I think the implication here is that ActivityPub is still server to server. Is better distributed than one closed-monolith to another, but BitTorrent was really good client to client. Protocol wise it’s probably not perfect for small updates, but imagine if you just had a magnet link to your friends’ “website” which, instead of being hosted somewhere is available when they update it and gets distributed around peers.
Sounds like Bitcoin to me. Bitcoin took so long to get invented because if you went to a computer science conference and said you'd give a talk about how you built a node network 20,000 computers in it that does as much work as 1 computer did people would just laugh at you.
Now if you had a system with 20,000 computers where there are 20 copies of your content in the system that might be interesting, but peer-to-peer networks can easily be a way to make Amazon Web Services look cheap the same way that Bitcoin makes Visa and Mastercard look fast and inexpensive.
You don't need durability or even reliability. It can be completely ephemeral. It's social commentary, and that doesn't need to live more than a day. There isn't even a need for an SLA.
A simple in-memory object store with basic signing for authorship would work. This isn't even a hard problem. It's a UI/UX problem. Let individual clients / implementers worry about customer specific asks, like video, media, voting, and persistence. The core protocol should just be about exchanging messages in a swarm and clients keeping track of the nodes that they like.
The big win here is that everyone gets to decide upon their own algorithm and curation. You could compose your own Hacker News and suppress stories about Bitcoin. The next big win is that it's censorship resistant (you can opt into whatever personal censorship or automatic curation you want). There are no misaligned incentives between the platform and the consumer, so you can do whatever you want with the product. Finally, since the data and protocol are first class, you can meld it into whatever you'd like.
As someone who builds recommendation, filtering and moderation systems I think most of the discussion on the topic is naive.
About a billion pieces of content are posted to social media a day, maybe you can look at 100 of those, so no matter how you look at it content is being winnowed down by a ratio of 1-to-10,000,000. Maybe I can afford to show you one comment that was inspired by Fox News's ceaseless agenda spamming on certain issues. Trouble is, some people like to keep repeating things that other people repeat and they're going to cry censorship if I am not showing you 99/100 pieces of content. Trouble is all that spam displaces real content that somebody put blood, sweat and tears into plus it also poisons the well and drives consumers away. (You never hear complaints about "censorship" in the West when it is a book or an investigative journalism project that takes person-years, it is always in the context of low-effort imitation, spam, etc.)
This 1971 book is head and shoulders better than anything I've seen written recently
about the problem of personalized news media. I find it quite interesting that the book predicted we were going to have something like the WWW almost 15 years before we actually did. (Technologically we did, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel. The trouble was the lack of a business model to make it a sustainable business outside France. Technology had to progress so far that it was so cheap that we didn't have to think about it as a business when we were deploying to people...)
Most notably Bagdikian points out the severity of the filtering problem, that the editor of a small town paper looking at the AP feed in 1971 could spend at most 6 seconds deciding what article to run.
In recent years we've had an epidemic of aquired situational narcissism where someone whose life was just work, sleep, eat, repeat suddenly discovers that the government did something really bad with respect to COVID-19 and now they wake up and their computer is now a command center and they are trying to organize everybody. I will hear what they have to say but I am not going to stand for them repeating and this person has another 999 just like them and, sorry, I listened to the first person once and just don't have time for the other 999.
Thank you for posting this. Until you've been on the infrastructure side of the problem you'll never truly grasp how big the internet is and how much of it is crap. I had managed a lot of email and SMTP filtering in the past and had a few users that really complained when things got past the spam filter. One user was complaining they were getting around 20 or so spams per day out out of about 100 received messages, and I agreed it seemed high compared to most users. Then I looked at the number of messages we blocked for that one user alone. Around 3 to 4 thousand messages every single day.
Without moderation and without limits spammers would just use up all the bandwidth and compute they could find blasting you off the face of the map.
