My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network
carter.sande.duodecima.technology
carter.sande.duodecima.technology
You need the original purpose. It has to be to make something that isn't itself. Myspace was mainly novelty and music, Facebook was for status minting from ivy colleges, other ones are for an exogenous purpose as well. Politics isn't a useful unifying principle. I helped run a progressive political precursor to one of the major ones about 20+ years ago, and it only existed because it was tolerated by part of the establishment, and it could not survive a truly hostile environment.
Gamers made discord a thing because it was for playing games. Hipchat was about making code, and Slack was a way to manage people. Reddit was for sharing alternative/emerging culture.
A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture, and the current generation of censors came up in divergent/alternative culture, so they have a more sophisticated idea of what nascent opposition looks like than the old ones.
Short version is, we don't need a decentralized social network, we need new culture that produces networks, and courage to create that culture.
Of course, special-purpose social networks never become nearly as big as Facebook, but in my mind that's a feature, not a bug.
I'm working on a social-ish network for TV. Is Facebook good for live discussions about TV? No. Is Reddit? No. Is Twitter, kinda but not really. That's the problem I'm trying to solve just for TV.
There are some audiences that go gaga for that type of connection. They love unprompted (over)sharing and friend collecting. I suspect you get a base of that on a service like Facebook, and since they're the heaviest users, the platform will eventually warp to appeal to their needs.
I always got a lot more value out of vertical communities like forums and newsgroups, just because there was typically specific valuable content and opportunities for deeper discussion.
But I suppose I was never the sort who was hugely motivated by "reconnect with your high school buddies/distant relatives" which was the default pitch for general purpose social networks.
For example, I was scared when I started using discord, because it's entirely reasonable to think if I'm logged in in two places and start a voice chat, surely it'll start playing that audio anywhere I'm logged in, right? Everything else follows a "you do it on one machine you're logged in on, and you do it on all the others as well (such as writing a partial message, and not posting it - the same partial message is right there waiting if you grab a different device).
Well, not only do they correctly handle that one use case (audio chats) with a totally different 'you're doing it only in one place' model, they even track which machine you're currently live on. If you're actively using your home machine, they don't ring your phone - your phone which you might have left home. Or the session you accidentally left running on your office machine. They know you're actually live on a particular machine, and don't annoy or embarrass people by making the others ring.
There are just a lot of really, really important things like this they get right.
Forums did have a little bit of shared standardization, since a lot of people tend to use only a handful of highly popular forum apps, but kinda like the old 90s-style thing where there was always a roster of "must have" OS tweaks and apps you'd install on a new machine (and get to thinking 'geez, why don't they just make this part of the OS) - there's a similar thing with forums where there are a lot of sidecar things that ought to part of every forum, but simply aren't standardized. (Some of these are critical to doing certain jobs; some of them are, like accessibility features, critical to certain users, and difficult to make forum admins care about if they don't personally have the problem).
That, and what you're saying about "having it all in one place". It has a lot of benefits, like being able to cross-communicate and deeplink between communities.
Consider this, WhatsApp stories are not much different than personal blog but putting up stories takes few clicks while self hosting is whole new endeavor. Ideally everyone should own a blog/self host. This would solve the issues with centralization.
The problem is hosting a blog and discovering it is still not as easy as creating WhatsApp/Insta stories. Nor the users are ready to pay the price for running that blog. Centralized services solve all these problems. If some platform ever solves issues with self hosting and makes it easy to self host for minimal cost, I think we will have changed the face of Internet forever.
tl;dr We haven't achieved the required level of software/hardware abstraction for everyone to self host
What is the underlying project that requires collaboration? I have a few ideas, but I hope framing that way yields ideas for others.
Gossip.
I'm not being (entirely) snide: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/106939711455438...
It might even be profitable to start a venture that allows complete easy self hosting of content.
Wasn’t Berners-Lee working on something like this with his pods?
For FAANG. Instead of improving standards such as XMPP and RSS, they actively ditched them to create walled gardens..
The missing piece is that social networks are not about publishing your thoughts ideas or knowledge, they are about propagating your thoughts ideas and knowledge to others. The emphasis of a social network is on "propagation" aka, propaganda.
Social networks push opinions into people's face, it promotes, markets and advertises messages in ways that people can't avoid reading even if they're not looking for it.
They're not designed to make accessible information for those looking for it, but to allow you to advertise yourself and your ideas to others. And definitely not designed in any way to filter for accurate and high quality information.
What social networks do is make it really easy to voluntarily subscribe to propaganda and be subjected to it day in/day out. It's bonkers when you think about it that we all agree to participate in this.
That is the issue with centralization: you have no control over your feed, no control over your data, no control over discussion on your content.
On the other hand blogs/websites are all federated by design. You can control who views your content, shares your content. You control discussion on your website. You are also responsible for your content and moderation. You can also curate your own feed with RSS.
The reason people prefer posting to facebook or twitter (or even medium) say compared to their own blog, isn't the challenges in setting up a personal blog. It's because on facebook and twitter they can push their post to a big audience, even if no one is searching for the kind of content they're publishing.
A self hosted blog/website does not have this feature.
Just as an example, the government does have an official self-hosted blog: whitehouse.gov and the President could have simply published all their thoughts and messages there instead of Twitter. They could also easily have a personal self-hosted blog. But why didn't and don't they? Instead choosing to post to Twitter?
On a blog, there is always the possibility that a post would "go viral", but the odds of that happening (and the potential reach) seem dramatically lower than for something like Twitter and Facebook. Maybe, to borrow a possible-not-quite-applicable concept we've been hearing about from epidemiology, the R₀ for popular posts on blogs is intrinsically going to be much lower than that for popular posts on these kinds of social media?
After all, Twitter and Facebook (eventually) added a standardized means for reposting something without changing it, typically with a very rapid and easy user interface flow. There's probably never been anything as quick, easy, or standardized for reblogging, including because reblogging always has potential to remove or change the format, context, and content of what gets reblogged (and in the case of reblogging as a link, to require blog readers to follow the link in order to see the content, which could also be seen as reducing the blog's R₀-equivalent, since fewer people will follow a link than would read something in a feed that gets pre-rendered for them).
E.g. When you create a new blog post this is stored in a pod of whichever data provider you chose. The fact that you wrote this blog post can then be discovered e.g. on your social media, after which people can read it in their favorite blog post reader.
I find the implications of such a platform to be the most interesting thing. It effectively creates two different markets: that of data providers, which compete to provide the best service, and of application providers, which compete to provide the best features.
One narrow incomplete summary of Quanta is that it's Federated Social Media.
No, what's missing is that outside of mining their data to sell ads, or possibly having it as a nascent feature of expensive walled garden phones, no one has figured out how to get consumers to pay for those services as a standalone offering - yet.
There’s no reason a Facebook like experience can’t be created using a domain registry, hosting, an RSS/atom feed, and a friend request API.
I feel like you are right about the need for an original purpose. And would add that at such a momentous time when everyone can see the consequences of private, centralized media selling attention so efficiently, is it really impossible that the situation rises to that level of original purpose? The seed of a new community might just need a great spark.
TikTok would beg to differ.
You are correct about having a base, but once you grow out of that base, you can compete as a general purpose social network (ultimately an advertising/lead channel - even if only for the market of ideas).
It's all about execution and as you said, purpose. So what's FB's purpose anymore?
> A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture
And arguably TikTok found that.
Smart view on TikTok though. I thought the purpose of TikTok was for teenagers to be on a platform without their parents checking up on them, and the CCP was right there to collect kompromat on the next generation of potential western leaders.
I am suddenly very optimistic about the purposes for how new platforms will emerge. Younger people will figure it out.
Shameless plug: my social network is in alpha if anyone wants to offer feedback. https://trophy.gg
Disagree. There were plenty of gaming chat tools. The first group I got into Discord with wasn't playing games, the first group I got into Hipchat with wasn't particularly code-oriented, the first group I got into Slack with wasn't the kind of group that had management, and the first subreddits I got involved with were nothing to do with that kind of culture. Those tools succeeded not because they were doing something new but because they made something that didn't suck. Sometimes that's all it takes.
I remember talking with friends 2-3 years before Slack et al about how all the existing chat tools sucked and maybe we should build a better one. We concluded that there must be some fundamental reason why Skype etc. were so bad, something that we were missing. But we were wrong, and Slack proved that.
(This isn't an argument that Facebook can be replaced the same way, because Facebook has a great UX. My point is just that you don't always have to do something different. Sometimes "x, but better" is enough).
This is probably my bias as an engineer showing, but the technology doesn't seem like the hard part-
I always understood that having an resilient network means people will use it to post some bad things, but I don't know if I really internalized the scope of that until later.
I had originally envisioned it might be useful in oppressive countries, where people needed a way to communicate - Recent events have shown how dangerous that can feel when you're in the midst of people who feel like that describes them.
As another HN post pointed out, there are two natural audiences for such networks - Idealists, and those who can't get away with stuff on other networks.. And the second is going to be far more common. That will influence the culture, and help to drive other "good" people away from the service, amplifying the effect.
Even if you have user-selectable moderators (Which I had, similar to the request the author makes), without a huge war-chest to hire a large team of default moderators, you'll never be able to keep up. The default experience for the average user will be terrible.
Over and over, I ran into issues like that - It's relatively easy to built the technological network, but managing the social network aspect is an unsolved problem.
that doesn't at all address bubbleism, but trying to decide which set of statements is 'ok' for everyone seems like a lost cause
Also, one avenue to radicalization is a feeling that your views are being censored. If you get to choose your bubble, that argument is undermined, so extreme bubbles might have a harder time growing.
Insulated bubbles are the problem I think, these echo chambers are a problem, especially unmoderated or those thriving by hate, aggrevation and/or exclusion.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
It's more analogous to email and shutting down an email server than shutting down reddit.
Yeah, this is why the fediverse is terrible, too. Your site admin shouldn't be the one deciding who you can DM, or which people can follow your feed.
Imagine if email worked that way.
Moderation is great, the trouble is when a single moderation standard is used across a monopolized market.
EDIT: also to note, email does kind of work this way with administrator applied spam lists. I would not want to use an email service that couldn't or wouldn't filter spam.
I think there is actually a lot of room for experimentation around how we interact online, and moderation is one of the most important areas. We need to think harder, rather than retreating to one of the two default positions.
As long as it's optional - and in the fediverse design it is - then it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. Whether or not those instances actually survive and have any users or just immediately collapse into internal bickering is beyond the strict scope.
Am I unusual? When there is hate speech directed at me, I don't really care if I see it or not.
But I do want to prevent other people from seeing that hate speech (I don't want the hate to grow).
That's a necessary affordance, given the technology. A mail server could indeed refuse to forward some of your emails, and this could even make some sense e.g. as part of spam prevention policy.
It is perfectly reasonable for a user to want to DM someone on an instance that has different moderation policies from their own, and it is equally reasonable to want to receive replies to those DMs.
If the specifications or implementations don't allow that, then I suppose it has to be justified by saying that the DMs could be used for sharing copyright infringing material (or worse), and admins don't want to run the legal risk of hosting that on their servers. Legally, though, that doesn't seem any different to operating a mail server, which don't typically have Content ID matching systems on them. Perhaps the implementation of end-to-end encrypted DMs would assuage some of these concerns a little.
On my mailserver, I make the rules. I decide how my spamfilters, greylisting and blacklisting is tuned. I decide who is allowed to have an account. And therefore, I decide what is allowed to be sent and received.
It was right around the time congressional hearings were taking place about Twitter and FB suppressing conservative voices. A lot of conservative talk show hosts were talking about how they had moved to the platform and urging their listeners to do the same if they thought what Twitter and FB were doing was wrong.
When you have heavy weight talk show hosts pimping your product without paying them and they're touting your platform as one that doesn't censor speech, you're going to have a huge increase in followers.
This is tantamount to "Stop hitting yourself."
Like the old line about academia, "the fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low," the stakes for gaming and socializing with internet strangers are both pretty low.
Additionally, computers make you an efficient asshole. You can make a pretty big mess before you have time to think about whether you really should be doing what you just did. To err is human. To really foul things up requires the aid of a computer.
I have since formulated the concept that any communications channel, any at all, where it does not cost to transmit per message will eventually be colonized by the advertising fungal organism. Even low-cost messaging can be colonized, but the lower the cost, the faster it comes.
Similarly, like FreeNet, any communications channel that can be used to post Things You Do Not Like will be used to do so. And that once you implement some kind of wide-scale filter against that, absolutely nothing can be done to stop someone from attempting to take over, to add and subtract to that filter, for their own purposes and their own ideology.
I have no solutions for this.
I’m imagining an opt in block list, where with enough downvotes, if you are a member of the block list, the content is hidden.
If the block list starts blocking content you want, you can fork it, keep the parts you want, remove the parts you don’t.
Everyone knows one another, so if one person blocks a bad actor, it makes sense that everyone else will block them sooner or later.
When people want to use the platform to "become a thought leader" or "expand their network" then you're in the realm of public publishing which is where all the problems you cite become issues. The web makes privacy possible, and I don't understand why so few people are interested in that angle. For me I want to be able to share photos of my daughter with family and friends. I don't care if someone else wants to privately rant about the government to their friends--privacy enables both of these.
People seem to both want a service that is immune from society and also used by society. That's a conflict that won't resolve.
Just the last week a musician tweeted something dumb about making his daughter learn how to use a can opener to open beans, and within a day, the very successful podcast he did the theme song for, where his track was used for the past like 10 years disowned him and stopped using the song. Then he was kicked off the cruise gathering where he was good friends with the guy who ran it and has been a regular headliner for years.
The internet has created a culture problem that I'm not convinced decentralized social networks will fix. At best, if one was created that people actually used, we wouldn't have situations we've seen with Alex Jones and Trump where all the platforms unperson someone on the same day, cause they could still at least keep their audience on the decentralized platform.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ManiacalV/status/1345870405085573...
The bean dad attention led people to discover these additional tweets which are much worse than his questionable parenting judgement in that particular thread, and that’s what drove people to stop associating with him:
https://www.thewrap.com/bean-dad-deletes-twitter-account-ant...
TBH when I first saw that he got chased off twitter for the other tweets I did think it was going to be some cringe “edgy” humour attempt à la James Gunn. But that “white homeland” and “mud people” tweet is overt and not acceptable racism.
Reddit used to be an example of this, it allowed communities to create their own rules enforced by their own moderation with very limited rules at the platform level (i.e illegal speech was banned), over the years however due to social pressure on Advertisers, reddit has started shifting more and more of those moderation from the community level to the Platform level, and IMO it is having a negative effect on the site as whole.
In the end Platforms should build TOOLS for moderation but not actually do the moderation themselves
The platform needs to insulate itself from attacks: DDOS, illegal content, reputation attacks.
The groups/fora/subreddits need local moderation that keep it on-topic and restrict trolls, flamers, spammers and other bad actors that destroy the utility of the group. (There are occasional groups that exist to be an outlet for off-topic discussion from others, or to out-troll each other, or rant.)
Third is individual content control. Everybody needs to have easy access to a killfile: I don't want to see that idiot; I don't want to see any thread that idiot started; I don't want to see any thread that idiot contributed to; I don't want to see an article or thread with these keywords.
K-means clustering.
This will scale, is compatible with machine learning, and yields an effect that is good for the users of a service -- but is not useful to owners of a service that maximizes profit and control over user happiness.
If trolls, jackasses, and idiots (by each users independent definition) get automatically segregated into groups where they see only each-others posts, and out-groups just never see their posts: problem solved.
Now, you might say "I don't want a service where neo-Nazis congregate!". I say: why, again, don't you want your police service to be able to infiltrate these groups and observe these people, and arrest them as they see fit?
Hmmm. I wonder.
Once it becomes clear to "evildoers" that the site is not "friendly" to their evil -- toleration doesn't equal agreement -- and that they are not hidden from justice, they will go elsewhere (at least the smart ones), and you can round up the dumb ones at your leisure.
Having been on the 'Net since before the Eternal September, I haven't been able to quite understand this drive to purge "things I don't like" from public forums.
If grandma is really lovely, but has some bad habits from her youth or a different time or something -- then don't mark her post as "racist".
I don't believe, either, that people are incapable of learning. If she spews hateful invective and then doesn't get happy-birthday wishes, she'll learn! Sheesh.
Remember, your K-means Clustering will be public; its easy to see where you stand, and why you got there! If people in your preferred group prefer to not see people spouting the N-word, you might want to consider reforming your habits and beliefs, if you want to remain a functioning part of that group!
The problem is not moderation: it's the belief in a consequence-free existence.
Restore evidence-based reality == restore civilized society.
But, there are a lot of people who don't like that idea.
Most people are like Grandma, just on different topics. The extreme but possible endgame for your system is everyone stuck in clusters of one, because they've banned everyone else for different offences (or those people have banned them).
In real life people take the bad with the good and learn to ignore minor disagreements (and some big ones too, up to a limit). That is a stable system which has worked pretty well for a very long time.
On the internet, there is little of the former (Our monkey brains are not default-wired to treat text we read on a computer with respect and empathy), and none of the latter.
Personally I like some cross-pollination. It can take me by surprise when I'm subjecting to the vagaries of the public.
People tend to protectively double down, and get very defensive, even over very benign topics. Some thrive on that friction, some just would rather leave it alone and drift towards those with similarish outlooks.
People also have a tendency to believe what they want to believe.
I got a load of stick off a friend, because he thought I held a particular political persuasion. Just because I mildly challenged him. Well I'm not even sure as to why he thought the way he did. He just put me in another box/bubble that wasn't his, and lashed out at me. Quite ugly behaviour in my mind. As soon as he realised we were on the same page on the topic, he vaguely apologised for his outburst. To me however, I was left thinking, well what if I hadn't seen eye to eye. Nice guy in the main. Just like racist Grandma.
Anyway I think what I'm trying to say is that I expect differences of opinion. And can accept them (outwardly at least, up and to a point, maybe..). I like a bit of healthy discourse. But the subtleties and lost contexts can be horrible pain points of misunderstanding. Some just can't stand a difference of opinion.
This insane drive to change the meanings of words (eg. every traditionally conservative leaning person is now a Nazi, and everyone proud of their unique cultural heritage is now a Racist, so long as they are also white) is no problem!
A member of a brittle, sensitive, easily-triggered group will quickly find themselves isolated and hearing only the few people who almost exactly match their identical beliefs. And, even those won't last long (just until the first imagined slight or use of the wrong adjective).
This, too, is instructive. Coddling a lack of resilience is not helpful to someone -- but, whatever. Fill your boots! If it works for you, have a blast with your two currently-acceptable friends! ;)
But seriously, the current Kristallnacht purge of social media is the best thing that could happen, in my opinion. It'll force a Cambrian explosion of new platforms that more capably handle differences of belief and tolerance!
This is a strawman, and is generally unhelpful to a good-faith discussion of politics, speech, and moderation.
That is not how it works. The police does not need this. They also will not really use it. However, this does give repugnant ideas a place to spread. It normalises them. It makes things much, much worse.
I get where you are coming from, but, can we look at three historical examples of repugnant ideas?
1. The earth does not revolve around the sun.
2. Slavery is immoral and man should never own another.
3. Women should take part in the voting process.
There are millions I'm sure from "You need to wash your hands to stop the spread of invisible things that kill people" to "Public executions as decided on by a King are not good for our society" to "The indigenous people here should have the same rights and protections we afford ourselves".
We are wrong about stuff all the fucking time! The humans in society that argued for the worst things, were the same as us. What if we are drastically wrong about any event in the last year? Where do we discuss it without fear of reprisal?
I do not think it's a good idea to "pre-decide" on what is a "repugnant idea". This is what conversation is supposed to be for.
Whether black people should be allowed to live? Gay people? Trans people?
Who is it you still need to have a conversation about whether they are allowed to have human rights?
Are you entirely sure about that.
We might, but the users of Parler et al quite specifically do not.
You’re being deliberately disingenuous. The racism on display in any unmoderated space is foul and horrendous.
It's a gold-mine for every law-enforcement service on the planet, for good or ill. They drop to their knees every night, and thank God for Twitter, Facebook, Parler, etc.
And, you might be partially right -- it'll only work for rounding up the really dumb ones. All the smart ones are already on Signal, Telegram, ...
But, seriously. This has got to end.
Throwing a kid into juvenile detention because they yell at their friend "I'm gonna kill you!" in the middle of a game or make a gun shape with their hand at school has got to hold different weight than someone posting an instructional video on beheading. But, no, you have kids kicked out of school because someone saw a toy gun on a Zoom call...
The real problem for police is that they have 5% of the population being called "Racist" or "Terrorist" or "Nazi". Not 0.001%. They can't possible track down any real risks.
However, a social network using K-means Clustering easily isolates the "everyone other than me is a racist" crowd, from the "we're normally quiet and tolerant, but holy smokes this guy has really lost the plot" crowd.
The police could use that kind of help.
The events of Jan 6 show that leaves a rather huge problem unsolved.
I don't know if any amount of internet censorship can ever stop sects from forming. You have to realize that "drinking the kool aid" is an idiom that long predates the internet going mainstream [0]. You can try to push these people off of mainstream platforms, but what will that accomplish? Ultimately, someone will create an easy to use darknet chat platform, and the more radicalized people will use that. In some ways, it's best if we can shine some daylight at the neo nazis. At least then we have some idea who they are and what they are planning.
What we had more recently was a kind of social media conveyor belt and sieve system that found, nudged and filtered people into a specific direction until there were enough deluded/lunatic/trolls/whatever you want to call them citizens from across the country willing to storm the capitol building.
Your darknet chat room just doesn't have that reach, potentially it has the reach to organise domestic terrorism in terms of bombings or something similar, but you'd never get a group of people so self assured in their bubble of reality that they'd willingly assault the capitol building.
While this sounds reasonable, it is not at all clear that it is truly the case.
One day I walk in the house and see my mother crying, watching TV, and pictures of a lot of people laying down. My mother was NOT a crier, so this scared the crap out of me as a child, and is probably why I remember it so starkly today. At some point years later I came to learn what was actually going on that day. (My mother was also not an explainer.)
I wince when I hear the phrase used casually. But of course, people have largely forgotten the deeply dark connotations it has.
Anyway, even though we can’t ensure radicalized sects don’t form, simply ignoring them as the post above mine suggested, is not any kind of solution. As we’ve seen, such groups won’t necessarily be satisfied to just talk among themselves.
This would likely alleviate the moderation issue too. You aren't going to see filth and extremism unless it's posted by your social network, which decreases the incentive for bad actors to post it in the first place.
Something like Discord gets even closer. I'd say Discord actually makes a pretty good social network, although most people don't treat it as such. In my experience, the biggest issue with discord-as-a-social-network is the binary nature of discord server membership. I've had my one "friends group" server split into 3 or 4 servers (each with 80% membership overlap) over some people who had drama, and this makes it much less manageable as a social network because you tend to spend most of your time on one or maybe two servers.
I think this is why everyone who started a MySpace account has the founder as a friend. You have one example of how the thing works, and he's too busy doing other stuff to turn it into a soap box.
I think the right solution is exhibited in the way people use Slack servers for niche communities. You don't install Slack because you heard Slack is neat. You install Slack because someone sends you an invite link.
That's exactly what I'm building (with ActivityPub). It's not yet production-ready though.
(I'm there with my hn username. Building a decentralised professional social network-linkedin)
If you want to collaborate, I'm here:
https://github.com/Clay-Ferguson/quantizr
If you create an account on Quanta reply back with your account name so I can find you.
Your code was very helpful to me getting my impl working!
The answer is yes - yes it is too much to ask for - you don't get a free service without paying for it in some other way - mostly these days through the data mining/advertising side of things. If there's no way to turn a profit then why would someone pay for it to be setup?
It's just really annoying to do that right now and the solutions that attempt to make it easy and slick aren't quite there.
This type of thing could be made more popular with normal people if it's easy enough since popular features which "break" the business models of companies like Facebook become popular (e.g. filtering of news feed that under the users direct control or lossless storage of photos).
I think most people would be happier owning the hardware than renting an online service.
I hear your argument. No VC-funded start-up is likely to make moves in this space. But your question ignores a whole sector of the economy: non-profits. I believe there even have been some non-profit social network attempts (perhaps even still active), though I can't recall their names.
Honestly, if it manages to approximately implement the community approach that works under Wikimedia itself, it may well become the most non-toxic social network, as they self-advertise it.
If it is generally useful to society but unprofitable to provide, isn’t that the category of things that the government should fund and operate like a utility?
That said, I don’t think the government should be in the business of running social networks. But at the same time I didn’t think China would get so much more right about the Internet than we have.
How can that be so when we have websites like Wikipedia, or Openstreemap?
Mastodon exists. It is what you described. It is paid for either by generous individuals or by donations.
Aether works that way. It is missing the anonymity OP wants but everything else is there.
Better yet if one can just open up a web browser (installing nothing!) and use it.
ALL other requirements are secondary.
Chat server can be scaled to many via docker.
An average end-user can fire up such a chat server to cover his own group chat.
Manyverse (Sweden) is that mobile app.
I’ve toyed with it. Looks interesting.
Very much like Gnutella except there are no seed servers, Manyverse instead uses cipher-link hash tags as a joining mechanism which often requires a posting at external websites to get started.
Disclaimer: just a hobbyist, not a contributor to Manyverse nor Scuttlebutt.
My understanding is that it is the same as seed servers
- Distributed content delivery. Every Aether node hosts the content. There is no centralized server hosting the data.
- Customizable moderation. You're free to ignore a moderator that who is being unfair and you don't see the results of their moderation. What they delete is only hidden to people who trust the moderator.
Am I right in seeing that a monthly subscription is the only option to get a client and start using Aether?
You might be confusing it with Aether Pro, which is a different app for a different purpose (remote collaboration) and is not P2P.
Imagine a scenario in which a revenge porn image is posted to the site. Is the victim's primary recourse simply to block the image on their end? That would leave them without any power to prevent the poster from sharing that image with anyone and everyone the victim knows. The victim might not even be immediately aware of that harassment if they block the image. Putting the burden on the end user to control what they see is not moderation. There needs to be some way for that content to be removed from the system globally for moderation to be effective.
The web is a pull based model while social media is push based. That means social media is much more prone to this type of harassing behavior. I would also argue that the web as a whole doesn't address this problem well as is seen with what the NYT recently revealed about Pornhub.
You have just described the world wide web. I may not want that stuff to exist, but I also certainly don't want the world wide web to not exist.
That said, governments are just organizations and very powerful organizations at that. Like any powerful organization, a government can become corrupt or tyrannical and start working against the populace. It is always a good idea to keep it in check so that its power cannot grow boundless.
So do we ban the internet or encryption?
You don't want a centralized internet and trust someone else to control it for you. You want control over your connection to a decentralized internet.
Decentralization + filters which are either trained by machine learning or appointed by the community that the forum serves (rather than the stockholders that the platform enriches) is what needs to replace Facebook, Parler, etc.
What does it need to have on top of RSS feeds?
The author might want to think about DNS a bit. Google and Cloudflare could wreck havoc on any new social network by filtering their DNS and with web browsers bypassing the local system settings, that could take out a lot of nodes in your network. I actually think some rights organization might want to start looking at domain names that are not returning their proper results from the giants.
My top item these days, however, is actually bot or troll farm detection.
Social media is cool because you get to participate and overhear conversations that you normally would never have anything to do with. However, bot abuse on website like Twitter and Facebook means that every interaction sooner or later gets brigaded by bots amplifying their message.
The technology exists, and as far as I understand, it isn't particularly complex. Projects like BotSentinel do a surprisingly good job of identifying these bad actors.
Perhaps all this falls under the "Customizable moderation" header, but part of me thinks this would be best addressed in combination of some sort of "proof of work", be it as simple (and inaccessible) as a $5 fee on sign-up or something more accessible but more complicated.
Maybe the deposit could also suffer a bit of value loss. Just enough to make spamming not worth it. I wonder what would be just enough here. It ought to be less than what would make it undesirable for almost all users?
Edit: I feel like the main problem with social media innovation is that there's very little possibilities to experiment. You need a good amount of users to test something out and users will only go to established services.
Bots are a problem on twitter and Facebook because neither of those networks is truly social, it is just shouting into the void.
Bots can react but they can't interact, make interaction not reaction the foundation of a social network and you nullify the power of bots.
In such a scheme, bots are attributable to accounts so that there is accountability and messages don't get artificially amplified.
It seems to me that messengers more accurately match the "social network" paradigm these days, while FB and Twitter are more like TV or newspapers (though curated by "friends").
Is it the discovery of new people to "stalk" and eventually engage with? Or engaging with content outside your actual social network (commenting media articles etc.)? A desktop/web version? The feeling that you're not actually disturbing anyone directly by posting something because there's a chance it will not pop up in their feed? Something else?
ActivityPub is basically as far as one could push the decentralization of social media without severe UX compromises.
This isn't the 00s, people don't expect the browser to the the only thing they use to connect to the world any more.
Think of something like Amazon Cognito or Okta, but decentralized and transparent.
So there needs to be some kind of data format that is accepted as the standard format everyone uses. I don't mean a protocol like ActivityPub, I mean something like JSON or XML tag names that describe and hold all social media posts and every other kind of microblog or personal data.
I guess this is commonly called the "Semantic Web" and various parts of it already do exist.
I'm not sure why everyone wants to over-complicate this.
If you want to make it easy enough to use for any mom and grandma, and you want any hope of gaining traction then you're going to need capital, which is going to necessitate a business.
And perhaps it should require some effort, some learning, and some know-how before one can jump on their Internet soapbox. The signal to noise ratio is pretty low.
Do you mean an online web system for sharing emails? If so, it's not really a mailing list. It's just an ad-hoc webserver system with poor standards for finding or doing anything. These systems are a joke imo, but to their credit, few web folks have come along to help them turn their loose jumbles of text into anything well structured & responsible. Even still, almost every one of these mailing lists would be well served by having an RSS feed of the activity, which is fairly direct to do.
Not sure what you are talking about, would like some clarity, but feels like a non-answer to me.
This is my wish. For a social network that isn't popular enough for spammers to notice it. I'm a member of a few such websites, mainly related to music, and that suits me just fine. I have little reason for a massive town square like Facebook, etc. Little reason to be discoverable by anyone in the world. Scale is overrated.
The difference is that a centralized service has at least one person that must be responsible for content, whether or not they moderate it adequately, whereas, with a P2P service, each user may effectively run their own service and must be responsible for its content, whether or not they moderate it adequately.
P2P would seem then to have more scalable user-invested moderation. Unfortunately, some using these services think they’re in the internet equivalent of a bohemian nudist colony. That’s not how it works, though. The responsibility is heightened, not lessened.
If your data is local to a user's device (laptop, desktop, tablet, phone), then it's not online 24/7. So, you need some way for other people to see it.
If you require people to use a server, there's either problems onboarding and trusting that server operator. Or you make people host their own server and nobody uses it b/c that's too technical.
I want to be fully responsible for what I decide to say, if I break the law, that should be entirely on me.
I want a protocol that allows me to host my own content on my website and let other people in the fediverse 'like', 'comment' and 'share' it.. So 'social media' becomes less about a service that does hosting and more about a client that does the aggregation and interacts with others I'm following
At best you end up with a little hangout for you and a handful of people you already know, possibly people who were already on the mainstream for-profit social networks with you but you insisted they use this other one to contact you. At that point you have an overengineered group chat application.
Probably the only reason anyone has even heard of it is because it's the pet project of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, known (somewhat infamously, a few of his talks at conferences have been pulled) for his association with the neo-reactionary political/philosophical movement.
It's not vaporware — I use it everyday to interact with many people. It's not where it hopes to be but it's going there at quite a clip.
> not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network.
You can literally set an urbit up and join a not-dead distributed social network right now, this second, in probably less than 3 minutes — it's explicitly not vaporware if people are using it to build thriving communities.
You can try with these commands, using Mac in this example:
mkdir urbit
cd urbit
curl -JLO https://urbit.org/install/mac/latest
tar zxvf ./darwin.tgz --strip=1
./urbit -c mycometSo in addition to privacy (the author addresses this) you want ease of use and a funding model, as well as some momentum.
Where is my community of people I want to publish and subscribe with ?
Alike Twitter actually losing half of its userbase.
What do I share with whom, do I give out much private information, would I get stalked or banndd, is there moderation, how is gatekeeping done ?
All these points seem taken care of by federations like Mastodon and alike where everyone is free to chose and quit an instance if not adapted.
Even the Twitter split is showing only different platforms for different people endeavours work.
Now from an OSS point of view, Mastodon and alike are complicated to keep track of.
This info looks outdated. Is Square really a sketchy website?
Bitcoin needs 10-15 more years to be adopted, but it will make content delivery for money easier after it’s adopted. Right now its adoption rate is too small to build a social network on top of it.
I honestly don't think it can scale much beyond 20 people, with 1 person determining if certain conduct is okay or not. And say you get kicked out for making a joke or whatever, then like in real life you have to find another Social circle
For example the aspect of ownership. Whether the account should belong to the person who registered it. Some people, for example, invest in design, promotion and content creation.
It seems to me that the technical solutions proposed by you remove the issue of ownership. What do you think?
E.g., "stick your head in the sand" moderation -- where I can decide what I don't see, but the content is still out there for anyone else to choose to see -- utterly fails at half the purpose of moderation.
How is content moderated that is harmful to one set of people if available to another set of people?
Child pornography, revenge pornography, doxxing, coordination of violent insurrections.
Serious vulnerability and potential for abuse and censorship. People could slip in the id for a user they want banned and anyone using that list would not easily realize they are prevented from seeing content from that user. Almost like reverse shadow banning.
The first successful decentralized social network will be using the decentralized compute and storage systems being developed in the crypto space.
I checked the Gas price on ETH and quickly concluded that's not even remotely sensible to use it for social media networks, and the bigger problem is that if something became hugely popular that could drive up ETH gas prices too, so building on that infrastructure seems risky from a cost perspective.
>grassroots content deliver (like bittorrent)
>customizable moderation (like ublock)
All but perhaps the last one is a browser level concern, and you can do that today in Brave browser. That said, I wonder if I can use a magnet link in an img src on Brave. I'll have to try it sometime.
You would likely be too focused on what's important to you, since noone is incentivised to artificially keep their "average session time" up. You would also not be tracked, hence miss out on important ads about stuff you don't need on a website that shouldn't know what you did last weekend.
I think you suggest a terrible idea. If I sounded sarcastic, it's probably because I am.
No way the average person will be doing that.
That means most/all of the people you'll be talking to on these networks would be hardcore techno-libertarians. A plus for some, a very strong negative for others.
Semi-relevant XKCD:
Social networks are like bars. If you and some friends go to a bar and you see a bunch of Nazis getting kicked out, your reaction is probably not going to be "that bar doesn't allow Nazis, let's leave and go to the bar that will let anyone in."
China's firewall is relatively open compared to North Korea, for instance.
Social media companies to compete on features not the network effects.
I feel like there needs to be a new internet standard.
We have emails, phones, texts, etc ...
Why can't we have a standard for social media and messaging which doesn't lock you in?
Imagine if I could only use one phone provider because all my other friends and family use that one provider.
Social media has been broken from the start.
Someone please fix it. It's bullsh!t.
* Privacy. This means actual privacy and not some bullshit substitution, such as anonymity. If privacy were really important nothing would ever be anonymous, because you would always want to know who you are speaking to or otherwise deny access to the conversation.
* Portability. Decentralization is too preoccupied with fixed addressing. If I move my laptop from one building to another the network has either failed to resolve my device or considers it a different/new user. You can have both portability and decentralization.
* Services. There is so much more to a valid social experience than texts, which is 70s era computation.
* Control. End users should have the ability to deny any output, or else this entire conversation about decentralization is moot.
* Turing Complete. The application should be able to build an instance of itself that can then perform an end-to-end self-assessment via test automation upon that instance.