Get Nebula with a 40% discount using my link (sponsored): go.nebula.tv/techaltar Interview - Eugen Rochko (Mastodon CEO): nebula.tv/videos/techaltar-the-future-of-mastodon-eugen-rochko-ceo Interview - Matt Mullenweg (Automattic CEO, Tumblr, Wordpress, etc.): nebula.tv/videos/techaltar-tumblr-wordpress-embracing-activitypub-automattic-ceo-interview Interview - Matej Svancer (OpenVibe CEO): nebula.tv/videos/techaltar-building-a-client-app-for-the-fediverse-openvibe-interview Interview - John & Seb (SFBA.social Mastodon Instance operators): nebula.tv/videos/techaltar-running-a-mastodon-instance-with-38000-users-sfbasocial-interivew
I am very curious how long this will last, most people don't seem to be willing to pay for it, and how would any company cope with the amount of data the big players do, especially when the big players are often the ones renting out server space to the little guys.
@@MegaLokopo a lot of people are willing to pay for it if and only if their server is run by an individual real person. like, Patreons etc by admins make money from grateful users. the corporations, though... they're gonna have to find customers somewhere else if they wanna get paid by users
@@raphaelmorgan2307 I think the idea that people will pay enough donations to individual maintainers of websites and apps is very naive. If you talk to any admin of servers and forums, they will tell you that they always have to pay out of their own pocket to maintain the website. This is the reason Mastadon will never be huge - no one wants to pay, and the larger a server gets, admins will have to pay more to maintain the server, until they are no longer able to do so and the server shuts down. And users will flock to other servers. Rinse and repeat.
you never have free chatting from the beginning. Just think about previous years of paid mailing, telephone calls, mobile bills. Information exchange is never free unless you tell with own month, or pay someone to help deliver it :)
I think a big comparison is email, since its also an interoperable protocol between different mailservers. One problem with email is that the big players like google have created network effects by making smaller email servers more likely to get put in the spam folder, which makes companies and organizations less willing to host their own mail server like they used to, and instead centralize on google or Microsoft etc. Will this same thing happen with the fediverse once it gets big enough for people to start to send spam with it (does it work like that?), and so the existing big servers will automatically block newer and smaller players leading to a network effect where you can't really create a new server? Just like email today?
I don't think this is going to happen. There are other threats that I feel will become soon relevant. I fear that small instances will die because of the costs caused by million and million of posts coming from big instances (as Marton explained, each post is "copied" into each federated instance. So, millions of posts coming at once from a big platforms like threads could overflood small servers with content that instance owners will have to pay for just for hosting reasons). This is going to either lead to "freemium" (paid or ad supported) hosting services like geocities in the past or to a forced defederation of small instances that will break the fediverse and the mark the return to closed walled gardens. That's what I'm mostly worried about.
huh? wdym? SMTP and that's it. if i send a fake email via SMTP spoofing i still get the emails on my gmail account as long as the host adress isn't xxx dot pron dot cuck you. at least as long as that fact didn't change since we did it in tech school 10 years ago... please tell me if it did...
@@neffscape6353 if someone is getting a lot of costs because their server federates with the big platforms, I think they'll probably stop federating with the big platforms before they simply give up on their instance. as far as @RemotHuman's fear, I think this is entirely likely but I don't particularly care, because the big platforms can only stop us from interacting with the big platforms. a large portion of us don't want to interact with them anyway, and are perfectly content to ignore them and create community with other smaller servers
@@neffscape6353could the storage of the posts be distributed similar to a torrent file? You'd have to host your posts yourself, or pay someone to store it for you in the cloud. Could lead to a bigger decentralization
I swear to god this is one lf the most underrated channels on youtube. Been watching you for almost 8 years. Keep up the good work, I really really like the format you've got going on!
To be fair, the argument that some servers might refuse to delete your content is very similar to pointing out that people can download your RUclips videos. Though true that it might be a lot more pervasive. It'll be interesting to see how the law interacts with that eventuality if it occurs.
When I delete a youtube video, sure maybe 5 people somewhere downloaded it. But there's a big difference if dozens of platforms all have their own copies of that video, and God only knows if or when they'll getting around to deleting it. A user copy - small consequences. Multiple platforms sharing a copy out of your control - larger consequences.
The EU has a "right to be forgotten law", which means these servers need to delete the content. What happens when servers pick up the content from outside is not clear however.
@@the11382 Well that's great for the 27 countries in the EU. But most of the world doesn't have laws like that (to my knowledge). But even then, we're talking about speed of deleting content as well. A law might force them to delete within the week, but that's about 5 years in internet time.
@@65Drumsthat doesn't really invalidate the point of OP, sure a user having saved a local version of a file doesn't broadcast it to new users by default but if we assume ill intent, a user reposting a video on another platform would be just as bad. Plus, there wouldn't be any notification of the original getting deleted which is the case in the proposed model. IMHO, you have to assume ill intent for there to be a problem and if you do, all bets are off.
from my experience the issue has more to do with federation bugs i guess. i've seen deleted posts regularly not getting removed on other instances by random chance, but quite often
The instant someone explained to me that the fediverse worked very similarly to the email I immediately got it. Not so difficult to understand after all, at least the general idea.
@@B20C0pains are there for email ... But most of it is about spam and sorting. Which is not that hard compared to sorting and storing physical mail. Especially storing. Imagine the amount of physical mail you have to sift through. Imagine your work mail and personal mail together. But it's less of a pain than it is with email. Most people would appreciate having to use only one social media platform with their favourite or used to ui experience.
From my understanding the fediverse itself isn't working like email. Maston and other similar apps work like email. Threads for example in fediverse is like a single instance in metadon. We can't create our own instance in threads. Correct me if I'm wrong. I am also trying to understand this 😅
@@45jobinjose One of the things that the fediverse makes you aware of is that "apps" aren't really apps. They're often a lot of things that got glued together and locked in. And stuff like Mastodon, based on the idea of a shared protocol, forces you to think more about that, because having that protocol allows for a lot of freedom. Like email and all that. Threads is supposed to (one day) work with Mastodon instances and all other ActivityPub services. As the video explains, there's already a few Threads accounts exposed within the fediverse. You can use Mastodon or Akkoma or Shorkey or whatever and it works... in one direction, to follow a few Threads accounts, for now.
@@45jobinjose that is correct. Threads is just another centralized silo which plans to open up to the larger network. You cannot create your own Threads server or whatnot, you can't self-host it. It's just the Meta offering and that's it. And yes, it's not exactly working "like email", but the idea is there. Say you like how Twitter works, but you don't like its current leadership (I mean, kinda understandable these days). What do you do? Just get a server and run your own version of Twitter? With Mastodon, that's possible. Say you don't like how Xitter (I think it's a more fitting name for it, sorry) looks and behaves, but people are there (or Facebook, for example). What do you do? Just try to adapt to it? Wouldn't it be better for you to use whatever you like and still access the content you want? That's what the Fediverse allows you to do.
What you're also seeing with Mastodon is also a policy choice. They call it the Server Covenant -- essentially, to get listed on their first-party directory, your instance has to commit to a baseline set of content moderation rules. (If memory serves this was shortly after Gab moved to a Mastodon instance, but don't quote me on this.) So while it's still *possible* to discover instances that don't, to a certain degree there's a filter for it being applied to the network at large.
One thing that I can foresee happening is a further fragmentation of the internet. You can choose to leave a federation if you do not like it, join another, or even start your own. Kind of like subreddits, fragmenting users and giving them their own bespoke experiences. But it can also lead to echo chambers that fuel extremism. Which we already see on reddit to a level.
But that’s also exactly what social media and the Internet at large needs. Kurzgesagt has a good video, explaining the double edge sword that is large social networks, and its affects on society and division.
The entirety of reddit has become this. Even on centrist subs it's dominated by the woke left. Reddit really needs to remove moderators, actually higher people and have an objective guideline because right now you basically cannot say anything on that site even with factual proof.
We already have whole Lemmy instances that are echo chambers full of extremism. They're often banned by many instances which isolates them even further. It's already a problem and there's not much that can be done. But those would likely exist regardless, federated or not.
a large crowd source. If a lot of different servers opt into this standardization, then any change for the worse will upset a lot of users that could easily 'stay on the older' version or fork it themselves Migration too. For example, changing browsers as become not to bad now. Transferring bookmarks, sessions, and local storage with a simple click. Now apply this to creators, what if it was just one click on youtube to migrate all videos, comments, likes, and views to a whole new platform whenever you wanted
The main prerequisite for enshittification is lock-in. RUclips can be shitty to its creators because all the viewers are there and it can be shitty to its viewers because all the creators are there. There is no way to leave RUclips without losing access to these other parties. But on the fediverse? If a good enough competitor to RUclips comes along, guess what? I'm out and I'm taking all my network links to the other side with me.
@@wchorskiexcept that all IT departments are forever telling people to use chrome to fix their problems because google has somehow managed to undermine the compatibility of non-chromium browsers with many modern sites. In theory the web is open and interoperable, but that hasn’t been entirely successful.
Not sure why you keep bringing up Dorsey. As you mention in the video yourself, the AT protocol is different from ActivityPub, so putting his face next to the protocol there 12:54 is just misleading. What's more, he has left BlueSky a while ago, even going as far as deleting his account, he is all in on Nostr now, which is yet another protocol.
It's from an article called "the enshittification of Tiktok" written by Cory Doctorow in January last year, on Wired. It's good, but I can't post links here.
Comparison between google building its empires on open protocls and what meta is trying to do now is absolutely genious and makes everything very easy to understand
@@growtocycle6992 If you read my comment you would see i am complimanting the creator on explaining the situation by framing it with similarities between previous actions of google.
I would like to see this in the instant messaging universe. Same platform for every phone number, users choose their operator (Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, Line, etc)
Except perhaps not phone numbers … widespread sharing of phone numbers are something of a security vulnerability given how many banks and utilities still use SMS verification, and also can exacerbate digital harassment for many people.
@@bubbleman91 URL = Uniform Resource Locator. There's also URN, which is a Uniform Resource Name. Both are types of URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). 😉
Despite the odds, I am really hoping something like this takes shape. I grew up in the early 2000s, and as a kid I really only got to see the tail end of the old internet as everything pivoted to walled gardens. I feel nostalgia for the 90s internet, despite never really getting to experience it. I'm really hopeful this catches on, though my logic is telling me it is unlikely or that it will go down very differently to the open source dreams of the platforms and standards. But this did convince me to create a mastadon account! I'm excited to see how I like it.
Heya, have fun! I think you'll be surprised what you can get out of it, even if you don't ever get to move everyone in your family and friends and school/job. Treat it as a new world you're exploring, at first seemingly inhabited but quirkier the more you delve in. Also on that note: you'll probably quickly get bombarded with people telling you to move from Mastodon(.social) to Firefish or Misskey or Akkoma or alike. Succumb to the pressure! Join other places! Experiment! Don't be ashamed to have multiple accounts! Have fun with the platform itself, it's yours too now!
The start of this video made me nostalgic for the early web and it feels like the Fediverse is the natural evolution of blogs and forums that got subverted by Big Tech's walled gardens that made everything convenient and centralised. It also meant we got mined for data and now they have us the enshittification has started. I'm borderline evangelical for the Fediverse and, while I haven't got everything up and running on there, I am throwing my lot in with the Fediverse. I've also ended up helping to run a medium sized Lemmy instance. So I reckon everyone should give it a go, there's a service available to fit everyone's needs.
I feel a similar way despite being born in 2005 I grew up with the centralized social media giants and hearing how the Internet used to work in seeing how we are going back to that and better makes me really hopeful when I first joined Mastodon it was such a weird concept to get a hold of "social media platforms working... together????" I just found that concept so baffling because I grew up with them fighting against one another and seeing that not one person owns the platform was incredibly interesting and that compelled me to stay on the platform and cross post to both Twitter and Mastodon I would like to think Mastodon is my main platform as I like the community
A lot of the objections with federating with Threads has to do with a fear that Threads will embrace, extend, and extinguish the open protocols. This has happened before with XMPP/Jabber and Google Talk.
The key to all these different decentralised, maybe confusing instances is to find the right one for you. And that's in most cases not one of the big ones. There are instances for geographical reasons, where you can find information about the city or region you live in. Or instances dedicated to different interests - be it your profession or your hobby. Choosing wisely means getting a whole new way of using social media.
0:12 {Correction} from a plethora of CD’s … it could be found ANYWHERE… couch cushions, cup coasters hanging on a string in groups like an art installation… c’mon people help me out with this list …
PoketCasts was the GOAT and than is shat all of us who paid it, and made us switch to the subsription model. They could at least have given us a 6 month subscription just in good faith.
A thing people often miss is when you come up with Open Protocols is that it also makes the data way more scrapable, you con't just turn that off like say reddit has now. So if you support Open protocols and standards you also have to support the possibility that someone would use you public data for training or other things. Please correct me if I'm going wrong with the assumption.
It's correct. As said by everyone, you should not seek privacy (as in your data being private) at all in the Fediverse. The Fediverse is all about making your data public to as much instances as possible.
I think those are separate issues. Open protocols do not mean open data: if we look at Mastodon, you can make your posts unlisted so they wouldn't be shared in the public feed of your server, but they are still publicly visible if someone directly goes to your profile, so there is a granularity to how available the "public" data is. And what you share on the Internet can still be protected by copyright law, which means that for your data to be used for training, you must agree to it first, which is something OpenAI, Stability AI and probably others are in the middle of legal battles about (see Stability AI vs Getty, OpenAI vs New York Times).
@@xE92vDpostings aren't polled like with RSS, as you might be thinking. every follower *subscribes* to the account and thus every follower gets new posts sent to them like e-mail newsletters do. federation only needs the name/handle to be public. lock down all privacy settings, e.g. require to review follow requests, disable search engine scraping and explore-timeline visibility. then set your default post visibility to followers-only and your profile is private, server-to-server and server-to-client encrypted and by no means scrapable - because the postings are not pulled from your profile, but get sent actively to the followers
Imagine the backend of the application is mostly MQTT brokers, IPFS swarm for content backup, and mostly the content is all stored in the users browsers so when Bob wants to see Jim's cat picks the network would download those picks from other browser instances that are online that have already looked at those cat picks.
Good luck making that sort of system compete with modern internet systems, there is just too much data, it doesn't scale well, which is why it has never worked in the past despite being tried periodically.
That's the basis of the open web though, completely open and free is what drive the early free internet into what it is today. To a degree, monetisation led to control and structure and while that maybe not what the modern internet built on today I don't think it will be beneficial to the new protocol system that want to capitalise on the same growth.
I whole heartedly agree, but can also understand the creator's perspective. I am against monetization as to what it lead in the past (data harvesting, content farms) however, creators need to survive. Maybe the problem is much more systemic and can't be solved through tech! Maybe artists need bigger societal / governmental support in order to not be profit driven.
I think they will just need to go the old fashion way of just finding a recurring sponsor for their content. That has always been how traditional publishers operate (news, magazine) which got hijacked by the modern algorithm-base distribution. Creators depend on platform like RUclips less for payment but more for reach and content distribution, if they can all have their own social media network, they should be able to just find a sponsor (the cost of video publishing is way lower than traditional print media)@@ErikUden
@@ErikUdenCreators can always just list their public crypto wallet or PayPal address and ask their users to donate to them. Or they could get in-video sponsorships. Patreon donations and in-video/in-post sponsorships already make up a significant portion of the revenue creators make, so they'd probably make even more money if there weren't other ads on the platform distracting users from their sponsorships, and if they didn't have to pay Patreon's obscene transaction fees. As for the platform itself, they could also request donations. Maybe whenever the user opens the app, if they've donated less than $5 in the past month, it will interrupt them and ask for a donation. But also, because PeerTube uses BitTorrent technology, it will probably be much cheaper to run than RUclips. And other decentralised social media are probably even cheaper to run.
Hey, great video, as always! Small correction, at around 6:20, you state that Metcalfe's law describes an exponential increase of value as a function of participant, while in fact, it's "only" quadratic (it even says so on the wiki screenshot you posted).
Excellent comprehensive view of the potential pluses and pitfalls of the Fediverse and the ActvityPub protocols. I'm anxious to start checking out some of the associated interview material through my Nebula account! 😁
After watching the whole video, I think that Nostr could be a nice option for you to see as well. It's a different protocol which works like the Fediverse but instead of every server being an instance, they are simply relays, also monetization is native to the protocol due to a tight integration with the Lightning Network (a Bitcoin's second layer). It solves many of the problems that were mentioned in the video, but of course, it changes a number of comprimises for others.
I’m confused where the actual data is stored. Does every member of the Fediverse store a copy of every post? Are edits allowed? If so, do you download the whole edit history? If not I’m guessing there’s limits to which Fediverse compatible service you can migrate to. I think you could get around this some of this with caching but then how do you do search? Very curious about the AP spec though. Really enjoyed the video!
For example Alice is signed in and posts on americium instance and bob is signed on Neptunium instance. When bob wants to view the post Alice posted. Order to do this neptunium instance's main server(s) would download the post through a request from americium instance then serve it to bob
@@Choroalp I see that makes sense. I presume that caching would be up to the party that's requesting the data (neptunium in your example). Do you know if the monetization model would be some sort of revenue share for paying subscribers? It seems like this sort of distributed model doesn't benefit the ad-centric monetization model of social networks today.
If you've been online any time since 2000-05 then AOL was pretty much dead, de facto. I've been online since 2007 and never heard of AOL until later on, and if I didn't watch this video, I might have never known what was it actually about. I thought it was just a sort of provider like Google, offering mail and IM. As for the larger internet, I always thought it was something developed internally for the US Army and then some people adopted it for civilian use and its usage gradually boomed. Now I know a hell of a lot more, wow.
@@catalinpetrescu8488 I've actually been online since around 1997-8 ...It's just that in Serbia AOL was an unknown entity. You basically just browsed at random and found geocities sites and, eventually, forums.
In my country msn was the standard and then google off course we had our own sapo out of a university but idk how popular it was in the aol day i don’t even know if aol was offerered here, i only started using the internet in 2004? Thru other people computers And on my own in 2007
It reminds me of the futurama episode about the scammer aliens and their sprunger noses - benders big score. They would be so happy for everyone to send their datas into a big Cambridge Analytica sprunger
You can massively improve the protocol by making every post have tags associated with it. NSFW could be a tag individual instances or users filter for, which reduces the overhead of moderation. Everything in the Fediverse becomes semi-permeable.
@@xE92vD Odd how TechAlter didn't mention it. Several instances even expand upon this, looking at the documentation. Moderation should be many times easier than TechAlter initially suggests then.
@@MegaLokopo Nah, this isn't a utopia, just a reduction of the problem of moderation to mostly bad actors, instead of including a lot of good faith actors.
@@the11382 id argue moderation should be dealt with by the end user. I don't want Hitler deciding what is and isn't okay. He isn't in power today, but I don't trust he never will be, and I don't want anyone having moderation control over other people just themselves.
Idea for website hosting without hosting: You upload a file or a website and it gets bounced around in many clients to other clients and it's really hard to lose that data
I wonder if maybe the Peertube protocol works against it. Rather than the content item (in this case, the video) being in every server that requests the video, it might be better if the service requests the video from the server the user uploaded it to. But neither work that well, tbh.
normally i watch your video on the release date, but i missed this one, probably because of mark's face in the thumbnail (i just ignore big tech names)
Some Fedi clients, such as Misskey, Pleroma, and Akkoma, have what are called "emoji reactions" (akin to Discord) which, while not being likes/dislikes, are still really good at expressing disapproval of a post. You can add custom emojis, too! My instance has a cute fox pointing a middle finger, for example
21:01 That's a GOOD thing NOT a bad thing. Because each instance can moderate there own way and it is not one corporate overlord that is a dictator and makes all the decisions. So if one instance determines the content shouldn't be deleted they can choose to keep it, and if you don't like it then block them or if it's copyright infringement fight them. But as we know many corporate giants censore stuff and temove content that they should not.
@@ZenAndPsychedelicHealingCenter That's just blatantly wrong. It takes time for things to pick up popularity, just because it didn't blow the day it launched doesn't mean it's dead and outdated. This is pretty standard for standards, which fediverse is one. But go off lmao
As opposed to what, getting sponsored by some scam like MasterWorks? Foh lmao, at least Nebula was created by content creators. Nebula isn’t even a walled garden platform, fym. It’s just a streaming service with content behind a paywall.
You are watching this on RUclips, a closed source, walled garden owned by a bazillion dollar company, TechAltar has to pay his bills and pay for his food, give him a break and shove the hypocrisy up your ass.
Open standards are great and all, but the main reason why Mastodon servers fail (and I imagine its the same for other fediverse services) is because it becomes too costly to operate. Facebook isn't evil because it's a singular entity who owns and controls all the servers that Facebook uses, facebook is evil for all the "other" things they do. Data collection, targeted ads etc etc etc.
I like how there are still hard-working and thoughtful people still trying to make the internet more open - and not turning to scams (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) or monopolisation.
It's not really about hardworking or thoughtful. It's more like someone solves a problem for themselves or as a hobby, and because software is infinitely replicable, everyone can benefit from it.
Hey! I have a question 🙋 if instances are federated that means hosting is federated as well? Isn’t this hosting redundancy inefficient with resources, thus making it harder to turn a profit?
Any federated server has to provide its own hosting, just like any website does. You're only storing the accounts and feeds of the users on your instance though, so the amount of redundancy isn't too bad. Big social networks like Facebook need lots of redundancy as well to alleviate traffic bottlenecks, so while they're centralized in the sense that they're operated by a single corporate entity, they still include a lot of decentralization physically. Fediverse instances can be a lot smaller than the entire network, so they don't need as much infrastructure. I imagine the vast majority of instances can remain tiny (< 100 users), and run on an old laptop in a closet somewhere.
If you want to host something on the Internet then someone has to pay for hosting it. I'm seeing a rise in "data co-ops" where 50-200 people pool their money and knowledge together to host one for just a couple of bucks per year each. One person can have a basic server for $5 per month (I do) but if you get a few dozen people together you can have a pretty good one for $5 a year a person.
It's not like cryptocurrencies where every server processes every transaction. It's more like email - your server processes your emails and ones that people send to you.
It's not up to the protocols to build payment into themselves. It's up to services which use those protocols. They'll figure out something, they always do.
love how moderation is a problem.. i mean aside from disruptive things like spambots and the like who cares? it's moderation and censorship that should die as a central idea, people can regulate themselves all they want in their bubbles, but forcing it as a default on everyone is unacceptable.
WWW and HTML were already around when AOL started offering the services in the video, why is the story changed to sound like Tim Berner Lee created WWW in response to private internet attempts?
@@xE92vD yes and that's what I mean by WWW and HTML, they were invented by Tim Berners-Lee long before AOL's hub was a thing and the video is portraying them as if they were the response just to fit the story but it's incorrect information.
That's called email. There's a program called Delta Chat that makes chat work through email. There's also XMPP which is an actual chat system that works like this.
Same. I treat social media just like real life. I connect witn different type of people on different platform. Like how we live our daily lives, different dynamics depending where we are who we are with. I don't want what I post in Facebook also show up in LinkedIn 😂 But for messaging, this totally makes sense, like phone calls and sms. Just works on any phone models or OS.
"That's why I always believe there should be a diversification on the internet, as having a monopoly can sometimes lead to harm in various aspects, such as total control or privacy issues. If Europe, India, Latin America, Australia, or another region of the world created their own version of the internet, similar to what China did, we might live a bit better without relying solely on the Americans."
@@monstrositylabs In fact, it actually does work out for the average Chinese citizen. When you have billions of people connected to your walled garden, you basically get something for everyone, there are tons of interesting videos, social media posts, and articles. Of course, there's heavy state control and censorship, but this mostly affects political, news and economical content, i.e., a fraction of what's interesting on the Internet.
You don’t need to have your own limited Internet if they just don’t monopolize and ruin the Internet like they’ve already done. there’s virtually no privacy on the Internet in China a lot sites and things aren’t even allowed either. It’s way too limited and surveyed.
No one at the time ever thought AOL was The Internet, we were actually a lot smarter than you give us credit for. AOL didn't define us, I can't say the same for the social mediia users of today.
ActivityPub has nothing to do with privacy, but being public. If a company wants to track you or whatever, they are free to do so. Though mastodon and lemmy or such are all open source software. But who said the software running on the server is the one that is actually FOSS?
That would actually be cool. I'm not a heavy gamer but having to install like five storage-heavy game launchers just to play one game each is a mess. Alternatively, it doesn't even need to be with ActivityPub. The concept of repositories are already federated: often self-hosted or managed by company/organization and can be accessed by many clients. Imagine having MS Store install from Steam's repo the same way you can have Debian's Synaptic install from Microsoft's repo. The main opposing force for this is probably the DRM standard.
Lutris lets you launch and install all your games from one place and helps with compatibility as well. It's a pretty useful open source game launcher. It's not federated but might be cool to look in to
Nebula's customer service team won't even respond to my e-mails, so however great they might be for channel owners they're crap in my experience for people paying (or trying to pay) them.
There's just one big flaw. What about privacy? When I am on peer A and my employer is on peer B, they could not find my private profile easily. Because they didn't know I am on peer A. But when it's all interoperable, then they can easily fine me although I am on peer A and they're on peer B...
You can set your posts to be public or private or only available to certain people on Mastodon as you can on any other service. If you are relying on your employer not being on the platform that you are posting on publicly at all then I'm not sure you are doing privacy right in the first place
@@TechAltar Here in Germany, this isn't a big of a deal but I know in the US it might be. Locking posts down is a good option. Or just using a pseudonym.
The decentralized nature of Mastadon instances poses legality issues as well. If there is someone who posts genuinely illegal content on one instance, and it is then reposted to other instances, it can be very difficult to delete all copies.
As platforms become bigger and keep adding up services, federation could completely eliminate a significant chunk of legal liability almost instantly. My guess is this is appealing to big tech as most of them have already reached the limit of growth in their respective markets and are forced to continuously spread into other markets to maintain overall company growth. So federation in a very weird twisted way, could help companies to continue to pursue the everlasting high of record profits
I blocked Mastodon link verifier bots when they swarmed me with over 200 bots at once to verify one link and grossly inflated my page view counts. Moreover, most of the Mastodon servers I checked out had the same "community guidelines" as corporate social media sites. There's no real incentive for someone wanting to engage in honest discussions to join.
How would this handle international laws? I could imagine ways to abuse it for dictators and I think it might have problems with consumer privacy protection as well?
What’s in it for the non-business or -media operators of fediverse instances? Surely the same financial incentives to scale up and maximise data collection still exist. Simply having the option to access Meta platform content without meta directly tracking me would be nice, but if that’s the deal I can’t see the big players cooperating with the Fediverse in the long term. The browser-based open internet runs on advertising revenue, and that is almost entirely dependent on the data harvesting and cross-site tracking activities of a few big players. It is also a crumbling system that doesn’t properly reward good content and pushes media toward empty clickbait.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Get Nebula with a 40% discount using my link (sponsored): go.nebula.tv/techaltar
Interview - Eugen Rochko (Mastodon CEO): nebula.tv/videos/techaltar-the-future-of-mastodon-eugen-rochko-ceo
Interview - Matt Mullenweg (Automattic CEO, Tumblr, Wordpress, etc.): nebula.tv/videos/techaltar-tumblr-wordpress-embracing-activitypub-automattic-ceo-interview
Interview - Matej Svancer (OpenVibe CEO): nebula.tv/videos/techaltar-building-a-client-app-for-the-fediverse-openvibe-interview
Interview - John & Seb (SFBA.social Mastodon Instance operators): nebula.tv/videos/techaltar-running-a-mastodon-instance-with-38000-users-sfbasocial-interivew
Any chances that Nebula would integrate the fediverse for comments? That would be cool!
the last fifth reason is called "extend and extinguish" by the way
It is amazing to see open platforms thriving and more people using open source software on a daily basis 🎉
I am very curious how long this will last, most people don't seem to be willing to pay for it, and how would any company cope with the amount of data the big players do, especially when the big players are often the ones renting out server space to the little guys.
@@MegaLokopo a lot of people are willing to pay for it if and only if their server is run by an individual real person. like, Patreons etc by admins make money from grateful users. the corporations, though... they're gonna have to find customers somewhere else if they wanna get paid by users
@@raphaelmorgan2307 a lot of people are but not enough to make it work long term.
Wow my favourite distro in the comment section 😂😂😂
@@raphaelmorgan2307 I think the idea that people will pay enough donations to individual maintainers of websites and apps is very naive. If you talk to any admin of servers and forums, they will tell you that they always have to pay out of their own pocket to maintain the website. This is the reason Mastadon will never be huge - no one wants to pay, and the larger a server gets, admins will have to pay more to maintain the server, until they are no longer able to do so and the server shuts down. And users will flock to other servers. Rinse and repeat.
People: * freely chatting with their friends *
Facebook: absolutely not
Facebook is open platform, free and not restricted by hardware... Unlike Apple iOS?? If you want to swap to X or Snapchat or whatever, you can...
@@growtocycle6992Or, hear me out, we swap to Mastodon, Pixelfed and Peertube instead.
you never have free chatting from the beginning. Just think about previous years of paid mailing, telephone calls, mobile bills. Information exchange is never free unless you tell with own month, or pay someone to help deliver it :)
We do love the Fediverse. Thank you for the shoutout!
Why do you not have a check mark
@@Josh-oc7ib good point
Love the Vivaldi browser
media.tenor.com/F9CDMvpAcVkAAAAM/nerd-alert-bumper.gif
@@Josh-oc7ibnot above 100k subs
my father still uses the you got mail sound for his notifications which is funny to me
If I find out how to use it in windows 11, I'm gonna try it too 😅
I think a big comparison is email, since its also an interoperable protocol between different mailservers. One problem with email is that the big players like google have created network effects by making smaller email servers more likely to get put in the spam folder, which makes companies and organizations less willing to host their own mail server like they used to, and instead centralize on google or Microsoft etc. Will this same thing happen with the fediverse once it gets big enough for people to start to send spam with it (does it work like that?), and so the existing big servers will automatically block newer and smaller players leading to a network effect where you can't really create a new server? Just like email today?
I don't think this is going to happen. There are other threats that I feel will become soon relevant. I fear that small instances will die because of the costs caused by million and million of posts coming from big instances (as Marton explained, each post is "copied" into each federated instance. So, millions of posts coming at once from a big platforms like threads could overflood small servers with content that instance owners will have to pay for just for hosting reasons). This is going to either lead to "freemium" (paid or ad supported) hosting services like geocities in the past or to a forced defederation of small instances that will break the fediverse and the mark the return to closed walled gardens. That's what I'm mostly worried about.
huh? wdym? SMTP and that's it. if i send a fake email via SMTP spoofing i still get the emails on my gmail account as long as the host adress isn't xxx dot pron dot cuck you. at least as long as that fact didn't change since we did it in tech school 10 years ago... please tell me if it did...
i remember running my own email server in the 2000s and i was already late
what a time to be on the internet
@@neffscape6353 if someone is getting a lot of costs because their server federates with the big platforms, I think they'll probably stop federating with the big platforms before they simply give up on their instance. as far as @RemotHuman's fear, I think this is entirely likely but I don't particularly care, because the big platforms can only stop us from interacting with the big platforms. a large portion of us don't want to interact with them anyway, and are perfectly content to ignore them and create community with other smaller servers
@@neffscape6353could the storage of the posts be distributed similar to a torrent file? You'd have to host your posts yourself, or pay someone to store it for you in the cloud. Could lead to a bigger decentralization
Back then, everyone mocked Compuserve and AOL users for not having access to The Real Internet™
I remember finally getting an email address through Compuserve
Now we mock Facebook and Twatter users.
< Prodigy Internet :p
I was a legit power user back in the day and I still respected the hell out of AOL. There was a time when they were just right about everything.
As it should be
I swear to god this is one lf the most underrated channels on youtube. Been watching you for almost 8 years. Keep up the good work, I really really like the format you've got going on!
My thoughts exactly! +1
yes totally agree. its insane how well his videos are made. insta click on every single video in my subs!!
I wouldn't really consider a channel with 700k subs to be underrated lol
He is underrated . i have seen channels with 10% potential going 10x than this channel .
Been watching him when he had hairs 😂❤️❤️
To be fair, the argument that some servers might refuse to delete your content is very similar to pointing out that people can download your RUclips videos. Though true that it might be a lot more pervasive. It'll be interesting to see how the law interacts with that eventuality if it occurs.
When I delete a youtube video, sure maybe 5 people somewhere downloaded it. But there's a big difference if dozens of platforms all have their own copies of that video, and God only knows if or when they'll getting around to deleting it. A user copy - small consequences. Multiple platforms sharing a copy out of your control - larger consequences.
The EU has a "right to be forgotten law", which means these servers need to delete the content. What happens when servers pick up the content from outside is not clear however.
@@the11382 Well that's great for the 27 countries in the EU. But most of the world doesn't have laws like that (to my knowledge). But even then, we're talking about speed of deleting content as well. A law might force them to delete within the week, but that's about 5 years in internet time.
@@65Drumsthat doesn't really invalidate the point of OP, sure a user having saved a local version of a file doesn't broadcast it to new users by default but if we assume ill intent, a user reposting a video on another platform would be just as bad.
Plus, there wouldn't be any notification of the original getting deleted which is the case in the proposed model.
IMHO, you have to assume ill intent for there to be a problem and if you do, all bets are off.
from my experience the issue has more to do with federation bugs i guess. i've seen deleted posts regularly not getting removed on other instances by random chance, but quite often
The instant someone explained to me that the fediverse worked very similarly to the email I immediately got it.
Not so difficult to understand after all, at least the general idea.
Then you haven't understood the pain that is e-mail.
@@B20C0pains are there for email ... But most of it is about spam and sorting. Which is not that hard compared to sorting and storing physical mail. Especially storing. Imagine the amount of physical mail you have to sift through. Imagine your work mail and personal mail together. But it's less of a pain than it is with email. Most people would appreciate having to use only one social media platform with their favourite or used to ui experience.
From my understanding the fediverse itself isn't working like email. Maston and other similar apps work like email. Threads for example in fediverse is like a single instance in metadon. We can't create our own instance in threads. Correct me if I'm wrong. I am also trying to understand this 😅
@@45jobinjose One of the things that the fediverse makes you aware of is that "apps" aren't really apps. They're often a lot of things that got glued together and locked in. And stuff like Mastodon, based on the idea of a shared protocol, forces you to think more about that, because having that protocol allows for a lot of freedom. Like email and all that.
Threads is supposed to (one day) work with Mastodon instances and all other ActivityPub services. As the video explains, there's already a few Threads accounts exposed within the fediverse. You can use Mastodon or Akkoma or Shorkey or whatever and it works... in one direction, to follow a few Threads accounts, for now.
@@45jobinjose that is correct. Threads is just another centralized silo which plans to open up to the larger network. You cannot create your own Threads server or whatnot, you can't self-host it. It's just the Meta offering and that's it.
And yes, it's not exactly working "like email", but the idea is there. Say you like how Twitter works, but you don't like its current leadership (I mean, kinda understandable these days). What do you do? Just get a server and run your own version of Twitter? With Mastodon, that's possible. Say you don't like how Xitter (I think it's a more fitting name for it, sorry) looks and behaves, but people are there (or Facebook, for example). What do you do? Just try to adapt to it? Wouldn't it be better for you to use whatever you like and still access the content you want? That's what the Fediverse allows you to do.
4:10 POV: Someone sees your search history.
It's not my search history, but the most popular websites ranked by traffic :P
@@TheFridayCheckout😂😂😂😂
I was looking for this comment 💀
@@TheFridayCheckout😂
@@TheFridayCheckoutthe world is cancelled on Twitter 😹😹😹
What you're also seeing with Mastodon is also a policy choice. They call it the Server Covenant -- essentially, to get listed on their first-party directory, your instance has to commit to a baseline set of content moderation rules. (If memory serves this was shortly after Gab moved to a Mastodon instance, but don't quote me on this.) So while it's still *possible* to discover instances that don't, to a certain degree there's a filter for it being applied to the network at large.
One thing that I can foresee happening is a further fragmentation of the internet. You can choose to leave a federation if you do not like it, join another, or even start your own. Kind of like subreddits, fragmenting users and giving them their own bespoke experiences. But it can also lead to echo chambers that fuel extremism. Which we already see on reddit to a level.
Too true, Ive seen this pattern in discord servers as well
But that’s also exactly what social media and the Internet at large needs. Kurzgesagt has a good video, explaining the double edge sword that is large social networks, and its affects on society and division.
The entirety of reddit has become this. Even on centrist subs it's dominated by the woke left. Reddit really needs to remove moderators, actually higher people and have an objective guideline because right now you basically cannot say anything on that site even with factual proof.
We already have whole Lemmy instances that are echo chambers full of extremism. They're often banned by many instances which isolates them even further. It's already a problem and there's not much that can be done. But those would likely exist regardless, federated or not.
I absolutely agree with you..
What's stopping this ActivityPub network from sharing the same fate as WWW-that is, becoming commercialized to the point of enshittification?
Nothing.
a large crowd source. If a lot of different servers opt into this standardization, then any change for the worse will upset a lot of users that could easily 'stay on the older' version or fork it themselves
Migration too. For example, changing browsers as become not to bad now. Transferring bookmarks, sessions, and local storage with a simple click. Now apply this to creators, what if it was just one click on youtube to migrate all videos, comments, likes, and views to a whole new platform whenever you wanted
The main prerequisite for enshittification is lock-in. RUclips can be shitty to its creators because all the viewers are there and it can be shitty to its viewers because all the creators are there. There is no way to leave RUclips without losing access to these other parties. But on the fediverse? If a good enough competitor to RUclips comes along, guess what? I'm out and I'm taking all my network links to the other side with me.
@@wchorskiexcept that all IT departments are forever telling people to use chrome to fix their problems because google has somehow managed to undermine the compatibility of non-chromium browsers with many modern sites. In theory the web is open and interoperable, but that hasn’t been entirely successful.
Not sure why you keep bringing up Dorsey. As you mention in the video yourself, the AT protocol is different from ActivityPub, so putting his face next to the protocol there 12:54 is just misleading. What's more, he has left BlueSky a while ago, even going as far as deleting his account, he is all in on Nostr now, which is yet another protocol.
Fun Fact AOL still exist and have over a million subscribers most of the subscribers signed up more than a decade ago and forgot
"enshitify" is my new favourite word! hahahahahaha
It's from an article called "the enshittification of Tiktok" written by Cory Doctorow in January last year, on Wired. It's good, but I can't post links here.
Enshittification is a pretty established term by now tbh I read it every now and then in different contexts
To be honest this is one of the last channels I would expect making a dedicated ActivityPub video this "early" in its life.
Been online since the BBS and CompuServe days. Never used AOL or MSN because it wasn't necessary. All you needed was a dial-up ISP.
Dear Techaltar congratulations to 700.000 subscribers
Thanks!
damn, only 700000? its easily one of my favorite channels
@@TechAltarboycott y t
@@dongshengdi773why?
Comparison between google building its empires on open protocls and what meta is trying to do now is absolutely genious and makes everything very easy to understand
Care to elaborate on what meta is trying to do now that is different than Google?
@@growtocycle6992 If you read my comment you would see i am complimanting the creator on explaining the situation by framing it with similarities between previous actions of google.
I would like to see this in the instant messaging universe. Same platform for every phone number, users choose their operator (Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, Line, etc)
Matrix
Except perhaps not phone numbers … widespread sharing of phone numbers are something of a security vulnerability given how many banks and utilities still use SMS verification, and also can exacerbate digital harassment for many people.
Now I finally know what URL stands for :D
Ok I already forgot it 🙃
@@bubbleman91same
@@bubbleman91 URL = Uniform Resource Locator. There's also URN, which is a Uniform Resource Name. Both are types of URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). 😉
@@bubbleman91 universal resource locator (i think)
As a web developer I am ashamed that I forgot the fulform 🥲
Despite the odds, I am really hoping something like this takes shape. I grew up in the early 2000s, and as a kid I really only got to see the tail end of the old internet as everything pivoted to walled gardens. I feel nostalgia for the 90s internet, despite never really getting to experience it. I'm really hopeful this catches on, though my logic is telling me it is unlikely or that it will go down very differently to the open source dreams of the platforms and standards. But this did convince me to create a mastadon account! I'm excited to see how I like it.
We got 14.6 million users at the moment! I think it already took great shape :D
Heya, have fun! I think you'll be surprised what you can get out of it, even if you don't ever get to move everyone in your family and friends and school/job. Treat it as a new world you're exploring, at first seemingly inhabited but quirkier the more you delve in.
Also on that note: you'll probably quickly get bombarded with people telling you to move from Mastodon(.social) to Firefish or Misskey or Akkoma or alike. Succumb to the pressure! Join other places! Experiment! Don't be ashamed to have multiple accounts! Have fun with the platform itself, it's yours too now!
The start of this video made me nostalgic for the early web and it feels like the Fediverse is the natural evolution of blogs and forums that got subverted by Big Tech's walled gardens that made everything convenient and centralised. It also meant we got mined for data and now they have us the enshittification has started.
I'm borderline evangelical for the Fediverse and, while I haven't got everything up and running on there, I am throwing my lot in with the Fediverse. I've also ended up helping to run a medium sized Lemmy instance.
So I reckon everyone should give it a go, there's a service available to fit everyone's needs.
I feel a similar way despite being born in 2005 I grew up with the centralized social media giants and hearing how the Internet used to work in seeing how we are going back to that and better makes me really hopeful when I first joined Mastodon it was such a weird concept to get a hold of "social media platforms working... together????" I just found that concept so baffling because I grew up with them fighting against one another and seeing that not one person owns the platform was incredibly interesting and that compelled me to stay on the platform and cross post to both Twitter and Mastodon I would like to think Mastodon is my main platform as I like the community
These are the kinds of conversations I want us to be having. It’s thoughtful, interesting, and important.
Thank you for making another great video!
Yeah, I like decentralisation but I don’t want a tsunami of more dead links.
A lot of the objections with federating with Threads has to do with a fear that Threads will embrace, extend, and extinguish the open protocols. This has happened before with XMPP/Jabber and Google Talk.
Killer video, thanks for all the hard work!
The key to all these different decentralised, maybe confusing instances is to find the right one for you. And that's in most cases not one of the big ones. There are instances for geographical reasons, where you can find information about the city or region you live in. Or instances dedicated to different interests - be it your profession or your hobby. Choosing wisely means getting a whole new way of using social media.
Sadly it also means it is going to suck to use, until someone makes a good search engine again.
I really hope the Fediverse succeeds, I hate walled gardens and I would love to follow everyone from my own instance
What's your instance :D?
Isn’t this the same as having to identify yourself to use websites?
Why aren't you already on it? There are enough public instances.
@@Turdfergusen382no, it's like having a Twitter account but you also own Twitter
@@Turdfergusen382no, it's like having a Twitter account except you own your account instead of Elon Musk owning your account
0:12 {Correction} from a plethora of CD’s … it could be found ANYWHERE… couch cushions, cup coasters hanging on a string in groups like an art installation… c’mon people help me out with this list …
Will Nebula be building out ActivityPub/fediverse support?
PoketCasts was the GOAT and than is shat all of us who paid it, and made us switch to the subsription model.
They could at least have given us a 6 month subscription just in good faith.
Fuck Auttomatic. Tumblr is such a good platform but leadership is slowly crumbling away every good part of it.
A thing people often miss is when you come up with Open Protocols is that it also makes the data way more scrapable, you con't just turn that off like say reddit has now.
So if you support Open protocols and standards you also have to support the possibility that someone would use you public data for training or other things.
Please correct me if I'm going wrong with the assumption.
It's correct. As said by everyone, you should not seek privacy (as in your data being private) at all in the Fediverse. The Fediverse is all about making your data public to as much instances as possible.
I think those are separate issues. Open protocols do not mean open data: if we look at Mastodon, you can make your posts unlisted so they wouldn't be shared in the public feed of your server, but they are still publicly visible if someone directly goes to your profile, so there is a granularity to how available the "public" data is.
And what you share on the Internet can still be protected by copyright law, which means that for your data to be used for training, you must agree to it first, which is something OpenAI, Stability AI and probably others are in the middle of legal battles about (see Stability AI vs Getty, OpenAI vs New York Times).
you won't be scraped on the fediverse if your privacy settings are set that way
@@Pythagoras1plus privacy settings? which privacy settings lol
@@xE92vDpostings aren't polled like with RSS, as you might be thinking. every follower *subscribes* to the account and thus every follower gets new posts sent to them like e-mail newsletters do. federation only needs the name/handle to be public. lock down all privacy settings, e.g. require to review follow requests, disable search engine scraping and explore-timeline visibility. then set your default post visibility to followers-only and your profile is private, server-to-server and server-to-client encrypted and by no means scrapable - because the postings are not pulled from your profile, but get sent actively to the followers
Another well researched, greatly written video that objectively goes into pros and conds and avoids being biased. Great work as always Márton!
Imagine the backend of the application is mostly MQTT brokers, IPFS swarm for content backup, and mostly the content is all stored in the users browsers so when Bob wants to see Jim's cat picks the network would download those picks from other browser instances that are online that have already looked at those cat picks.
That sounds really stupid.
Good luck making that sort of system compete with modern internet systems, there is just too much data, it doesn't scale well, which is why it has never worked in the past despite being tried periodically.
so technically you can do and view anything from any domain instance if this becomes the standard
6:26 I thought that you as an engineer would understand what exponential means. The complexity is stated on the wiki page - it's quadratic.
That's the basis of the open web though, completely open and free is what drive the early free internet into what it is today. To a degree, monetisation led to control and structure and while that maybe not what the modern internet built on today I don't think it will be beneficial to the new protocol system that want to capitalise on the same growth.
I whole heartedly agree, but can also understand the creator's perspective. I am against monetization as to what it lead in the past (data harvesting, content farms) however, creators need to survive. Maybe the problem is much more systemic and can't be solved through tech! Maybe artists need bigger societal / governmental support in order to not be profit driven.
I think they will just need to go the old fashion way of just finding a recurring sponsor for their content. That has always been how traditional publishers operate (news, magazine) which got hijacked by the modern algorithm-base distribution. Creators depend on platform like RUclips less for payment but more for reach and content distribution, if they can all have their own social media network, they should be able to just find a sponsor (the cost of video publishing is way lower than traditional print media)@@ErikUden
@@ErikUdenCreators can always just list their public crypto wallet or PayPal address and ask their users to donate to them. Or they could get in-video sponsorships. Patreon donations and in-video/in-post sponsorships already make up a significant portion of the revenue creators make, so they'd probably make even more money if there weren't other ads on the platform distracting users from their sponsorships, and if they didn't have to pay Patreon's obscene transaction fees.
As for the platform itself, they could also request donations. Maybe whenever the user opens the app, if they've donated less than $5 in the past month, it will interrupt them and ask for a donation. But also, because PeerTube uses BitTorrent technology, it will probably be much cheaper to run than RUclips. And other decentralised social media are probably even cheaper to run.
6:04 I don't really bother, I just basically use whatever mesanger app they use. I do talk about truelly private options like Jami and Signal though.
Hey, great video, as always!
Small correction, at around 6:20, you state that Metcalfe's law describes an exponential increase of value as a function of participant, while in fact, it's "only" quadratic (it even says so on the wiki screenshot you posted).
Excellent comprehensive view of the potential pluses and pitfalls of the Fediverse and the ActvityPub protocols. I'm anxious to start checking out some of the associated interview material through my Nebula account! 😁
Great video. Your best video in a while!
After watching the whole video, I think that Nostr could be a nice option for you to see as well.
It's a different protocol which works like the Fediverse but instead of every server being an instance, they are simply relays, also monetization is native to the protocol due to a tight integration with the Lightning Network (a Bitcoin's second layer).
It solves many of the problems that were mentioned in the video, but of course, it changes a number of comprimises for others.
I would appreciate if the video had subtitles (not auto-generated).
I wonder why Friday Checkout didn't come out but after this I was relieved. You always give your best.
I made an account - on a server that doesn't work with mobile apps. I're tried the standard apps. Might have to figure out how to switch.
I’m confused where the actual data is stored. Does every member of the Fediverse store a copy of every post? Are edits allowed? If so, do you download the whole edit history? If not I’m guessing there’s limits to which Fediverse compatible service you can migrate to. I think you could get around this some of this with caching but then how do you do search? Very curious about the AP spec though. Really enjoyed the video!
For example Alice is signed in and posts on americium instance and bob is signed on Neptunium instance. When bob wants to view the post Alice posted. Order to do this neptunium instance's main server(s) would download the post through a request from americium instance then serve it to bob
@@Choroalp I see that makes sense. I presume that caching would be up to the party that's requesting the data (neptunium in your example). Do you know if the monetization model would be some sort of revenue share for paying subscribers? It seems like this sort of distributed model doesn't benefit the ad-centric monetization model of social networks today.
The Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) is the future of the internet.
Never had AOL in Serbia - but I used browser guessing web adresses, Yahoo Mail and Geocities sites.
If you've been online any time since 2000-05 then AOL was pretty much dead, de facto. I've been online since 2007 and never heard of AOL until later on, and if I didn't watch this video, I might have never known what was it actually about. I thought it was just a sort of provider like Google, offering mail and IM.
As for the larger internet, I always thought it was something developed internally for the US Army and then some people adopted it for civilian use and its usage gradually boomed. Now I know a hell of a lot more, wow.
@@catalinpetrescu8488 I've actually been online since around 1997-8 ...It's just that in Serbia AOL was an unknown entity. You basically just browsed at random and found geocities sites and, eventually, forums.
In my country msn was the standard and then google off course we had our own sapo out of a university but idk how popular it was in the aol day i don’t even know if aol was offerered here, i only started using the internet in 2004? Thru other people computers And on my own in 2007
The only RUclipsr who discuses the relevant ideas. Love your channel!! Been a subscriber since last 9 years! 🎉
Great info, man. It'll be interesting to see where the Fediverse goes.
It reminds me of the futurama episode about the scammer aliens and their sprunger noses - benders big score. They would be so happy for everyone to send their datas into a big Cambridge Analytica sprunger
You can massively improve the protocol by making every post have tags associated with it. NSFW could be a tag individual instances or users filter for, which reduces the overhead of moderation. Everything in the Fediverse becomes semi-permeable.
That is already a field in the JSON responses sent to federated instances.
@@xE92vD Odd how TechAlter didn't mention it. Several instances even expand upon this, looking at the documentation. Moderation should be many times easier than TechAlter initially suggests then.
That would be nice, but it is too easy of a system to abuse.
@@MegaLokopo Nah, this isn't a utopia, just a reduction of the problem of moderation to mostly bad actors, instead of including a lot of good faith actors.
@@the11382 id argue moderation should be dealt with by the end user. I don't want Hitler deciding what is and isn't okay. He isn't in power today, but I don't trust he never will be, and I don't want anyone having moderation control over other people just themselves.
Cool, but in modern days its hard to see people moving from status quo, in any instance. A change in habits is the hardest thing.
Idea for website hosting without hosting: You upload a file or a website and it gets bounced around in many clients to other clients and it's really hard to lose that data
I wonder if maybe the Peertube protocol works against it. Rather than the content item (in this case, the video) being in every server that requests the video, it might be better if the service requests the video from the server the user uploaded it to.
But neither work that well, tbh.
Good morning Marton!
Morning :)
@@TechAltar good afternoon 4.20pm Thailand
normally i watch your video on the release date, but i missed this one, probably because of mark's face in the thumbnail (i just ignore big tech names)
6:17 According to the page on the screen, the value of the network rises quadratically, not exponentially.
If the fediverse adds a dislike button I will hop on board so fast
Lemmy has one
Some Fedi clients, such as Misskey, Pleroma, and Akkoma, have what are called "emoji reactions" (akin to Discord) which, while not being likes/dislikes, are still really good at expressing disapproval of a post. You can add custom emojis, too! My instance has a cute fox pointing a middle finger, for example
I wasn't big on reddit but I'm loving using Lemmy
Lemmy stronger than the loser spez
I tried Lemmy, but there's nothing there. Everything i search for still ends up being on that shithole Reddit.
21:01 That's a GOOD thing NOT a bad thing. Because each instance can moderate there own way and it is not one corporate overlord that is a dictator and makes all the decisions. So if one instance determines the content shouldn't be deleted they can choose to keep it, and if you don't like it then block them or if it's copyright infringement fight them. But as we know many corporate giants censore stuff and temove content that they should not.
Stuff like the fediverse make me so excited about the future of tech
@@ZenAndPsychedelicHealingCenter That's just blatantly wrong. It takes time for things to pick up popularity, just because it didn't blow the day it launched doesn't mean it's dead and outdated. This is pretty standard for standards, which fediverse is one. But go off lmao
What a great informative video. Thank you!
I love how you made a video on how Fediverse will break walled gardens, and at the end of the video, you promote your own walled garden, Nebula :p
we all have to put bread on the table, and god forbid bro get a real job
As opposed to what, getting sponsored by some scam like MasterWorks? Foh lmao, at least Nebula was created by content creators. Nebula isn’t even a walled garden platform, fym. It’s just a streaming service with content behind a paywall.
You are watching this on RUclips, a closed source, walled garden owned by a bazillion dollar company, TechAltar has to pay his bills and pay for his food, give him a break and shove the hypocrisy up your ass.
Open standards are great and all, but the main reason why Mastodon servers fail (and I imagine its the same for other fediverse services) is because it becomes too costly to operate. Facebook isn't evil because it's a singular entity who owns and controls all the servers that Facebook uses, facebook is evil for all the "other" things they do. Data collection, targeted ads etc etc etc.
Really good and important video! It asks and answers the main questions I had about this. Bring activity pub on!
I really like Mastodon, but considering increasing user numbers, how is the infrastructure cost supposed to be paid for? Is there any idea?
I like how there are still hard-working and thoughtful people still trying to make the internet more open - and not turning to scams (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) or monopolisation.
It's not really about hardworking or thoughtful. It's more like someone solves a problem for themselves or as a hobby, and because software is infinitely replicable, everyone can benefit from it.
who said bitcoin is a scam lol
This kid thinks bitcoin is a scam lmao
@@Reivi it is
@@ricelovingasian69everyone with a brain lol
Hey! I have a question 🙋 if instances are federated that means hosting is federated as well? Isn’t this hosting redundancy inefficient with resources, thus making it harder to turn a profit?
Any federated server has to provide its own hosting, just like any website does. You're only storing the accounts and feeds of the users on your instance though, so the amount of redundancy isn't too bad. Big social networks like Facebook need lots of redundancy as well to alleviate traffic bottlenecks, so while they're centralized in the sense that they're operated by a single corporate entity, they still include a lot of decentralization physically. Fediverse instances can be a lot smaller than the entire network, so they don't need as much infrastructure. I imagine the vast majority of instances can remain tiny (< 100 users), and run on an old laptop in a closet somewhere.
If you want to host something on the Internet then someone has to pay for hosting it. I'm seeing a rise in "data co-ops" where 50-200 people pool their money and knowledge together to host one for just a couple of bucks per year each. One person can have a basic server for $5 per month (I do) but if you get a few dozen people together you can have a pretty good one for $5 a year a person.
It's not like cryptocurrencies where every server processes every transaction. It's more like email - your server processes your emails and ones that people send to you.
Jack Dorsey will eventually evolve into Samurai Jack.
It's not up to the protocols to build payment into themselves. It's up to services which use those protocols. They'll figure out something, they always do.
Is the opening desktop a Packard Bell?
love how moderation is a problem.. i mean aside from disruptive things like spambots and the like who cares? it's moderation and censorship that should die as a central idea, people can regulate themselves all they want in their bubbles, but forcing it as a default on everyone is unacceptable.
WWW and HTML were already around when AOL started offering the services in the video, why is the story changed to sound like Tim Berner Lee created WWW in response to private internet attempts?
Not sure what you mean by WWW and HTML. One is the World Wide Web and one is the HyperText Markup Language used to build the structure of a website.
@@xE92vD yes and that's what I mean by WWW and HTML, they were invented by Tim Berners-Lee long before AOL's hub was a thing and the video is portraying them as if they were the response just to fit the story but it's incorrect information.
We should ALWAYS be worried about people like Zuckerberg.
I just want this but for messaging apps not for social media
That's called email. There's a program called Delta Chat that makes chat work through email. There's also XMPP which is an actual chat system that works like this.
Same. I treat social media just like real life. I connect witn different type of people on different platform. Like how we live our daily lives, different dynamics depending where we are who we are with. I don't want what I post in Facebook also show up in LinkedIn 😂
But for messaging, this totally makes sense, like phone calls and sms. Just works on any phone models or OS.
Look into XMPP, IRC, Matrix, Signal, etc :)
Check out Matrix
The fediverse is literally just email but for for social media; email is the fediverse but for messaging
Can anyone explain me what does nimble internet native google means, around 03:28
Concept is all nice, but who will host the data? Given that it has those protocols which is standardised.
Somewhere somethings got to store them.
...the respective owners/admins of the individual instances?
"That's why I always believe there should be a diversification on the internet, as having a monopoly can sometimes lead to harm in various aspects, such as total control or privacy issues. If Europe, India, Latin America, Australia, or another region of the world created their own version of the internet, similar to what China did, we might live a bit better without relying solely on the Americans."
Who is this quote from?
Sure, because that really works out for chinese citizens! lol
Who made that quote o.O?
@@monstrositylabs In fact, it actually does work out for the average Chinese citizen. When you have billions of people connected to your walled garden, you basically get something for everyone, there are tons of interesting videos, social media posts, and articles. Of course, there's heavy state control and censorship, but this mostly affects political, news and economical content, i.e., a fraction of what's interesting on the Internet.
You don’t need to have your own limited Internet if they just don’t monopolize and ruin the Internet like they’ve already done. there’s virtually no privacy on the Internet in China a lot sites and things aren’t even allowed either. It’s way too limited and surveyed.
Zuckerberg being interested in something is a disastrous sign
No one at the time ever thought AOL was The Internet, we were actually a lot smarter than you give us credit for. AOL didn't define us, I can't say the same for the social mediia users of today.
I would love this idea too for movies and entertainment.
Someone explain to me how this isn't just massively increased fingerprinting that allows all your activity to be tracked more than it already is
ActivityPub has nothing to do with privacy, but being public. If a company wants to track you or whatever, they are free to do so. Though mastodon and lemmy or such are all open source software. But who said the software running on the server is the one that is actually FOSS?
I'm personally thinking about creating a federated game launcher ecosystem, but I don't really have the time or the energy for it at the moment.
That'd be cool, but SAME! No one working on open source stuff has time, energy, or money.
That would actually be cool. I'm not a heavy gamer but having to install like five storage-heavy game launchers just to play one game each is a mess.
Alternatively, it doesn't even need to be with ActivityPub. The concept of repositories are already federated: often self-hosted or managed by company/organization and can be accessed by many clients. Imagine having MS Store install from Steam's repo the same way you can have Debian's Synaptic install from Microsoft's repo. The main opposing force for this is probably the DRM standard.
Lutris lets you launch and install all your games from one place and helps with compatibility as well. It's a pretty useful open source game launcher. It's not federated but might be cool to look in to
Everyone dissing the big companies: content creator monetization is going to be the biggest hurdle imho.
Nebula's customer service team won't even respond to my e-mails, so however great they might be for channel owners they're crap in my experience for people paying (or trying to pay) them.
Nebula is also a small company currently facing growing pains... so personally I feel like I can cut them a little more slack.
@@FreeManFreeThought That's all well and good, but there's no excuse for not responding at all to a customer. Not even a generic reply!
buy having a server on fedaverse do we have to buy domain name also?
What is pixel fan didn't find on Google
Just discovered this channel. Amazing content. You have got yourself a new subscriber
There's just one big flaw. What about privacy? When I am on peer A and my employer is on peer B, they could not find my private profile easily. Because they didn't know I am on peer A. But when it's all interoperable, then they can easily fine me although I am on peer A and they're on peer B...
You can set your posts to be public or private or only available to certain people on Mastodon as you can on any other service. If you are relying on your employer not being on the platform that you are posting on publicly at all then I'm not sure you are doing privacy right in the first place
@@TechAltar Here in Germany, this isn't a big of a deal but I know in the US it might be. Locking posts down is a good option. Or just using a pseudonym.
this was a great breakdown, thanks
thank god the top 10 most visited websites were sparred
Quality informative content, may your subs be many!
Good point 5 about Meta doing an "embrace extend extinguish" to activitypub
The decentralized nature of Mastadon instances poses legality issues as well. If there is someone who posts genuinely illegal content on one instance, and it is then reposted to other instances, it can be very difficult to delete all copies.
Especially when every country have different laws.
As platforms become bigger and keep adding up services, federation could completely eliminate a significant chunk of legal liability almost instantly.
My guess is this is appealing to big tech as most of them have already reached the limit of growth in their respective markets and are forced to continuously spread into other markets to maintain overall company growth.
So federation in a very weird twisted way, could help companies to continue to pursue the everlasting high of record profits
I blocked Mastodon link verifier bots when they swarmed me with over 200 bots at once to verify one link and grossly inflated my page view counts. Moreover, most of the Mastodon servers I checked out had the same "community guidelines" as corporate social media sites. There's no real incentive for someone wanting to engage in honest discussions to join.
How would this handle international laws? I could imagine ways to abuse it for dictators and I think it might have problems with consumer privacy protection as well?
What’s in it for the non-business or -media operators of fediverse instances? Surely the same financial incentives to scale up and maximise data collection still exist. Simply having the option to access Meta platform content without meta directly tracking me would be nice, but if that’s the deal I can’t see the big players cooperating with the Fediverse in the long term.
The browser-based open internet runs on advertising revenue, and that is almost entirely dependent on the data harvesting and cross-site tracking activities of a few big players. It is also a crumbling system that doesn’t properly reward good content and pushes media toward empty clickbait.