$1M to build decentralized social networks
requestforsocialnetworks.com
requestforsocialnetworks.com
Isn't the point of a blockchain to keep a ledger of the changes? So how can you delete anything without rebuilding the entire chain? Being decentralized in this case just means that now everyone has my data. Sure, it is encrypted, but are we just going to say what is secure today will be secure tomorrow?
My understanding of blockchain is that it is meant to be tamper proof. Which is nice for things like tracking votes or ensuring the integrity of things, but with my personal data I WANT to have the power to tamper with it. These two ideas seem to be at odds.
If I'm misunderstanding, maybe somebody can educate me.
The blockchain is a really terrible medium for a social network. Maybe some kind of hybrid where the blockchain entries point/link to a centralized (or federated) location, but, then, why not just build your own protocol that doesn't use the blockchain? Just build it over Matrix or something.
What does the blockchain provide, other than a buzzword?
Well what makes me uncomfortable about this type of data being decentralized is that I want to guarantee a delete or edit. To do that on a decentralized network you need to have a way to guarantee that those edits propagate to machines that you do not control. Is there a way to ensure this?
Of course such edits could be stored in new blocks with the information to replace the title of previous blocks. However, it would not be possible to delete any content.
On top of this I propose building a protocol for store and forward messaging. Something where it is possible for anyone to develop a server that speaks this protocol. Instances of these servers can be registered in the namespace above and this is how these servers can find each other to push data around. Anyone should be able to run these servers, providing service just for themselves, small communities or even large organizations, businesses, institutions or resold commercial services.
Lastly I propose an application layer on top of this. This application layer has two components:
1) A suite of standard protocols for user agents to contact these servers and download user data 2) A suite of standard protocols for rich content, encryption or group distribution
From these pieces, it would be totally possible to build a giant decentralized social network that could present the same sort of data we see on social networks. While things could start with simple messaging, similar features to what we find on social networks could be built.
Of course there's the problem of bad actors and abuse, but it seems this could be solved by merely blocking all communication except for that from a list of known senders... We could call this the friends list.
It would be a lot of work to build and get right, it's a shame nothing like this exists today.
Personally I see no reason to make global addressing mandatory -- could be optional for those who want to be globally findable. Otherwise, use ssb pubkey as identifier and only connect with immediate FoF network.
You can't do this without having a central authority (which people don't want to be beholden to), making names cost money (or be otherwise difficult), or accepting squatters. People aren't going to pay for names and you've gained nothing if you centralize the name store. People aren't going to accept the immobility of federation like they do with email (and it still gravitates towards centralized authorities).
I think we're just going to have to accept large hard-to-gen and hard-to-read identities (e.g. base32'd pub keys like onion service names) and we each "tag" friendly names to them locally as we choose.
Until an indexing service becomes a defacto standard, once again making it centralized. This is what I meant about federation (i.e. sharing your name lists) gravitating towards centralization.
> Squatting on previously-unused-in-the-service IRL identities doesn't matter at all.
It does when I can register thousands and thousands of names. This is why it must be too difficult for squatters and not too difficult for users.
Xor, <whoosh>, as the joke flies over my head.
When I registered with social networks at the beginning of the Web 2.0 hype, it was all exciting and new. There were many offers and most companies (MySpace and Co had no idea how much potential was available for advertising and marketing). After that came Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. That's when it all got more professional. You went from a user to a customer, from a customer to a record with which you could earn money. It's getting around and everybody's jumping on the $$$-train. Youtube is like a TV channel, only that runs more advertising there and Instagram can also be seen as a advertising portal. Facebook dug its own grave because it became too greedy. Since only old people hang out on Snapchat, nobody wants to go there anymore. Not even my little nephew wants to join a social network and that's the point where I see it as a bubble that burst.
Social networks are like alpha versions of open World Crafting Games on Steam. there are hundreds of offers, but nobody wants them anymore.
I could lose the no win political debates, the self-aggrandizing from my friends, the memes, but seeing my friends kids grow, my parents seeing my kids grow. That's cool.
I've met many people in developing countries that don't have running water, or indoor sanitation, but still access Facebook through a cheap smartphone. It's important to a great many people.
Personally I find Facebook extremely useful; I just hate the implementation, which seems to be a buggy mix of dark patterns which attempt to manipulate my state of mind and do bad things with my personal data.
A realistic open competitor would be extremely welcome, but first you have to somehow get past the network effect.
There is simply no replacement solution for staying in touch with people outside of phone number based solutions à la WhatsApp (which you could argue is also a social network).
This sort of comment is why people in tech are very often seen as being incredibly bad at solving non-trivial social problems by people outside of our industry. Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to use one regularly. There are plenty of problems with the way networks work, and what they do to our mental health, but the notion that no one should use them any more is plain stupid.
Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth use a product designed to addict them.
I agree in general though - they can be useful, and they can fill a real purpose.
A lot of people I know only use Facebook for messenger. Some only use it for private groups. Some for events. Some for the newsfeed. Those people use twitter, instagram, whatsapp, snapchat, or discord for the features they don't use on Facebook.
IMO instead of looking for a service which could distribute the back-end servers of a single social network we should be encouraging the distribution of features, and make sure they can interact with each other smoothly.
I was referring to daily- and monthly-active-users numbers. That's people who sign in and interact with their accounts at least once a day or a month respectively. Those are the important numbers, and they're a fairly accurate representative of the number of people who currently use social media. I think it's fair to say people who stop seeing any positive value in their accounts stop being monthly active users.
That's a logical fallacy. You cannot possibly interpret the reasons why people use the social networks. They very well may feel forced to use them in order to get a job or otherwise be socially accepted. You call that "value" perhaps - they use it to get a job, therefore providing value. But that is an intentionally misleading line of thought and leaves the reader less informed than when they started reading.
The situation is a lot more complex than "providing value". People use social networks because they have been artificially forced into society as a near-necessity. Our society does not actually need them. But because we have them, people must use them. That they use them does not mean they derive value from them. They may not see it that way (I don't), and in aggregate, it does not seem to provide value to society at all. I would even argue that social networks have provided detrimental effects to society overall, and produced negative value.
Yes it does, necessarily. This is basic biology, economics and self preservation. It may be temporal (i.e. good in short, bad in long) but nonetheless, people do not do things they do not value.
They most certainly do. You are confusing doing X because one values doing X with doing X because they really want Y. Be it biology, economics, or (especially) self-preservation—among many other possible rationales—it does not follow that seeking any of those Ys means one values doing the X one believes necessary to get to the Y.
I mean, I don't think my mother chats with her COPD support group or shares pictures of her grandchildren on Facebook with our relatives because society has artificially forced her to do so, but OK. I guess she's just a slave to the machine, then.
> That they use them does not mean they derive value from them.
It kind of does, though. Social media is just an umbrella term for platforms that allow integrated, multimedia communication between a network of accounts. All other valid and legitimate criticisms aside, people find value in social media because of the people they network with, and because social media platforms tend to be more user friendly and accessible to the mainstream than were forums, email and telephone.
Nobody needs another Facebook or Twitter.
The future of humans communicating, however, is wide open. Anything that succeeds on Blockstack will not be a clone of something that already exists, but rather something novel, even something that could only exist on the platform.
I've said it before, but the closest thing to the future of social networking that I've seen is Slack: Right now, outside of its marketed purpose, it's mostly used as an extension of existing online communities or as a way for people to stay in touch after departing a company, but the way it's it's centered around distributed groups is powerful, much more so than the way groups were grafted onto the core topology of Facebook.
A successful decentralized social network will not look like Slack, either. Just as Slack drew from IRC and Facebook drew from MySpace, a new network will have to draw on all of these and more, synthesizing a new experience that offers genuine value.
So out of the fire, and into the frying pan.
or allowing others to comment on your videos?
What does the "foundation of the internet" mean in this context? The internet's structure and its protocols haven't really changed. Are you confusing the centralization of user attention via network effect for centralization of the actual network?
Beaker and dat are built on the same base protocols as the traditional web (tcp/udp), but also add higher level protocols for changing the centralized power dynamic I mentioned above. The key, IMO, is that there is a good story for users around transitioning from the centralized web into the decentralized web because of the shared foundation.
I see the confusion. When I say "foundation" I mean how we build applications, not the underlying protocols. Maybe I should have said "foundation of web application design", or something like that.
"Facebook but decentralised" is already 26 characters so that seems like a bit of a tight limit. I suppose it'll help find people who have any marketing nouse, which is the actual challenge for a project like this, not technology.
"Please implement the social network in 5 weeks or less, GitHub link to code too please"
As an aside, do the submissions have to use the Blockchain? There are already a ton of good decentralized social platforms that make no use of a blockchain whatsoever, and the majority of them inter-federate with one another.
A lot of these ICOs want developers to invest their money AND build the product for free.
I agree, there are a lot of good non-blockchain solutions to this... like most ICOs
These guys launched the same concept last year. For $25m and they literly have nobody using the platform.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/blockstack-partners-vcs...
If I was browser stack I'd be offering a lot more than $1 million considering how important this is to their platform.
Blockstack was in the R&D phase until early 2017 (building the core tech & infrastructure), we launched our browser last summer and now have decentralized apps built on the platform that are live. These apps can scale to millions of users today. We're excited about enabling developers to build new apps like decentralized social networks.
P.S. I'm convinced it's not enough money. It will take over a year just to have something working and usable and it will take more than 5 people to do that.
With Blockstack most of the heavy-lifting is done for you by the underlying platform (identity, auth, storage -- all three decentralized).
We've seen people build functioning chat apps and alternative to Google docs within few months. See stealthy.im and graphitedocs.com
I would suggest we come up with an authentication system that can scale across several small technical groups of people, perhaps something like OpenLDAP. Then lets put a few gateways in front of it like SAML2/OAuth/whatever. Set up replication between a few technical folks in a small circle of trust. If a friend leaves the circle, exclude their node from replication.
Now put whatever trendy web app, chat app, misc app in front of that authentication. The apps can come and go, but the authentication data, email contacts, phone numbers, all maintained in one authentication system and highly replicated.
Each application should be coded in such a way that users own their data and are prompted to download backups. Data retention policies should be very obvious to the end user and they should know this is not a long term archive for their binary data.
Each small group of technical folks share their platform with their circle of technical and non technical friends. Each geek pulls a copy of the backups in the even a friend wants to leave the circle. Different geeks in the circle can manage different pieces of the platform or different applications.
At least, that is how I would approach this problem. YMMV.
I think people are worrying so much about network and storage and uptime for ephemeral machines that they are missing the forest for the trees here. Just get a decent platform and iterate from there. At first, you don't have to federate, conform to a protocol, distribute data, etc. But if you are building these things, why not at least offer anonymity?
0 - https://github.com/cretz/bine 1 - https://github.com/cretz/yukup/tree/master/yukup/pb/proto
Facebook selling ads based on demographics is centralized but it seems to me like a small part of what's messed up about social networks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
It is simply a platform on top of the Web same as Wordpress, that anyone can install. It can even run on local wireless mesh networks.
Oh and it’s totally Free and Open Source and any community or startup can use it to build apps to put in the store.
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Contact me if you’re interested to be involved, or just have a question about how to get started. (Greg+hn, the at sign, then qbix.com)
Private communication is not possible. Humans have been striving to achieve it for all of history. I guess that the rich and powerful can achieve it to a certain degree. The analog hole is the problem. Why is there not more technical discussion about plugging the analog hole?
Key feature of any social network should be 'right to be forgotten' (e.g. delete content), and ability of network to moderate and update content (due to legal requirements, or due to users requests for their own content or for other reasons).
How do you manage that in a system such as proposed here? How do you enforce content to be removed due to court order? How do you take down a revenge this or that after your account gets hijacked and your password/keys are gone?
But even in decentralized model, you may think you 'own' you data (as in TOS), but surely it cannot just reside on computing resources you have full control over. Now if you lose your passwords/keys, who do you contact to take your content down, grant you access to it again? What is an arbitration process to decide that you're you, not some impostor?
I've said this before, the only data an user should have the right to remove should have no value to someone else. I absolutely hate reddit threads filled with "[deleted]", people deleting their Mediafire accounts, picture hosts removing infrequently fetched images and so on and on. It's so hard to avoid "digital Alzheimer's" it's infuriating and we should curb it rather than encourage it. I do myself want to delete old FB Messenger conversations, but I'd be seriously pissed seeing some old chat containing only my incoherent ramblings. I think one-sided deletion isn't the solution, fine-tuned privacy settings (and thus hiding and possible recovery) is.
It's important that we don't forget to deal with this before we actually do start to notice that "f* shouldn't have deleted that".
I disagree - the right of users to assert control over their identity and data supersedes your desire to control or use that data for your own purposes, or your desire to have the web act as an immutable historical record, which it was never designed or intended to do.
I agree that Reddit threads with deleted content are annoying, but that's an implementation detail Reddit chooses to have and could likewise choose not to have (the way Hacker News chooses to make it impossible to delete user accounts, change usernames or delete comments after a certain time.) But the premise that people should be allowed to delete content from the web at all shouldn't be up for debate.
>I think one-sided deletion isn't the solution, fine-tuned privacy settings (and thus hiding and possible recovery) is.
Both can be solutions, but I believe the former is a necessity.
The right of users to assert control over their identity is different from the control over all of the data the user put online. Your right to your data should end with my right to my data. As I said, data deletion is so often damaging it's ridiculous.
> or your desire to have the web act as an immutable historical record
Please don't twist my words, I never said that.
> But the premise that people should be allowed to delete content from the web at all shouldn't be up for debate.
I think that exactly has to be up for debate, especially with "social networks", noone is social alone thus the data shouldn't belong to that one person. I'm not saying it should be new "Facebook" that should have the control, not at all, the users should get to decide. Over time I've accumulated access to various collections of images of for example events that have happened in the past. I made those pictures, I shared them, I have control over them, do you think it's right I now go around and wipe them?
I don't believe it is - the data you put online is your online identity, for better or worse. Control of one is control of the other, especially when it comes to social media, which often has the mediation and sale of that identity as part of its business model.
>Please don't twist my words, I never said that.
To me, that's implied in the belief that deletion is harmful and needs to be managed. If that misrepresents your views, I apologize.
But a lot of people do seem to have the concern lately that things like the "right to be forgotten" are a threat to data archiving and the public record, and they're right, but... that doesn't matter. That's the web working as intended, it's meant to be stateless and ephemeral by design. Link rot, unfortunate as it is, is a feature, not a bug.
>Over time I've accumulated access to various collections of images of for example events that have happened in the past. I made those pictures, I shared them, I have control over them, do you think it's right I now go around and wipe them?
Yes, if you want to, I think it's entirely your right. Why should you have the right to add data to a service, but not to delete it if you choose? Particularly when those services claim an arbitrary right to do so themselves?
Mind you, I'm not saying you have the right to delete it everywhere, because that's infeasible, but you should have the right to delete what you published from whatever service you published to.
Why should I have the right to delete content that relates to other people, if I might even say important to other people? Simply because I was the first should mean that I get to say what happens to the content?
> Link rot, unfortunate as it is, is a feature, not a bug.
Really curious, how is it a feature, not a bug?
The biggest obstacle to this is browsers. Browsers must implement decent identity and authentication with pluggable encrypted data storage. Without that there simply can’t be a decentralized social network on the web.
Beaker browser is the only active project attempting to move in that direction, even though it might not be the right solution. They deserve the $1 million, not some idiot blockchain bikeshedders.
Anyone know of a similar decentralized DNS platform and allows users to 'own' their personal data without an attached ICO?
Does this have a system that allows users to keep ownership of their personal data?
Cryptocurrency could potentially provide an avenue to compensate anonymous storage providers for storing encrypted data backing a social network. A well-integrated system could give users the one click to join experience you need to get wide adoption, without forcing them to think about who runs their server.
This is what Blockstack and many other projects are trying to do (I don't know about Blockstack in particular, it didn't work when I tried it a couple months ago and the founders seem to grandstand a lot).
It needs to be an API, that developers can use existing platforms (current browsers, mobile and native apps) to build their apps. Users aren't going to care enough about decentralized data to change their behavior.
The basic challenge is that smart people keep making really poor choices which are very funny but also counter productive.
The problem is making something as engaging and entertaining and interesting as Facebook. Good luck.
It uses Javascript or Typescript as its language.
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