Meta is Building a Decentralized, Text-Based Social Network (platformer.news) 107
Twitter's decline is paving the way for other platforms to build next-generation replacements. And now the biggest player in the game is getting involved: Meta is in the early stages of building a dedicated app for people to post text-based updates. From a report: "We're exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates," the company told Platformer exclusively in an email. "We believe there's an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests." News that Meta has been exploring a text-based network was first reported Thursday by MoneyControl. The app is codenamed P92 and will allow users to log in through their existing Instagram credentials, the outlet reported.
Details about the project are scant. The product is still in its earliest stages, sources said, and there is no time frame for it being released. But legal and regulatory teams have already started to investigate potential privacy concerns around the app so they can be addressed before launch, we're told. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, is taking the lead on the project, sources said. The most remarkable aspect of the project is that Meta plans for the network to be decentralized. While the company would not elaborate beyond its statement, in a decentralized network individual users are typically able to set up their own, independent servers and set server-specific rules for how content is moderated. Building a decentralized network could also give Meta the opportunity for its new app to interoperate with other social products -- a previously unheard-of gesture from a company known for building some of the most lucrative walled gardens in the industry's history.
Details about the project are scant. The product is still in its earliest stages, sources said, and there is no time frame for it being released. But legal and regulatory teams have already started to investigate potential privacy concerns around the app so they can be addressed before launch, we're told. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, is taking the lead on the project, sources said. The most remarkable aspect of the project is that Meta plans for the network to be decentralized. While the company would not elaborate beyond its statement, in a decentralized network individual users are typically able to set up their own, independent servers and set server-specific rules for how content is moderated. Building a decentralized network could also give Meta the opportunity for its new app to interoperate with other social products -- a previously unheard-of gesture from a company known for building some of the most lucrative walled gardens in the industry's history.
Eh (Score:2)
So they are re-inventing IRC? (Score:5, Informative)
Or is it usenet?
Everything old is new again.
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If it's already decentralized, it wouldn't even need to use Mastodon's protocol to be interoperable. Anyone could create their own translation layer to bridge it.
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If it's not walled off it will be (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: So they are re-inventing IRC? (Score:2)
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Re: So they are re-inventing IRC? (Score:3)
Theyâ(TM)re bringing back .plan files
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I do *not* want meta to `finger` me.
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Reading followon comments to your post, I'd think that they didn't know what usenet *is*.
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Just when someone else posted that google groups was on the way out...
Seriously? (Score:2)
Even if Twitter is "more popular then ever" (which I highly doubt), it is veritably not more profitable then ever (not that it was ever particularly profitable). Most advertisers are gone and the number of people willing to pay for blue check-marks are not enough to cover the costs of running the service, even after massive cuts to personnel and infrastructure that created frequent service outages. Even the richest (correction, second richest, for now) man in the world can only throw money on a bonfire fo
"Twitter's decline" was all the bias I needed (Score:1, Interesting)
And somehow, the service is still running the same with much less staff.
The only "decline" is in corruption. I don't use Twitter, but I would trust it more now than ever before.
As for Meta making a Twitter-a-like, I doubt that would have much traction since th
Re: "Twitter's decline" was all the bias I needed (Score:5, Funny)
I read your comment and suffered a -2 to INT. Thanks for that.
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Re:"Twitter's decline" was all the bias I needed (Score:5, Insightful)
It's breaking more often, they don't know who they are employees are, they are failing to pay bills, and debts are piling up .. ...it will go under not due to anyone's interference in it's operation but because it's not making money
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More accurate headline: "more people take a moment to watch dumpsters as dumpster fires surge."
Are active daily users still up? I doubt it.
Re:"Twitter's decline" was all the bias I needed (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny to me that that is your take away.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised coming from someone who thinks giving all of the footage to a single journalist with a well known ideological slant will some how result in some sort of unbiased reliable coverage that somehow disproves all of the footage we have all seen of protestors beating cops and breaking their way in through windows and the like.
I mean, thanks to the text and email releases from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox we know that Tucker, much like a number of his other Fox hosts, doesn't even believe his own "reporting" https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com] , why do you?
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using your sock puppets to mod up your bullshit too. Shamefull
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Nope, don't use them. Only ever had one Slashdot account.
It's hilarious to me though that you think you're some sort of oppressed fount of truth whose opinion everyone else on this website respects except me.
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Conspiracy! Is there nothing you far righters wont turn into it?
Notice my signature, I've used it for around a year now because sock puppet accounts are not good for the health of this site which has already seen a mass user exodus.
Now is some one else using puppet accounts to moderate this conversation? It's certainly possible and I would tell them to fuck off with that shit for the exact reason outlined above.
Go ahead and keep thinking its me though, you're known for your conspiracies so you're not going
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An not a single ounce of that footage changes the ample footage of protesters beating cops and busting out windows to gain entrance.
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No it doesnt. All of the charges against him are based on already shown footage, it's what they're using against him in court. This new footage does not make anything in that footage magically go away.
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Its funny how you don't think providing the raw materials to someone who will present the opposing argument ...
Opposing argument!? What the fuck kind of world do you live in where a reporter who we now know does not even believe his own heavily biased reporting gets sole access to the footage and edits it to create his own narrative that just happens to fit the lies (and we now know the he knew he was lying) that he was telling prior to getting the footage.
If McCarthy wanted real alternate views on the events he would have released the footage to all major news agencies equally. There's no reason to give it to Tucke
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oops, didnt finish my sentence.
"What the fuck kind of world do you live in where a reporter who we now know does not even believe his own heavily biased reporting gets sole access to the footage and edits it to create his own narrative that just happens to fit the lies (and we now know the he knew he was lying) that he was telling prior to getting the footage" is a reliable "opposing" view.
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Cite a source.
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Cite a source.
Judge denies Jan 6 defendant's request to delay trial pending review of surveillance tapes [thepostmillennial.com]
Judge denies Jan. 6 defendant access to Capitol security tapes made available by McCarthy [washingtonexaminer.com]
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What is your excuse for prosecution in Jan 6 cases withholding any and all of this evidence from trials?
So let me get this straight, it's no longer "cases" it's case and it's no longer "any and all" and just some?
But really my favorite part here is straight from one of your own linked to articles https://www.washingtonexaminer... [washingtonexaminer.com]
"Carpenter sought to delay her trial for six weeks to give her legal team time to sift through nearly 44,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage recently made available by McCarthy. However, Boasberg voiced concerns that doing so would set a precedent that could “derail dozens
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Yes and just like in the last case this extra footage isnt pertinent to the case. If they have him committing his crimes in current footage what's the point of pouring over this other footage other than to drag the case out and make political spectacle?
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Yes and just like in the last case this extra footage isnt pertinent to the case.
Your argument does not make any sense. The footage of getting escorted and not stopped by capitol police is clearly relevant to getting charged with sedition based on being in the capitol.
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Not if they have footage of him gaining entry in a means that any reasonable human would assume meant they werent supposed to be there but were going anyways. This is pretty much everyone who went in btw. One doesnt walk through doors being guarded by cops getting bear sprayed without knowing they arent supposed to be somewhere.
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And that is a shame. Never the less if they have him on film committing the crimes that he is accused of then the footage is irrelevant. If there are those that didnt follow proper procedure they should be disciplined but I fail to see how this effects the defendants guilt.
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Courts do not let lawyers present everything and anything they want on out into infinity, this is not at all something unique to this court case. If a judge decides the "evidence" the defense what's to present isnt pertinent then they can refuse it. If it turns out this was done inappropriately then the defense can appeal and get a retrial.
They have this guy on film entering through a door broken down by rioters and they have him on film being told to leave multiple times by security which he chooses to ign
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He does not think they deserve a robust defense. He has already othered everyone who disagrees with him. His view is those people are not his fellow citizens they are don't support his 'community' off the re-education camp with them.
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Yeah, i had to google that name to even know who he was.
Right you know who one of the leading personalities on Fox is but you don't recognize the names of cable's other talking heads. - Right.
So you are
1) Totally ignorant of the national media landscape but happy to parrot 'derp Tucker bad derp' because some leftist rag spoon fed you that and you accept it unquestioningly.
2) You're a liar
3) you're a troll
Which is it?
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Right you know who one of the leading personalities on Fox is but you don't recognize the names of cable's other talking heads. - Right.
I read the news for 95% of my news consumption, watching news is a waste of time most of the time. I do have Fox on my youtube feed though so I can see the headlines and at least have a vague idea of the far right narrative on things and do on rare occasions even watch a run of it just as I do occasionally watch the PBS news hours on youtube as well.
Never mind that Tucker Carlson is probably the most famous reporter in the US right now and that he is often the butt of comedy where as this person you brought
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I did argue against what you are saying. I pointed out that it does not matter what Tucker thinks and it should not matter.
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So someone else wrote the below?
So you are
1) Totally ignorant of the national media landscape but happy to parrot 'derp Tucker bad derp' because some leftist rag spoon fed you that and you accept it unquestioningly.
2) You're a liar
3) you're a troll
Which is it?
--
You should really change your account password if that's the case!
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If McCarthy wanted real alternate views on the events he would have released the footage to all major news agencies equally. There's no reason to give it to Tucker first with vague promises to deliver it to everyone else later unless he's trying to control the narrative by giving it solely to a known conservative spin doctor first. How the fuck do you see that as us getting legitimate alternate views?
I think the Jan 6 committee did the same. You have at least two sides to a story. Some at Jan 6 were violent, most were not. Some reporters stood in front of a raging fire and called a protest "mostly peaceful", and many of those people were. Still the people who weren't stood out a bit more.
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So the solution to this supposed bias is to release the footage to a known conservative spin doctor who we now know has been knowingly lying on this subject via his now released texts and emails instead of to all news agencies equally? Give me a break!
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>>1) real democracy requires allowing dissenting opinions to be expressed
Is that why Republicans are obsessed with removing books from libraries and dictating what can be taught in schools?
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school libraries.
I tell you what when schools start teaching that 'some people believe that homosexuality is natural or whatever but other people believe is shameful degenerate behavior that is harmful to society'.
Then they can 'say gay'
Until then they should leave social and philosophical matters strictly out of elementary education. Because what they are doing isn't teaching its grooming - almost to the textbook definition of it.
Re:"Twitter's decline" was all the bias I needed (Score:5, Informative)
And somehow, the service is still running the same with much less staff.
Didn't they lock themselves out of their own API and break their site just this week?
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It shouldn't be a surprise. Elon himself said it will become broken from time to time as the system is modified. And the fact that it "breaks" when changes are made testifies to the fact that it's design/documentation are lacking. Elon isn't to blame for that.
Re: "Twitter's decline" was all the bias I needed (Score:2)
I've never really been a Twitter user, not now or in the past, but I know from a bit of personal experience that Elon's companies tend to only hire people that actually know what they're doing, and they get a lot done with relatively little work. Twitter's existing workforce may not have from the sound of things. What we're likely witnessing is a side effect of that transition.
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It shouldn't be a surprise. Elon himself said it will become broken from time to time as the system is modified. And the fact that it "breaks" when changes are made testifies to the fact that it's design/documentation are lacking. Elon isn't to blame for that.
Elon fired all the staff who actually knew what did what and where to look for the information necessary to keep things running while keeping around ass kissers. It's common for megolomaniacs to do things like that.
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Elon did get rid of many people. And I'm sure some tribal knowledge was lost.
But that is really beside the point. Turnover is common and any decent engineering firm needs to make sure that a system can be maintained even if the original developers are no longer available.
I'm not judging Elon one way or the other.
I'm just pointing out that it appears Twitter engineering *may not have* documented the system well enough and they *may have* created a fragile system that isn't easily maintained.
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man and here I am having spent my entire career learning how to update complicated systems without breaking them and this whole time it turns out I could have done that and just told my boss that its not my fault its broken...
What a world.
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Twitter was purchased and, whether or not you like its owner, the lies Twitter spread, the election interference, the shadowbanning, mass manipulation, and narrative echo chamber fashioned/sanctioned by its past showrunners have been exposed.
And those actions have been continued by its new owner, except with less consistency, a much more pronounced political bias, and ridiculous pandering to the new owner [engadget.com].
And somehow, the service is still running the same with much less staff.
Not really [cnn.com].
The only "decline" is in corruption. I don't use Twitter, but I would trust it more now than ever before.
To the extent that Twitter is now ruled by an owner who has abandoned most of the principals he claimed to support at the start I guess you could say corruption is declining if only because I don't think there's anything left to corrupt.
As for Meta making a Twitter-a-like, I doubt that would have much traction since they already have Instagram, which they already want to transform into TikTok.
Possibly. What Twitter exposed is that there is a need for a service that basically serves to ma
Also with a *lot* less revenue (Score:2, Insightful)
The Twitter buy out was a classic leveraged buyout. Meaning the people buying it (who Shall Not Be Named, least I bring the wrath of the mod mob that always follows That Which Shall N
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Re: "Twitter's decline" was all the bias I needed (Score:1)
You could be talking about foxnews right now and not miss a step? Media is polarized but I don't see Twitter ever being their polar opposite.....
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The decline is corruption? Like Musk making sure his tweets get the most views by threatening his engineers?
There has been no reduction in corruption, they just changed it's bias.
So Mastodon .... (Score:4, Insightful)
... But controlled by Meta
Re:So Mastodon .... (Score:5, Funny)
So, Metadon?
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Maybe it can cure a few of the addicts still left.
So, it starts out locked (Score:2)
Log in with existing Instagram credentials... so it's a text add-on to Instagram. Such wonderful people!!!
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SSO just lowers the friction for their existing base. Federated identity makes a lot of things simpler. And could mean that it's open to more login sources later. Probably a good thing, but too early to say. And part of having something decentralized would be a way to log in without having to host credential storage.
Not sure how that's somehow worse than creating an independent login and password. Either way you're handing over an email address to Meta and creating a password. But at least this isn't t
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What decline? (Score:1)
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"Twitter last reported 237.8 million mDAUs and a 16.6 percent yearly growth rate for the second quarter."
That is not in the link you shared. The 237.8 current user count is. The 16.6% growth is not. Do you have another link?
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The question is whether the new active users are people or bots.
decentralized (Score:2)
Sure, I'll believe it when I see it. I'm guessing they mean the 21st century/crypto version of decentralized, where things are actually centralized and there is a marketing story about how independent you are.
The original Skype might be the most successful 'decentralized' software ever. How did that work out?
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The original Skype might be the most successful 'decentralized' software ever. How did that work out?
E-Mail would like to have a word with you...
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Email is really a server-to-server process, requiring servers - email is not peer-to-peer. The original Skype protocol was peer-to-peer with no centralized server - an endpoint would become a 'supernode' to provide the server side features and the protocol had the discovery and operation of the supernodes built in.
"The Skype user directory is decentralized and distributed among the supernodes in the network. Supernodes are grouped into slots (9–10 supernodes), and slots are grouped into blocks (8 slot
Tim Berners-Lee Solid (Score:2)
https://www.inrupt.com/solid [inrupt.com]
If you haven't looked into it, it's pretty interesting. It's exactly what facebook wants to do, but without facebook. Sadly this project doesn't get the love it deserves but in short;
* You're in control of your data and who you share it with.
* It's decentralized
Basically it's a protocol, but what it needs is some skilled coders to take that protocol and make the next facebook out of it.
Taiwan's text based bulletin board (Score:2, Interesting)
PTT has entered the chat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
BTW,
Taiwan first learned of COVID-19 through PTT.
https://www.scmp.com/abacus/te... [scmp.com]
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I had never heard of PTT but terminals and BBS are also what I thought of when I read "text-based."
Now please get off of my lawn.
Woods for the trees (Score:2)
We have that already: Group text messages (Score:1)
Granted, it's limited, but it can be the "right tool for the right job" for keeping up with small groups of friends or family.
Why they will beat Mastodon. (Score:2)
Fediblocked in 3.. 2.. (Score:1)
I'm unsure whether the speed of light will be broken in the planck time it'll take for the entire fediverse to block any meta mastodon.
Cannot be decentralized. (Score:2)
Meta needs to make money off of this. That means that there will be ads. Which means the 'decentralized' network won't work without the centralized meta ad network. Which means the decentralization is a farce and is only meant to offload server costs to users.