Ask HN: What are decentralized Twitter alternatives?
Once upon a time Jack said that Twitter initially was very open in its early stages but eventually became much more centralized, and the scale of supporting such a centralized network in the future could be unsustainable. “Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization,” he added. “Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there.”
Are there any truly decentralized social communication tools/protocols to look at? Mastodon, GNU Social, and the Fediverse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse The two software systems are compatible (both comply with the OStatus standard) so you can interact with content on servers that use the system. Diaspora also exists, but it's arguably more like Facebook: I host a Mastodon instance and have posted below if anyone would like to learn/discuss more about both my instance, and Mastodon as a whole, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697231 GNU Social is exactly how I imagined it to be. That prompted me to imagine what a parody of a GNU-style Twitter would look like, and yes, the connection works from the opposite direction. Tilable interface, requires days to set it up, tweet with i "Hello World!" <ESC> t, native vim keymap support, and hard to quit. > tweet with i "Hello World!" <ESC> t, native vim keymap support vim is not GNU, emacs is. That means it would actually be <M-t> Hello World! <C-x> <C-s>, and the documentation would have a lengthy section on what the "Meta" key is and why not just call it "Alt". Neither actually :-) EMACS dates back to 1976 (David Moon & Guy Steele); vi also dates back to 1976 (Bill Joy). GNU Project dates back "only" to 1983, with GNU Emacs soon after: 1984. It's maintained by GNU. GNU Emacs is the modern Emacs. That's unnecessarily complicated. The vim way is better. Sadly, it seems to be dead. ...which is exactly what one should expect something called "GNU Social" to be. (not actually the op) I agree. I say that a someone who doesn't tend to support popularity contests as a solution to everything. For example, privacy, buying local, supporting SMBs, thinking critically, and many more are hard, in different ways but those albeit important are not easy to do. Many people would say "make privacy easy!", OK we've got Signal, Tails, Tor, etc. "Make supporting SMBs more appealing!", OK we've got Shopify, Stripe Etsy, Gumroad etc. "Make thinking critically easier!!!" ... Wait a second, thinking critically is and will be hard, perhaps not hard but at least not easy. GNU Social was called StatusNet and Laconica before that, but no, they still chose a deliberately uncool name in one of the most extreme popularity-driven markets. Not that we ought to drop our standards, but why choose such a petty hill to die on? I hear that it hosts a relatively vibrant Hurd community. It’s not exactly modern design but it does work and is super easy to set up. It can be made relatively pretty: https://web.archive.org/web/20100413124819/http://identi.ca/ > Mastodon How decentralized alternative to Twitter works IRL: Never exists account - https://mastodon.social/@1234567890examplecom2021 > The page you are looking for isn't here. Suspended account - https://mastodon.social/@realDonaldTrump > The page you were looking for doesn't exist here anymore. I think you're mixing decentralised and unmoderated here. You're free to run those accounts from another instance or provision your own. But you can't force someone else to carry that account, just as I can't force your Mastodon instance to carry mine. Which means that in practice, it's very debatable how much more free these decentralized platforms are than centralized ones, and whether they're worth the extra effort required to make decentralization work. Especially since Mastodon seems to have (from my limited understanding) a "if you dare to talk to the Bad People you're also a Bad Person and getting dropped" mentality, effectively meaning that you cannot run an instance that is federating with both the mainstream fediverse and anything the mainstream fediverse doesn't like. This is like complaining that a public street isn’t free because people can walk away if they don’t want to deal with you. No, it’s saying that it’s not enough of an improvement to warrant the gulf of work required to make it compelling to anyone beyond the few people who use it today. We really need to move beyond this mindset where we think anyone will use an exact replica of an incumbent with some silver bullet tweak nobody actually cares about. It’s like thinking “Twitter but built with Rust” is compelling and getting mad at the sheeple when they couldn’t care less. The second paragraph is lamenting the fact that other instances can refuse to federate with you: > Especially since Mastodon seems to have (from my limited understanding) a "if you dare to talk to the Bad People you're also a Bad Person and getting dropped" mentality, effectively meaning that you cannot run an instance that is federating with both the mainstream fediverse and anything the mainstream fediverse doesn't like. No, it's like me telling you that you can't be talking to 'tgsovlerkhgsel, or I'll start petitioning everyone you know to stop talking to you, giving each of them the same ultimatum to ensure maximum compliance. The toxic part here isn't someone banning/defederating you, but someone who didn't ban/defederate you getting threatened by others that they'd better do that or else everyone else will defederate them. The point is that this isn't a characteristic of the platform but of the users. The users don't want to be federated with someone who is federated with someone they don't like. How do you fix that, just force everyone to federate with each other? How do you stop people from forking their own clients to remove the forced federation? Right, it's users, not tech (it's always people, not tech - Twitter is a problem not because it's centralized, but because of decisions made by people at the helm). What both 'tgsovlerkhgsel and I are trying to say is that there is this kind of realpolitik going on at Mastodon, of which you should be aware before considering to join. You start going against the "party line", you risk getting defederated or, if you're an user on someone else's instance, having your instance's admins pressured to ban you on the threat of the whole instance getting defederated by others. And it's a significant threat, because as much as Mastodon is distributed, people still want to stay connected to the major instances. I myself moved from Twitter to Mastodon a while ago and very much enjoy it, but I also try to not say anything there that would attract interest of the defederationists. So start a federation that doesn't do that. Yes, it probably won't have many users. Once again, it's a people problem, and a hard one. Maybe a blockchain? A public and unalterable ledger (which is what a blockchain is, of course). But being completely unmoderated users will use tools to moderate for them, tools that can block content they don't like. Indeed, users would coalesce and build lists of who to listen to, and who to not, and they'd keep that list on the unalterable and uncensorable blockchain. Freedom comes with realpolitik, always. At some point, people learn that their lives are better without this or that group constantly coming in and will take protective/separatists measures. Which is exactly what you are seeing. That is fine when done at the individual level. What people are complaining about is when the platform makes that decision for you. It is fine to block a phone number from calling you, it is not fine to block people from being able to use a phone (by means of blocking access to all phone networks) without a court decision. Now individual networks are private companies and might chose to have stricter moderation, but 1) that should place them in a different legal category, and 2) there should be enough competition to provide valid alternatives to the people being blocked from such networks, otherwise it risks abuse of dominant position, given the monopoly of access. We are discussing Mastodon, so that complaint is not valid. If you don’t like that your instance has stopped federating with another, you are free to join a different one or start your own. > Which means that in practice, it's very debatable how much more free these decentralized platforms are 100% more freedom right there. Freedom doesn't mean you can force me to listen to you. It means I can't force you to stop.
What Mastodon enables people to do is a very direct way of stopping conversation with people that can't behave. I don't like that kind of mentality much either, but is there a way they can suppress only some of the messages on their instance, while other ones are still federated on their instance? Maybe there would be a way to allow such a thing to work, that admininstration of some instance can program it to copy only the message they want to copy, or to let you to program your instance to only send some messages to their instance, so that some links including only some messages, and other links between instances will have all messages because they allow you to copy all of them. (I think that the client-based filtering, although with default settings provided by the server (which the user can choose to use, customize, or ignore), might be better, but server-based could be used if needed, e.g. to avoid flooding the bandwidth. If you are using NNTP, then you can filter by From header, References header, Injection-Info header, Newsgroups header, etc. The server probably could still ban users who misuse those headers for ban evasion, I suppose, but if those headers are not misused, and the connection does not waste too much memory/disk space/bandwidth, then a hard ban is not needed and the filtering can be used instead.) I think the amount of instances that would want to distribute anything from Gab [0] which is based on Mastadon is very very limited. Gab ripped their federation code a while ago. Also, when they were federating, they never cared much about properly federating. They used federation as an argument to switching platforms but they didn't care about it. What they cared the most, I think, was the client ecosystem of Mastodon/…. Gab clients were banned, but Apple/Google cannot ban fediverse clients. So, `@realDonaldTrump` was suspended at least from Mastodon.social. How many instances left? How many also suspended `@realDonaldTrump`? He can afford his own instance which will never block him. Let's not pretend he's being stopped from running an independent social broadcast. It doesn't matter how many instances block him - nobody can be forced to listen to him. "@realDonaldTrump" will spawn his own blockchain based social network. He is special, of course. gargron (Mastodon dev)'s reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697378 > That being said, the actual Donald Trump would not be welcome on mastodon.social, nor would he be welcome on most servers that I am familiar with. He would likely have to host his own Mastodon server. Every time I go looking for one of these open alternatives it’s filled with fringe conspiracy theorists, actual racists, etc. Example is LBRY. Bryan Lunduke says he’s switching off YouTube for LBRY, so I go there to check it out. Top trending video is some white supremacist thing why I shouldn’t forget my ancestry. Search for “how to repair furnace”, second result is video how Epstein is alive. Even Lunduke is taking the opportunity to start his red-pilled politics channel. I have similar story with Mastodon. The fundamentals are there but the big challenge is no censorship actually makes these smaller platforms something that people don’t want to use. Well, yes. There are only two reasons to use the less popular alternative: ideological preference, which is very rare, or being banned from the #1 service. > no censorship actually makes these smaller platforms something that people don’t want to use Invert that sentence and you see why it's happening on the major platforms; deplatforming the deplorables is necessary or they drive normal people and advertisers away. Human nature eventually turns deplatforming the deplorables into deplatforming anyone I disagree with. A decentralized Twitter would need decentralized moderation. > Human nature eventually turns deplatforming the deplorables into deplatforming anyone I disagree with. I agree with this part, but how does this part: > A decentralized Twitter would need decentralized moderation. ... not just turn into the first part after a time? I don't think there will ever be a "truly" decentralized twitter that is popular, because it would necessary have to lack any type of non-first-person moderation, and we as a society would probably not want that. It would attract types of information that most of us would agree that we do not want around (child porn, terrorism planning, etc) and with any sort of traction, the government would step in to shut it down. And before you say "it can't be shut down" ... anything can be shut down when you control the means of financial transactions, Internet cables, and a police/judicial system to punish those that go too far out of acceptable bounds. > not just turn into the first part after a time? It wouldn't turn into the first part, because "the banned" of some instance could go create their own instance run by their own moderation rules. > It would attract types of information that most of us would agree that we do not want around (child porn, terrorism planning, etc) and with any sort of traction, the government would step in to shut it down. If some instance of a federated system is allowing child porn or other criminal content to flourish then they should be shut down. Every instance would need to be held to a baseline standard for dealing with such content. > If some instance of a federated system is allowing child porn or other criminal content to flourish then they should be shut down. Every instance would need to be held to a baseline standard for dealing with such content. ... so moderation, then? Yes, moderation. The ideal isn't a system that is un-moderate-able (for the reasons listed, among others), its a system where individuals can choose their moderators based on the differing goals and preferences of the online communities (but within some reasonable bounds/process for limiting rights-violating content like child porn, criminal incitement, etc) > how does this part not just turn into the first part after a time? Probably would need a USA govt type setup...a core set of baseline rules (i.e. a constitution), a setup where changes aren't possible unless multiple parties agree (i.e. checks and balances), and a system of voting that doesn't allow a simple majority to make decisions irrespective of minority interests (i.e. an electoral college). On a scale this large, with so many people performing moderation and guidelines to follow, it most likely just leads to deplatforming the ones that are an unreasonable threat to the comfort of most users and businesses. There’s an analogy here with programming languages. It’s super hard for a new language to get popular. It might do some things objectively better, but if that doesn’t impact the majority of its users, it needs more or else it ends up populated by ideologues. An exception can sometimes be found in languages with solid interop/foreign function interfaces. Python gets to build on decades of C libraries easily. Likewise with clojure and the JVM. Or Gmail and a standardized email protocol. So what’s the analogue for social networks? Tim Berners Lee’s pods? Would it be an app that pulls from and pushes to Twitter/insta/fb in addition to its own servers? That’s how apple’s iMessage has done so well. It falls back to SMS if the other person isn’t an adopter of their system. New systems that can take advantage of existing network effects seem so much more likely to gain popularity. And we really need more of the open interop with social media. Using a decentralized social network is currently like using email without a spam filter. I have an idea of creating a plugin to a decentralized social network that acts as a moderator. The plugin will work on behalf of the user, compared to current moderation which acts on behalf of the platform. Different users can select either different moderators or different settings for the same moderators. Moderating could be a mix of AI and human flagging. Moderating could also include more editorial work such as suggesting people to follow. I think you're right. A little surprised about Mastodon because I've only heard that from people I follow on twitter who tend to not be crazy, but I guess it makes sense. I have an idea for an app whose primary motivation is offering a comment section for websites that don't normally have comments or have them disabled (yes, this idea is old as dirt and has been tried many times). The part I'm really struggling with is how one would market such an app without targeting free speech absolutists and nutters, despite it being really useful for everyone. It seems like the moment you start highlighting free speech as a feature you become a magnet for the absolute worst kind of people. This is the one thing that I still miss from Google Reader. It got discussing articles right. Specifically, what it got right is that you discuss them with a small group of direct acquaintances. I think that any attempt to produce something that works like the comments section of a newspaper website will invariably produce something that works like the comments section of a newspaper website. Yes, I am aware of the irony of saying this in the comments section of a website called Hacker News. So don’t highlight free speech as a feature since you clearly do not understand the market for whom that feature is important (ie: free speech absolutists and conspiracy theorists). What the people who actually value free speech want is sensible, non-political moderation where the free speech absolutists and nutters are muzzled but the minorities complaining about oppression are not. > an app whose primary motivation is offering a comment section for websites that don't normally have comments Disqus has done this to a fairly wide extent. They allow site maintainers to moderate comments IIRC. I think this is more about something like running a chrome extension to have comments without the site owner's involvement. https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+extension+comments+fo... Ah, the value of a social network is in what the users bring. If the first users post crap which attracts more users who would post more crap, then that's not the network you want.
Quite important that Facebook's first users are Harvard undergrads, and Twitter recruited "influencers" as their first users, those are the groups that people would want to join. I think there needs to be a way of filtering out posts by certain users. Allow people to make lists to filter out the crazies, so other users if they want can use them. And/or use an algorithm to classify posts, and allow users to pick and choose what kinds of stuff they want filtered. Then by default have most of these filters on, but you can disable some of them if they go too far. The problem for permissive alt-platforms is that if the mainstream platforms expand their definition of bannable undesirables (call them witches for short) then all the witches will go to whatever platforms are still available to them (the permissive ones). This article details nicely how it all plays out: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ... >The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong. >... >The equilibrium is basically what we see now. The neutral gatekeeper institutions lean very liberal, though with a minority of conservative elites who are good at keeping their heads down and too mainstream/prestigious to settle for anything less. The ghettos contain a combination of seven zillion witches and a few decent conservatives who are increasingly uncomfortable but know there’s no place for them in the mainstream. https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org is an interesting way forward. If you can create your own node on your own server with your own rules, it doesn't matter (so much) if there's a short-term infestation of disagreeables elsewhere. Haven't recent times shown that allowing a bubble of disagreeables to congregate doesn't look like the best idea? People don't seem to be thinking through the "NO CENSORSHIP" goal. They want to go to a site where Trump can tell people to install "freedom software" with a link to Ransomware or Malware? I always fail to understand what motivates someone that likes censorship, hates Free Speech, and generally cannot stand to coexist with anyone too diferent from himself...to go looking for an alternative medium without censorship, supportive of Free Speech, and where those way different from himself congregate? When so many options like Reddit, Quora, Raddle, Fakebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc., exist almost exclusively for 'normies', why not stay at the echo chambers dedicated to them, where all the undesirables have been banished and deplatformed? What's the irresitable lure of these alternatives? Funny, I get the same impression when I go to Twitter, it’s full of far left loonies and communist sympathizers, not to mention raging cancel culture mobs, so brainwashed they disown their families for supporting Trump. And the worst thing is that Twitter is based in Silicon Valley, with many of its key employees belonging to the same herd. There must be an alternative platform. I would encourage you to answer in good faith: 1. What would make someone “disown their families for supporting Trump”? What are their motivations? How are they arriving at the conclusion they need to do this? Does the disowned family member supporting trump play any responsibility in this engagement? What values do you hold dear to yourself that might make you disown another family member if violated? 2. When you call someone a “moronic sheep…” Do you think that person feels like a sheep? Do you think they might see you as a sheep for being apart of a different “herd”? I would encourage you to explain why they are moronic sheep rather than taking the mental shortcut of calling them a moronic sheep and therefore unworthy of having valid opinions. 3. You summarize behavior as: “‘orange man baaad’ chants.” Why do you think they see him as bad? Why do you think they “chant” it? Is there anything you say, that they might characterize as a chant? Your post pretty much says “I want a place that doesn’t have people that think differently,” “I want a place where I won’t be challenged,” “I want a place without sheep,” “I want a place with people that think the same as me.” Do you think what you’re actually looking for is an echo chamber? 1. 4 years on non-stop propaganda by left wing owned mainstream media, amplified by online echo-chambers, will do that to you. Especially if the other side is labeled all shades of evil, like ‘racists’ and ‘fascists’ indiscriminately and without evidence. Slander is a powerful political weapon. 2. "Moronic sheep" is a poetic way to describe people who tend to trust lies they've been force-fed, without questioning. I blame the lack of critical thinking, groupthink, and deep internalized 'herd following' attitude nurtured from schools to colleges. Which, btw, a possible reason for larger Trump support among people who haven't passed through the brainwashing machine of the US college/academia. I guess anti-individualism is the best way to call it. I always refer to excellent "Excellent Sheep" book by William Deresiewicz who succinctly described just what I experienced first hand during years of Ivy League un-education. 3. see 1. if we can't get free speech on BigTech platforms then we shall part our ways, each stuck in its own 'safe space'. As for me personally I prefer swimming against the current. I don't think you answered the questions in good faith, and I think I responded to you in good faith. If a sheep is someone who: "tends to trust lies they've been force-fed, without questioning." Then what is a good measure of who is a sheep or not? I questioned your beliefs, and you gave me back lines from your echo chamber verbatim. Here's some good questions for you: Nah, I think I answered it alright , why don’t you go after leftist media and their propaganda , ask WaPo to provide a “good faith summary of other person argument” when they accuse ALL Trump supporters of being racist ‘white supremacists’ indiscriminately and without evidence on daily basis for years, inciting witch hunts and riots. What you’re doing is called demagogy, or worse, sealioning. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, just apply your high standards of good faith argument to left wing media and their culture of political ‘discourse’, lmao. I’m just a lowly Trumper. Your clear lack of desire of ability to engage with some very reasonable and intelligent points is exactly why Trump supporters are frequently characterized this way. You're a sheep if you blindly follow a small number of news outlets that lean very far to one side and spend most of your time surrounded by people with similar views. (This goes either way, of course) Not all Trump supporters are white supremacists, but I haven't seen any examples of people demonstrating that sort of behaviour and ideology who aren't Trump supporters. That should be food for thought. I’m surrounded by liberals and their bs, just like you. My only source of disinformation is liberal/mainstream media, just like yours. And I haven’t seen as many lies as I’ve seen last year, and this one, oh God. I’m ‘radicalized’ by you, dear liberal people, and I’m one of the 75M. > I’m surrounded by liberals and their bs If everything around you smells like shit, check your shoe. I wish you were right. There are two approaches: * The federated approach, where many Twitter like sites can interconnect and exchange messages. One current example of this is Mastodon, older examples are Status.net/Identi.ca * An indie approach, where everyone basically hosts their own profile and there are no Twitter like sites at all, one instead uses readers that are completely separate from ones hosted profile, just like it was in the blogosphere days. One example of this is https://indieweb.org/ I favor the indie approach as the federated approach seems to in practice often end up with interoperability issues and mono-cultures, at least historically. + there’s still central providers, just a few more than in the case of Twitter, whereas in the indie world everyone is basically a provider themselves and one can eg. put up a static site and use that (through various Micropub tricks and such) For the indie approach, you would need to automate the self-hosting setup to gain realistic traction with the masses. What about somehow utilizing wireless router hardware for the local hosting? Pretty much everyone has a similar router/modem setup that's always connected to the internet. Could create a script that sets up a file structure directly on the router (or a usb stick plugged into the router) that stores/hosts that person's data (and maybe even stores/hosts misc data of others to backup other people's data) I myself don't think it's necessary to host it locally at home. The most key thing to me is to control the domain name so that I can move from one provider to another. But if all the data is stored in a central database, wouldn't that essentially make it centralized? > just like it was in the blogosphere days so if it's just like the blogosphere days, how exactly is this different from just advocating for a return to the blogosphere, which hasn't happened for many years and hence probably isn't happening for a reason? It's different because the blogosphere was all about posting blog posts whereas social media, which started out being called "microblogs", is about posting other types of material and doing other kinds of social interaction. In essence the indieweb enables posting all of those types of content, and making all of those interactions, through ones own site, in a way that can give a user experience comparable to eg. Twitter. It's the classic pendulum of innovation – Twitter and friends spearheaded new interactions and UX that once proven can be standardized and implemented in the open, just like the blogosphere was an open implementation of the pattern of news sites. While somewhat offtopic, an important question is why would you want one ? IMHO the main issue of Twitter is not even the way how it's now a walled garden (and since recently, effectively outside of the Web). It's how the combination of a ~~140~~ 280† character limit, personal walls, hashtags, likes and an horribly hard to navigate comment system has resulted in a medium where constructive debate is almost impossible, while feelings-driven mobs rule. †While moving to a 280 character limit probably made Twitter better, I'm wondering about the loss of compatibility with texts. One actually remarkable way in how Twitter was good is for post-disaster communication, which is the very situation where Internet might be down while basic cellphone communication still up. There's this sort of thing, definitely, but I'll note that Facebook lacks many of these features, and is still a toxic environment, although perhaps less overtly so. My own guess is that the most fundamental problem is that Dunbar's number is real, and bad things happen if you blow past it. Large scale human communication works best when it is not modeled as an endless, 24/7 masquerade ball where the theme of the party is bullhorns. There's a lot of toxicity on twitter, but also some interesting discussion that I have not found anywhere else online. I routinely block people who get too political or are gratuitously mean. It makes twitter much more pleasant. for better discussion, 280 would be a minimum rather than a maximum, but twitter doesn't want better discussion as that also depresses engagement. Maybe? But, on the other hand, even at 147 characters, your comment seems like a complete and well-composed observation. I don't see how requiring it to be 90% longer would improve it. I only got past 280 by counting just 185 characters, and deciding to add this sentence as filler. it's not that you can't have a single, good point fit into a small number of characters, but that good discussion requires more than one good point, and plenty of nuance and thought. it's strictly true that the number limit is arbitrary (and only loosely correlated to 'goodness'), but assuming there is a limit at all, my (simple) point was it should be a minimum rather than a maximum, for better discussion. Good discussion also benefits from pithy remarks, and suffers from bloviating. yes, and pithy doesn’t necessarily mean short. =) While I agree that the medium Twitter enforces is antithetical to reasonable discourse, I think this question is being asked because recently twitter and facebook deleted Trump's account (as well as some other prominent accounts). If you are ideologically aligned with one of those deleted accounts then it's a natural human response to think, "ok what if I'm next?" or "how can I still discuss my views?" and then look for alternatives. 1. Twitter bans people based on their political beliefs 2. Twitter provides a platform for cancel culture 3. I don’t like Jack Dorsey PMs: Email. Posts: Blog. [XML-RPC if you wanna email from your phone to your blog. Different post-type or tag for 'like' vs 'post' (heck, invent any 'like' 'like' you like).] Follow: RSS. It's all there and decentralised for years, just not in a polished package of a 140 character comment, and likely requires more than 15 seconds of thinking. Actually really straightforward. Only tricky thing would be SMS but that's... 'depreciated' as a popular feature today. With RSS you have to follow explicitely. I like the non-linear composition of the suggested tweets. That's a good point! Could someone (or many someones) provide 'suggested' blogs/posts as a service on top of the existing infrastructure? That would be a good idea, provide a list of things you subscribe to and get back a list of things you might like. Or a personalized/generated RSS feed? Micropub is a more recent alternative to XML-RPC: https://indieweb.org/Micropub Hate to reply to myself, but if a webhost could do the above on a 1-click install managed service with a nice UI, it might be a winning ticket for this, Tumblr but better. An ansible or puppet script. UI make very smooth and nice looking, I think that would be a go-er. Where do I apply for funding (/s)? I fiddled with a toy project that was basically RSS-powered Tumblr. Seems like now might be a good time to pick it back up > Blog [...] Different post-type or tag for 'like' vs 'post' See also Webmention for a way to have likes and replies on a blog that behave more like what you see on Twitter. Any company that can censor will eventually be pressured by governments (or its own employees) to do so. Therefore, I see Signal as a model for how everything should operate in the future: your "account" in the company's database is just an encrypted blob that they can't read. Is there no way to make a Twitter-like broadcast messaging app work on top of a Signal backbone? It'd take a smarter programmer than me to figure out the details, but it's got to be possible, right? I mean, right now we have several well-accepted cryptocurrencies that I can use to send an uncensorable, untraceable payment anywhere in the world for about $5 in fees. It's a bit clunky, but it basically works. Why can't I post an uncensorable tweet for $5, too? You can, http://member.cash It is on BCH, so cost is more like a fraction of a cent, but same idea. Part of the genius of Twitter is the name and its brand. Twitter, tweet, tweeting, tweeted, etc. Even if Twitter had no goodwill, it's an excellent name for such a service. None of the options presented here have that. "Hey dude, did you see that mastodon post?" "I'll add you on GNU Social" "Fediverse is getting popular, wanna fediverse?" "Nmd'ed you!" "Totally Aaether that!" "Breaking News: The Prime Minister of Australia just diaspored" Speaking of GNU social, I have always thought that GNU was quite possibly the worst name to use for the project, simply because nobody knows how to pronounce it, and maybe if you do know how to pronounce it, someone else might pronounce it completely differently, so it you end up pronouncing it in two (or more!) ways until the person you're talking to knows what you're talking about. Is it 'new'? Or 'nyew'? I've also heard 'geh-new' and 'G-new'. 'new' is probably the easiest to say and is technically correct, but it is also an extremely ubiquitous adjective which can be placed next to literally any noun, and therefore a terrible way to brand something. And I think that is the primary reason why GNU/Linux never caught on and everybody just called it Linux. "What OS do you use?" "GNU/Linux" "Wait, I didn't know there was a New Linux!". On the topic of unclear pronunciations, “new” is a poor choice for description of pronunciation, because accents are split on whether to pronounce that /njuː/ (“nyew”, which I think I’ve heard called “liquid u”, though I’m not sure how that gets spelled) or /nu/ (“noo”). Broadly speaking, the general American and Canadian accents omit the /j/, and the rest of the world includes it. But a particularly fun fact is that certain singing styles can alter adopted accent also: the classical singing style uses the /j/, so that even Americans who would say “noo” will sign “nyew” when operating in the classical/opera style. Visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU
Click on the listen link in the first paragraph and you'll understand how to pronounce it. Pronunciation issues have never stopped us from posting GIFs even though too many people still mispronounce it New? I have always pronounced it as Ginu. -_- Gnoo I always say: guh-NOO Rhymes with kazoo. or expand it. While Mastodon and Diaspora may be distinctly bad names, perhaps you don't need a great name either. Take Facebook, for example. Even with Twitter, I think there are probably thousands of words that would sound as natural as "tweet" if people were constantly saying it (and shouldn't it be "twit" anyway?). The person with a twitter account could then be a ‘twat’ In the early days of Twitter, a guest asked Colbert if he'd used it and Colbert replied "I have twatted." Mastodon posts are toots +1, I really like it. It's cute, short and playful. Definitely cute, short and playful. It has the downside that "toot" is also used as a more polite, kid-friendly word for fart. Though I do love the thought of hearing a newscaster saying something like "Breaking news: President Trump has just tooted, and critics are calling it inappropriate and disgusting." "Tweet" sounded ridiculous at the beginning too. Everyone has just gotten used to it. "iPad" as well And the more trivial derivation "Twit" would have been even worse. Meanwhile "Tweeter" sounds terrible Ease of adoption is also being overlooked here. The average person doesn't want the hassle of self-hosting their own social media server. Not when they can join Twitter and be tweeting at the world within seconds without ever worrying about the technicals. That means the kind of people you'll be talking to on these platforms will most be techno-libertarian types. A plus for some, a strong negative for others. You don't need to run your own Mastodon server. It's like email: you can run your own, but it's easier to join some of the numerous existing servers. Also, I don't see how decentralized service can live without decentralization of control and ownership of nodes. Without the latter, you just get a multi-DC centralized service. So there's no alternative to a certain degree of self-hosting. Either you yield control to a central authority, or you care enough to maintain a node under your control. OTOH self-hosting should be made as simple as possible for an average user. Much like running a Skype node, or a torrent node did not feel like hosting, and felt like just running an app. This is ruined by the need to run on mobile clients (can't be reasonable servers) and exacerbated by the widespread NATting of home networks, so your desktop can't easily be a server, too. This likely isn't what the op had in mind, but if you're open to it, the best alternative to both reading and authoring on Twitter is to get up from your desk and exercise outside for 10 or 15 minutes. If you see other people, start a friendly, civil conversation. The skills you develop once you get the hang of doing this, and the information you'll stumble upon outclass Twitter, which is merely an interaction between human and keyboard. This is what op practices every day :) And thank you for posting this reminder here. The audience is too small On Twitter you can easily reach thousands of people, in person you only talk to a handful There is a crypto project by the imfamous Tim called SAV3 launching soon. It aims to be a decentralized, uncensorable Twitter alternative. Definitely worth a look: Medium: https://thetimtempleton.medium.com/what-is-sav3-d31ccb979ea1 Testnet: https://testnet.sav3.org/ Website: https://sav3.org/ Secure scuttlebutt comes to mind, https://scuttlebutt.nz/ but you specifically asked about twitter, so I would recommend mastodon Forget Twitter alternatives. How about a social network that mirrors real world social interactions? Only adding people you actually know. Keeping conversations private. Encryption to prevent censorship. What is the social media equivalent of signal? This is already how people use social media like Instagram and features like Stories only viewable to your list of special friends. It’s pretty old hat by now. I use Facebook and Stories every day (Stories seem lame but are too useful for, say, meeting women, to dismiss) but if you went to my profile you’d think I haven’t used Facebook in seven years. In case you don’t know, the Stories system replicated on every social media platform including Youtube and Twitter most recently lets you post ephemeral images/video/text and anyone who responds to it is sending a private 1:1 message. It’s a surprisingly healthy direction away from the awful default public posts with public comments and likes. It’s liberating to post stuff as a story where nobody can know if 0 or 100 of your friends engaged with it. Just throwing this out there since most HNers aren’t really hip with how social media is used these days. In others words, people are on Twitter quibbling in public because, like HN arguments, we actually like doing it. Not because there aren’t alternatives. That’s not encrypted and free from censorship. Are you willing to pay for such a service? More importantly, are you willing and able to convince enough of your network to pay for it? Otherwise, any system will asymptotically look like Twitter/Blah. You could very well use your group chat feature on regular cell phone as a start (takes care of the payment aspect). But soon you or your friends will want feature X. So, cough up more $$ again. Another option is to cultivate real life friends/family that you can hang out with, chat, share photos in the privacy of your home/blah (wait till covid passes please). You can create Signal group chat (up to 150 members) https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007319331-Gr... This is what Google thought Google+ would be, but users were more about connecting to anyone and everyone and it became too messy for Google to want to deal with. G+ was glorious in the beginning days. With no qualms it was the best social network I've experienced yet. IMO, what killed it was Google requiring the real names - which I still believe was a good idea - but then the death knell was when they waffled on that. If they would have stood firm on the real names policy, I'm convinced they would still be here today and there is a very good chance they would have surpassed both Facebook and Twitter. Isn’t everything effectively centralized in so far as a server host can cut your service? Or an ISP? Or even a payment processor? It seems the systems we built are too complex and rely on the judgment of too many humans. Humans that are easily influenced. Even something like IPFS relies on unrestricted access to the internet. I’m against most government intervention, but requiring certain services to refrain from censorship seems like the only real path to an open web. Scuttlebutt works quite well gossiping over a wifi router, doesn't even need to be connected to the internet. One could easily set up a mesh network in your home town and "socialize" over scuttlebutt without any further services. IPFS sucks big time, not censorship resistant. And memory is lost when you do "garbage collect". Are there any tools out there that will posts your content to multiple platforms simultaneously? The current fringe sites are worthless to me since currently they are mostly created and used by people who were kicked off the top sites. However, as an example, if there was a tool that would post my video to youtube, dailymotion, and however other many video sites are out there I'd gladly do it. You could still maintain a preferred network to help consolidate likes and subscribers, but you are less beholden to any one company if your content has existed many places for years. It could be difficult in mediums like twitter where there is a real two way interaction, perhaps a comment consolidator within the tool? If it doesn't exist I think government should atleast build the tool for themselves. There's no reason for communication from the government to exist first on a private platform. It should be put out on a .gov platform that then goes to whatever popular platforms of the day exist. Maybe the Matrix project will eventually offer something like this: This is a question I had been asking for several years until I came across Twtxt (the spec/format originally created by Felix, @buckket, read about it at https://twtxt.readthedocs.org) -- When I came across it I saw a bit more potential so I created (what is effectively) a multi-user client also called Twtxt over at https://twtxt.net (launched in Aug 2020). Since then we've also created a Mobile App (Goryon) available in the App Store (iOS) and Play Store (Android), we also offer free (at this time) hosting of pods (individual instances) at https://twt.social/ -- Today we have a dozen pods/instances and some ~300 users. My own pod (twtxt.net) sees around ~4M hits/month :O https://getaether.net is decentralized reddit. I've used it and unfortunately nobody is on it. Not even for boring discussions. Imo your best bet nowadays is to find obscure discord servers. it has wide adoption and doesn't have mass appeal since each server casts its net only as wide as it's admins can reach. Discord is neither decentralized nor censorship resistant. Discord (the company) has full control over what is allowed to be discussed on there. it's at least decentralized and discord afaik doesn't have employed mods that police every discord made out there unlike reddit. also discord, you need to opt in to ANYTHING. twitter you kinda do as well, but they've sort of turned into a weird news site now. As the commenter you are replying to stated, Discord is not decentralized. Do you somehow have the notion that Discord is decentralized because they have "servers"? Oh wow, @InInteraction there are plenty of federated twitter (and facebook, and youtube, and instagram, etc.) alternatives...The key term to search for is "fediverse" (sort of a portmaneau of federated univers of social networks). The following info site might help with a brief overview: https://the-federation.info/ There are many other sites that can provide an overview/intro. Plus, the following is a sample of alternatives: Blogging => Plume, Write.as/WriteFreely => Comparable to Blogger.com, Medium, Tumblr Image Hosting => PixelFed, MediaGoblin => Comprable to Instagram Microbloging => Gnu social, Mastodon, Microblog.pub, Pleroma, postActiv, pump.io, etc. => Comparable to twitter Pastebin => distbin => Comparable to Pastbin.com, ~GitHub Social networking => Diaspora, Friendica, Honk, Hubzilla => Comparable to Facebook Audio/Video hosting => PeerTube, funkwhale, NodeTube => Comprable to Youtube, SoundCloud, vimeo Events => Mobilizon => Comparable to Facebook, Meetup.com Forum/Link Aggregator => Lemmy => Comparable to Hacker News, Lobste.rs, Reddit Good luck!!! I always wondered if one could start "tweeting" by dropping messages directly into the Bitcoin blockchain. Lots of people are very invested in it, and forking the blockchain is a lot of work and is unlikely to happen causally for the purpose of censorship. Sure, it would cost something like 50$ a tweet and nobody would read em, but the protocol allows it. Smoke Signal on Ethereum does this. Uncensorable messages. Here you go. How about having one's own news/update feed on your website that people can follow/subscribe to using something like RSS ? I'm looking to build something like this and open source it, will you use ? any suggestions ? There's Urbit and Twetch. First uses some of ethereum, and calling a twitter replacement is 1% of it's story. Twetch uses a bitcoin fork as a db and users have to pay to post, but get impression revenue directly Urbit is interesting but $120 for a planet is egregious That's what I said about Bitcoin at $1 (groan).... I'm heavy into Urbit now, learning their programming language, Hoon (more mindbending than Brainfuck). I just checked on opensea.io; you can get a planet for 0.04 ETH--around $50. Urbit is the Next Big Thing--I haven't seen anything like it in 40 years; it's a "computing platform" blank slate! I don't think it'll ever go away because there are enough tech people to keep it going. I can also see academia using it. Setting up your own planet is a real hassle. Soon, you will be able to "rent" your own planet for a monthly fee (like paying for an ISP), and the provider will take care of all hardware and software. On the other hand, you can put your planet on a server for $10-$20/month. Look into it; it's going to be a wild ride! Urbit using Ethereum as a global consistent PKI store seemed like a perfectly fine idea, until transaction costs for distributing those keys bloomed 11,000% in a year :( It's being worked on. If the plan to use ZK-STARKs to rollup PKI transactions goes through, it should be only a few cents to set up a planet. In the meantime though, it is a major barrier :( urbit: because templeOS wasn't nutty enough. Hive is a decentralized, blockchain based alternative, though the layout resembles Reddit a bit more than Hive. There are a variety of front ends people use to connect to the Hive blockchain (and you can create your own, if you're so inclined). PeakD is one of the most popular and user-friendly ways to connect, and they have a bunch of links on their front page that have a lot more information: Direct link: Edit: *..resembles Reddit a bit more than Twitter. I use a protocol on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, through my software wallet. It also has a bunch of portal sites like memo.cash and member.cash These protocols were initially developed for Bitcoin but after it dropped the ball on scaling everything was ported over to Bitcoin Cash. The website is a window to the platform, but anyone can host a mirror or a personal version, all it requires is a Bitcoin Cash node. Its fully decentralised, with self-sovereign identity and is uncensorable. There's Nomad [1] based on the footnote [2] protocol. [1] https://nmd.co i remember once peepeth[0] was trending in the ethereum ecosystem. There used to be something called tsu[1] a few years ago, that paid fiat for its users. [0] https://peepeth.com/welcome
[1] https://www.vox.com/2014/10/21/11632070/new-social-network-t... It isn't decentralized but I'm working on a new alternative and you're welcome to check it out. It's focused on low-friction, open, live discussion (messaging meets news aggregator). While some may not be interested because isn't decentralized, I'm a firm believer that we need more options, more competition. https://sqwok.im/p/QBKItu9bkEPXfA (cross posted this page) The web is already decentralized, you are free to setup your own new Twitter website and tell people about it. Want it to be hidden or hard to shutdown? Put it on the dark web. Don’t get sucked into the blockchain buzzword. Blockchain is a solution to a very specific problem / set of requirements. The real problem is that so many people joined a single service in the first place, but that’s up to them and has pros/cons. Federated services have a rough history - see XMPP. How do you put something on the "dark web" ? Is it something other than hosting on your PC ? You host anywhere. Follow this:
https://medium.com/@jasonrigden/how-to-host-a-site-on-the-da... There are federated networks which don't allow for centralised access restrictions as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, et al, are evidencing today. But projects such as Mastodon put control in the hands of site or node administrators, and at least on Mastodon, there's an exceedingly healthy culture of blocking sites which themselves advocate oppressive practices. So those looking for an uncensored microphone may be somewhat disappointed. I welcome their tears. > there's an exceedingly healthy culture of blocking sites which themselves advocate oppressive practices Oppressive, but defined by whom? I've seen arbitrary blocks of instances simply because they run Pleroma or Soapbox. In fact, my own instance was briefly on fediblock.org's list because my bio says "I care about freedom—both in software, and in speech"; the reason stated was "free-speech". That's absurd! As is often said on the fediverse, some switched over from Twitter due to too much censorship, others due to to little. “Free speech” servers are sort of infamous for nazis and brigading, unfortunately. There have been enough incidents that some moderators block first and ask questions later. Don’t you think the tears might be yours someday? Will you always be on the “right” side? Will the people with the power to censor you always be “good”? I think censorship is a game where everybody loses eventually. This. Precisely. All you need is for the definitions of various words to change over time. And then you find yourself on the wrong side of an (arbitrary) line. Then you get deplatformed. I'd say think carefully before you open that door, and walk past that particular dangerous line, but our "platforms" seem to have driven their mobs/herds over that line, with nary a thought to what comes next. The slope is slippery. And we are gathering speed. Whilst people cheer the actions. "I welcome their tears." Hopefully we have mathematics and physics on our side. > there's an exceedingly healthy culture of blocking sites which themselves advocate oppressive practices That's an issue, not a feature. You can choose your own moderators on Aether.
https://getaether.net/ If you’re looking to browse twitter with less of the privacy invasive tracking mechanisms , https://github.com/zedeus/nitter Public instances:
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances I use a protocol for a decentralised message board that builds on top of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Initially it was developed for Bitcoin but it can only work on Bitcoin if transactions under 1 cent are possible. The protocol is also used by various portal sides like memo.cash and member.cash I prefer member.cash because it has that feel of reddit. It's pretty cool actually, if somebody upvotes you instead of karma you get satoshis! >...and the scale of supporting such a centralized network in the future could be unsustainable. I don't think this is borne out in practice. Centralization seems to be the rule for large systems since networking scales O(n^2) otherwise, so decentralization has to provide pretty compelling advantages to overcome this large disadvantage. Most of the decentralized Twitter alternative systems required AGPL to join. Are there any MIT licensed social protocols? Protocols aren't licensed. You're totally free to implement an ActivityPub server with any license you like. AGPL is preferred by the community, but it's not mandatory. Honk uses ISC, Smithereen is unlicense, pubgate is BSD-3-Clauses, …. I appreciate listing some non-AGPL ActivityPub servers! Thanks. How much of a hive of scum and villainy are you willing to tolerate? If you were on Twitter, I’d assume at least some. Does federated count? There is the opensource project here:
https://github.com/jointwt/twtxt And a public instance at:
http://twtxt.net/ Blogs and RSS/microformats. Use your own feed reader of choice, send webmentions for notifications or cross-blog comments. See https://indieweb.org It’s decentralized, and more importantly it’s based on web standards. It works today. https://voice.com is blockchain based How is blockchain a useful feature? Immutable, attributable, verifiable/secure? Can't see anything else really Nice, hadn't heard of this. Is it similar to steemit? Also how do you delineate being "decentralized" versus using blockchain to store data? Working on another site and I have contemplated whether using blockchain for some of the data would have any advantages. Many people mentioned it already, but Mastodon. Shameless plug, I wrote an article[0] about my experience migrating Stick with me here: your own website connected to a webring[1]. Unfortunately, both went all but extinct when we gave up autonomy for convenience and shininess. I'm working on one, every account is based around a bitcoin wallet and the source of truth is one the client side. Will be open to testing soon!: https://chapo.app Lots of talk about federated services in this thread. Anyone have a link to a good YouTube video running through the fundamentals + any principles required to build the "hello world" version of a federated service? https://uniqpath.com p2p search and newsfeeds (soon)
join the discussion ^_^ IRC (Internet Relay Chat): The network effects are irreplaceable, unfortunately. I am the admin of both a Mastodon Instance(https://zee.li), and a Peertube Instance(https://tube.zee.li), both of which are ActivityPub based federated instances. While individual nodes are not decentralized the federated network as a whole is. It is ultimately up to you to choose a well-federated, fast, and reliable instance that meets your criteria for information freedom and user protections. You can find an uncurated list here(https://instances.social/list) or a curated list of instances committed to "active moderation against racism, sexism and transphobia." here(https://joinmastodon.org/communities). My instance while valuing user protection, errs on the side of information freedom as a valuable principle to protect as a whole. Both Mastodon and Peertube include pretty effective and comprehensive moderation tools to ensure you never see what you do not want to see, but that decision is not made for you on my instances. The content policy below applies to both instances-
Moderation will be minimal and limited to abusive or illegal content, ultimately we want to foster an inclusive environment without draconian, biased, puritan, or emotional moderation. Moderation is taken care of by server host & volunteers. NSFW content is allowed but must be blurred by default. Gore/Porn/Nudity = NSFW. Any content that abides by Illinois, New York City, New York State, and U.S. Law is allowed. Server Specs:
i7-9700k
512GB NVMe SSD
64GB DDR4
1Gbps Backend Infrastructure-
Hosted in NYC, Wasabi S3 storage backend, with BunnyCDN as CDN provider for both instances. Who we are-
This instance is ran voluntarily. I have been a server administrator for going on 10 years now starting with a passion for gaming private servers and evolving into running a business that offers web/service hosting for various clients & personal projects. These instances will not disappear overnight given my track record with various volunteer services(Tor Non-Exit Relay, Free VPN for my Mumble, Mumble, Various websites for musician/artist friends, that I have and still host). Why we created this instance-
Freedom of speech & information is paramount in a free society. While not legally obligated, centralized platforms have increasingly infringed on societal and moral obligations to appease advertisers & coddle the fragile. How long we plan to maintain this instance-
Indefinitely How we will pay for this instance-
Donations, Personal Funds. More instances are in the works and I plan on hosting more instances for the community and web at large that follow the same principles, Gitlab, Pixelfed(ActivityPub), and Funkwhale(ActivityPub) instances immediately come to mind. I signed up for and confirmed an account, but now when I navigate to zee.li I just get a blank screen. When I go to other pages, i.e. https://zee.li/settings/profile, I get an interface but it appears un-styled Interesting, I'm having no issues here. Can you post the output in your browser's console as well as your OS, browser, & versions? Thank you! We also have a discord if you would like additional assistance! https://discord.gg/XWq3fgcRgs Seems to have been an issue with Cloudflare caching, please try now! Oh just saw this reply. I've actually gone ahead and set up my own server for my account. Digest appears to be invalid on the CSS for mastodon... Thank you for making this post I would say pleroma.social, you host your own instance and it's much lighter on computer resources than Mastodon. https://arweave.org has some options Bitcoin has resisted censorship. Other decentralized services don't allow free speech. You can run an instance where you can post whatever you want. That's the decentralised part. I don't think there is any social media platform that will remain decentralised/open. Remember Twitter or for that matter Facebook in the beginning were not moderated as much as now. Entities like Governments can end up forcing that. The problem those firms have is not government coercion but unchecked extremism in their own employee base. the world wide web? Yes, but no. I think what people are really looking for is some kind of software platform that allows them to put up their own website, so nobody else can delete it out from under them, but also have some kind of interaction with other people with their own independent sites. So that they can press a button and "retweet" something someone else said, or reply to it without creating a new account on the site of everybody you want to reply to etc. The hard problem is probably to get some kind of a distributed user accounts database, so that you own your account based on cryptography rather than the capricious whims of billionaires, but still use it on more than your own website. Maybe something like Namecoin but for usernames. > Maybe something like Namecoin but for usernames. I seriously think that solving decentralized identity (and trust) is the most important current goal in the field of online technology. Once it is solved, all future innovations become ten times easier to implement and adopt. That's probably an exaggeration, but it could certainly be a more foundational technology than cryptocurrency, for example. Anyway, to get a sense of the state of the art, I recommend this paper[0] from late last year. To pick just one of the approaches discussed in it, let me mention BrightID which is documented here[1]. You're describing the indieweb: your identity is decentralized and is your domain name (not at the whims of billionaires), you put up whatever content you want but typically articles, interact with other people's content (likes, retweet, comment) without the need to create an account anywhere. The real blocker is that in practice there is a huge step between creating an account on a commercial service and buying your domain name, setting up a website and making it reachable to the world. Yes!! do check out venturon.org a social media platform for good, where people can come together, create teams, volunteer and also ideate trend issues. Yes! Do join Venturon.org, a social media platform for good, where we can together ideate, volunteer and build solutions. To a first approximation: none. Paper and pencil has historically been very useful "the only winning move is not to play." There hasn't been a post with the words "twitter alternative" in 3 weeks [0]... but this probably has nothing to do with Twitter banning Donald Trump today. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I think it has to do with Google Play Store and Apple App Store banning Parler. The Blockchain oh please no. imagine if each tweet consumed as much energy as a current bitcoin transaction. that'd be great. /s He said he wanted decentralized. i have a question for signal users. what happens when signal will be used by teams to organise the capitol building style attacks? or a disinformation campaign by a crony government? or racial message storms that make rounds on whatsapp (why they introduced the 5 forward limit) They called it Springtime in Egypt. Will usa see an American spring? Ala Arab spring? I dont care about that. I am asking the technology. How will it handle such stuff
If you're acting in good faith, those shouldn't be even remotely hard questions. If those are hard questions and can't be answered directly, you should re-examine who is a sheep. "What are some of the weak points of my belief system?"
"What might I be wrong about?"
"What is a good faith summary of the other person's argument?"