Saturday 15th July 2023

Topics:

• According to their website, Meta intend to make Threads part of the Fediverse: "Our plan is to make Threads part of the fediverse, a social network of different servers operated by third parties that are connected and can communicate with each other. Each server on the fediverse operates on its own but can talk to other servers on the fediverse that run on the same protocol. We plan for Threads to use a protocol called ActivityPub to talk to other servers that support this protocol.". Ref: https://help.instagram.com/169559812696339
• That would make Threads the main user of the ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon and other smaller fediverse websites, effectively becoming the dominant user in the space with the largest user base by far. Ref: https://activitypub.rocks/
• In my option, all existing social media fediverse implementations are a not truly free, because if they can ban a user or block an instance, they have central authority.
• In some instances, I have heard of entire servers being banned on Mastodon, resulting in ghettos forming. Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495086
• In my opinion, the first fediverse that uses a blockchain will win this market, as blockchains are the closest thing we've got to a truly decentralized platform.
• This also helps explain why blockchain technologies will have a vibrant second life beyond Fintech.
• Of course an immutable blockchain ledger would make user content placed there difficult to edit, but not impossible if the ledger contains a content token (like how NFT works), rather than the content itself.
• Twitter was never federated on the backend, but in the early days it was extremely distributed on the frontend: can you imagine that for the first few years I used Twitter, I exclusively used 3rd-party clients!
• As a Palm webOS fanboi, my Twitter UX was an app called "Bad Kitty", and before Twitter shut down access to 3rd party clients like these, every user was using their personal favs.
• I yearn for a truly federated social media platform, that uses a blockchain on the backend for distributed storage, no centralized API, no centralized authority, no shared block lists, and the freedom to use any 3rd party client you want.
• Blocking of other users can happen at the client level. It should never happen at the instance level: that breaks the federation.
• There is nothing new here, it was launched back in 2008 with identi.ca: "In 2008, Evan Prodromou founded the social network http://identi.ca. He published the software GNU social under a free license (GNU Affero General Public License, AGPL). It defined the OStatus protocol." Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
• So Mastodon is not using a blockchain for distribution, and some of their documentation is actively hostile towards web3. Ref: https://fedi.tips/does-mastodon-or-the-fediverse-use-ads-or-trackers-or-algorithms-or-blockchain-or-cryptocurrency-or-anything-annoying-like-that/
• Some POCs exist for a Twitter clone that uses web3 protocols, but they are simply tech demos: https://moralis.io/how-to-build-a-web3-twitter-clone/ and https://medium.com/@solidity101/step-by-step-guide-to-building-a-decentralized-twitter-application-with-solidity-d84b1b38d914
• But nothing in production at scale that I am aware of?
• What I am working on this week:
  • greppr.org : now at 2m web pages indexed. Added time fields to each search result.
• Media I am enjoying this week:
  • House of the Dragon
  • Longitude by Dava Sobel

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