This is a subject that strongly matters to me. I too would love to see a return to non-proprietary, open communication protocols, open source software and decentralized hosting—everywhere on the Internet, not just on Less Wrong. This is one of the few capital-C Causes in my area of professional competence that I would happily donate a lot of labor and/or money to, if only I knew of a way to promote it. But I don’t, and I don’t know of anyone who does.
To argue that the problem can be solved in the LW microcosm would need to either take advantage of LW-specific community features, or explicitly not solve the general problem (e.g. by not scaling, or by admitting that some things would always remain Web-only and non-interoperable). If either one is the case, please mention that explicitly.
Like gjm, I immediately want to jump the inferential distance to the usual unsolved problems. (E.g., how do you handle ‘graceful degradation’ for people who encounter a necessarily web/http link for the first time, so the community can grow and people with regular blogs can link to it?)
It might help if you add explicit disclaimers saying “please don’t bring up issue X, that’s for a future post”. Are there things you don’t want to talk about before a certain point? Is your sequence planned out enough (and short enough in practice) that I should refrain from anticipating certain issues, even in separate posts?
I fear that my comment(s) might appear negative, focusing on problems that I don’t know how to solve before you even posted about them. I very much want this conversation (and the wider LW 2.0 one) to be constructive! If you think there’s a better way for me to engage with it, please don’t hesitate to tell me so. And thank you for taking the time to advocate a solution to a problem I deeply care about.
ETA: also, I would very much enjoy myself writing posts on subjects like “Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client” (or as it’s sometimes known, The Web Is Not The Net), “The Proper Placement of User Features (is at the clientside)” aka “separation of protocols from implementation”, and so on. I just didn’t think it was on-topic for LW. But if you make it on-topic, then I might just join in.
Talking about optimizing a widely-used system seems very on-topic for Less Wrong. At any rate, it doesn’t seem any more off-topic than things like fibromyalgia. I probably couldn’t contribute anything of value, but I’d be fascinated by those hypothetical posts.
The only LW-specific community feature my proposal takes advantage of is our cultural applause of “I cooperate in Prisoner’s Dilemmas.”
It scales in the specific sense that it allows for incoming users and authors to be added incrementally. It fails to scale in the sense that it can never be an open system in the same sense that Usenet is an open system. However, that is no worse than our existing situation.
Graceful degredation is a hard problem. Please don’t bring up graceful degredation, that’s for a future post. :-P
I am waffling on whether to encourage people to anticipate issues. On the one hand, it’s helpful for me to know what I need to address along the way. On the other, I really don’t want the comment threads bogged down by material that only makes sense to our technical contingent.
I love it that you jumped to the correct interpretation of The Proper Placement of User Features.
The only LW-specific community feature my proposal takes advantage of is our cultural applause of “I cooperate in Prisoner’s Dilemmas.” [...] It scales in the specific sense that it allows for incoming users and authors to be added incrementally.
New users, who encounter inbound links on other sites, aren’t yet invested enough in the community to join an NNTP network. This isn’t a PD type problem, since “cooperation” here requires investment that only pays off later (if at all): spending time choosing, installing, and learning to use a new client application, usually without understanding why a non-web solution is being used, let along that particular solution.
This is one I’m glad someone asked about because I thought it was clear and it wasn’t: I am not advocating a native-client-only approach. I am aiming for something that uses NNTP as mechanism on the back end, so invested users have better options than “bug the 1.5 guys in a position to fix things to fix things” and interoperability between LW and the diaspora is easy rather than hard.
Inbound users should not have to know or care that NNTP is involved (1.7), for exactly the reason you mention: to the average user, the web is the internet (1.1, first because I expect most people here don’t realize it either), and explaining to them why they are wrong is not helpful. I want the answer to the eventual, inevitable question “how do I do X” (where X is not some fundamental operation like “read” or “post”) to be “install this app today and be happy,” as opposed to “bug person Y for six months and hope they take the time to implement X.”
The ‘cooperate’ action I need has to come from diaspora authors, not inbound new users; they are the ones that would need to be convinced to join the network and use blog software that supports it. Making that cooperate action as close to costless as possible (I would settle for “no harder than setting up your own blog”) is a hard problem—but, I believe, solvable.
Thanks for making that clear. I can’t foresee what your argument for NNTP on the backend is going to be, so I’m interested in reading your further posts on it.
I don’t. And I’m sufficiently politically naive to think that broadcasting that is a good idea.
Maybe the iterated ones, if the discount factor’s right. Maybe the real thing too, sometimes. Depends on the opponent. Depends how I’m feeling about counterfactuals. Whaddya got?
This is a subject that strongly matters to me. I too would love to see a return to non-proprietary, open communication protocols, open source software and decentralized hosting—everywhere on the Internet, not just on Less Wrong. This is one of the few capital-C Causes in my area of professional competence that I would happily donate a lot of labor and/or money to, if only I knew of a way to promote it. But I don’t, and I don’t know of anyone who does.
To argue that the problem can be solved in the LW microcosm would need to either take advantage of LW-specific community features, or explicitly not solve the general problem (e.g. by not scaling, or by admitting that some things would always remain Web-only and non-interoperable). If either one is the case, please mention that explicitly.
Like gjm, I immediately want to jump the inferential distance to the usual unsolved problems. (E.g., how do you handle ‘graceful degradation’ for people who encounter a necessarily web/http link for the first time, so the community can grow and people with regular blogs can link to it?)
It might help if you add explicit disclaimers saying “please don’t bring up issue X, that’s for a future post”. Are there things you don’t want to talk about before a certain point? Is your sequence planned out enough (and short enough in practice) that I should refrain from anticipating certain issues, even in separate posts?
I fear that my comment(s) might appear negative, focusing on problems that I don’t know how to solve before you even posted about them. I very much want this conversation (and the wider LW 2.0 one) to be constructive! If you think there’s a better way for me to engage with it, please don’t hesitate to tell me so. And thank you for taking the time to advocate a solution to a problem I deeply care about.
ETA: also, I would very much enjoy myself writing posts on subjects like “Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client” (or as it’s sometimes known, The Web Is Not The Net), “The Proper Placement of User Features (is at the clientside)” aka “separation of protocols from implementation”, and so on. I just didn’t think it was on-topic for LW. But if you make it on-topic, then I might just join in.
Talking about optimizing a widely-used system seems very on-topic for Less Wrong. At any rate, it doesn’t seem any more off-topic than things like fibromyalgia. I probably couldn’t contribute anything of value, but I’d be fascinated by those hypothetical posts.
For many reasons, I agree with this.
The only LW-specific community feature my proposal takes advantage of is our cultural applause of “I cooperate in Prisoner’s Dilemmas.”
It scales in the specific sense that it allows for incoming users and authors to be added incrementally. It fails to scale in the sense that it can never be an open system in the same sense that Usenet is an open system. However, that is no worse than our existing situation.
Graceful degredation is a hard problem. Please don’t bring up graceful degredation, that’s for a future post. :-P
I am waffling on whether to encourage people to anticipate issues. On the one hand, it’s helpful for me to know what I need to address along the way. On the other, I really don’t want the comment threads bogged down by material that only makes sense to our technical contingent.
I love it that you jumped to the correct interpretation of The Proper Placement of User Features.
New users, who encounter inbound links on other sites, aren’t yet invested enough in the community to join an NNTP network. This isn’t a PD type problem, since “cooperation” here requires investment that only pays off later (if at all): spending time choosing, installing, and learning to use a new client application, usually without understanding why a non-web solution is being used, let along that particular solution.
This is one I’m glad someone asked about because I thought it was clear and it wasn’t: I am not advocating a native-client-only approach. I am aiming for something that uses NNTP as mechanism on the back end, so invested users have better options than “bug the 1.5 guys in a position to fix things to fix things” and interoperability between LW and the diaspora is easy rather than hard.
Inbound users should not have to know or care that NNTP is involved (1.7), for exactly the reason you mention: to the average user, the web is the internet (1.1, first because I expect most people here don’t realize it either), and explaining to them why they are wrong is not helpful. I want the answer to the eventual, inevitable question “how do I do X” (where X is not some fundamental operation like “read” or “post”) to be “install this app today and be happy,” as opposed to “bug person Y for six months and hope they take the time to implement X.”
The ‘cooperate’ action I need has to come from diaspora authors, not inbound new users; they are the ones that would need to be convinced to join the network and use blog software that supports it. Making that cooperate action as close to costless as possible (I would settle for “no harder than setting up your own blog”) is a hard problem—but, I believe, solvable.
Thanks for making that clear. I can’t foresee what your argument for NNTP on the backend is going to be, so I’m interested in reading your further posts on it.
I appreciate both your encouragement and your criticism.
I don’t. And I’m sufficiently politically naive to think that broadcasting that is a good idea.
Maybe the iterated ones, if the discount factor’s right. Maybe the real thing too, sometimes. Depends on the opponent. Depends how I’m feeling about counterfactuals. Whaddya got?