Darcy – federated social media platform | Hacker News Reader

Darcy – federated social media platform

darcy.is

47 pointsdanboarder13 comments

Isn't it ironic that this page only has so far:

* A blog (which solved the issue of "everyone having a place to express their opinion" about 20 years ago, but fell out of favor because it required time and thoughts, gave too much power and responsibility to authors, did not gave enough power for a central capital monopoly to fully monetize it)

* A link to a twitter handle (which solved the issue of "let's push my content in front of people that might be interested because their friends are interested", at the cost of optimizing for toxic filter bubbles and anonymous bots trolling each other.

It's really funny to see people wondering how they're going to salvage twitter or replace twitter, improve twitter, etc.. when times are giving the occasion to do the bold thing : get rid of twitter. Log off twitter. Start a blog, subscribe to interesting people's blog, maybe resurrect a half-decent "social network of blogs" that would bring memories of Google Reader.

Maaaaybe, add a "x people read this" and "y people hates that" counter if you want, to satisfy the author's ego ("Other people like me !") and protect reader's ego ("I'm like other people !"). This also gives you a tool to prioritize and monetize _the list of blogs_, if you're okay to become the Sheppard of a thought bubble. But, to the world at large, "virality" is a bug, not a feature.

* A promise to leave moderation to instance owners, but have an API to delegate moderation to "us", which is still not the time-proven solution of "judges from a branch of government telling the law written by another branch of government, whith decisions enforced by yet another branch of government, where government is ideally democratically elected" - but I suppose that in a century or two, we'll get there.

* No solution to the two real power of twitter :

  - giving random Joe's a way to insult celebrities and politicians

  - giving journalists around the western world something to talk about without having to read hard and thoughfull content or leave their desk

* Also, no software (yet) ?

Yeah this feels like a rush job to take advantage of the moment, but they're really not prepared with anything substantial.

My first thought: "is this a Mastodon instance?"

The answer is "no, but they are using Solid[0]."

[0]: https://solidproject.org/

What is the advantage of using Solid?

Its not exactly successful, and people are already complaining of Mastodons complexity in their Twitter replies. So I dont think would improve the situation at all.

The difference is abstract & ehether that makes a difference for users or not depends on what we do with it.

Mastadon is a one-off custom protocol. It latter grew some ActivityPub interop but Im not sure how deep that goes.

Solid is a layered set of more general protocols. Its good for building vastly unimaginably wider sets of online systems with. We could go reimplement a Mastadon & stop there. But those same layers could/should also give us a strong interoperable basis to do a bajillion other connected online things, & have a wide variety of clients sites & servers possibly interoperate well. The layer cake alsp means its more likely we could reuse part of the stack while improving or retrofitting other parts.

There's always a difficult battle, describing to people why architecture matters. It may not. But to a programmer, the architecture bounds the space, shapes what is possible. Some people just care about end user experience, but for the person engaged in bringing out the future- developers- architecture is abstract, but means a lot.

I think Solid has very good groundwork & could easily reshape developing online systems quickly. If there is continued push to refine & advance the libraries, toolkits & frameworks available. Having more competition within the solid exosystem would be a good ineicator to me, that there is sufficienct diversity so that the niche can explore & expand & grow effectively. Places where multiple ideas are playing out win, and open source can be great for that.

What about Mastodon isn't interoperable with other ActivityPub services? IIRC Pleroma and other ActivityPub implementations play nice together with Mastodon in a fully federated manner. Its been like this for half a decade already.

Now that Mastodon is seeing a huge influx, I think it's for the best if we improve its ActivityPub protocol and not fragment the space further

So it's federated but they get to moderate it all? Sounds like the worst of both worlds.

And https://darcy.is/code-of-conduct/ makes it sound like their moderation would likely result in an environmental something along the lines of LinkedIn as far as the range of conversation goes.

Paid social media is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Many people would pay to join a high quality social media network if their friends and family were already there, but very few will pay to be the first on a network devoid of their social contacts.

What advantages does this have over something like Mastodon?

I always liked Friendica's approach to use a LAMP stack for easier deploy https://friendi.ca/resources/requirements/

I'm getting a CORS error trying to log in with my own Solid pod :(

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