If that’s the case it’s just going to be dumb crap; it’s driven by business and not technology.
About Twitter RSS: I recently discovered nitter.net. It's a Twitter front-end without all that tracking and with the addition of RSS. Jack's at https://nitter.net/jack and the RSS is https://nitter.net/jack/rss
This rules out a lot of existing projects. IMO rules out AP, SSB, Matrix, etc
Twitter management actively and specifically decided to not be that.
Sadly, all centralized Facebook/Twitter/YouTube since 1st January of 2020 would add more restrictions (according each new ToS and Privacy rules).
BTW, I already prepared for fully migrating my Twitter activity to Mastodon.
Replace email with "social media content" and you have ActivityPub.
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.
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.
Twitter is creating a syndicated public one-to-all feed system; Email is a syndicated private one-to-many feed system. The public/private difference cannot be discarded and makes your question unrelated to my statement.
I encourage you to pursue a top-level thread about your concern instead, so that it’s not disregarded as a reply to mine.
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.
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.
If you were asked to hack on YouTube's algorithm, any modifications you'd produce, no matter their merit, would be tested against the status quo for their ability to generate revenue.
We dint even need an open protocol for it, just a reasonable aggregator.
It should be federally mandated to enforce education.
Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some opportunity to join forces on this.
I wrote a toy twitter clone using a discord server as a data source and it worked pretty coherently
Twitter is a global chatroom
what i think jack/twitter is moving towards is a model thats catering to the direction the youth are headed, with twitters implementation of topics, its akin to discords (gamer chat app) interest servers
Perhaps it's largely about branding/development control? I imagine it looks better to investors to say "we're making this new thing" rather than "we're gonna use this other thing that we don't own".
The developers behind Matrix are currently funded from cryptocurrency money to the best of my knowledge.
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
(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.)
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.
He doesn't care about decentralization. ActivityPub is impossible to directly control and it has no innate analytics, advertising or monetization layers. This makes it impossible for Twitter to utilize such a protocol.
If anything, Dorsey wants to embrace, extend, and extinguish AP by making an incompatible protocol that he can then pump VC money into in order to have it gain traction on Twitter's terms - with all the ads, spyware and analytics that Twitter desires.
The protocol wars begin anew.
Your doubts are correct. From the thread:
>@halcy: So, ActivityPub?
>@jack: Team will have charge to choose whatever is best, be that what exists today or start from scratch.
Dorsey follows the Mastodon twitter account - he knows about it.
That being said, solutions like Scuttlebutt, DAT, & IPFS are decentralized, do work, and do have social networks.
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.
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.
If anyone is interested I wrote a piece about democratizing social media https://medium.com/@shareU/we-built-this-city-2cb97437942f
https://twitter.com/MastodonProject/status/12047748080153272...
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.
https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/watch...
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.
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...
Twitter doesn't ban political speech, what they will stop accepting are political ads.
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...
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.
This is not true on multiple levels
Webber has not trashed ActivtiyPub. I'd love if you could provide some evidence.
And the updates, in the form of OcapPub, are not at all incompatible with the current AP. They're an optional add-on that has a good default behavior.
Source: I worked on the same paper where Webber talks about improving ActivityPub, I presented my own white paper about ActivityPub. I gave a talk about these possible upgrades at the ActivityPub conference and I do a podcast with Webber where we talk about ActivityPub.
I'm not a Mastodon developer, nor have I developed with it, but surely there are learnings there that could potentially be contributed back to the W3C to make ActivityPub better (including making it more rigorously spec'd).
The people at the W3C are not gods - they're human beings just like the rest of us. Why not get involved in the conversation there?
The only genuine reason I can think of to split away from the ActivityPub effort to build a completely different protocol would be if the W3C's working group on ActivityPub is filled with such toxic politics that it's impossible to make any progress on making the spec better. (That's been the only reason I could see in the past when I've been part of protocol standardization efforts).
Without evidence of that, however, I'd say that it's far better for the community to get involved in making the existing spec better. Robust debate (supported by evidence, such as that which Mastodon's built up) is incredibly valuable to the community as a whole.
Also, it's incredibly valuable from a political decentralization perspective to have as neutral a party as possible facilitating the standardization efforts, to minimize the risk of Big Tech shaping standards in ways that would suit them financially (and potentially against the interests of the average internet user).
[0] - https://activitypub.rocks/implementation-report/
[1] - https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/why-activitypub-is-the...
Not only this, but they go against it in multiple places. How they've implemented 'summary' and the bizarre things they've done to create compatibility with Misskey (but not in an actually-compatible way, Misskey's had to patch their own solution every time) has made every implementation have to implement an against-spec trashfire.
I'm not a Mastodon developer, nor have I developed with it, but surely there are learnings there that could potentially be contributed back to the W3C to make ActivityPub better (including making it more rigorously spec'd).
Alternatively, the AP spec is fundamentally broken in many ways, and that effort would be better off going into a protocol like Secure Scuttlebutt (not a fan, but it's much better than AP) or Diaspora (also not a fan, but it's much better than AP).
The people at the W3C are not gods - they're human beings just like the rest of us. Why not get involved in the conversation there?
The only genuine reason I can think of to split away from the ActivityPub effort to build a completely different protocol would be if the W3C's working group on ActivityPub is filled with such toxic politics that it's impossible to make any progress on making the spec better. (That's been the only reason I could see in the past when I've been part of protocol standardization efforts).
Not only politics, but it's incredibly slow. Webber has written a post on how troublesome the standardization process was, though he doesn't go into just how bad it was:
https://dustycloud.org/blog/on-standards-divisions-collabora...
Without evidence of that, however, I'd say that it's far better for the community to get involved in making the existing spec better. Robust debate (supported by evidence, such as that which Mastodon's built up) is incredibly valuable to the community as a whole.
There are already existing specifications, none of them as bad as ActivityPub. I'm fully for going in one of those directions, but AP is more or less a failed experiment.
Also, it's incredibly valuable from a political decentralization perspective to have as neutral a party as possible facilitating the standardization efforts, to minimize the risk of Big Tech shaping standards in ways that would suit them financially (and potentially against the interests of the average internet user).
W3C is not neutral, and not only are they not neutral, but the RIAA and MPAA are people with enough sway to have messed up the entire web multiple times (see: making EME a standard).
A neutral party sounds great! The W3C should not get to be involved, however.
In his own words:
> "OcapPub" sounds like a new protocol, whereas it's really just a way-to-use ActivityPub mostly as it already exists. Maybe time for a new name for that?
Even if Webber does think ActivityPub has fundamental problems, he doesn't seem to be discouraging anyone from pushing it. I mean, go ahead and watch his most recent talk and decide whether or not Webber is "trashing" ActivityPub.[2]
> "It was 3 years of really hard work, and it wasn't clear in the process if it was going to pay off. And it has. We now have this as a standard that we can all use to be able to speak to each other, and I think this is really exciting."
[0]: https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org
[1]: https://dustycloud.org/blog/2019-10-01-updates/
[2]: https://conf.tube/videos/watch/2b9a985b-ccdd-49ce-a81b-ed00d...
That's a misrepresentation of history. Being responsible for your own data hygiene has been the norm in many online circles for a long time. I have often experienced pretend-stalking (e.g. via exif information not stripped from images) as a way of opening the eyes of community members about the data they leak.
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.
Also, the way you ban people is basically by having unique capabilities handed out to everyone. Then you can do various things to stop access (it's called a revoker in ocap jargon). See http://habitatchronicles.com/2017/05/what-are-capabilities/
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...)
What do you base your statement on? I've heard this take before, but I haven't seen anyone provide a good explanation for it.
Use search to find Kaniini's threads about Rapunzel.
Also, no, it's not something inherent in distributed social networking as a whole (previous attempts have avoided it), and it's not even inherent to push protocols, but without a bit of thinking behind it, it's easy to collide with.
Deleting is stupid, though, yeah.
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."
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.
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.
It's less the wire format (JSON-LD) and more the semantics (ActivityStreams) that are important, to be honest.
Ah... so that's how he's going to get the funding: https://external-preview.redd.it/CypLdP3MLDVm15Lwm1f-M98gyMh...
Why else would you need to insert a blockchain into the solution? Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/) is already one possible solution and they wouldn't have to reinvent some new protocol.
> A distributed social network or federated social network is an Internet social networking service that is decentralized and distributed across distinct providers (something like email but for social networks), such as the Fediverse.
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)
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."
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.
It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.
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
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.
I'm sadly not surprised. While HN does attract hobbyists like me interested in technology and how it affects society, it also attracts a lot of those who dream of building and controlling the next big data silo for personal profit. Permanently liberating an entire mode of communication into an uncensorable distributed system that can't be easily replaced due to the network effect (such as your example of email) precludes that path to profit.
Does it make sense business-wise? What business will want to be on a system that has no moderation? It's just asking for your brand to be accidentally or intentionally associated with undesirable things.
You're posting this in a place (HN) that itself is not averse to deleting posts, shadow banning, manipulating the rank of articles, etc. Some have argued that HN is a good discussion environment precisely because of those things, though I don't necessarily agree. What I'm getting at is that you have reason to not expect sympathy for your position here.
The questions are where do you draw the line, and who gets to decide where the line is drawn?
If you don't like what the moderators are doing, you can select a different moderation feed, or start your own.
This way we decouple the moderation from the platform.
How is this not a laughable expectation? You may as well expect them to "solve evil".
There will be a space where different people and organizations can build filters that rate information for veracity and other traits. Over time these filters will develop a track record. People will be able to filter their feed through such filters.
Centralized orgs can already do this, but they make a central and opaque choice about it. This means that there is a lot of pressure from various interest groups to make sure that the hidden filter is biased towards their favored viewpoint, and the users cannot really see what the result of this fight is.
It's like how it probably wouldn't be a good idea to have just one news organization that served the whole US.
Making total censorship impossible is mostly congruent with the goals of society in my opinion. Censorship has done immense damage, e.g. Lysenkoism in the USSR (to pick a particular example).
However there is still the option for users to voluntarily opt in to certain kinds of filters. Most likely most people would voluntarily opt in to a filter that rejects child porn, for example. It's an open question whether a decentralized system with filters would lead to better overall environment, but I think it's worth trying.
This sort of case makes me an advocate for centralized access to moderate/regulate/also be accountable... but then if there's this magic backdoor to data access and removal...?
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.
Good luck with your 'open standard'.
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
[0] Haha
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.)
Of course, plenty of reasons to be sceptical about them either going with ActivityPub, or not.
You can even run an instance yourself, just like you run WordPress.
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.
Feel free to email me if you'd like an invite to the network.
Also it's weird but Jack follows Cernovich.
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.
- 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.)
...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.
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.
Will keep my fingers crossed.
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.
Further, GNU Social still doesn't implement AP. This is largely because AP is very annoying to implement, but also because GNU Social sucks.
Do we really need a billion dollar company to figure this out, or is it just an advertising issue?
"In 2019 Anime will be associated with fascism, neo-Nazis, and hard-core misogyny." - Time traveler me from the future.
"LOL WUT?" - Me in 2005 before murdering this obviously false me from an obviously impossible timeline to prevent damage to the space-time continuum.
Definitely the best ActivityPub software on the market!
Also: Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
They are the last company that should be trusted to develop an open standard.
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.
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.
- Scuttlebutt
- GNUnet
- Secureshare
- Fereenet
- ZeroNet
- Retroshare
- Diaspora
- Mastadon
- Matrix
- Cabal
Twitter PiperNet?
Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some opportunity to join forces on this.
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. We merged the replies from here to there.)