Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
The author suggests everyone "acquire your own damn digital land." And I think this is the way forward. In 2005 or the pre-FB era being a "techie" was a personal distinction. I feel that now most people have become "techies" in varying degrees, either out of necessity or general interest. I mention this because I think I think there's so many more people now that are fully capable of operating their own site or blog than there were in the pre-FB era or the pre-smart phone era.
I think one of the greatest joys of "getting online" back in the day was the sense of adventure that the internet provided - strange, funny, obscure, intriguing, informative "websites" lurked everywhere. And stumbling on one of them and bookmarking them is/was a strange thrill. Contrast this to scrolling through a uniform looking "newsfeed" you have no control over. I think something like a "back to the internet" movement just might make it's own momentum.
However, Ive had trouble with super basic deployment stuff and i haven't found many resources to help. Ive just been using Cpanel, manual ftp updates, shared hosting etc, but have found this setup is super limiting, and I didn't really know much about hosting options before setting hosting up
I just found netlify, which seems great: integration with github, easy ssl certs, free, but just changing the DNS to point to netlify has been confusing, and I haven't been able to fix it. I also setup a site for a friend who was using wix (so terrible...) and can't figure out how to get hosting switched.
I feel stupid for not being able to do this, and have been able to figure out how to do a lot of stuff that should be more complex (building web apps, data analysis with Python, etc) but I've struggled with basics of deployment
A good set of resources for people who aren't engineers but have some HTML / CSS and programming knowledge, but don't have any devops or professional engineering background would be really useful imo
The only way to ensure that your content doesn't get reshared without your permission is to create a tightly locked-down walled garden. If you're really worried, you need some sort of DRM too. And if you're really really worried, you need global laws that ban software that breaks DRM.
You can't have private, distributed data. You have to pick.
Can you elaborate on how exactly maintaining your own site/blog/domain/presence etc is at odds with privacy advocation?
Content control, copyright and DRM are orthogonal to the issue of privacy.
Also I don't really understand the use of the phrase "the distributed internet" to distinguish from "silos" and "walled gardens." The internet is by design distributed. FB while being a walled-garden is still very much "on" the internet.
You can't publish your site/blog/domain/presence privately to your friends. That venue does not substitute for Facebook. When talk about replacing social media, we have to accept that most people don't want to share their baby photos etc with the world.
A website that any old person can access means it's a website that any number of bots can crawl over and aggregate. Now you're basically back where we started with Facebook.
I think it should be possible by leveraging public-key encryption. That's going to require something beyond Wordpress though.
What giant corporations don't want to build their own sites?
>"It isn't that people can't, it's that they would rather pay for it with money or data instead of time."
There might be a sea change in this though. And I think with things like Squarespace et al you can create a slick looking site for yourself with both minimal time and cost.
It’s just The Internet.
None of these sites or apps have done anything new, with the technology we have. It’s the same shit that existed in 1999, but scaled up to more bandwidth, faster client-side hardware, and warehouses full of servers.
Facebook really isn’t an improvement on AOL. Snapchat is just a means of forcing people to delete the lewd emails you’d like to send. Twitter is SMS text messaging, plus a mailing list web UI.
Since maybe 2004, people got sold on the idea of turning their address book into a home page, exposing their contact list as content. But it wasn’t anything new or incredible, it was just user behavior that changed.
Only now, when everyone is desperate for a political scapegoat, are we claiming that it was used to rig elections. But the only difference between the time before “social media” up until now, is that when we just had 900 page paper phone books, the phone book never drew lines to graph connections between phone numbers.
We have smart phones now, and smart phones have been the real game changer. In 1999, an ad campaign would have conflated these devices as supercomputers banned by export treaties, pointing to Game Boys getting used as missile guidance computers or military grade cryptographic hardware. But again, it’s just scaled up network bandwidth and more computing power packed into smaller packages. The real game changing aspect of smart phones is the cameras, hot microphones and uniquely identifiable, trackable radio tags we’ve been brainwashed into carrying.
Insisting on calling it a “social internet” simply treats people like children.
Platform monopolies are not The Internet. The Internet does not require a prefix or qualifier. It’s not the “social” internet.
It’s just The Internet.
Yeah, I really miss all the SMS tools that use to be available...
Text "Movies 90210" to 9999... I don't want adds and all the cruft of HTML, just data!
I guess with Twilio I could recreate that functionality for most of the data I want by web scraping but that is painful and hard to maintain.
The first step is rejecting the aggressive attempts at corporations to ensure you live in their "garden" as much as possible. It's bizarre that people are doing gymnastics about how if you just restrict yourself to this certain 3% of the food in that garden everything will be ok.
How about setting out on your own instead? How about starting from: "I don't need youtube, I don't need amazon, I don't need google analytics" and figuring it out?
That's what everyone used to do.
Just black text on white background.
I write about stuff I find interesting. So far a few unfinished pages.
I don't even think it is indexed yet.
It is my rebellion against pixel perfect audience building technical blogging and what not.
It feels good.
I might add links to other similar pages at some point.
Anyone else makes old fashioned web sites?
There is no CSS, I just use tables. Eat me.
Got distracted by choosing one.
Got distracted by choosing a template.
Got distracted by problems with Markdown (an8d Asciidoc).
Get distracted every time I want to write.
After I got my html "template" up and running I just copy that and write whatever I want to write.
Conclusion: for me, when writing, finding the correct tools prevented me from just writing.
(I have however spend some time on my developer tooling and feel I get a good return on investment there. Currently (for 5+ years) Netbeans and Maven, and later also VSCode + Yarn.)
I've spent more time than I dare to admit trying to rebuild my person web site which I ran successfully from 2000-2012. Which coding framework should I use, CSS, database, hosting platform, the list goes on. I should have just spent the time writing it all in plain vanilla html (which I've now started doing).
Ironically if I'd start posting my content on a social network where I had no control over how it looked/functioned I would have spent my time actually putting together something useful.
It's a noble goal.
To achieve it, the author suggests that people buy a domain name, spend $4 a month on web hosting, and manually install Wordpress. The author leaves out ssl, so I assume either the person is going to pay some more for a cert or spend time learning about LetsEncrypt and installing CertBot.
Add to that Wordpress maintenance time and time installing plugins.
Subtract from that the ability to write polemics on any of these topics:
* geopolitics wrt Ukraine
* diversity in tech/gaming
* China's policy on Tibet
* probably others that I'm missing.
Because if rile up anyone with even slight hacking skills (or anyone who could pay such a person) your $5 a month website is toast.
And we're apparently replacing the attention economy with "directly checking your site," RSS, and email newsletters.
If we're going to entertain technical-user fantasies like this make-the-internet-great-again piece does, can't we as technologist at least imagine a less boring future?
* it should cost $0 to publish
* the more popular/polemical one's writing, the faster it it should be to retrieve the document. You know, technology that has existed for close to two decades now
* it should be as easy to use the software of our fantasies as it is to use the awful social media networks we're decrying. Drudgery shouldn't be a badge of ethics.
* it should also probably be able to deliver publicly-funded scientific journal articles at $0 cost to the user.
Actually that last one is key. If someone thinks they've got a Facebook-killer, don't describe the technical underpinnings to me. Just give me a search bar to find publicly-funded scientific journal articles on your system. If I can discover them and read them and they haven't disappeared after a month, I'll then consider using your system to express myself.
> Add to that Wordpress maintenance time and time installing plugins.
For most of us it would be more efficient to just use html.
Then you don't have to maintain Wordpress at all.
Or, if updating links etc gets tedious: use static html generators.
If it's just a static server, then it won't require the maintenance of core, plugin updates that WordPress and other CMS's need, just the web server updates.
Not sure what exact shape the author imagines this might take, but I've had this idea (dream) in the back of my mind for a long time.. We need a standardized protocol that is open (I.E. not controlled by or dependent on 1 or 2 companies), private and secure by default, and dead simple to setup. For a while a few years ago I was really excited about the Bittorrent Bleep concept. The fact that it's been discontinued demonstrates just how important it is for these protocols to be open source and have multiple implementations!
Imagine a protocol that was P2P, supported chat/messages/voice/video, group messaging, integrated microblogging, ability to follow your friends and rank their posts with your own algorithm! Imagine if it was modular. You could choose from a half dozen post ranking algorithm plugins, or write your own, or sign up for extra-value services from companies that were competing for your business (maybe providing curated post lists or cloud storage of your posts/PMs).
I realize that absolutely none of this is innovative on it's own. We've been able to send encrypted messages/host blogs/script our own algorithms forever. But it's highly fragmented and requires a certain technical acumen that many people just don't have. My grandparent's aren't going to host and configure their own blog. Not going to happen. But, while it lasted, Bittorrent Bleep was entirely doable for them.
Consider Facebook. With the friend request it invented a new social protocol. It was based on an underlying technical need (this platform will allow you to message, interact with and view the content of this target user) but became a social contract (I assert that I know and am willing to interact with this person on a level where they can see my daily updates and information that I have chosen to share). This was incredibly rigid and binary, but essentially shaped the social media landscape and affected the way that users, especially early users considered their friendships and acquaintances.
Also its a bit out of vogue now, but there was a massive 'thing' of the facebook relationship status being some kind of social registry.
If anyone has read the 'Kingkiller' chronicle books by Patrick Rothfuss, I would imagine a 'social protocol' to be something like the 'rings' system from the city of Severin. Simple ruleset, but allows complex social emergent behaviour and could be abstracted over different mediums or communications channels.
Probably subjective, but therein lies the insight into why Facebook is so culturally significant.
If Snapchat were an open Facebook implementation, it would not have taken off.
However, the real innovation would be in managing the cryptographic keys in a way that is both secure (within parameters) and dead simple for end users.
This is the part where someone starts shouting "blockchain!" Not sure if that's the solution, but with enough smart minds thinking about it I'm sure a there's a way.
My grandparents didn't set up their own Facebook account either. We (mainly my mom, I think) did it for them. You could help your grandparents set up a blog, then show them how to post to it (think something like WordPress or Ghost, not a static site using Markdown and Git). After all, they had to learn the Facebook interface too.
I had some extra server space after a side project a few years ago and offered to set up Wordpress blogs for my mom and a few friends. Most of them were basically never used. My mom kept up near weekly posts for a year and a half or so, but it's been several years since her last post. I bet I could delete them all right now and it would be next Thanksgiving before they noticed.
But, they're always asking why I'm not on FB.
I'm not sure if decentralised solutions like Mastodon/Scuttlebutt/Diaspora etc will succeed, as I feel this is a human problem, not a technical one.
I think many of us wants even further back than the golden years of blogging: we want back to before "blogger" was a profession, back to when we put things on Internet to share and get feedback.
IMO "Finding an audience" is something you need if you are going to milk advertisers.
What's the best way to do this, a password you give to people? I don't like the idea of forcing people to give up their identity.
I’d have never thought it’s so customizable: in the store there is an app for xmpp chat with a fb-like ui (very popular amongst my younger friends) and the social aspect can be managed by Circles [https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/circles], control over visibility and permissions is included.
Of course, it does not scale to millions of users, but that’s the point. The approach is a middle ground between “delete social media” and “own your own domain”.
The problem its hard when not social media to get visibility.
Its easy to start a blog (wordpress/blogger/tumblr etc.. ), its harder to get people to go to it and periodically check it out. RSS aggregators/ google reader was a good way to do this, but they've fallen out of favor. There is a ghost town of abandoned blogs on the internet presumably because they didn't get the reads/ interaction.
Its almost like you need to announce your new blogpost on twitter/ fb..
But I think there are solutions.
I saw this open source groupware on hn a while back and am starting to get in installed for an art non-profit. There are probably others, but I'm going install and see how it goes:
Absent such groups, it would seem to be desirable to let individuals monetize work which makes them happy. In such a web, it would be more akin to a street marketplace, as opposed to, say, a curated set of goods.
So the matter we must take up is that of equal opportunity for those wishing to increase their readership, (whether for influence or monetary reasons)?
That's my interpretation. In this sense, are Google and many other "given" sites on the web a barrier to having a conversation about such measures, because of their power?
Google would seem to want this a more open web. I suspect they're starting to fear everyone using Facebook for everything, thus investing in Wordpress. Though they haven't been big supporters of their own blogging platform.
A lot of the social media Giants like you to keep your content on their own site, basically the longer your on Facebook/twitter the more ads they can show you. Google drops ads all over the web (except Facebook and twitter) so they don't care where you go.
In practise, however, it is a very quixotic pursuit to try to pull the social world away from SV companies with network effect lock-in. The only way to succeed just may lie revolve in anti-social marketing behaviour.
In my experience, 'the masses' are bright enough that they will drop a service when it's no longer useful to them, or when something better comes along. After all, they adopted FB in the first place, right?
If you're opposed to the services, the best you can do is abstain from them and share your reasons why with anyone who cares to ask, but don't bother preaching. It might be as effective to be a loud exception: as an example, how could a public agency organize a public forum via FB if all citizens aren't using FB? By standing out from these services, inclusive groups will have to accomodate their members who are outside of them. That's all we can ask for.
People are giving their attention, personal information, and money via these social services, but maybe they can afford to spend it there. Otherwise they would stop, no?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
1. We started with the idea that actually social tools would let you get in, get out and get on with life. They would help you coordinate your actual social life in the real world instead of sucking up your time online. A minute spent on the app would result in hours socializing in the real world, not the other way around. Group activities would form like snowballs leading to an actual goal, not random chatting. Thus came the first part of our mission: Empowering People.
2. We also realized very soon that communities wanted to install our software themselves. The flipside of letting people actually get together on their own time, is that we can help unite their members and engage them. Universities and Buildings, for example, release their own social app to their Students and Tenants, and allow them to find one another and connect on their own time. (See https://qbix.com/communities). Thus we cane upon the second part of our mission: Uniting Communities
3. We realized there is actually no good open source alternative to Facebook, that communities can install the same way they can install Wordpress for blogs. We wanted to change the world and have developers and startups build social apps as easily as Wordpress plugins. We wanted communities to run our platform and apps even on a mesh network or router disconnected from the Internet - REAL decentralization, to be used in countries with censorship, or on a cruise or remote village to plan dinners, date, etc.
But the world has changed since blogs and we had to build and maintain literally thousands of features, from user signup to data access to payments. We recently got a security audit by an outside firm and are proud to say that they found (and since patched) only three, very hard to exploit, vulnerabilities in the entire platform. The code is at (https://github.com/Qbix/Platform). We don't have a slogan for this part of our mission yet :)
It's totally free and open source, and we will begin growing a community around it in 2018. If you want to join or find out more, contact me -- the email is greg and the domain is qbix.com
See a 7 minute video about it to understand fully the how and why:
One of the examples says that when overlaying a Google map widget on the dentist's site, that the dentist does not have access to location data. Elsewhere, the video mentions iframes. If the dentist's web site runs HTTPS, how are you injecting iframes? Or is the primary "site" being served locally, with the dentist's web site displayed in an iframe?
If all of the user's identity data is stored on their phone, how do they backup that data or move it between devices?
1. I used Keynote and then ScreenFlow
2. The dentist's site HTML/JS actually chooses to include the iframe pointing to the user's identity server, our platform does the rest.
3. The user's data is stored encrypted in other areas, as well. They themselves can decrypt the data and grant keys to access it as they see fit. Our platform handles the rest.
However, Facebook as come to be a `SP for media`, which is why its generally known as social media. There's just no general purpose on FB other than to share media articles nowadays.
I went a few years without Google Analytics, and I was proud of the fact that my weblog had no tracking software. I kept thinking I would write a script to track the audience myself. But I was busy and never got around to it. So in the autumn I decided, okay, I'll use Google Analytics for a few months, till I can write my own code.
I'd written my own system for tracking my weblog, back in the era of 2005-2009, before I used WordPress (back when I only used my own code for websites).
Looking at the Google Analytics results nowadays is heartbreaking for someone like me, who remembers the independent blogosphere of 12 years ago. Because it is gone. Utterly gone.
Back then my traffic tended to come from dozens of independent bloggers who noticed when I occasionally said something smart. The blogosphere was a world of individual voices. There were big group blogs, such as Crooked Timber, but even those consisted of individuals and it was easy to figure out who had admired something I wrote. It was a world where you had some sense of who was reading you, and what they thought about you, and they could see when you read them in return.
That world died in the era 2006-2010 as Twitter and Facebook gained influence.
Nowadays, Google Analytics shows I get traffic from sites that aggregate audiences. Overwhelmingly, that's Facebook and Twitter. The traffic is very sporadic, full of big spikes of anonymous readers. A few times a year I'll write something that gets on the front page of Hacker News, and then I'll get from Hacker News anywhere from 4,000 to 40,000 visits over two or three days. Which is great, but also sporadic.
What I miss is the ability to follow those who are reading me, and more so, their awareness, in response, that I am reading them in return. The dynamic of "You read me so I read you and you see that I read you" is alive and well on specific sites, such as Twitter, but I miss it being part of the general Internet experience. I do realize I can use something like https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge to treat social media as a series of RSS feeds, and I am planning on doing that, but that still misses the element of them seeing that I am reading them.
I've been thinking about some way to try to balance people's preference for walled-gardens with this kind of open back and forth conversation. I might work on this more seriously later in the year.
If anyone is interested in a bit of history, way back in 2006 I wrote what was widely considered the most definitive summary of the fighting that had taken place among those interested in developing RSS. All of this was made irrelevant by the rise of Twitter, but in 2006, this still seemed like a very important topic for the Web industry:
"RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it"
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
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I do not revel in the glorious autonomy of, say, permanent academics whose self-help blogger reflexes have become so internalized that it's no longer clear whether they recognize that a post is opportunist piggybacking on trending slacktivist topics. If I can't tell from the general tenor of your blog whether you can tell that you're baldly shilling your books, your self-perception in the matter has ceased to hold relevance.
My first thought upon seeing affiliate marketing links on a self-serious blog is usually something more along the lines of: why does this creature believe they should be paid to have tastes in others' works?
For the most part, I'm not going to visit at all. But when I do, I am going — 100% of the time — to strip tracking parameters, affiliate codes, and all the other bullshit off any link prior to visiting.
Knowing that a platform's design serves to background any given individual user's capitalism of-the-soul in the service of a more homogeneous, impersonal assault from the proprietors is an extremely valuable thing. De-emphasizing personal schemes allows platform-centric economies of scale to double as behavioral peacekeeping. If I only have to circumnavigate a user's terrible ideology, vainglorious twitter feuds, etc. to accrue value from the subset of their posts I find worthwhile, I'm doing better, curatorially-speaking, than if I had to concern myself with that user's schemes to monetize their mere existence in my vicinity.
Constraints on affordances limit a small proportion of content-creating elites. You know you're one of those when your whining about the platform becomes action in leaving the platform, self-publishing in parallel, or otherwise upregulating personal agency.
For everyone else, though, those same constraints make the world go round.
The average internet user has no business whatsoever running their own services, per every single survey of digital skills ever conducted. And a CS prof writing otherwise is either (a) grossly incompetent in his stated area of expertise or (b) allowing himself to shoehorn flights of fancy into his writing in the service of pushing schlock.
A profile you lose because you didn't pay $4 last month, or didn't get security updates for, or […] is simply not a plausible centerpiece of alternative social media under any demographically-literate view of the world.
Homestead the noosphere all you want. Tenements will still need building too.