Planetary: An open and humane alternative to Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Planetary: An open and humane alternative to Facebook

planetary.social

26 pointsyarapavan24 comments

This looks like just a sign-up page, which falls into the 'announcement of an announcement' category. That's off topic here.

On HN, there's no harm in waiting until a thing exists. Once it exists, we can have a nice thread about it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

it's still in beta testing. It works well but there is still more work to be done before it is released.

That's great, and I wish you well getting it to release. It's just that HN threads need to have something substantial to go on, such as an initial release, in order to have a solid discussion. If you email us when the release is ready, we can give you some tips about how to present it on Hacker News.

If you don't have a signup link, it's pre-alpha.

Lofty goals but I don’t see how free and private expression will be humane and free from harassment. People believe different things and whether we consider that humane and harassing is totally subjective. Let’s tale HN as an example: someone promoting the MIT license to the detriment of the GPL is a reason to fight in this space. What about moral and political issues on which we disagree?

I like the spirit but it just doesn’t seem realistic. (Though if it threatens Facebook and Twitter I’m in favor of it.)

You give people tools to handle issues.

You let them follow or block people. You allow them to join open or closed groups, groups which are okay with adult language or groups which encourage manners, some groups might be invite only, etc.

In most instances given those kinds of options people can manage their interactions.

You don’t have to shutdown people you don’t like on the platform, so long as they are not engaging in criminal activity.

> You don’t have to shutdown people you don’t like on the platform

Unfortunately it's never framed as such. It's usually of the form "this person's words/ideas are objectively bad and your platform is bad by allowing them to post at all"

Some words and ideas are objectively, universally bad.

Other words and ideas may not be universally bad, but I don't want to host them on my platform. My platform, my rules.

Still other words and ideas are not universally bad, and I don't have a problem with them on my platform, but some of my users will. So my users need the ability to define their own rules and control who they interact with.

Scuttlebutt is a bit different because the tools of control are in the hands of the users.

Sure, there will always be abusive jerks on any platform with an uncensored text field to type in.

BUT in scuttlebutt we not only have the power to block people, but when we block them 2 things happen:

1. the block prevents anyone downstream from us from receiving that persons content via us (remember this is distributed P2P stuff) 2. the block message is public and can be commented on.

Once a significant number of people block someone they become effectively cut off from the main body of the network. Think of it as an immune system response.

When I block someone i comment on the block message. I might say "blocked for misogyny" and this signals other people who follow me and might have that person's content via another source, that they might want to take a look and preemptively block that person to protect themselves from that type of content.

> What about moral and political issues on which we disagree?

there are a number of people who disagree on Scuttlebutt. We seem to get along, or we just block them and don't have to hear it.

Private groups are a thing on the roadmap that will enable folks to have their own topic specif stuff. So, if a bunch of republicans want to talk right wing things, they can do so without pissing off the democrats who want nothing to do with it, and without getting blocked out of the network. We're not there yet, but it's definitely in the plan.

> Private groups are a thing on the roadmap that will enable folks to have their own topic specif stuff. So, if a bunch of republicans want to talk right wing things, they can do so without pissing off the democrats who want nothing to do with it, and without getting blocked out of the network. We're not there yet, but it's definitely in the plan.

I think this is a tremendously naive TBH. There is an awful lot of internet regulatory discourse that is focused on "we must stop these people talking anywhere" much more so than "I don't want to see these people."

It feels like Planetary needs to decide what it wants to be. If it's a decentralised censorship resistant network then it should just scrap it's T&Cs as they're meaningless. If it's not then the decentralised parts feel useless as it's actually just centralised in truth.

Great goal! I'm a big fan of social networks for social good, including empowering users, reducing spam, and improving communications.

The Planetary project uses the Scuttlebutt protocol. I've looked at the protocol a bit, and I love its strengths - such as distributed replication in offline peer to peer settings.

But I don't have a clear understanding of how Scuttlebutt will handle some typical use cases. For example, how to handle accountability, or compliance, or anti-spam training across instances, or stopping mass-spidering across instances. Social networks at scale have tremendous pressures due to attackers, harassers, spammers, etc. and it's non-trivial to stop these, even more so with Scuttlebutt because it would need new kinds of distributed tools and new kinds of user awareness.

If someone here is able to engage with these questions, and ones like them, I would be very happy to provide more info and specifics. I keep my notes in progress at https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/social_network_plan

These posts are starting to bug me. There was another new social network post the other day, also slating FB.

As much as it sucks, people aren't on FB for superior encryption or privacy controls - they're on there because their friends are on there. Solve that first.

I get the frustration but the only real "solution" to the network effect is to steal the "friend graph" from the other sites and give people an account without them asking for one.

It's not realistic. It's not a problem we can "solve". People just have to be provided with compelling enough alternatives, and enough reasons to bother leaving.

That being said Planetary isn't really another social network. It's just an iOS client for Scuttlebutt, which is an existing network, with thousands of users and an incredible community.

> I get the frustration but the only real "solution" to the network effect is to steal the "friend graph" from the other sites and give people an account without them asking for one.

If this were true, then Facebook would have never taken out MySpace. Facebook got its foot in the door by being a social network designed for a specific niche of people (college students). It tapped into what that audience wanted and wasn't getting elsewhere, and only expanded after being _the_ platform for college students.

The problem with most of the social networks today is that they want to start off as an everybody social network. I say "most" because I'm sure there are social networks out there succeeding with their target niche, but haven't yet expanded beyond that niche to a more visible entity. When they're ready, I'm sure we'll slowly hear of them more and more until they become commonplace, without having a dramatic entrance.

I somewhat disagree with this, you can't solve a human problem with something technical. Even with free accounts (which are ill advised and have been done before).

Every other FB competitor entered the market with a hook that focused on being human (and appealing, a lot of times, to our vanity). Think Instagram, SnapChat and now TikTok. It's a lot harder than simply having better features, and without the user's friends.

Nit: I don't like the logo at the bottom near the link to the scuttle project, it is like a big red centralised node of power in the middle with a big target on it, what your trying to get us away from, probably just a me thing

that's not a logo.

Those concentric rings are a depiction of network hops. It's a smaller version of a section of an infographic that I can't find at the moment.

I agree it's not obvious.

In ssb, by default, you get content from friends, and friends of friends. You don't follow the tree of connections indefinitely.

Is there anything like self-hosted Facebook "wall?" Something that's like Wordpress in that I can post updates to it and like Facebook in that people can find my updates and comment?

Wordpress itself. Have seen several families use it as a Facebook wall replacement with email updates if you subscribe.

This. Wordpress is incredibly flexible and you can do all kinds of neat stuff without having to deal with the CMS aspect of it.

Is it intentional that the Scuttlebutt graphic looks like an anus?

Planetary only downloads content from your friends and their friends - it’s impossible for people to spam you

How does the look / work in practice?

If you are not connected to me as a friend, and you are not a friend of one of my friends, I literally won't see your content.

Scuttlebutt is a distributed peer to peer network so we only gather content from other peers we connect to. Some of those peers are centralized "pubs" but functionally they're just another user (somewhat oversimplified). we ask our peers "hey do you have any info on person x whome i follow" and then follow that person's connections out one more hop.

so, if you are too many hops away from me I won't see you content.

If you ARE within range of me and you message me i will see it, BUT if you spam me I will block you and you'll stop seeing me, receiving my content, and receiving the content from any friend of mine whose content you got through me. You could get their content via another person/pub but I likely cut you off from something by blocking you. I will stop seeing your content completely because my client will stop asking for it.

Because blocks have a follow-on effect enough people blocking you will act like an immune system defense and cut you off from the main body of the network.

Bad actors are rapidly flushed from the system in my experience.

So, A is a friend of B and B is a friend of C, then A will see all of C's content?

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