00:00SPEAKEROkay, I've done it. I didn't know it existed, but I found the good YouTube.
00:04SPEAKERThere's a lot of good YouTube, man.
00:06SPEAKERWell, okay. I found the best YouTube.
00:08SPEAKERThere's like woodworking YouTube. There's goat herding YouTube. There's,
00:12SPEAKERhey, we put goats into Taylor Swift's song YouTube. There's making models YouTube.
00:20SPEAKERThere's painting stuff YouTube.
00:22SPEAKERThere's a lot of goat YouTube is what I'm getting, some goat tube.
00:25SPEAKERI mean, goat tube is pretty, but like, I like cleaning stuff YouTube. It's kind of like paint.
00:29SPEAKERIt's like a water pressure simulator, water pressure washer simulator,
00:33SPEAKERbut without having to do all the work yourself.
00:35SPEAKERCan I just clarify real quick? You did say goat herding with a D.
00:39SPEAKERYeah. You get to watch the dogs work the goats, which is nice.
00:43SPEAKERIt sounded a little bit like goat hurting.
00:46SPEAKERNo, only a monster would hurt a goat. They're delightful animals. They're sweet and kind.
00:49SPEAKERGoats. Goats are wonderful. Okay. Well, I found my personal best YouTube.
00:54SPEAKEROkay.
00:54SPEAKERAnd it is exclusively made up of old stock archival Titanic material.
00:59SPEAKERWow. Like pre-discovery of the ship under the ocean.
01:02SPEAKERWell, that's out there too. You can find like colorized 4k footage of like, you know, the very,
01:08SPEAKERthe scant footage that was recorded.
01:10SPEAKEROh, like Ireland and stuff like that. Oh, cool.
01:13SPEAKERThat's out there. But what I'm talking about is I somehow watched an hour long
01:17SPEAKERtalk that Bob Ballard gave from about 12 years ago the other night.
01:21SPEAKERWho's Bob Ballard?
01:22SPEAKERBob Ballard is the world famous oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic.
01:26SPEAKERWait, have you got Titanic fever, Brad?
01:28SPEAKERKind of. It's a reversible business really kind of acted as a jumping off point anyway.
01:34SPEAKERThat's one thing, way to say it.
01:35SPEAKEROkay. But one of my prerequisites is that the quality needs to be bad. This was like,
01:40SPEAKERthis was like four by three. It looked like it was shot on some kind of handicap
01:44SPEAKERin an auditorium at the university. Where does he teach? University of Rhode Island, I think.
01:48SPEAKERThat sounds like the oceanographic Institute, I bet.
01:50SPEAKERYes. Anyway, whatever. He did. It was just like fascinating long
01:53SPEAKERtalk about the process of finding the wreck.
01:56SPEAKEROkay.
01:56SPEAKERAnd a really good Q and A. This was all about like 12 years ago. And anyway,
02:00SPEAKERas soon as I finished watching that, YouTube then recommended to me CBS has an archival,
02:05SPEAKERlike a from the archives channel on YouTube.
02:08SPEAKERWow.
02:09SPEAKERAnd I found their B roll. Does it qualify as B roll if people are talking in it? Maybe not.
02:14SPEAKERNo, that's just A roll.
02:16SPEAKERI guess this was the press conference where he announced them finding the wreck like 48
02:21SPEAKERhours after they had found it. And it's the entire thing shot by the CBS cameraman from start to finish.
02:26SPEAKEROh, wow. No cuts. I remember when that happened. I remember what a big deal that was because
02:33SPEAKERwe had a Titanic coffee table book before that.
02:36SPEAKERYeah. It was just like the story of the... Because my mom and grandmother came over on those,
02:42SPEAKERnot the Titanic, obviously, because that would have been 40 years, 30 years before they came over,
02:46SPEAKERbut they came on the antecedents of those... Is that the right word? Of those ships.
02:50SPEAKERSuccessors.
02:52SPEAKERYeah, successors. So they came over like the Queen Mary and the QE2 and the... I can't remember the
02:57SPEAKERother one, but on different trips back and forth because you couldn't... Normal people couldn't
03:01SPEAKERtake planes back then. Also, you had to be kind of suicidal to do a transatlantic flight in 1940,
03:05SPEAKERI think.
03:06SPEAKERFair. Fair. I should put the link to this in the show notes because it's incredible
03:11SPEAKERfor like eight different reasons.
03:14SPEAKERLike, what were the questions like?
03:15SPEAKERHe didn't take questions at this. This was a solid 45 minutes of him talking,
03:19SPEAKERbut kind of maybe the most amazing thing about this is he's a little disheveled at the beginning,
03:24SPEAKERand he makes it extremely clear that basically he has not slept in the last 48 hours since they
03:29SPEAKERfound it.
03:30SPEAKERI can't imagine.
03:31SPEAKERAnd that he was up, they were up until 4 AM the night before this press conference preparing
03:36SPEAKERthese slides that they were to show to the press. And he says over and over, he's like, "I haven't
03:41SPEAKEReven analyzed the work that I did myself on this yet. No scientist wants to present their findings
03:46SPEAKERbefore they've even understood what they did. So please just take everything I'm showing you with
03:52SPEAKERa grain of salt." He's kind of on the edge in this thing. He seems extremely frazzled.
03:57SPEAKERIt's kind of amazing.
03:58SPEAKERWas this on the ship?
03:59SPEAKERI don't know. It's in a big enough auditorium or kind of briefing space of some kind that I
04:05SPEAKERwouldn't think it was on a ship. I assume this was on land.
04:08SPEAKERIt has to be in like Newfoundland or something then if it was only 48 hours.
04:11SPEAKERYeah. Or maybe it might've been a little longer than 48 hours, but it was very...
04:14SPEAKERWow.
04:14SPEAKERAt one point he kind of under his breath is sort of like says something along the lines of like,
04:20SPEAKERI guess it's... Well, it's been more than a few days since I found it,
04:23SPEAKERbut I haven't slept since then. So it's basically all one day to me.
04:26SPEAKERIt's just like really barely hanging on, but it's still utterly fascinating all the triangulation
04:32SPEAKERthey did with readings and positions and logs from the nights and analyzing ocean currents and
04:40SPEAKERfiguring out what the distribution of the debris field would be based on everything all the day
04:44SPEAKERthat they had.
04:46SPEAKERBecause that whole process is designed to take seemingly an infinite number of variables like
04:53SPEAKERwind and currents and what direction the captain chose to make the ship go and all of those things
04:58SPEAKERwhere they found the people. And it's not like they had GPS back then. So the locations
05:03SPEAKERwere based on how good the person on the... What was the ship that rescued the people,
05:10SPEAKERthe first one that started with the sea?
05:11SPEAKERSo the Carpathia is the one that actually did go and rescue people. But there's another
05:15SPEAKERinteresting aspect of this is that the California was the other ship that was basically watched
05:19SPEAKERthem sink and did nothing.
05:21SPEAKERYeah, because they thought they were shooting off the flares because they were partiers.
05:24SPEAKERI don't know why actually. I haven't looked that up. I wondered if it was because they knew it was
05:28SPEAKERa big ice field and they didn't want to put themselves at risk.
05:31SPEAKERThe official line that I always heard or read was that they thought it was like they knew the ship
05:37SPEAKERto be unsinkable. So they thought it was a celebration. Man's own hubris.
05:42SPEAKERYeah. Another aspect of this is that he chose to disregard a lot of the California's data because
05:46SPEAKERthey, for various reasons, they found it to be unreliable. And one of those reasons they thought
05:50SPEAKERwas that they kind of massaged the data to make themselves look better and not having responded.
05:56SPEAKERThat's entirely possible.
05:58SPEAKERAnyway, hey, you know what? There's some fun historical artifacts out there on YouTube to
06:02SPEAKERbe found.
06:04SPEAKERThat's the thing that I love. It's both the good and the bad thing about the centralized service,
06:08SPEAKERright? Well, I mean, we'll talk about it in a second, I guess.
06:11SPEAKERYeah, I was going to say. Topical.
06:42SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will.
06:45SPEAKERI'm Brad.
06:46SPEAKERI apologize in advance if I sound scratchy or bad today. I have a bit of a cold,
06:52SPEAKERa summer cold, Brad.
06:53SPEAKERWent out of town and promptly got sick.
06:55SPEAKER#NotRona.
06:56SPEAKERAs happens.
06:57SPEAKERWe've tested, so nothing yet. We remain optimistic that it's just a common rhinovirus. But anyway,
07:05SPEAKERwe're here. We're podcasting. We're talking today, as we hinted in the intro, about Federation.
07:11SPEAKERThis is finally our Star Trek episode, I guess.
07:12SPEAKERYes. The United Federation of Planets,
07:16SPEAKERStarfleet, the military slash exploration. Go on.
07:21SPEAKERLook, they've taken it to weird places in some of those new series. It used to be just a peace
07:24SPEAKERkeeping slash... Look, Starfleet didn't start as cops. That's all I'm saying, okay?
07:29SPEAKERRight. Yes. Well, actually, I don't know. Having watched some of the original series,
07:33SPEAKERit was a lot more naval in the '60s than it became in the much more peace loving '90s,
07:41SPEAKERI guess. I don't know.
07:42SPEAKERWell, that's fair. There's a lot of punching Klingons and Gorn and stuff like that.
07:46SPEAKERThere are a lot of World War II vets running that show, probably, at that point, let's say.
07:51SPEAKERWell, yeah. World War II in Korea, probably, right? The youngsters were probably hard-bitten,
07:58SPEAKERwhat? Journeyman to the 58th parallel. Is that it? Sure. That's the right... Anyway,
08:04SPEAKERbut today we're talking about... We want to talk about... So, Facebook did a thing. I'm sorry,
08:10SPEAKERMeta slash Facebook slash Instagram did a thing the other day that they've been threatening to do
08:16SPEAKERfor a while. They released a Twitter competitor based on Instagram that will, at some point in
08:22SPEAKERthe future, theoretically use the activity pub protocol to federate out a microblogging service
08:29SPEAKERthat is hosted by Facebook, basically.
08:32SPEAKERYes. I think... Does it use activity pub now, I assume?
08:35SPEAKERIt does not use activity pub yet.
08:37SPEAKERNot yet?
08:38SPEAKERIt does not federate yet. It may use activity pub. They have explicitly said it's based on
08:42SPEAKERthe Instagram backend at this point. So, we've talked about this a little bit off and on. We've
08:51SPEAKERtalked about the end result of these ideas, but we haven't actually talked about federation,
08:56SPEAKERwe realized, and what it means. In the classic Star Trek sense, it means a grouping of things,
09:05SPEAKERgrouping of dissimilar things into one homunculus of governments.
09:13SPEAKERActually, maybe we should start using the Star Trek analogy for this. It seems like this is a
09:18SPEAKERreally abstract concept that a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their head around,
09:21SPEAKERto the point that the blue sky people used this kind of cities analogy of every instance is his
09:26SPEAKERown city and they have transit that links them. Some of those cities have museums and some of them
09:32SPEAKERhave blah. Maybe perhaps a Star Trek and the planets analogy is a better way to go.
09:38SPEAKERWell, but the idea is, this is born out of 15 years, 20 years almost of proprietary closed
09:47SPEAKERsocial media, social networks where you build, as a user, a presence and a platform inside these
09:54SPEAKERclosed platforms. For example, if you have 250,000 followers on Twitter and you want to go someplace
10:02SPEAKERelse because you don't like the new owner of Twitter, tough shit. There's nothing you can
10:06SPEAKERdo because it's a completely closed backend and you can export the data, but there's nothing
10:12SPEAKERfunctional you can do with that. The interesting thing about these new kind of federated
10:21SPEAKERprotocols, which have been around, just to be clear, this isn't anything new. This is how the
10:26SPEAKERinternet started. Usenet is essentially a federated protocol. Email is a federated protocol. Anybody
10:32SPEAKERcan set up an email server. Anybody else can connect to that. There's a mechanism to set up
10:40SPEAKERdomain entries that let you connect to other domains from your own email servers. Now,
10:45SPEAKERit's a little less true now than it was 40 years ago because of things like the thing that Google
10:50SPEAKERpushes to help fight spam. The spam becomes a problem in these unfederated networks,
10:56SPEAKERas has plagued IRC and Usenet and all the other kind of proto versions of these things.
11:03SPEAKERThe federated stuff that we're talking about here is designed to be a little more humane and a
11:06SPEAKERlittle more usable. The fundamental idea is that if you want to post on Mastodon,
11:17SPEAKERyou can go create an account on somebody else's server someplace. Also, if you want to pay Linode
11:22SPEAKERfive bucks a month and download a Docker image for a Mastodon server, you can put that on your
11:28SPEAKERown domain and host it yourself. We do that for mastodon.content.town right now.
11:33SPEAKERYeah. I'm curious because you have done basically all the administration for that instance. Based
11:39SPEAKERon your experience, is it feasible for somebody to run entirely their own Mastodon instance just
11:45SPEAKERfor their use or is that so much upkeep and overhead that it would be ludicrous to do?
11:50SPEAKERSo there's a couple of single user designed Mastodon. Mastodon is open. It's based on two
11:58SPEAKERor three protocols, depending on how you look at them. ActivityPub is the one we're going to talk
12:02SPEAKERabout most today, I think. It's designed for multiple users on one instance. Our friend,
12:09SPEAKERBen Brown, has one that's a single serving Mastodon instance. I can't remember what it's
12:14SPEAKERcalled off the top of my head. I didn't actually write that down. It's not Mastodon at that point.
12:20SPEAKERSo the initial point of note here is when we talk about Mastodon, we're going to use Mastodon
12:25SPEAKERand the Fediverse interchangeably for the most part. The Fediverse is all of the software that
12:34SPEAKERcan communicate using ActivityPub and the other associated protocols. Mastodon is just the most
12:39SPEAKERpopular of those right now. But important to note, Fediverse is very much a Mastodon/ActivityPub
12:46SPEAKERconcept. When people say Fediverse, they're talking about that specific network. Blue
12:50SPEAKERsky is a separate thing from that, et cetera. Yeah, exactly. The Fediverse comes from the
12:57SPEAKERuniverse that's federated. That's the idea of that whole thing. Shuttlecraft is Ben Brown's
13:04SPEAKERsingle user ActivityPub server. You can go to his GitHub page and grab it. It's a Node.js web app
13:13SPEAKERwith no dependencies. You can host on Glitch or low-cost virtual hosts without having to have
13:21SPEAKERbackend databases and stuff like that. Interesting. Former show guest Ben Brown.
13:25SPEAKERFormer show guest Ben Brown, yeah. But the main idea of Federation is that anybody can host a
13:32SPEAKERserver. There's two main ideas. Anybody can host a server and your data is portable. For example,
13:43SPEAKERif I'm on Twitter and you're on Instagram, you don't have a Twitter account. I don't have an
13:46SPEAKERInstagram account. Right now, there's no way for us to communicate with each other using those
13:49SPEAKERservices. We have to go someplace else. In a federated ecosystem, assuming we all use the
13:54SPEAKERsame protocols to talk to each other, I should be able to send a message to you on Instagram from my
13:59SPEAKERTwitter account, just like you could send me an email from your nextlander.com email address to
14:05SPEAKERmy content.town email address. Right. And follow each other further across instance boundaries.
14:13SPEAKERYeah. And pull the relevant data that gets pushed out in a microblogging service or a photo sharing
14:17SPEAKERservice or whatever. The interesting thing about all the activity pub stuff is it's pretty
14:21SPEAKERopen-ended. The Mastodon is microblogging, but there are versions of the Mastodon software that
14:28SPEAKERare designed to work like Instagram, where it's primarily a photo sharing thing, or I assume
14:32SPEAKERthere's audio sharing and all sorts of other stuff as well. It's been, as a little bit of an aside,
14:38SPEAKERit's been interesting as Twitter dies, as Twitter rapidly declines and these competitors emerge,
14:43SPEAKERwatching people look back at the origins of Twitter and discuss how things came about,
14:47SPEAKERsuch as the character limit. Yeah, that was a remnant of SMS.
14:51SPEAKERRight. So that was a reminder that these days people talk about Twitter and its ilk
14:56SPEAKERas microblogging, but the initial concept for Twitter was more public text messaging.
15:03SPEAKERIt's a text messaging party line is basically what it was.
15:05SPEAKERRight. Right. That's kind of where it came from. And that's where the character limit
15:10SPEAKERoriginated. Although they obviously expanded that once nobody used SMS really for Twitter anymore,
15:14SPEAKERbut I would argue that the character limit is pretty key to the appeal of Twitter and things
15:19SPEAKERlike it. Well, and also like what part of the connection to text was one of the things that
15:26SPEAKERmade Twitter really appealing early on in like disasters and things like the Arab Spring and
15:33SPEAKERstuff like that. Right. Especially where you don't have like proper data connectivity,
15:36SPEAKERbut you can still send SMS. Yeah. Or where your government turned off
15:40SPEAKERproper data connectivity. So, okay. So the two core ideas, anybody can host a server,
15:46SPEAKERthose servers can talk to everybody else and you can move your content between servers. You can,
15:52SPEAKERyou're not trapped on one server forever. If you accidentally end up on the Nazi server,
15:56SPEAKERyou can get off the Nazi server and go someplace else.
15:59SPEAKERYes. And relatedly, if a Nazi server emerges and happens to be federated with the rest
16:05SPEAKERof the network, everybody can just be like, well, fuck these people and kick them off
16:10SPEAKERto the point that they kind of can't interact with anybody else.
16:13SPEAKERYeah. So there's like, and just to be clear, there's a lot of activity in this space. There's
16:17SPEAKERa bazillion Mastodon kind of forks or variants or like there's front end clients. There's elk,
16:24SPEAKERwhich is a front end, elk.zone, which is a front end client that will connect to your Mastodon
16:29SPEAKERinstance, like tweet deck or tweet bot or whatever your favorite Twitter client was,
16:34SPEAKERwould connect to Twitter and let you view your data through a different kind of lens.
16:42SPEAKERThere's Kalki, which is designed by humans version of like Mastodon is very open source-y. It feels
16:49SPEAKERvery open source-y in a lot of ways. Kalki is designed to be a little more humane and kind of
16:53SPEAKERtake the bells and whistles of Twitters and Instagrams and put them on that front end as well.
16:59SPEAKERAnd the way the activity pub and other protocols are set up, it works. It just kind of works.
17:06SPEAKERAnd like what your client knows about, it'll show, and then the other stuff doesn't get shown.
17:10SPEAKERRight. I think that is for a certain definition of just works. Like there's
17:17SPEAKERsome concerns about onboarding with people who are less technical. I think Mastodon has taken on a
17:23SPEAKERreputation of being somewhat complicated and hard to get into. Well, there's concerns about
17:27SPEAKERonboarding. There's also weird stuff like posts federate across instances, but likes and reposts
17:32SPEAKERand stuff like that don't necessarily. So you end up in these weird situations where you post
17:38SPEAKERsomething and 50,000 people liked it, but you only see two of them because you only see the likes
17:43SPEAKERfrom your particular instance. It doesn't actually impact... I think what may seem like a negative in
17:50SPEAKERthis case is actually often a positive because it means that you post things because you think
17:54SPEAKERthey're interesting inside the community that you live in, not across the wider network.
17:58SPEAKERBut when you come from Twitter and you're used to getting engagement from the entire network,
18:02SPEAKERit feels weird. There's a bunch of stuff going on. So there's the Mastodon and affiliated stuff
18:08SPEAKERthrough activity pub. There's Blue Sky, which is on the AT protocol. That's the thing that
18:13SPEAKERwas backed by Jack Dorsey, who in his weird libertarianism has always, for a really long
18:21SPEAKERtime, has said, "Yo, Twitter shouldn't be on a proprietary backend. It should be a protocol
18:26SPEAKERand we're going to fund this thing." And Twitter put some money into it. He put some money into
18:30SPEAKERit. Some other rich people put money into it. Then they employ a dozen or slightly more people,
18:35SPEAKERI think, now building out something that's designed to be the commons.
18:39SPEAKERTONY It spun out of Twitter, I guess, before Musk came along and bought Twitter, the intention was
18:45SPEAKERto develop this open protocol and then transition Twitter to it. Obviously, that has a lot of
18:51SPEAKERbusiness advantages for them to be the ones that define the protocol. They can define it in a way
18:56SPEAKERthat would have served their business or interests. The Blue Sky Public Benefit LLC is probably still
19:04SPEAKERdoing that to a large degree.
19:06SPEAKERPAUL The thing…okay, so I'm going to say this and I'm going to sound a little naive, maybe, but
19:15SPEAKERwhen somebody puts $20 or $30 million, even if that's the same as me putting $50 or $100 in
19:22SPEAKERsomething in terms of relative net wealth, there's a significant amount of effort that's gone into
19:28SPEAKERthis and I'm going to take them at their stated…I'm going to believe their stated goals.
19:33SPEAKERTONY I generally do too. PAUL Among their stated goals is that
19:38SPEAKERthey're building the protocol so it's independent of the company that builds the protocol to the
19:44SPEAKERpoint that they're even considering one of the things that they talk about is what happens if
19:49SPEAKERthere's an adversarial relationship between the company and the protocol. Does the protocol need
19:55SPEAKERthe company to survive? Stuff like that. The people building it, for the most part,
20:04SPEAKERseem like they're very young. I think they're pretty idealistic in a lot of ways.
20:11SPEAKERTONY I was going to say some of the language you see that they use around this initiative,
20:15SPEAKERthe protocol, everything about it is a little bit ideological or dogmatic. They talk about
20:19SPEAKERthe mission a lot. I had never heard of a PB-LLC before this and read up on it a little bit.
20:26SPEAKERPAUL I think Kickstarter is a public benefit C-corp or B-corp, I guess. Same idea.
20:31SPEAKERTONY I guess that changes the obligations to
20:34SPEAKERstakeholders in terms of generating profit or it lessens the obligations, I should say.
20:39SPEAKERPAUL Well, LLCs are not…it's difficult. You have to convert an LLC into a different kind of company
20:45SPEAKERto make it a public company first off, which is good. The way they put it is that the PB part
20:52SPEAKERmeans that they don't have to prioritize profit over mission statements.
20:56SPEAKERTONY And growth, specifically. There are challenges with it. One would argue that
21:04SPEAKERthe activity pub has been around for a long time at this point and it would have been better to
21:08SPEAKERcommit this effort into activity pub. I'm not deep enough in with the protocols and what they're doing
21:13SPEAKERto know where that lands. I also have often seen the benefit of two different groups of people
21:20SPEAKERbuilding competing things and the strengths of those things, both of those things becoming
21:26SPEAKERbetter as a result of that. PAUL
21:27SPEAKERYeah. I've talked to a professional developer on our Discord who has a lot of experience working in
21:33SPEAKERopen source and who has, I think, dug into these protocols and their documentation quite a bit. I
21:38SPEAKERthink her take was that there's definitely a little bit of not invented here kind of stuff
21:43SPEAKERor they're reinventing a wheel that has already existed with activity pub for a while. So there
21:49SPEAKERis some of that overlap and functionality. The biggest advantage I have seen with the
21:54SPEAKERAT protocol, and I don't know how this is defined. They've mostly described this in blog posts, is
21:59SPEAKERthat the user data is completely portable, like all of it. I think we might actually need to pause
22:05SPEAKERat some point and define what social graph means because that's a term of art or a piece of jargon
22:11SPEAKERI see flying around a lot lately. And I don't know exactly what that encompasses, but they're
22:15SPEAKERbasically saying everything you do is portable and bundled up into one sort of, I think they've used
22:20SPEAKERthe word passport or something like identity, terms like that. But that's follows, likes, posts,
22:27SPEAKEReverything you do can just be packaged up and taken somewhere else. Whereas with activity pub,
22:32SPEAKERmy understanding, or you kind of touched on this, I think some of that can come with you to another
22:37SPEAKERinstance, but in other cases, I think like the instance admin has to help you out to make some
22:43SPEAKERparts of your data portable and transfer it over. I'm not super clear on that stuff, but I think
22:48SPEAKERthe transference is a little more limited, I think on the Mastodon side.
22:52SPEAKERYeah, on the Mastodon side, at least right now, it is, like I said, actively in development. This
22:57SPEAKERis something that is a pain point for users. So it seems like something they're making
23:02SPEAKERan effort to change. Right now, when you migrate servers, your follows and people who follow you
23:10SPEAKERboth come with you, but your posts and likes and reposts and stuff like that. So you basically
23:14SPEAKERstart with a clean account when you move onto the new server and your old posts will remain where
23:18SPEAKERthey were on the old server, but then that account is basically archived, for lack of a better term.
23:29SPEAKERThe place that all this stuff is... Okay, there's a lot of people working on these problems. There's
23:34SPEAKERa lot of activity pub clients. There's Lemmy, which is like a Reddit-style link aggregator.
23:40SPEAKERThere's Threads, which is the thing Facebook launched and has a bazillion users on day three,
23:46SPEAKERmore than any other federated social network immediately.
23:53SPEAKERThreads is probably the reason we're actually doing this episode, but we'll get into it.
23:56SPEAKERYeah. Actually, that may not be true because stuff like WordPress and Drupal and Tumblr
24:01SPEAKERall have activity pub plugins that let you post directly into active. Theoretically,
24:08SPEAKERif we were running content.town on WordPress, we could put a plugin in that just automatically
24:13SPEAKERpopulates. Anytime we make a post on the podcast feed, it would just go into the
24:19SPEAKERtech pod Mastodon instance. I forgot what I was going to... I was going to mention something else
24:28SPEAKERhere and I've completely forgotten what it was. Oh, I mean, also Gab and Truth Social are activity
24:35SPEAKERpub clients. So it's like, there's... It's worth talking about explicit bad actors that are also
24:42SPEAKERusing this technology because that gets into a test case of how instances can be siloed off and
24:48SPEAKERde-federated and et cetera, et cetera. Well, yeah. I mean, the big point is that
24:53SPEAKERthose two key ideas, the, "Hey, anyone can host this and B, your stuff is portable."
25:02SPEAKERAnyone can host and talk to anyone else on the network and your data is portable,
25:06SPEAKERraise a lot of complicated issues, right? There's some obvious stuff. There's a lack of central
25:11SPEAKERservices that people have come to expect from Facebook and Twitter and Flickr and all the
25:16SPEAKERearly social media stuff. You don't get algorithmic recommendations because there's
25:21SPEAKERno algorithm. There's no reason for an algorithm on Mastodon because those aren't for-profit
25:27SPEAKERenterprises for the most part. People are hosting servers for their communities or building new
25:32SPEAKERcommunities and hosting servers there. If you're not making money from people looking at ads,
25:38SPEAKERthere's no reason to prioritize engagement, which means there's no reason to have algorithmic
25:42SPEAKERrecommendations, which means everybody just sees a reverse chronological feed of who they follow
25:47SPEAKERor the reverse chronological feed of everything that's posted on the server in the case of
25:51SPEAKERMastodon. You can see the local timeline and see what people on your instance are talking about.
25:55SPEAKERYeah. I mean, I don't know if I'd say the profit motive is the only reason for
25:59SPEAKERalgorithmic sorting. There is just a certain overwhelming volume of posts you can reach if
26:07SPEAKERyou follow a lot of people. I mean, there's a convenience factor, but for the most part,
26:12SPEAKERalgorithmic timelines exist because more time spent on the app means increasing the amount
26:17SPEAKERof time somebody spends on your social media app increases the number of ads they see,
26:20SPEAKERwhich increases the money for the company. Definitely the case on big corporate platforms,
26:25SPEAKERbut I think there is some argument for like curation, just like you said,
26:28SPEAKERas sort of a convenience or sorting feature even on these open platforms.
26:34SPEAKERWell, or the thing that Blue Sky does is actually really neat where they have a relatively
26:39SPEAKERstraightforward way to create custom feeds based on your own criteria. I can make a feed of all of my
26:47SPEAKERfriends' posts, people I follow's posts that don't have any likes yet, so I can be like, "Oh, hey,
26:51SPEAKERlet's see. Maybe I can give some likes out and make people feel good about the posts that they
26:55SPEAKERdid today." Right? Have you messed with that stuff at all? Because that was one of their big pitches
26:59SPEAKERand it being Blue Sky and the AT protocol, I think are also in active development and even more
27:05SPEAKERnascent than Mastodon and ActivityPub by a lot. So a lot of the stuff just hasn't even been fully
27:11SPEAKERimplemented or defined yet, but that's one of their big pitches for this thing is like, "Hey,
27:15SPEAKERyou can have your own algorithms. You can do your own sorting. Every instance can have its own
27:19SPEAKERmoderation and stuff like that." The way you're describing it makes it sound more like just a
27:24SPEAKERglorified version of Twitter lists. I don't know if... I had kind of had the impression that it was
27:30SPEAKERgoing to be more like, "Oh, there'll be waiting involved and you can kind of define specific
27:35SPEAKERsearch terms and not just make a flat list of accounts." But I haven't actually touched that
27:39SPEAKERstuff. Well, so yeah, you can do it programmatically rather than just making a
27:43SPEAKERflat list of accounts. So for example, it's allowing users to create behaviors that then
27:53SPEAKERcan be programmatically exposed to people who are interested. So for example,
27:57SPEAKERthe science Twitter people use the test tube emoji and stuff that they think is worth going
28:02SPEAKERin the feed. So if somebody is sharing news about some new study or some interesting climate change
28:07SPEAKERstuff or whatever it happens to be, they'll put the test tube emoji in and then that gets pumped
28:13SPEAKERup to the science Twitter, the science Blue Sky feeds. So imagine the users can create their own
28:21SPEAKERretweet mechanism that's tied to a topic or you can do things like filter for stuff that's listed
28:29SPEAKERas not as sexually explicit. You can filter out whatever you want and you can either add it to
28:35SPEAKERyour feeds or remove it from your feeds, which gives you kind of power over the stuff you see
28:40SPEAKERin a way that is pretty novel, frankly, after spending years on Twitter and Facebook and stuff
28:45SPEAKERlike that. It's a neat idea. And I think those can be made publicly available. It's easy to just
28:51SPEAKERcopy. There's a tool that will let you create them and then add them to your thing and then you can
28:57SPEAKERmake them publicly available from there. And I think that tool was actually made by a user. I
29:01SPEAKERwant to say it's probably JSON or something. I didn't look at it and see what the backend is
29:03SPEAKERfor that. The other stuff that's not available is stuff like centralized search. So there's no
29:09SPEAKERMastodon-wide search and a lot of people are actively against Mastodon-wide search because
29:14SPEAKERthey want the freedom of putting a robots.txt file on their host that prevents Google and Facebook
29:22SPEAKERand everybody else from indexing their stuff. The big one is that there's no moderation on these
29:29SPEAKERor no cross-platform moderation, I guess. Yeah. Moderation, I think, is probably the
29:33SPEAKERforniest topic here or the hardest one to solve when everything is broken up piecemeal into a
29:39SPEAKERbunch of little fiefdoms instead of having one giant company with a large amount of resources
29:47SPEAKERto actually do moderation correctly, which is not to suggest anybody actually does it correctly,
29:52SPEAKERbut it takes a lot of resources. Well, and just to be clear, the gold standard
30:00SPEAKERon moderation and the challenges of moderation is tech dirt. Mike Masnik over there has been talking
30:06SPEAKERabout moderation in a thoughtful, intelligent way for a really, really long time. We run a Mastodon
30:14SPEAKERinstance. Everybody's welcome to join. You have to get approved. It usually takes a day or two,
30:18SPEAKERdepending on how often I log into the Mastodon server. We run it for our community and we welcome
30:27SPEAKEReverybody. It's a fair to high load for moderation even with 400 people on the server, just because
30:36SPEAKERof the way reporting works. When somebody reports an account, the report goes through me and then
30:42SPEAKERit goes off to the server where the account that's reported lives. It's fine. It's like two clicks
30:47SPEAKERfor me to move through, but if somebody goes through and gets hit by a bunch of spammers,
30:52SPEAKERthen it means that I have 40 clicks to do on Tuesday morning. It is not as turnkey as
31:01SPEAKERrunning a brand page on Twitter where you just block racists and spammers.
31:09SPEAKERThere's also the larger problem of how you moderate bad servers. If white supremacists or
31:16SPEAKERpedophiles or spammers, whatever, set up an instance of their own, which is something
31:22SPEAKERthat, again, takes about 10 minutes if you know how to do Docker containers or whatever and pay
31:27SPEAKERfive bucks for a line node, it's really easy for them to have an outsized impact because one bad
31:36SPEAKERserver can create an incredible amount of spam in almost no time. This is something that the
31:45SPEAKERMastodon dev team is actually working on now, as I understand it, is a way to share de-federation
31:53SPEAKERdata. De-federation is when you say, "Hey, we're not going to take any more data from the server.
31:57SPEAKERWe're cutting them out of our network." It's basically the kill file from Usenet
32:05SPEAKERfor an entire server. There used to be tools that make it easier to share that information
32:12SPEAKERbetween instances. For example, I trust the Hackertown, which is the instance that Mike
32:21SPEAKERMasnick runs. I think his feelings about moderation align very closely with mine.
32:27SPEAKERI trust him to take his de-federation list. I would love to be able to subscribe to his
32:31SPEAKERserver's de-federation list and cut that out from there. Now, that also is problematic. We saw how
32:38SPEAKERblock lists were abused, and people would say, "Hey, here's a giant block list of a bunch of
32:45SPEAKERpeople who are anti-trans on turfs on Twitter." Then the malicious people who made those block
32:51SPEAKERlists would also put a bunch of pro-trans activists into those lists, so those people
32:56SPEAKERget disallowed as well. The whole thing is fraught, is I guess where I'm going.
33:04SPEAKERAnd then one trend that I think is fairly inarguable that I've observed over the
33:08SPEAKERrecent years is that people don't do a whole lot of due diligence about stuff like that necessarily.
33:15SPEAKERYeah, so you want to think about that as you're signing up for a Mastodon instance
33:19SPEAKERor an Activity Pub instance. What I mean is a lot of people are very
33:23SPEAKERprone to seeing something that sounds good-natured like that. And granted, who's got the time to sit
33:28SPEAKERthere and go through thousands of account names in this thing to see who's actually getting blocked
33:32SPEAKERin this list. But the same thing happens with the way news is disseminated on places like Twitter.
33:37SPEAKERA lot of people don't read past the headline that is embedded in the tweet and just
33:41SPEAKERtake whatever that says at face value without reading the piece.
33:45SPEAKERNever mind whether the piece is even well-intentioned or if it is actually misinformation
33:49SPEAKERor not. Yeah, it's like the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page.
33:53SPEAKERYes, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone to be clear. But a lot of people are very prone
33:59SPEAKERto just passively absorbing stuff that goes by in their feed or clicking a block list,
34:03SPEAKERthinking that it's on the up and up and not necessarily following up on what it's doing.
34:08SPEAKERSo yes, stuff like that is very prone to abuse. Well, and then there's a whole other level of
34:14SPEAKERcomplexity on the Activity Pub side by the fact that Facebook, or sorry, Meta owns threads.
34:21SPEAKERWe lost that fight, didn't we? I'm just going to keep calling it Facebook forever at this point.
34:26SPEAKERI spent a month or two really consciously refusing to call it Meta, but I think everybody
34:30SPEAKERelse has moved on. Anyway, but they have a terrible history toward moderating political
34:36SPEAKERspeech that causes an increased moderation burden. So something that's going to cause
34:41SPEAKERpeople to complain about it, they just will ban everything on both sides. The classic example is,
34:48SPEAKERhey, you should be able to post breastfeeding pictures on Instagram or on Facebook because
34:57SPEAKERthere were a bunch of mom groups and they needed to be able to show how latching works.
35:03SPEAKERBreastfeeding shouldn't be sexual content. I realize I'm naive on this as well.
35:09SPEAKERThe point is it's weird to take one country's standards for lack of a better term and apply
35:20SPEAKERthem to everywhere in the entire world just because the company happened to be started in
35:26SPEAKERone particular country. So the end result of the whole breastfeeding on Facebook thing was that
35:32SPEAKERthere's a whole bunch of really screwy rules about how close baby's mouths need to be to a nipple for
35:38SPEAKERit to count as sexual content versus non-sexual content. And it's a nightmare. The whole thing is
35:44SPEAKERa nightmare. Yeah. We should talk about threads probably that launched this week. It's built on
35:50SPEAKERtop of Instagram. It's not a place for news or political commentary. That's the thing I was
35:56SPEAKERgoing to bring up since that's what you're touching on in the context of Facebook is that
35:59SPEAKERAdam Mosseri, I had not heard of him. I think he's the head of Instagram. Yes, he is currently the
36:04SPEAKERhead of Instagram. He's the Instagram overlord. But also apparently ran the Facebook news feed
36:10SPEAKERseveral years ago. And has a fine product that has absolutely no problems in the past or anything
36:17SPEAKERwith promoting fake content that militarized a large portion of the country. Yes. And got a lot
36:24SPEAKERof people killed. No genocide since 2018. Yeah. Anyway, he's come out and very explicitly said,
36:32SPEAKERwhat were the terms? Politics and hard news are the terms that he used. That politics and hard
36:36SPEAKERnews are not going to be encouraged on threads. Not for brands. It's for brands and influencers.
36:42SPEAKERHe literally says it. There are more than enough amazing communities, sports, music, fashion,
36:47SPEAKERbeauty, entertainment, et cetera, to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into
36:52SPEAKERpolitics or hard news. Let's not make anything that's going to be complicated, guys. Okay.
36:57SPEAKEROr controversial or invite any kind of scrutiny whatsoever. I mean, on top of that,
37:02SPEAKERit's very notable the examples that he did give here, sports, music, fashion,
37:06SPEAKERbeauty, and entertainment, all extremely brand driven categories or verticals as they call them.
37:14SPEAKERThey're categories that there's a really good advertising pipeline from influencers
37:18SPEAKERthrough to brands to stores. So it's a weird coincidence.
37:22SPEAKERYes, that's exactly it. Threads, I don't know if it's going to catch on or went out or whatever,
37:29SPEAKERif anybody truly wins out and emerges as the victor here. It has a huge user base already by
37:34SPEAKERvirtue of piggybacking on the existing Instagram user base. But very much the vibe that is emerging
37:40SPEAKERabout Threads so far is that it's the platform for brands and influencers and your corporate
37:46SPEAKERmiddle manager boss and soccer moms, mainstream people who don't know or care what Federation is
37:53SPEAKERand just want a Twitter successor in a safe, cozy corporate environment.
37:58SPEAKERAnd I was going to say, that is an important point because the data and the feedback,
38:03SPEAKERboth to Blue Sky and to Mastodon in general, is that most people don't give a shit about
38:09SPEAKERFederation. Kind of they shouldn't have to. I think that's part of the core thing.
38:18SPEAKERBut I mean, it's going to be interesting to see what happens because three or four days in,
38:24SPEAKERMeta is three times the size or Threads is three times the size of the entirety of the
38:30SPEAKERFediverse up until this point because it's like 12, 13 million people on Mastodon and
38:36SPEAKERan associated activity pub site. Well, that's higher than I would have expected.
38:40SPEAKERWell, I mean, they've been doing it for five years, six years. And they've seen big,
38:46SPEAKERhuge spikes when Elon Musk does something shitty at Twitter, starting with the sink and going on
38:51SPEAKERdown. The thing that's weird though is because of Facebook's moderation policies in history,
39:00SPEAKERwe're going to end up with a weird AOL/real internet split again,
39:04SPEAKERwhich arguably already Facebook has done for a large number of people. But it's that happening
39:11SPEAKERagain and I'm going to be absolutely fascinated to see what happens with cross instance moderation
39:18SPEAKERfrom the rest of the Fediverse to Threads and vice versa. Some Mastodon instance hosts are
39:27SPEAKERaggressively saying they're going to de-federate Threads from the beginning, which I kind of get
39:32SPEAKERbecause adding 30 million people to the network overnight is going to cause a lot of moderation
39:37SPEAKERoverhead just for everyone. People on Mastodon instances are going to report… Just to be clear,
39:45SPEAKERThreads isn't connected to the Fediverse yet. If you report though, if it was and you reported
39:50SPEAKERPizza Hut for being a shitty brand on your Mastodon instance, it's going to create overhead
39:57SPEAKERfor your local admin, which is bad. That's not an okay thing. There's a lot of sex workers and
40:06SPEAKERthere's a lot of nudity and there's a lot of everything from classic 90s internet anarchism to
40:15SPEAKERhacker bullshit to whatever else on Mastodon and the Fediverse right now. Are they going to filter
40:22SPEAKERthat? Are you going to get content warnings like this is outside the brand friendly Paris Hilton,
40:28SPEAKERKhloe Kardashian zone? You might see a penis if you go here. I don't know what that looks like
40:35SPEAKERand it's a real weird question to the point that it wouldn't surprise me a lot if Threads ends up
40:40SPEAKERnever actually connecting to the activity popular. - Especially if they achieve the critical mass of
40:46SPEAKERusers they want without it, then what is there to be gained unless they're just looking to mine data
40:50SPEAKERfrom people in the Fediverse. That's kind of the bigger thing about Threads to me is we've just
40:56SPEAKERseen what the effect of complete centralization is and what the risks are of a very bad actor taking
41:03SPEAKERcontrol of the network and ruining it. So to see this much excitement about people just hopping
41:08SPEAKERfrom one shitty billionaire's platform to another is concerning to me. - Well, look, the nice thing
41:16SPEAKERabout Musk being such a shit bag is that it makes Zuckerberg look like he's much less bad. - It's
41:20SPEAKERcrazy. The effect, the relative effect has been kind of amazing to watch. - The other big issue
41:27SPEAKERthat hasn't been really touched on by, I mean, it's been on Tech Dirt and a couple other places,
41:32SPEAKERbut I haven't seen a lot of people talking about it is that there are real, serious legal
41:37SPEAKERimplications of hosting a node for these protocols. There's legal overhead for reporting type of
41:49SPEAKERcontent you might find, whether it's CSAM, child sexual abuse material, threats that need to be
42:00SPEAKERreported. There's all sorts of stuff that is a problem. There's also GDPR overhead. Once you
42:07SPEAKERreach a certain size, if you have a mastodontist with a hundred thousand people on it, suddenly
42:11SPEAKEREurope cares about you and whether you're collecting what kind of personal data you're
42:15SPEAKERcollecting, whether you comply with the right to be forgotten, which you do kind of on a platform
42:20SPEAKERlevel, but it's complicated and hard and you have to be able to produce this stuff you have to
42:24SPEAKERproduce. There's a feed that Mastodon generates that you can turn off, I think, now, which is
42:37SPEAKERgood, but it's all of the people who all of the people on your server follow. If somebody on your
42:45SPEAKERserver isn't even creating bad stuff, but they follow someone who creates bad stuff, you can end
42:51SPEAKERup in a situation where you're dealing with the FBI because there's CSAM or copyrighted material
42:59SPEAKERor any of the other things that the FBI gives a shit about on your server and then it's your
43:03SPEAKERproblem. That's kind of a lot of overhead that Twitter and Facebook and the social networks have
43:13SPEAKERshouldered up until this point.
43:14SPEAKERI guess we should probably also add the possibility there on top of bad content getting federated onto
43:22SPEAKERyour server that was posted intentionally. Since this stuff is all open source and not
43:28SPEAKERfully mature yet, there's probably also currently unknown security vulnerabilities in terms of
43:34SPEAKERpeople's accounts getting hacked. There's probably a lot of potential for things to get compromised
43:39SPEAKERand bad stuff to show up that way as well.
43:42SPEAKERWell, Mastodon has two factors now. I don't think Blue Sky does yet, but hey, somebody's account
43:51SPEAKERgets hacked and it's on your server, so you need to help them get their account back or determine
43:56SPEAKERhow you're going to tell it's them so that they can get their account back.
43:59SPEAKERAnd also potentially deal with whatever was done with their account while it was hacked.
44:06SPEAKERSo how these core ideas, the "Hey, anybody can host it and you can talk to anybody else on the
44:14SPEAKERnetwork and your stuff is portable" are implemented is varying widely right now and it will likely
44:20SPEAKERchange over time. Mastodon is aware that not bringing your posts over is a problem,
44:25SPEAKERright? That is, I think, a thing that I don't know if there's an ETA or a timeline on it,
44:29SPEAKERbut there's definitely GitHub activity around that idea.
44:33SPEAKEROkay, that's good to hear.
44:37SPEAKERBut I mean, also the protocol has been around for a long time. If you want to move to a server
44:41SPEAKERthat hasn't updated their version of Mastodon in a while, you may or may not be able to do that.
44:45SPEAKERSo there's version mishmash, mishmash, mich, mich. Wow, that's hard to say. Mismatch issues.
44:53SPEAKERMismash, a mishmash, a mishmash mismatch.
44:58SPEAKERYeah.
44:59SPEAKERSay that one three times while you're sick.
45:02SPEAKERThe other side of it is that Blue Sky is so new that all they've done is advertised intent.
45:08SPEAKERThey aren't actually, very little is actually actionable and available right now. They're
45:15SPEAKERtalking through it, they're testing stuff, they're building test clients and test servers and stuff
45:18SPEAKERlike that. I believe that there is a test server that you can build now that will let you build a
45:26SPEAKERserver that will federate out with Blue Sky.
45:29SPEAKERThey are running a sandboxed federated network, but it's not like they explicitly say at the top,
45:34SPEAKERlike, "Hey, this is not for public consumption. Don't post serious stuff on this. This is just
45:38SPEAKERour test bed." But that is at least possible to hook into if you're a developer. The way Blue Sky
45:44SPEAKERis going to go is really interesting to me because Mastodon came out of open source and it was
45:49SPEAKERfederated from the start and decentralized from the start. Blue Sky is painting this Blue Sky
45:55SPEAKERpicture of doing the same thing, but they are very centralized currently. There's only the one
46:01SPEAKERinstance, BSky.social, it's invite only, you need an invite code to get into it right now.
46:08SPEAKERSetting aside the promises they're making about decentralization and federation for down the line,
46:13SPEAKERright now it looks like a central Twitter clone or centralized Twitter clone. I'm less nitpicking,
46:21SPEAKERare they actually serious about what they're promising and more like, what are the long-term
46:26SPEAKERsocial dynamics going to be of this service emerging the way it is? To put it another way,
46:31SPEAKERour 98% of the people who sign up for Blue Sky even wants it to open, just going to sign up on
46:36SPEAKERBSky.social and forget that any kind of federation even exists and just treat it like it's a new
46:41SPEAKERTwitter. That seems fairly likely. It's interesting because when there were,
46:46SPEAKERI think they're up to, they're closing in on a couple hundred thousand users now,
46:49SPEAKERI'm not sure what the number, I haven't looked at the number lately.
46:52SPEAKERI think they've started generating more invite codes and there was a huge influx when the
46:56SPEAKERTwitter rate limit fiasco happened. Around the time they hit a hundred thousand users,
47:04SPEAKERthey started talking about federation publicly. The developers started talking about federation
47:08SPEAKERpublicly. Just to be clear, it is a small team, I get that. I've worked on small teams my whole
47:12SPEAKERlife. They do communication through their lead devs. They are not thoughtful about communication
47:20SPEAKERin a way that bums me out as somebody who thinks about how you communicate professionally a lot.
47:25SPEAKERYeah. What's the guy's name? Paul? Paul does a lot of posting.
47:31SPEAKERHe does both shit posting and content posting for the brand, which is anyway, whatever.
47:35SPEAKERIt seemed very telling to me when I got on there that he is both one of their lead developers and
47:39SPEAKERalso was the de facto company mouthpiece for a long time. They've got other people out there
47:44SPEAKERmessaging now who I assume are in more target. Jay and Emily have posted enough in the past.
47:49SPEAKERThe blog has a lot of good information on it now. They're getting better, but it's still,
47:54SPEAKERit seems a little hither and nether. Yes, it's been pretty...
47:58SPEAKERHiggledy-piggledy. Sure. I'm enjoying all the random
48:03SPEAKERterms coming out of your cold-addled brain today. My brain's a little weird today.
48:10SPEAKERI mean, the thing that is interesting is their mandate is, "Hey, we want to build the commons
48:17SPEAKERand we want this to be decentralized." You asked a question in the notes here in a little bit,
48:25SPEAKERbut yeah, I'm curious. By the way, there are multiple servers in the sandbox federated
48:29SPEAKERnetwork. There are developers that are outside Blue Sky that are running servers with clients
48:34SPEAKERon them that are federating it. That part's actually working. The rest of it is like, "Oh,
48:39SPEAKERhuh." Yeah. Again, I'm not questioning the functionality they're promising.
48:44SPEAKERI'm sure that will happen. It's more, like I said, it's more, is there going to be a critical mass
48:48SPEAKERof people signing up outside of the actual Blue Sky instance or not? Are they going to have a
48:52SPEAKERbunch of other communities that don't even use the word Blue Sky that are thriving? Or will 98% of
48:57SPEAKERpeople just end up in this main instance run by them? That remains to be seen. That's something
49:03SPEAKERthat can't be predicted. I mean, the question is, if Hotmail was invented in 1984, would there be
49:14SPEAKERother email clients now? Email servers and email clients. I don't know. I think there probably
49:19SPEAKERwould be by this point, but I think we're starting with this round. We're starting with the endpoint
49:26SPEAKERfirst, which is we want something that's kind of like Twitter, but doesn't suck. Then backing into
49:31SPEAKERthe rest of it from there, which is opposite of how the first wave of internet protocols developed.
49:37SPEAKERYeah. The one other thing I'll note that they mentioned in a blog post,
49:41SPEAKERthis was kind of in the description of like, "Oh, your user identity is all one package of data.
49:45SPEAKERYour posts, your likes, your followers go with you everywhere." In that context-
49:50SPEAKERAnd the people who follow you also. That gets communicated to the new server. Yeah.
49:54SPEAKERFollowers, that's the key one here, because the example they gave was like, "Hey, in the future,
49:58SPEAKERwe hope to see this protocol and this user identity system also become the basis of things
50:02SPEAKERlike a video platform or dating apps." It kind of got me thinking, I mean, obviously YouTube is
50:08SPEAKERmassively entrenched, but what if your Twitter followers were also your YouTube followers were
50:13SPEAKERalso your X, Y, and Z other platforms? What if you had... I doubt we're ever going to get to this
50:20SPEAKERpoint, but what if you did have one list of followers that just worked across the entire
50:24SPEAKERinternet on every platform that adopted the protocol? I mean, that seems nice. Maybe. I
50:28SPEAKERdon't know. It's like gravatars, but people use it. Yes. Bring back... Everybody should...
50:34SPEAKERThey should stand around gravatars for all of this. God. I think WordPress owns gravatar now.
50:40SPEAKERYes. I'm not sure. I think that's right. So, okay. So I'm going to read your big question
50:44SPEAKERunless you want to read it. Yeah, I can read it. Sure. I should read it. Here is a thought starter.
50:48SPEAKERThis is something I've been thinking about. Are decentralization and comprehensive moderation
50:53SPEAKERmutually exclusive or not? It's an interesting question because I don't think, and I especially
50:58SPEAKERdon't think after people got sacked from Twitter and started talking about their experience there,
51:02SPEAKERI don't think Twitter realized that their product was really moderation for quite a long time.
51:09SPEAKERThe thing that moderation at... So to be a little back story, we've talked about this in the past,
51:15SPEAKERbut in the pre-social media days, everybody had these websites that had editorial content on them
51:23SPEAKERand that was really valuable content. So you could sell a bunch of expensive ads against that. But
51:26SPEAKERthen you also had a place for users to hang out and chat in message boards or forums. That was
51:32SPEAKERgenerally viewed as a lot of traffic that was completely unmonetizable because there might be
51:39SPEAKERthings that advertisers don't want to put their content up beside. So you would do a $70 CPM on
51:46SPEAKERthe main news and editorial side of the site and you'd get 50 cents per thousand views, CPM is per
51:53SPEAKERthousand views on the other side. Now, the nice thing is Google has effectively raced to the
52:00SPEAKERbottom the entire value of online ads over the last 20 years. If you get 75 cents CPMs anywhere
52:05SPEAKERnow, you're doing pretty well. It's not exactly the way we hoped that would go, I guess.
52:11SPEAKERBut the upshot is Twitter and Facebook and the moderated social networks, by removing the
52:21SPEAKERpictures of penises and the bomb threats and the people posting shock pictures and all that stuff
52:28SPEAKERfrom the normal human's feeds, made a place where people could interact with other people on the
52:34SPEAKERinternet that was still ripe for advertising and for high dollar advertising in a lot of cases.
52:44SPEAKERMike Masnick had a really good article about this, and I think it's linked in the show notes.
52:49SPEAKERLike I said, they've been talking about moderation there for a really long time now at TechDirt.
52:54SPEAKERHis whole premise is that there's two kinds of moderation. There's top down,
52:59SPEAKERwhich is like what Twitter and Facebook and all those guys do, where some corporate overlord or
53:05SPEAKERgovernment or whatever says, "Hey, this is what's allowed and this is what isn't." It's a constantly
53:09SPEAKERmoving target, and you have to constantly adapt to the new ways people attack your moderation rules.
53:15SPEAKERYou have to spend a lot of time and energy and thoughtful, and it absolutely doesn't scale in any
53:18SPEAKERway, shape or form because there's an infinite benefit to bad actors for manipulating the
53:25SPEAKERmoderation and annoying and harassing and scarring your users. It's an easy, massive threat surface.
53:36SPEAKERThe other way to do this is grassroots from the bottom up, where the communities set the standards
53:40SPEAKERand then those standards filter up and percolate up through the world. Usenet is the classic
53:45SPEAKERexample of this because in the old days in Usenet, or IRC works too, but Usenet, people would share
53:51SPEAKERparts of their kill files. A kill file in Usenet was like a mute list. Keywords, usernames, things
53:57SPEAKERthat you didn't want to see anymore. If you didn't want to see anything about Barney the Dinosaur,
54:00SPEAKERyou didn't want to see a post that had other posts 12 layers deep, you would just comment,
54:06SPEAKERyou'd just add caret right caret right caret right caret right caret right to your kill list,
54:11SPEAKERand you'd never see a post that had more than five replies deep in it. You never had to decode all
54:14SPEAKERthat nonsense. Then people started sharing their kill files or bits and pieces of their kill files,
54:21SPEAKERand that created community standards from the ground up. I think Blue Sky's trying to do the
54:28SPEAKERlatter. It seems like they want instances to have tools to manage moderation and then through some
54:38SPEAKERmagic that hasn't really been adequately described yet, percolate that stuff up to the larger network.
54:44SPEAKERYeah. I think that might be where they're running into some problems or a disconnect because
54:49SPEAKERas much as they seem to want to decentralize the moderation and leave it to instances to a
54:52SPEAKERlarge degree and even to users to some degree, like I said before, it still looks like Twitter.
54:58SPEAKERIt is still a centralized service for now, and so people have expectations that the moderation will
55:03SPEAKERbe conducted in a similar way that it was there, even though they are not necessarily doing that
55:08SPEAKERall the way yet. Yeah. They don't have 500 people. Well, they're applying moderation unevenly to
55:14SPEAKERdifferent groups and to different levels of visibility, which is the classic, "Hey, I've
55:19SPEAKERfucked up moderation problem." Right. That's part of what I'm getting at. I guess I should just say
55:24SPEAKERmore broadly, the point of this question is simply I'm not in any way looking at what has been done
55:31SPEAKERin the corporate centralized moderation space in terms of existing real world examples on Facebook
55:37SPEAKERor Twitter or whatever, not to suggest those have been perfect or even good, or just abstractly
55:45SPEAKERon a centralized platform, you've got total control over, you could do whatever you want
55:49SPEAKERwith 100% of the contents. Presumably the only entities big enough to run centralized platforms
55:55SPEAKERare large companies and governments and so forth that have a lot more resources. And so what are
55:59SPEAKERthe resources required to run moderation that comprehensively or top down, like you said,
56:06SPEAKERand then on the other side, in a decentralized situation, you've only got so much control over
56:11SPEAKERthings that happen on other nodes that are not you, right? I'm just curious if these two needs
56:19SPEAKERcan co-exist or if this is a problem that can be solved, or if there are just inherent difficulties
56:25SPEAKERin both approaches that make it tough to combine them. Well, the thing you can't say is everybody
56:35SPEAKERuser's left to deal, fend for themselves. Right. Right. Because that's the equivalent of saying
56:41SPEAKERit's the wild west, right? You walk out in the street, everybody has their six shooter,
56:44SPEAKERand whoever draws last draws for the last time, I guess. You have to give people the tools to build
56:53SPEAKERcommunities that protect the most vulnerable among them. They said this actually in a Blue Sky
56:59SPEAKERblog post a few weeks ago, which is that they don't want to own the content, right? They don't
57:05SPEAKERwant to own social graphs, the followers are following and all that stuff. They don't want
57:08SPEAKERto own the communities. They want to be a tool that helps these communities own and govern
57:11SPEAKERthemselves. If you think about it in terms of the metaphor is like the constitution of the United
57:18SPEAKERStates, right? Hey, here's a framework into which other things can be added that will allow you to
57:25SPEAKERcontinue to be self-sustaining. No, not a perfect example, obviously. But the idea that
57:34SPEAKERmoderation is a community, keeping a community safe is a requirement for all the members of
57:41SPEAKERthat community is, I think, interesting and probably right. If you think about it,
57:46SPEAKERit's the same thing as putting a report button on a message board software where when some spammer
57:50SPEAKERcomes in, 20 people can hit the report button and then the spammer goes away. We did that at
57:54SPEAKERGiant Bomb and Tested back in the day. That's a classic example. It's the kind of thing that
58:00SPEAKERworked really well on Slashdot for a really long time. Slashdot comments, I'm sure people - Slashdot
58:06SPEAKERwas the first example I saw of this in that they had, if you are logged in user Slashdot and you
58:11SPEAKERposted the comments, everyone's like, "Oh, you get a pop up." It wasn't really a pop up, but you get
58:16SPEAKERa message that said, "Hey, you have five moderation points to use today. You should upvote the five
58:21SPEAKERbest comments that you see." That was interesting and that worked reasonably well. Then people would
58:27SPEAKERtry to push their - and they gave you guidelines. They were like, "This shouldn't be pushing your
58:31SPEAKERagendas. This should be the most thought out cogent thing," blah, blah, blah. That worked
58:36SPEAKERwell, but then people started using it to push their agendas and boost up shit that they thought
58:40SPEAKERwas important and other people maybe disagreed. They added actually another layer of meta
58:44SPEAKERmoderation that popped up way more frequently. The meta moderators were given comments in the
58:51SPEAKERcontext for those comments and were like, "Hey, this person voted this comment up. Do you think
58:56SPEAKERthat was a good upvote or this person voted this comment down? Do you think that was a good down
59:00SPEAKERvote?" The end result of that was that generally speaking, the best comments on Slashdot replying
59:07SPEAKERto Slashdot articles kind of got filtered up to the top of the list, which worked because
59:13SPEAKERpresumably a single digit percentage of the users of Slashdot comments interacted with those
59:19SPEAKERmeta moderation systems. It's possible to do. There have been successful iterations of this
59:27SPEAKERin different contexts in the past. I don't know. It remains to be seen if Blue Sky can make this
59:34SPEAKERwork in a federated way across multiple instances and all that kind of stuff.
59:37SPEAKERYeah. I probably should have written this question more broadly. I'll just give you the example that
59:42SPEAKERactually got me thinking about this topic in the first place was the big influx of people onto Blue
59:45SPEAKERSky last week. As I was watching more conversation from people who were new to the platform and were
59:51SPEAKERgetting their heads around what the idea of federation is going to mean in the long run,
59:57SPEAKERI'm seeing a fair amount of people saying, "I don't want a bunch of silos. That's why I didn't
1:00:01SPEAKERwant to go to Mastodon. I don't want a bunch of loosely connected networks that might or might not
1:00:06SPEAKERinteract with each other very well. I want one giant thing. I want the global thing that Twitter
1:00:11SPEAKERis." It's actually bigger than just moderation. I guess what I really should have said is general
1:00:17SPEAKERoperations or even more broadly, what people want. I guess what I really should say is our
1:00:23SPEAKERdecentralization and what people wanted from Twitter compatible is really what I'm getting
1:00:28SPEAKERat. Because again, and I get it. I totally get why the big part of the appeal of Twitter is that
1:00:33SPEAKERfucking everybody's on there. Not everybody, obviously. It's a pretty small social media
1:00:38SPEAKERplatform, all things considered. But like news, current events, politics people were all there.
1:00:43SPEAKERPoliticians, celebrities, actors, CEOs, billionaires, you name it. Everybody
1:00:50SPEAKERwith large public profiles was on Twitter and talking to each other. That's why people like
1:00:54SPEAKERTwitter is that it exposes you to the entire strata of global society. Everybody from the
1:01:01SPEAKERrichest people on earth to leaders of nations are on there and can be talked at, if not
1:01:07SPEAKERengaged in conversation. I think that's the thing people were looking for out of Twitter
1:01:12SPEAKERthat I wonder if things fragment, they're not going to get anymore and that there may be some
1:01:19SPEAKERdiscontent around that stuff. Go ahead.
1:01:22SPEAKERThere was an interesting thing, especially early on Twitter, when the Russians became
1:01:27SPEAKERinvolved in the misinformation campaigns five, 10 years ago now, it became less useful. But
1:01:34SPEAKERfor a long time, Twitter was the best place to get breaking news.
1:01:37SPEAKERYou'd get on the ground posts from people that were… Some guy posted a picture from his ferry
1:01:43SPEAKERride home from Manhattan to Staten Island of the Sully US air flight that crash landed in the Hudson
1:01:51SPEAKERRiver, or East River, I can't remember which one. But anyway, you would get that. When the
1:01:57SPEAKERCalifornia fires were going, we got information from Twitter about where the fires were because
1:02:02SPEAKERthat was the thing that worked most reliably. The Arab Spring stuff, there's a whole bunch
1:02:11SPEAKERof examples of breaking news happening and Twitter having that information before
1:02:18SPEAKERanyone else in the world did. That was the thing more so than posting about buying socks or pants
1:02:28SPEAKERor whatever it was that we didn't put in 2007. Being able to watch those conversations happen
1:02:34SPEAKERand understanding more about what was going on because you weren't just getting the newscaster
1:02:40SPEAKERperspective or the journalist perspective of the story, but you were actually able to see the
1:02:45SPEAKERpeople that were there and what they were saying about it was a huge deal. I hope that we don't
1:02:53SPEAKERlose that with this transition. That's the last point I was going to make here.
1:02:58SPEAKERContext of what people want and that clearly being a global, one global network for a lot
1:03:03SPEAKERof people. I feel like we should maybe prepare for the possibility that there isn't one definitive
1:03:09SPEAKERwinner out of this race to be the next Twitter and that a bunch of, or at least more than one of
1:03:13SPEAKERthem catches on in a way that is sustainable and that we actually, on top of any one network being
1:03:19SPEAKERdecentralized, we end up in a world where there are a bunch of competing solutions here that all
1:03:24SPEAKERsort of hang around and that we do have a Threads community and a Mastodon community and a blue sky
1:03:29SPEAKERand there just is no one Twitter replacement that things do fragment across services.
1:03:36SPEAKERLook, the good news is that this has all happened before. We had two protocols for email in the
1:03:44SPEAKERancient dark times before everybody was on the internet. There was this thing called Bitnet
1:03:51SPEAKERearly on, which was called, I think it's short for "Because it's their network." It was started
1:03:55SPEAKERin 1981 and it was a university computer network that linked a bunch of different colleges and
1:04:03SPEAKEReventually became part of the internet as a larger point. Depending on where your friend went to
1:04:09SPEAKERschool as late as 1993, when I was a freshman in college, you had to use one of the Bitnet gateways
1:04:16SPEAKERto talk to them from a normal pop email client or an IMAP email client. It's happened before.
1:04:26SPEAKERIf AT protocol takes off and blue sky takes off, somebody will write a blue sky to activity pub
1:04:32SPEAKERbridge. The nice thing about these being open protocols is that you can make open protocols
1:04:43SPEAKERtalk to each other. That's the bummer about Threads, honestly, is that if Threads decides
1:04:49SPEAKERnot to ever turn on activity pub support, then there'll be a hundred million people,
1:04:54SPEAKER200 million people, a billion people, whatever ends up over there not part of that overall
1:05:02SPEAKERcommons. It's like being trapped on AOL forever instead of eventually moving over to the real
1:05:09SPEAKERinternet, which then quickly became Facebook, I guess. So here we are again.
1:05:13SPEAKER- It's a weird moment on the internet to be living in.
1:05:15SPEAKER- It really is.
1:05:18SPEAKER- But like you said, this kind of transition has happened before and is inevitable because
1:05:23SPEAKEReverything, nothing lasts forever. Everything in shitifies sooner or later and something else
1:05:29SPEAKERcomes along. Yeah, that word really... Like in shitification, I think is the term of 2023
1:05:35SPEAKERis the word of the year.
1:05:36SPEAKER- It really is. I mean, in shitification, we've talked about it before, but the idea is
1:05:41SPEAKERthat first companies build a product that people like and they get a bunch of users,
1:05:46SPEAKERand then they realize that they can't monetize those users effectively. So they have to keep
1:05:51SPEAKERin increasing... As they increase their attempts to monetize, they make the product shittier and
1:05:55SPEAKERshittier for the people to use it until they're like, why am I still here? There's just nothing
1:05:59SPEAKERbetter than this. And then here we are on threads. - Interesting times to come.
1:06:06SPEAKER- But if you don't want to be part of a network that is subject to shitification,
1:06:13SPEAKER'cause it's carefully maintained by Brad and myself, you can join the TechPod Patreon for
1:06:20SPEAKERfive bucks a month. With that $5, you get access to our fabulous monthly Patreon episode and you
1:06:28SPEAKERget to join the TechPod Discord, which is full of delightful human beings, not a shitty person
1:06:32SPEAKERamongst them. And I mean, we kicked the shitty people out. It hasn't been a problem for the most
1:06:40SPEAKERpart. Yeah, it's been quite nice. But yeah, you can join the TechPod Discord. You can get the
1:06:46SPEAKERPatreon episode. You can support the podcast, which we really appreciate. We don't run ads.
1:06:49SPEAKERIf you heard an ad on this podcast, please let us know, 'cause there shouldn't be ads on this
1:06:52SPEAKERpodcast anywhere. - Somebody besides us is getting paid for that if you did.
1:06:56SPEAKER- Yeah. And actually, one of the nice things about podcasts, one of the things I love about
1:07:03SPEAKERpodcasts is that it is the last of the things that hasn't become centralized. Spotify has tried,
1:07:10SPEAKEReverybody who tries to monetize podcasts from a central service, Stitcher, they went out of
1:07:14SPEAKERbusiness, they're gone. Spotify is backing away from podcasts because they actually ended up
1:07:18SPEAKERfunding a bunch of really terrible people. And also they're not making as much money as they...
1:07:24SPEAKERPodcasts are great because two people can have a nice conversation every week,
1:07:27SPEAKERand we can make a little bit of money, and it encourages us to keep making those podcasts.
1:07:32SPEAKERSo anyway, you can go to... - You know what? MP3, the ultimate democratization.
1:07:37SPEAKER- It's MP3 plus RSS, Brad. - It's a mouthful.
1:07:40SPEAKER- Two great technology tastes that tastes great together.
1:07:44SPEAKER- That's right. - But yeah,
1:07:45SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod and sign up to be a patron. We'd really appreciate it.
1:07:51SPEAKER- Yeah, I realize somebody will call me out. I realize MP3 is a proprietary format that
1:07:56SPEAKERFraunhofer had to get paid substantial amounts of money. MP3 is not actually... We would be putting
1:08:02SPEAKERthis podcast out in aug if we truly cared about free audio, but anyway.
1:08:06SPEAKER- But we want iTunes to be able to listen to it. So anyway, but this is the part of the show
1:08:11SPEAKERwhere we thank our patrons, especially our executive producers. Thank you all, patrons.
1:08:14SPEAKER- Yeah, thank you. - But especially our executive
1:08:16SPEAKERproducer tier patrons, including Nick Johnston, Paddle Creek Games, Makers of Fractured Veil,
1:08:21SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Octo Thorpeon Crimes of the Leporidae variety. I believe Leporidae is a
1:08:29SPEAKERbunny's scientific name. Justwedge, 3.0 NFT salesperson. I don't know how you feel about that.
1:08:36SPEAKERJoel Krauska, Twinkie and The Argonauts, and David Allen and James Kamik. Thank you all so much,
1:08:42SPEAKERespecially the people who don't change their names, although I do enjoy the name changing
1:08:45SPEAKERbecause it always makes me smile. I hope everybody has a good week and I'm going to go blow my nose
1:08:52SPEAKERand be very excited about that. - Yeah, Scott Speed to you.
1:08:55SPEAKERHopefully the rest of your time in the desert is less sick than it has been so far.
1:08:59SPEAKER- Yeah, and if you need me, I'm going to be posting just the absolute worst shit over on
1:09:03SPEAKERVAP and Twitter. So we'll see you all there, I guess.
1:09:07SPEAKER- Let's just burn it all down on the way out. - Just another Will Smith.