[2024-09-29 note: This was previously posted on Cohost, on 2022-11-07 at https://cohost.org/ireneista/post/218386-twitter-and-utility but the irenes.space URL is the permanent one.]
[Cohost publication note: this is ported verbatim from a thread on the other site, so we're going to break with our usual practice and say that site's name]
we see two core things that Twitter is good at. they are mostly orthogonal, and other platforms have done one of them, but we don't know another place that's as good at the other.
the first thing, the one that's been done elsewhere, is large scale sharing of personal stuff and random thoughts among people who already vaguely know each other
person discovery is also part of that first category. yes, smaller, more inward-facing places have fewer people to discover, but that doesn't matter as much as you'd think because people tend to self-select to wind up near others they'll get along with.
Twitter is still pretty great at helping us meet strangers we didn't know we needed to know.... but so are lots of other places
the second thing, the one nothing else is quite as good at
is putting something in front of the world. it might be a call for personal help, it might be an idea you want to convince people of, it might be your creative output.
we're an activist, with thoughts on public policy in a variety of areas, so Twitter is very useful to us in that second capacity
for the first of these use-cases, we'll personally be going to Cohost. it's not really meant to be used for the second use-case, nothing else right now is, but that'll be our default regardless.
we think there needs to be a peer to peer protocol for disseminating tweet-like things. not federated; federation just encourages feudal dynamics. peer to peer.
we've seen a lot of proposals which get part of the way there, and all this while we've been quietly working on our own stuff, but we're out of time so we share the thought with the world in case other people want to take the idea. please do. <3
(we'll still keep doing our own thing, of course, but it's a big project and we have a life full of other stuff...)
let go of the urge to build hierarchies, and you can find the true solutions to these problems.
we have much longer thoughts on this topic but we're still figuring out how to discuss them
we do have another idea, for a radical new approach to the second use-case which isn't remotely tweet-like, but it is tied in with a bunch of other stuff and quite far down our personal roadmap. so. check back in a few years.
just linking up this side thread
[side thread on RSS]
RSS has scalability constraints, but the format itself does everything it needs to, there just needs to be a better way to disseminate it
that way doesn't necessarily need to be a lot of work. IPFS is a strong contender.
(IPFS is what you get if you try to take the idea of trackers out of bittorrent, and do a bunch of other stuff very thoughtfully, basically)
[a friend asked if we worry about IPFS being associated with cryptocurrency]
we do worry about that, yes. chronologically it predates the worst of the pyramid schemes, but the danger of being subsumed into all that rhetoric is real.
and also this one, about the difference between p2p and federation
[side thread on p2p vs federation]
federated software architectures are when there's servers, but lots of them, and they're each owned and run by somebody different
email is the classic example of a federated architecture, and also a very solid illustration of the problems with federation from an anarchist theory perspective
email has a spam problem, and the solution to spam was more centralization, and things are now at the point where there's four or five companies that basically control who gets to send email
the idea originally was that each email server is its own autonomous thing, but in reality each server is its own tiny hierarchy, where server operators have power over their users
and the defining characteristic of hierarchies is that small hierarchies fit into large ones quite easily
compare and contrast bittorrent. BT does have a server component, but the server does essentially light-weight administrative tasks, and later designs such as IPFS manage to avoid that
the bulk of the heavy lifting in bittorrent is performed *on the computers of individual users*, and this makes it difficult to censor (since ISPs and governments have mostly not been willing to block the protocol as a whole - there'd be too much collateral damage)
notice one really important thing: there is no concept of an account
you don't *need* any persistent concept of identity for what bittorrent does, and the protocol doesn't have one. they avoid the spam problem by not doing anything which would be valuable to spammers.
the moment you have some form of long-lived identity, which goes beyond the scope of a particular connection, things get complicated - both technically and politically
a full discussion of that would be too large, so we're just pointing it out as an interesting topic
peer to peer architectures, unlike federated ones, do not give anyone in the system power over anyone else. they are anti-hierarchical by design.
of course, sophisticated technical innovations can always reinvent hierarchy within a framework that opposes it. if you take technology out of the mix, that's still true: it's always possible for people to build hierarchy in settings where it doesn't exist yet.
so it's not enough to do a technical thing and then stop there. the social and cultural side of things needs to be part of the plan from the beginning, users need to know WHY the design is opposing hierarchy, and what that means for them.
that robust culture has to be there or else corporations, states, fascists, and other rude mean jerks will just come in and take over if it gets popular
if you liked this thread about the practical uses of Twitter and why it's not fully replaceable right now, you may also enjoy our thread from a few days later about the feelings side of social media