Gustaf:8333Dec 18, 2022
Pieter Wuille

So... this seems like a good time to start experimenting with Mastodon.

I'm very skeptical about the chances of getting enough network effect to bootstrap a new social media site in general, and even more for distributed/decentralized/non-commercial ones.

Still, recent events on Twitter make me believe there is a chance, and I'd like to help make that happen.

Dec 18, 2022 at 7:53pmWeb
Show threadfatrat šŸ€Dec 18, 2022
@pwuille great to see you here!
Show threadMatt CoralloDec 18, 2022
@pwuille itā€™s definitely splintering communities - infosec Twitter is dead, people see substantially more engagement here. Russian war Twitter is still mostly there. Bitcoin Twitter is half-foot-in on nostr, crypto Twitter is on farcasterā€¦ :(
Show threadEthan HeilmanJan 11, 2023
@matt @pwuille There is less engagement here but also much less noise.
Show threadMatt CoralloJan 11, 2023
@ethan_heilman @pwuille Twitter is like all bots now. I have no idea if thereā€™s any engagement because my mentions are flooded with garbage.
Show threadEthan HeilmanJan 11, 2023

@matt @pwuille in terms of infosec and cryptography, 80% of the signal moved to mastodon and 100% of the noise stayed on Twitter. This did significant damage to the signal to noise ratio on Twitter.

Assume pre-Musk twitter has a 70 good tweets to 30 bot tweets ratio. Tweeter shows you 100 tweets per day and 70 of them are signal.

Assume post-Musk lost 80% of good users. So you see the same 30 bot tweets you would have seen before and 14 good tweets then twitter fills the missing space with bots tweets.

This triggers the content-exodus death spiral:
Bots get more eyeballs per tweet --> users leave platform
--> ratio of bots increase --> Bots get more eyeballs per tweet --> ...

Show threadMatt CoralloJan 11, 2023
@ethan_heilman @pwuille donā€™t forget that, on top of that, thereā€™s way more bots than there used to be. But I also think we underestimate the amount of signal on mastodon. Lack of algorithmic timeline means thereā€™s a ton of signal you miss cause youā€™re offline or it just got likeā€™d not rtā€™d.
Show threadThe DoctorDec 18, 2022
@pwuille What are you trying to accomplish?
Show threadoaktreeDec 18, 2022
@pwuille We are still early in the history of social and microblogging networks. I would draw a parallel with the history of OS's. The ones who were once total leaders are now mostly historical relics.
And it is geeks and nerds who are the early adopters of most if not all successful IT projects. Crowds then follow.
Show threadPeter ToddDec 18, 2022

@pwuille I think the big problem we're going to see is that Mastodon has much worse protections against spam than Twitter does. That's not a problem yet. But it will be in the future. And dealing with it could destroy the ability of small instances like mine to federate with others.

If email didn't have big companies like Google pouring money into anti-spam, it'd probably be dead already.

Bitcoin can fix this by making spam costly. But the people behind Mastodon hate crypto currencies.

Show threadsilverpillDec 18, 2022

@pete @pwuille Luckily, Mastodon is not the only software that supports ActivityPub protocol. Other developers could be more open-minded.

>making spam costly

Are you thinking about hashcash? Or payments?

Show threadPeter ToddDec 18, 2022

@silverpill @pwuille Both. Though payments don't necessarily mean paying someone in particular: you can also sacrifice BTC to make a cryptographic identity expensive to obtain.

This is probably better than hash cash as it's easier to determine the value of the payment/sacrifice.

Show threadsilverpillDec 19, 2022

@pete @pwuille Here's how this can be implemented:

- Require actor objects to have identity proof that cryptographically links bitcoin address to actor ID. The mechanism of identity proofs is described in FEP-c390 (this proposal relies on DIDs, but bitcoin address can be represented as did:pkh identifier).
- Also require actor objects to contain a proof of burn. For example, it can be an ID of transaction that burns BTC.
- When the server receives activity from some actor for the first time, it should verify the proof of burn (for example, by connecting to a bitcoin node, looking up the transaction, and checking the sender address and the burnt amount). If the proof is correct, the server accepts activity. Otherwise it rejects activity and adds actor to a blacklist (temporarily or permanently).

The only problem I see here is that transaction lookup can be expensive.

fep

Fediverse Enhancement Proposals

Codeberg.org
Show threadPeter ToddDec 19, 2022
@silverpill @pwuille ā€œtransaction lookup can be expensiveā€ just provide a merkle path from the confirmed tx to the block header.
Show threadHomo Hominis HumanusDec 27, 2022

@pete @pwuille

Ultimately I think most of these alternatives (Mastodon, Nostr etc) donā€™t really solve the important problems, and only work better in some respects because of the tiny scale, while not offering anything near the level of discoverability of the centralized platforms.

Show threadmidnightDec 28, 2022
@pete @pwuille Ehh, if it weren't for Google there's have likely been a cleaner solution quite some time ago. :-( Progress halted after the corpos snapped up everyone and FLOSS progress was destroyed.
Show threadPeter ToddDec 28, 2022
@midnightmagic @pwuille What kind of cleaner solution? Spam prevention with email's design is fundamentally hard. Hashcash would have likely failed due to botnets and Asics; Bitcoin Lightning didn't exist until very recently.
Show threadmidnightJan 2, 2023
@pete @pwuille An old-school anti-spam mechanism which is ~100% effective is to ensure that literally every contact one makes has a separate contact email others can make use of. Automatically-negotiated contact exchange to give people something similar in functionality seems possible, esp. since everyone uses mobile devices anyway.
Show threadmidnightJan 2, 2023
@pete But, unfortunately, it looks like most of the people who would be motivated to make such a thing have essentially been all hired and stripped out from any remotely-related FLOSS project. Almost none of the floss projects I know from 15-20 years ago has survived.
Show threadXiphyDec 18, 2022
@pwuille For me @paulg being banned was just too much not to try Mastodon
Show threadMeni RosenfeldDec 19, 2022

@pwuille I think boostrapping new platforms is definitely doable, if they have good ways to discover interesting and relevant content.

I don't need the whole world to use the same platform as me - just enough people for me to find good content.

I still haven't figured out how to find that on Mastodon though...

Show threadNoam NelkeDec 19, 2022
@MeniRosenfeld @pwuille for me, https://www.movetodon.org did the trick.
Movetodon: Finds your Twitter Friends on Mastodon

Show threadNodeOpDec 19, 2022
@pwuille takes time, it took years before I became more active on Facebook, ...only to go away again
Show threadMindMiningDec 19, 2022
@pwuille perfect, welcome!