Hacker News Reader

Comment by rohan1024 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a piece is missing in the current Internet infrastructure although I have no idea what it is.

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

View on HN

I don't think the missing bit is the "ease" of self-hosting a blog.

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.

> they are about propagating your thoughts ideas and knowledge to others. The emphasis of a social network is on "propagation" aka, propaganda.

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.

You missed my point, I'm saying that the reason for social networks being popular is because they allow various actors to submit others to their propaganda.

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?

Interesting point. Could we see part of the contrast as the extremely low friction involved in the equivalent of "reblogging"?

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).

I think 'Social Networking' is really just a bad name for an internet identity and sharing model no different from the same problem in Operating Systems. The internet is the computer but it's missing identity and acls. With those things anybody could write an indexer that could build a feed for you.

That's the salient point. When you re-frame social media as collaboration tools, the answer to the question, "collaboration on what?" comes to the fore.

What is the underlying project that requires collaboration? I have a few ideas, but I hope framing that way yields ideas for others.

>What is the underlying project that requires collaboration?

Gossip.

I'm not being (entirely) snide: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/106939711455438...

Eventually, all what media does is information routing from producer to consumer. The existing Big Tech paradigm is just one of [many][1], if you think that way.

[1]: http://doc.replicated.cc:8080/%5EWiki/owner.sm

I think you might want to look at something like Solid[0]. It resembles your idea, but is more general. People host their data in a personal data store (a pod, which can be either self-hosted or by a 3rd party) and Web applications read to/write from this data store. It is more general in the sense that this data can then also be used by other applications to provide their own features (which is a hard problem to tackle, since you don't want to restrict all current and future different types of data to one interface).

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.

[0] https://solidproject.org/

I just learned about Perkeep and in my fantasy world it or something exactly like it plays a key role in putting people back in control of their content.

https://perkeep.org/doc/overview

I've spent years creating my version of what I think is missing: It's here:

https://quanta.wiki

One narrow incomplete summary of Quanta is that it's Federated Social Media.

It's unfortunate that their logo contains a capital Q. Hopefully they change that to avoid confusion with currently popular conspiracy theories.

Agreed. It’s still too complicated to run a personal website. “Social media” is a UX layer over web hosting.

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.

If based on a single cooperative user, writing a blog/photo sharing Facebook/Twitter lite site is relatively straightforward. Equally, spinning up its backend (pico-)services with Kubernetes and Docker is also far easier than it used to be, albeit missing the App Store install experience just yet.

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.

The real problem is that the data generated by the user is very valuable to the social network owner, there's no way to make money allowing a user to have a private self hosted federated infra unless you charge the user and then no one wants it since Facebook is free. If you really wanted to, you could easily build a federated easy to use distributed social network, but no one does because you don't make money on it and passion projects only go so far.

And there has never been the incentive. People complain about walled gardens, but unless you dedicated to FOSS, any commercial venture (with a few exceptions) produces apps and tools that feed the master and excludes other parties.

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?

> And there has never been the incentive.

For FAANG. Instead of improving standards such as XMPP and RSS, they actively ditched them to create walled gardens..

Yeah, absolutely agree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com