The Federated Internet

[PokerPacker]

I figured with all the nonsense going on with big players that have monopolized the internet, it's worth talking about the federated alternative.

Twitter has become a complete ****-show since Musk's takeover, and his version of "free speech absolutism" strongly resembles "Amplify speech I agree with and silence that I don't" and is turning the platform into a bastion of hate and misinformation.

As of today, Reddit has implemented the new policy of charging ludicrous amounts for their API access that effectively closes down applications providing a better experience for browsing reddit than Reddit's own applications, and in their damage control against community backlash, Reddit CEO slandered the name of one such developer making false accusations of blackmail.  Reddit is now going in and forcing out moderators (who are unpaid volunteers generating value to Reddit) who have protested against their new policies, which were enacted with very little heads-up and with no community feedback accepted.
Closing off the API also, and perhaps more importantly, removes moderator tools that were necessary for these unpaid volunteers to keep their communities running without being overrun by spam and malicious actors.

All of this is to point out: We never should have put all of our eggs in one corporate basket.  Even if they're benevolent now, that can always change. (Relevant xkcd comic from a time before google went evil).  Even if you have something like, say, Discord, that hasn't shown signs of going evil yet (has it?  I don't use it, but I don't think I've heard anything yet other than that time Microsoft tried to buy them but the were turned away), why give them the opportunity?

So how do you protect against monolithic actors with iron grips on their respective corners of the internet?  Create a federation of communities working together to create a better internet.  You can sign up on one "homeserver", which is where your account resides, but it can interact with every other community that yours has federated to.  If one of those communities is overtaken by a malicious actor, other communities can disconnect and "defederate" from them and move on without them.  It's all decentralized so no one bad actor can take down the system.  This all works by creating an open source platform with open APIs and protocols designed to allow for communication between communities.  The protocol ActivityPub is the basis for much of the federated internet.

 

Where can you get started?

• Mastodon is a Twitter-like platform.
• Lemmy is the Reddit-like community link-aggregator platform
• Matrix is a messenger with video and voice-chat and supports end-to-end encryption
• NextCloud for data hosting
• Pixelfed for image hosting
• Peertube for video hosting (it hasn't reached a state where I would recommend using it to replace youtube for finding videos, but if you still would like to degoogle your youtube experience, you can use the Invidious network as a youtube mirror, but that's not really the topic of this thread)

 

As open platforms, you can host your own if you wish, which may make more sense for something like NextCloud as your own personal data hosting service.  Good option to put on a dedicated server you rent out in the cloud, and you have the freedom to move it to another host if you don't like what your current host is doing, rather than being held captive to the platform.

[Fergasun]

The only thing that bothers me is forcing people to sign in to read content.  I was getting news from Twitter until yesterday. 

 

But this is also on the users.  Will they start to mirror content on something like Mastadon?  

 

Am I also odd in that I go to www.websites... ?  I have about 5 or 6 I go to.   I think of Twitter as billboards on the Internet... and it seems like a lot of us were fine looking at a lot of Billboards. Now we have been removed from the road. 

 

 

 

 

[PokerPacker]

20 minutes ago, Fergasun said:

The only thing that bothers me is forcing people to sign in to read content.  I was getting news from Twitter until yesterday. 

 

But this is also on the users.  Will they start to mirror content on something like Mastadon?  

The final piece my cousin needed to leave Twitter for Mastodon was that he found some Mastodon accounts mirroring some NHL journalists' Twitter accounts.  So, yes, there is already some content mirroring in place.

20 minutes ago, Fergasun said:

Am I also odd in that I go to www.websites... ?  I have about 5 or 6 I go to.   I think of Twitter as billboards on the Internet... and it seems like a lot of us were fine looking at a lot of Billboards. Now we have been removed from the road.

We're dinosaurs.  That's the old internet.  This is the new internet.

Oh, also on the topic of content from other sources, Matrix at the very least has a whole bunch of bridges meant to communicate with other messaging platforms.  I currently talk (in the text-chat) on my cousin's Discord channel via a Matrix bridge.  Also have a separate Mumble bridge for voice.  Mumble has been around forever and is a valuable platform for private voice-chat servers.  It's more old-internet style, though, like IRC and such where you don't really bother with accounts and do things more ad-hoc.  Not exactly the subject of this thread that's about federated services, but I'm perfectly happy including anything related to decentralized open platforms in here.

[The 12th Commandment]

Warms my ****les not seeing all the twitter links everywhere.  

 

 

[Captain Wiggles]

What no Truth Social? 🤪

 

[PokerPacker]

1 minute ago, Captain Wiggles said:

What no Truth Social? 🤪

 

That's actually just an instance of Mastodon that isn't part of the Mastodon federation.  That's why it was actually a half-way usable platform.  Nobody created something from the ground-up for Trump; they just took something that already existed and gave it a couple stupid tweaks and filled it with racism.

Edited July 1, 2023 by PokerPacker

[Destino]

The federated system linking to and cutting away from whatever they like or dislike sounds like it might further the troubling move towards increasingly radical echo chambers. Is there a reason to think it won’t? I agree with something needing to be done about corporate control of the net, but I am leery of the extreme political bias I see everywhere now. 
 

 

[TheGreatBuzz]

I'm way not smart enough for this thread.

[PokerPacker]

17 minutes ago, Destino said:

The federated system linking to and cutting away from whatever they like or dislike sounds like it might further the troubling move towards increasingly radical echo chambers. Is there a reason to think it won’t? I agree with something needing to be done about corporate control of the net, but I am leery of the extreme political bias I see everywhere now.

I'd argue it's less prone to echo chambers than the old way.  Consider this site, for example.  It is a collection of some forums on a single site controlled by one entity.  What we get on here is only what is posted by ES members, and is by nature going to focus on commanders related topics, and Washington D.C. area relevant topics.  In a federated system, we start with that as the basis for our home-server, but then we expand beyond the bounds of our home-server and now we can retrieve and interact with content from other sites; say sites for the other NFL teams.  But then along comes Jumbo, who decides that he doesn't want his community associated with Cowboyzone, so he defederates from them.  Aha!  Echo chamber!  But not quite.  CZ wasn't cut off from the federation, just from ES.  Members of NinerNation are still able to interact with both communities through the federation.  If I decide that I cannot abide Jumbo's judgement to block Cowboyzone, I can migrate to CheeseHeads for a homeserver that better reflects my ideals, and I'm still connected to the federation to hang out in the tailgate here.

So the federated approach really gives users a leg up in being able to be able to expose themselves to more viewpoints than individual instance runners may allow because users can migrate to a separate instance without completely losing the community, as opposed to the old system where if I choose to leave ES for CheeseHeads, I'm completely leaving behind the ES community.

Granted, some communities of people will choose to close themselves off into echo chambers, but that's but one instance of a much larger community.  Really, anytime content is moderated, you bring the capability of forming an echo chamber.  But with the federated approach, there's not a single entity in control to poison the entire community.  Elon Musk can't come in and buy the Mastodon platform and say "Okay, I'm now moderating this platform in such a way as to turn it into a Neo NAZI echo chamber".  At best, he can come in to one of the instances and convince the owner of the instance to sell to him to try to turn it into a NAZI echo chamber, but other instances in the federation aren't directly affected by this turn.  And then that's when you'll probably see mass defederation (no one entity can defederate an instance from everyone else; it's up to each instance which others it wants to associate with).  At that point, losing the users from that instance isn't a big deal because the ones worth interacting with have already left because they don't want to be in a NAZI-controlled instance or they've already been banned for not being NAZIs.

It's also worth remembering that in terms of Lemmy, and Instance is like an entire Reddit unto itself, complete with many communities, rather than being like a subreddit.  We're not talking /r/marxism defederating from /r/thedonald, this is Reddit A defederating from Reddit B.

 

8 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

I'm way not smart enough for this thread.

Twitter/Reddit/Discord proprietary corporate garbage
Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix freedom-respecting communal delight

[TheGreatBuzz]

1 hour ago, PokerPacker said:

Twitter/Reddit/Discord 
Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix 

 

I've heard of 2 of these.

[GhostofSparta]

46 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

 

I've heard of 2 of these.

They're not referring to Lemmy the musician.

[PokerPacker]

6 minutes ago, GhostofSparta said:

They're not referring to Lemmy the musician.

Lemmy Koopa, obviously.

[Spaceman Spiff]

2 hours ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

I'm way not smart enough for this thread.

 

I'm with you.

 

Speaking strictly for myself, I could not give any less of a **** about what Elon has or hasn't done to twitter.  I look at Twitter for about 10 minutes a day and my feed is a random hodgepodge of sports stuff and entertainment stuff.  I will say the blue checkmarks are a disaster, now that anyone can get one it's obnoxious.  In regards to reddit, I hardly ever visit it and, quite frankly, the ES Tailgate is MY version of reddit that I highly prefer.  In regards to the federations that brother @PokerPackerhas outlined, I would gladly leave CowboysZone out of my ****ing wannabe Star Wars Death Star federation home server whatever.  I don't want to associate with them, neither should anyone else here.

 

Again, I am speaking strictly for myself here. I am aware of how selfish I sound.

 

 

 

21 minutes ago, GhostofSparta said:

They're not referring to Lemmy the musician.

 

Well, they should be.  Lemmy kicks ass and will live forever.  

[CousinsCowgirl84]

10 hours ago, PokerPacker said:

I figured with all the nonsense going on with big players that have monopolized the internet, it's worth talking about the federated alternative.

Twitter has become a complete ****-show since Musk's takeover, and his version of "free speech absolutism" strongly resembles "Amplify speech I agree with and silence that I don't" and is turning the platform into a bastion of hate and misinformation.

As of today, Reddit has implemented the new policy of charging ludicrous amounts for their API access that effectively closes down applications providing a better experience for browsing reddit than Reddit's own applications, and in their damage control against community backlash, Reddit CEO slandered the name of one such developer making false accusations of blackmail.  Reddit is now going in and forcing out moderators (who are unpaid volunteers generating value to Reddit) who have protested against their new policies, which were enacted with very little heads-up and with no community feedback accepted.
Closing off the API also, and perhaps more importantly, removes moderator tools that were necessary for these unpaid volunteers to keep their communities running without being overrun by spam and malicious actors.

All of this is to point out: We never should have put all of our eggs in one corporate basket.  Even if they're benevolent now, that can always change. (Relevant xkcd comic from a time before google went evil).  Even if you have something like, say, Discord, that hasn't shown signs of going evil yet (has it?  I don't use it, but I don't think I've heard anything yet other than that time Microsoft tried to buy them but the were turned away), why give them the opportunity?

So how do you protect against monolithic actors with iron grips on their respective corners of the internet?  Create a federation of communities working together to create a better internet.  You can sign up on one "homeserver", which is where your account resides, but it can interact with every other community that yours has federated to.  If one of those communities is overtaken by a malicious actor, other communities can disconnect and "defederate" from them and move on without them.  It's all decentralized so no one bad actor can take down the system.  This all works by creating an open source platform with open APIs and protocols designed to allow for communication between communities.  The protocol ActivityPub is the basis for much of the federated internet.

 

Where can you get started?

• Mastodon is a Twitter-like platform.
• Lemmy is the Reddit-like community link-aggregator platform
• Matrix is a messenger with video and voice-chat and supports end-to-end encryption
• NextCloud for data hosting
• Pixelfed for image hosting
• Peertube for video hosting (it hasn't reached a state where I would recommend using it to replace youtube for finding videos, but if you still would like to degoogle your youtube experience, you can use the Invidious network as a youtube mirror, but that's not really the topic of this thread)

 

As open platforms, you can host your own if you wish, which may make more sense for something like NextCloud as your own personal data hosting service.  Good option to put on a dedicated server you rent out in the cloud, and you have the freedom to move it to another host if you don't like what your current host is doing, rather than being held captive to the platform.

Or you could just join an online forum, like ES for instance.

[PokerPacker]

55 minutes ago, CousinsCowgirl84 said:

Or you could just join an online forum, like ES for instance.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to push everybody join in on these platforms.  The only one of those platforms that I actually use myself is Matrix, which I use mostly as a bridge to talk to family (haven't been able to convince them to ditch Discord for it 😠 ) and to directly contact developers of open source projects.

 

But I'm all for taking back the internet from our corporate overlords, and the people have spoken that want their reddits and their twitters.  I just want to get the word out there about the existence of these alternatives if you are on Reddit and Twitter and what-have-you.  And even if you aren't a personal user of, say Twitter, you can't really avoid it.  How many posts on this site have embedded Tweets in them?  Back in the day people would just post links to articles with a relevant quote, but now they just embed tweets.  With all of the tracker and ad blocking stuff I have on my system, those tweets wind up broken messes.  So in order to maintain my privacy, I'm stuck with missing out on a lot of posts on here, but if we stop integrating this proprietary privacy-invading stuff through all-corners of the web, that's a win for me even if I'm not a Twitter user looking to jump to an alternative.

 

The problem is the corporate platforms have the user-base, and the Network Effect/Positive Feedback Loop keeps them on top and strangles out upstart platforms.  Or when a platform does become viable, they just buy it out like Microsoft did with Skype and tried to do again with Discord. But if these federated platforms can reach critical mass, it'll push the scales back in our favor, and as previously explained, their very nature prevents a buyout scenario. 

 

The real danger comes from companies attempting to worm their way into the platforms and utilize the old EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish; term courtesy of Microsoft) strategy to take it out.  Keep your eyes open for Facebook's Project 92 as an attempt to infiltrate the federation.  They've been contacting the owners of some of the biggest Mastodon instances to arrange a meeting covered by NDA because snakes prefer to slither in the darkness.  With some people having learned from past mistakes of letting Google in on the XMPP protocol, there's a lot of hosts signing a pledge not to federate anything owned by Facebook.

 

So yes, dinosaurs like us can keep to Usenet web forums, but the rest of the internet leaks into our spaces, both online and offline with all of the political control our corporate overlords are able to wield when they control algorithms that show us content to affect our opinions and votes, so I posit that it still benefits to get other people off of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit, etc. and onto platforms not designed to spy and manipulate.

Edited July 2, 2023 by PokerPacker

[Spaceman Spiff]

My rebuttal to your impassioned plea is laziness.

 

First of all, one of the things I know about you from reading your posts over the years is that you're a bright individual and you're also into tech.  You like knowing how these things work, and part of what excites you about this is not just sticking it to Elon, but you enjoy the tech.  You're talking about open source and I know that anyone who is into open source things isn't ****ing around.  I once installed Linux Mint on a laptop and then lost interest in it later that afternoon.  I also have no interest in the past mistake of letting Google in on the XMPP protocol.

 

You're also correct when you say that it's next to impossible to avoid something like Twitter or facebook.  I haven't had a facebook account for years and I do believe I'm better off without it.  However, I also don't feel the need to fill that void with something else.  I have Instagram and Twitter.  And if you're counting ES, I have this and a baseball message board.  And Linkedin, which I have to spend time on for work purposes.  

 

If Twitter went away tomorrow, I do believe I'd have a hard time being interested in replacing it with something else.  I'd probably want to replace Instagram since I use it for photography.  If ES went away, I hope one of you clever ****ers would get a message board up and running so we could all stay in touch, same goes for my baseball board.  But if ES went away and there was no readily available alternative, I wouldn't be searching to find a replacement.  

 

All of that is to say that I don't feel a real need for finding alternatives to Instagram and Twitter because I'm used to them.  And I like them.  And to your point about the big players, yeah, they have the user-bases which is pretty important.  The accounts I follow on Twitter and Instagram are what matter, the posters here on ES are what matter.  If they're hard to be replicated elsewhere (or in the ES case, can't be replicated), I'm really not interested. 

 

But I am a bit lost on how any of this prevents buyout scenarios when most IT bros are creating platforms in order to grow them and sell them and cash out.  I thought that's why any of the people who get into tech get into it; yeah they have a passion for it and want to create something cool, but they also want to get filthy ****ing rich.  Mind you, I don't hate them for that.  But I don't see how the Discord people wouldn't eventually want to sell to the highest bidder.

 

I'm also aware of your disclaimer in which you said you're not pushing anyone to join, but you want to take back the internet from the corporate overlords.  But I have a hard time about giving a **** about Elon and what he's up to and facebook infiltrating federations when I'm wearing a pair of Nikes and eating a sandwich from Chick Fil A.  I get that the tech and the internet is more important than what shoes I wear and where I choose to get my spite-sandwich from, but like I said I am a lazy creature and my skin in the game on all fronts is extremely minimal.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Spaceman Spiff

[Wildbunny]

Main problem is due to proliferation of bots over the internet especially social networks like Twitter and such.

I'm fine with free speech just don't make it anonymous. 

 

Those two things would change the face of social networks heavily.

 

That being said, I'm not on any social network. Maybe because I'm old, but I'd like to do it the old way watching tv and reading newspapers. Where I can just choose what I want to watch and read.

 

We're blaming the tools here but as always we haven't done it the right way. Mainly because the Iq has fallen off the cliff some time ago and we aren't producing young brilliant minds able to see what's true or not, and what is acceptable to say or not.

 

Basically we have reached a point where our civilizations thinks that individuals have no limits and can do whatever they want when they want freely..We simply have forgotten that everything has limits, even free speech.Everybody thinks he's great because he has x followers over the internet, when in fact, he's just a nobody. IRL.

 

If Twitte is becoming nonsense... Well, just leave it.

 

 

[Bang]

And all I want to do is talk football.

 

~Dang

[CousinsCowgirl84]

10 hours ago, PokerPacker said:

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to push everybody join in on these platforms.  The only one of those platforms that I actually use myself is Matrix, which I use mostly as a bridge to talk to family (haven't been able to convince them to ditch Discord for it 😠 ) and to directly contact developers of open source projects.

 

But I'm all for taking back the internet from our corporate overlords, and the people have spoken that want their reddits and their twitters.  I just want to get the word out there about the existence of these alternatives if you are on Reddit and Twitter and what-have-you.  And even if you aren't a personal user of, say Twitter, you can't really avoid it.  How many posts on this site have embedded Tweets in them?  Back in the day people would just post links to articles with a relevant quote, but now they just embed tweets.  With all of the tracker and ad blocking stuff I have on my system, those tweets wind up broken messes.  So in order to maintain my privacy, I'm stuck with missing out on a lot of posts on here, but if we stop integrating this proprietary privacy-invading stuff through all-corners of the web, that's a win for me even if I'm not a Twitter user looking to jump to an alternative.

 

The problem is the corporate platforms have the user-base, and the Network Effect/Positive Feedback Loop keeps them on top and strangles out upstart platforms.  Or when a platform does become viable, they just buy it out like Microsoft did with Skype and tried to do again with Discord. But if these federated platforms can reach critical mass, it'll push the scales back in our favor, and as previously explained, their very nature prevents a buyout scenario. 

 

The real danger comes from companies attempting to worm their way into the platforms and utilize the old EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish; term courtesy of Microsoft) strategy to take it out.  Keep your eyes open for Facebook's Project 92 as an attempt to infiltrate the federation.  They've been contacting the owners of some of the biggest Mastodon instances to arrange a meeting covered by NDA because snakes prefer to slither in the darkness.  With some people having learned from past mistakes of letting Google in on the XMPP protocol, there's a lot of hosts signing a pledge not to federate anything owned by Facebook.

 

So yes, dinosaurs like us can keep to Usenet web forums, but the rest of the internet leaks into our spaces, both online and offline with all of the political control our corporate overlords are able to wield when they control algorithms that show us content to affect our opinions and votes, so I posit that it still benefits to get other people off of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit, etc. and onto platforms not designed to spy and manipulate.

Anything centralized like the four your mentioned will eventually become corporate overlords once they gain a sufficient user base. 

[redskinss]

13 hours ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

 

I've heard of 2 of these.

I know, I'm over here like masta what?

You mean there's more to the internet than tik tok and extremeskins?

Edited July 2, 2023 by redskinss