Twitter to decentralize something (opens in new tab)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Payment is far too complex and abstract to contemplate building in at layer 3 (IP) of the network stack. Even in some idealized alternate history it would have never worked, and probably still couldn't work today.

PiedPiper solved this

Storing images in multiple, decentralized servers and making them available to arbitrary users instantly? Pretty sure that's a solved problem. </IMG>

Thank you! Your support is very much appreciated.

(Context: I have a Patreon here: https://patreon.com/nehbit)

I generally try to only charge it on the months I push a new release on, and otherwise keep it paused. I’ve found that’s a good way for me to not stress out when my ‘day job’ gets too hectic.

Yes, this is in fact a privacy feature - the data is gone 6 months after its last reference. In other words, we garbage collect for you so that you won’t end up dealing with a post you wrote when you were 14 10 years later, out of context. It’s sort of like the right to be forgotten.

That also makes it relatively unsuitable for long-term storage of stale information. Active communities will last, but archived ones with no new content won’t, and eventually be gone.

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

Trying to change the paradigm about how the planet connects and share information is an incredibly challenging task.

At twitter's scale, 5 people are a team you put together to decide if they are going to migrate to X library/framework for an internal tool.

This is not a task where you want to be frugal in terms of resources.

> Could be the next Bill Gates, Woz, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, and Bezos on the team.

I certainly hope not. While these were successful it does not mean that their projects were good or that they contributed for the good of mankind rather than for its downfall.

The Matrix protocol is more or less an open, replicated database. E-mail is similar in some ways, but:

1: it doesn't define enough metadata ("this is an image", etc)

2: it doesn't handle backtracking well, if one of the recipient servers misses a message (servers are just supposed to retry a given number of times).

3: it has no security/authentication concept.

All of these could be bolted on regular e-mail, but calling it e-mail at that point would be a travesty, and we might as well call that a new protocol. And if we are writing a new protocol, we might as well take a few liberties to address the shortcommings of the first (one could argue against the last part).

Fun bit: "BCC is not possible". Actually, a BCC e-mail would be an ad.

Weird. I'm wearing one of their shirts that I got from a convention!

mongoDB with default credentials

lol @ this screen name and question combo.

By open we mean everyone gets full permissions, tovarisch!

ActivityPub

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

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

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

In this context, I think they meant "free speech" and "objectionable material" referring to the same things, but by different groups. So death threats would fall under both: Gab would allow them, most other Mastodon communities wouldn't. People (or law enforcement agencies) can then choose their gatekeeper.

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