Post from @rabble on why he's chosen to use #Nostr and not #ActivityPub and the #Fediverse. He makes some compelling points. Personally I am not too worried about the server admin parts of his argument (I have enough control, even if I don't control th...
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@dalias @tchambers @ricmac @newsmast @PixelFed @julian uh the fediverse by design lacks any privacy whatsoever. It’s designed to not have privacy. Instance admins have all of your data and no checks on their use. It’s easy to snoop on dm’s and get at ‘private’ accounts. It’s just like living in a place where no locks are allowed. Sure most people knock and don’t go uninvited in to other people’s rooms or houses.
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@rabble @tchambers @ricmac @newsmast @pixelfed @julian "Privacy" doesn't mean "DMs" or "post visibility". It involves things like ability to snoop on who is reading what and amass and mine data on that. The fediverse model makes your instance a "privacy union" of sorts so that other instances can't see this sort of thing. Identifying to other instances breaks thay.
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Eugen Rochkoreplied to Richard MacManus on last edited by
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[email protected]replied to Eugen Rochko on last edited by
Pixelfed and Mastodon are not isolated from each other. I have Pixelfed users in my home feed on Mastodon. That’s a very weird definition of isolated.
UI-mismatch is the issue there and as well as with the “promise” of the fediverse. A shared protocol isn’t the same as a shared UI.
Then there’s the whole data-model-mismatch problem, where platforms only implement parts of the protocol such that things get lost or misinterpreted between platforms.
And so, despite being technically “not isolated”, people have multiple accounts all over the place to reroute around these mismatch frictions, which are significant enough to create prohibitive separations.
Whether its a misinterpretation from users or an overzealous advocacy of the power of the protocol and fediverse … I think it’s absolutely fair enough to say that we’ve arrived at a point where the promise of multiple platforms and instances all in a single unifying space is a bad over promise.
The friction involved in trying to reach for that is bad enough that most just bounce off of it, either ditching the fediverse, or giving up on this so called promise and staying on their platform of choice, or just creating multiple accounts and tolerating the chaos.
At the root of it is this lack of mobile identity (as well as, IMO, some other general design decisions). Not least because bridging these gulfs is exactly the sort of thing necessary to make the fediverse realise its killer potential. At the moment to many, probably most, the fediverse is in practice “just” a sea of disparate platforms. Which is a shame TBH, but also shouldn’t be glossed over as a non-issue.
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@ricmac Of the issues that @rabble raises the one that I think is the most important to address is:
"Each kind of fediverse server is isolated. You can use a Peertube instance to federate with other Peertubes for video, or Mobilizon for meetup-style events, or Pixelfed for Instagram-like photo sharing, or WriteFreely for blogs. But each of these is isolated. I need a new account on an instance of each of these servers. They all run the same protocol, but they aren’t actually interoperable. You can’t use a single fediverse identity with your profile and followers in Peertube, Mobilizon, WriteFreely, and Pixelfed. You need a totally separate account in each one. With Nostr, you can use dozens of apps all with your same identity, content, and followers."
cc @evan @Gargron @dansup @JsonCulverhouse @greg @emilynguyen
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@mike @ricmac @rabble @evan @Gargron @dansup @JsonCulverhouse @greg @emilynguyen But I don’t see how Nostr solves that problem because, at its root, this isn’t a problem of software but of culture.
For example, if I created a YouTube-style app based on Nostr, people who use Nostr for microblogging would still bristle at this use case if all they ever encountered was Nostr for microblogging.
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@mike @ricmac @rabble @evan @Gargron @dansup @JsonCulverhouse @greg @emilynguyen My feeling is that the world’s UI innovators may solve this problem for us. What with Ivory and Mona and Elk and Phanpy, you can already have wildly-different experiences of the same underlying network. Seems to me that many of the things that distinguish these alternate servers can be accomplished with sufficiently good client-ware.
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@atomicpoet @evan @JsonCulverhouse @emilynguyen @greg @mike @Gargron @dansup @rabble @ricmac App diversity is good. Having a different account for each app is not. In an ideal world, everyone should have one ActivityPub compliant identity and be able to use any ActivityPub compliant application
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@[email protected] ActivityPods is an intriguing project along those lines! https://activitypods.org/
The replies to your post are interesting. I'm in the camp that agrees that point about needing separate accounts was a very strong one -- okay, I buy that it's not an inherent problem with ActivityPub but it's very much an issue with today's actually existing fediverse. So the responses saying that it's not an issue, or not a big issue, strike me as somewhat in denial. -
There's no particular reason that you can't use the same authoriser if they accept oAuth and Mastodon and Pixelfed can do that at least, I don't know about Writefreely.
You have multiple accounts but the same method to authorise.
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@simon_lucy @Gargron @rabble @ricmac
“Need” is a strong word I’d say. Instead, I’m coming from the perspective of what “the fediverse”, an ecosystem of connected (“not isolated”) platforms, promises regarding inter-platform connectivity.
And a simple angle into that, I think, is the embedding of GIFs, videos, polls, emoji etc in social media, which has grown into a de facto standard over time for what were originally text-based platforms (over on BlueSky, they’re still whinging about the lack of such).
That’s an enhancement or enrichment of the UI and the scope of social interaction or conversation that basically expands into the big space of features that the web browser affords. In addition to whatever written language is used in the text of a platform, the additional elements of representation, communication and interaction all contribute to forming its “social language and format”, which then ties in closely with its culture.
The more the fediverse promises connectivity between different platforms, the more there’s an expectation that these “languages and formats” get translated across the protocol between platforms. Thing is, this isn’t just about text, it’s about a platform’s full gamut of visual elements and their formatting or arrangement. That is, it’s about their UIs. The more a platform’s UI gets lost as its translated/interpreted by another platform, the more there isn’t real connectivity at a meaningful social (media) level. Expectations matter here too, where disappointingly “lossy” interactions are simply uncompelling for many.
The web browser and internet is an important backdrop to this IMO. All web pages just work (kinda mostly) as they are intended in everyone’s web browser. There’s no loss. Each link takes you to where and what you’re supposed to. Same with books, or PDFs, or films or music. Fidelity of format is and has always been paramount.
And so, as I claim, the protocol is only the beginning, the foundation.
The actual site of the fediverse is in how UIs get translated across different platforms.
At some threshold of mis-translation, the connection, and the promise of the fediverse, is broken (even if not for everyone, as full or wide-band connectivity is the promise IMO).
Coming back to the web browser and the internet — where it’s important IMO to recall many fediverse advocates describing it as an opportunity to “remake the internet” — an obvious alternative presents itself (I think): Our fediverse clients/interfaces ought to be capable of rendering any form of social media in its intended/designed format just like the browser and the internet.
And of course, this doesn’t preclude user customisation such that some or even many might want to restrict content to a certain format. But, it’s also relevant I think to point out that many have accounts and are active on multiple platforms, both on the fediverse and on big social and interact with overlapping sets of people. Which is to say that using the browser/smartphone-OSs, people are already doing what I’m suggesting
In fact, I’d argue that what we have now is strange. Each piece of social media interaction has to get translated into whatever my current platform decides is the appropriate format and understanding of that interaction. In reality, that’s really not much progress on the screen shots used to share inter-platform content on big (unfederated) social media … and I’d say it’s a policy that clearly germinates from the same design culture (where the fediverse is still in its “lets clone big social” phase).
So, UI-Matching (which requires a good deal of Data-Model-Matching) … that’s the actual fediverse. What we’ve got now is some weird middle ground that mostly breaks its promises.
