Ask HN: Who is working on fully decentralized social networking?
I imagine that the news about Parler having its plugs pulled both from app stores and AWS hosting has many of us thinking: what will it take to build a solution where that's simply not possible?
I know of Matrix, Mastodon, and PixelFed (and use the first two), but is there a 'facebook killer' in development right now?
My concern is that, while seizing control of social networking from big corporations is surely a great idea, it may be initially inundated (and thus, socially formulated) by the same whackjob culture that flocked to Parler from Twitter.
How can we ensure that balanced and healthy communities form on the decentralized web?
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 50.8 ms ] threadSheeple seem to be completely allergic to open chat so they run from one proprietary service to another like
* AIM
* ICQ
* Paltalk
* Skype
* Lynq
* MSN Messenger
* Google Talk (and I think a few others from Google)
* Skype for Business
* Facebook Messenger
* Go2Meeting
* Zoom
* What's App
* Signal
* Apple Messenger
* Discord
* Slack
This is the road to ruin however because these platforms go through a cycle like:
* Platforms reach a certain level of quality and then start to decay (remember when Skype worked as well as Zoom does now?)
* Because of the "two-sided network" effect people tend to stick with the chat services that other people use so that chat services have no reason to fight that decay;
* Every so often somebody finds an opportunity and gets a new product in, often with a new idea or two and the rough edges sanded away (remember how Skype used to "just work"; Zoom "just works" now but once it is a market leader you're going to put up with it no matter how bad it is.)
* Big companies like AOL, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc. periodically come out with chat programs that "innovate" by connecting to their networks, but for the most part you could squint and AOL Messenger looks the same as Facebook messenger.
* Some big companies in a further fit of mindlessness produce or buy an endless series of incompatible chat applications.
So long as you go down the road that somebody is going to administer this big server, the company is someday going to get bought and go bad.
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Most people seem to think that using an open network is like putting your hand in a toilet. (Think of the "freedom" to wreck your hands with a mouse from the Apple 1984 ad)
The simple fact is that you could get a better client for a server IF there is a competition for clients. Twitter, Discord, et al.will just shut you down if you make a better client.
In the "police/military" sector communication with chat is widespread (e.g. most cops have a computer with an XMPP client in their car) They might tap out a message and it goes into Lotus Notes, be handled with a workflow, looked at by intelligence folks, etc. XMPP has all kinds of extensions such as: fill out something like an HTML form and send it somebody that serve those people well. (e.g. fill out a form about what happened on patrol today)
Contrast the continuous decline of proprietary chat w/ interoperable phone calls, SMS, you just take it for granted you can call a Verizon phone from AT&T and it is because the government got involved.
Europeans concerned about falling behind would be well advised to mandate interoperability for chat clients and servers -- the one problem is their privacy minimalism works in the favor of centralized companies like Facebook (which legislators might think they can control) opposed to a distributed network where somebody can record what goes by and have no respect for "the right to be forgotten."
Time is the biggest challenge, unfortunately.
As long as people are primed to viscerally pre-hate any competitor, it won't work.
Decentralized != immutable != non-heirarchical.
And like sibling, it need not be entirely anonymous either.
The feds would allow it if they had some level of legal access to manipulate it, which would in turn be what most people who want decentralized social networking seem to want: to at least have a somewhat democratically elected body governing it, not an arbitrary private company.
And if it were, is it even desirable?
It seems to me that we're headed for a land where data and ideas, once promulgated, become immutable, but that voluntary moderation regimes laid over those data can be utilized to keep the humans sane.
You could have control at each node, deciding with whom you federate. You can also have a crowded moderation, similar to HN.
In the US, hate speech is protected speech. In the UK, hate speech is defined differently than in China. Illegal pornography may include bestiality or drawings in some jurisdictions, not in others. Protection of copyright is enforced differently. There's also the distinction between reading, publishing and hosting potentially illegal material.
This is how the internet works already. It is federated. Established protocols exist for websites and email, but not for social media. Arguably, it's time to change that.
Decentralized social networking expects the user to control the user's own social input.
> else it'll end up as a platform for hate speech
A decentralized social networking user is not necessarily an anonymous social networking user. Such a user will still have contacts on computers and phones they own, still leave a connection trail on ISPs, and can still be held accountable. It's more difficult and less convenient for law enforcement--but privacy vs. law enforcement aceess and society's needs/interests thereof is a separate argument/topic.
We need a provider that is willing to host content that abides by the laws of the host country. The provider needs to take a stance such that they are willing to host unsavory content assuming it is legal. The 1st Amendment IS important and we need businesses that are willing to say as such.
If the host country is China, and it blocks content critical of the government? What if the host country is Nigeria, and posting gay content gets you shipped to the gulag?
I suspect your opinion is going to change in these cases. And if it doesn't, sorry, but I trust myself to figure out what content I want to read more than any nanny state.
If I go to Walmart and choose to shop in my underwear, they have the authority to make me leave and escalate to authorities if I deny their order. To me, our current laws put us in the same position with speech on Twitter. Our current laws allow private business to make up whatever rules, restrict whatever they want. It's their platform their rules.
I'm suggesting we need a company who makes it their business to allow content and protect their users using the actual law. US law shields content companies from liability because of what their users publish and upload. If someone uploads CP to Reddit then it's not Reddit that's punished (assuming they made good-faith attempts to remove the illegal material).
AFAIK, the users on Parler did not write anything illegal. Maybe they did - idk for sure. The messages on Parler were purely grotesquesand someone didn't like it.
Social media has given humans the once-unthinkable capacity to influence behavior and discourse across the world in real time. Our laws in the US have not yet caught up with this still relatively newfound tool.
Imagine a social network where you have an identity based on a key pair. The key pair can rotate every month or so. When you meet someone, and you want to "friend" them on your social network, you scan a copy of their public key straight off their phone via a QR code. Now you can author encrypted and signed messages - you know they're only visible to the people you're interested in talking to, because you have their public keys, and they know the messages came from you, because they're signed with your public key.
If your friend Alice introduces you to their from Bob, they might forward you a copy of this Bob's public key, in classic web-of-trust fashion. Alice signs Bob's key, and sends it to you. So long as you trust Alice to not indiscriminately sign keys, you can be pretty sure you're really talking to Bob. You'd easily be able the check the provenance of a key - I have this key that was signed by Alice who claims she got it directly from Bob's phone, and it also signed by Sue, who claims she got it from an email.
When I post a message on my "wall", really I'm posting something encrypted with the public keys of everyone I want to share it with. My phone can reach out directly to those phones to pass on the message. If it can't reach all of them, that's ok, because Alice's phone can forward a copy to Bob's phone on my behalf, or we could have some kind of "dead drop" server online where my phone uploads stuff, and your phone checks for it.
How does this not devolve into your typical Internet cesspool? Precisely because it's not on Facebook.
First, if Bob starts posting crazy ideas about how women should never have gotten the right to vote, I can delete Bob's public key from my phone, and I'll never see anything he ever says, ever again.
Second, and maybe more importantly, this social network we've just imagined has no motivation to "drive engagement". It doesn't promote controversial stories to try to get people to click on more ads. In fact, it can't. There's no "service provider" here to profit from it in the first place, and even if there was, it couldn't read the contents of any of these encrypted communications so it wouldn't know which ones are the controversial ones it should try to drive. Twitter and Facebook need moderation mostly because they spend so much time promoting content from fringe crazy people in the first place.
https://gurlic.com
Every publisher/user runs their own node, or from a node-service provider. And then you "friend" and follow built around RSS with signed or crypted items in the feed. Other nodes operate as aggregators and discovery services.
It's technically not possible to avoid leaking private messages, but metadata like license and level of confidentiality in the posts should at least provide hooks for legal enforcement.
hnpub.stavros.io:38213:@PJtGRbz9IwtobscVq+i4a8y0zZBc2j220D5jsoyKgaw=.ed25519~OezW1tkZu9dX/x7uhDLL/7m5xUosz68NeoqfDjhnYXQ=
It needs to (also) work over ordinary HTTP/HTML and needs to be indexed by search engines, just like Twitter.
The guys at STEEM.IT or LBRY.IO have figured this out. Also, somehow these sites aren't Neonazi cesspools. Not sure how moderation works over there.
Sigh. The problem with all decentralized platforms/solutions is that they're focused on "decentralized", not on "platform".
So high level plan should be: 1. Make platform that actually compete with w/ FB, Twitter, etc. 2. Decentralize it.
You can't build a successful platform and then decentralize it.
The means must fit the ends.
Why do you want decentralized infrastructure? Why would users want it? Why should they care about the problems you see with centralized systems? How do you monetize your platform?
Let's put this on it's head and pretend we are GAFAM:
Q: Why is our successful platform centrally governed?
A: So we can more easily extract data from the accumulated userbase.
Remember, our product isn't the service, but the data extracted from the users. And the users aren't our customers either, they are livestock. And our actual customers are the advertisers that pay us.
This means, for a successful new platform: you need a product. You need something that is valueable for the user from the getgo.
After you found something useful, you can think about how to connect the insular instances of your application to make the product even better without compromising the users' control over their content.
What about designing the entire system around tagging and filtering? Anyone can post anything, but users can choose which tags they want automatically hidden.
Example - any post with the word Trump in it gets automatically tagged with Trump, politics, etc.
This would remove the “filled with whackjobs” problem while simultaneously allowing for free speech.
What you're suggesting isn't all that different from usenet, which largely failed due to the spam problem.
Of course you may still get people trying to get around this, but I think you could avoid most outright awful stuff.
This may sound like it places a lot of burden on the individual but I plan on having reference implementations from super simple all the way up to clustered nodes ready to run in Docker containers. And hopefully with it all be open source and API-specified only, people can contribute other implementations.
The API is extremely simple. It is REST based and easy to comprehend. Anyone could write a simple server and reader who can program PHP, Node Express, or anything else.
The driving idea is to put individuals in complete control of their data and experience, and maximize interoperability. Much like an HTML img tag only has a src attribute, but the browser know how to retrieve the image from a server (which knows how to serve it) and then display it in the browser. Conceptually pretty simple.
If anyone is interested in knowing more, please ping me. I would like to release an API specification soon for discussion and refinement. Email in bio.
It's probably impossible to create a decentralised social network where don't constantly have to reblock the same trolls but also don't get locked into a tiny closed community. I want to be able to talk and share with the whole world, but I don't want to have to block the same assholes over and over again because they keep making new accounts. And I assure you that trolls can get pretty bad on any open, decentralised system. They certainly do on Diaspora.
Maybe something where your network only expands through trusted nodes in your network: if a friend follows a lot of trolls, maybe keep him as a friend, but don't allow your network to expand that way. But someone else might follow a lot of interesting people, so open up your network a bit more in that direction.
(Though I must say, I don't care for this entire line of thinking - it just gives spamming advantages to the wealthy, which is exactly the reason for crafting an alternative to facebook in the first place.)
Then charge for acceptances, even $0.10 per user would likely be not a big deal for users, but prohibitive for spammers who want to message millions and only a very small fraction will be gullible enough to pay for whatever the spammer is selling.
But this was for an old school "centralized" forum. Not sure what "paying for an account" would entail for a decentralized network.
Beyond that, I think originating your content on your property is key. If someone repeats it on a social network, that's fine. Just don't create it there.
https://urbit.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M04AKTCDavc
- privacy is not only not respected, but in fact actively and aggressively undermined
- online culture is increasingly polarized and extremist. Misinformation and disinformation are symptoms of this.
The reason for this, as I see it, is that social media platforms make their money off the actual online conversations. So to make money, they need to get more and more people on their platforms, they need to trigger strong emotional responses to "engage" their users, and they need to mine as much personal information from their users so that they can sell that to advertisers and other interested parties.
Contrast that with pre-digital social networks and hubs, like bars and pubs. The business model there is to sell food and drink, with the providing of a social place as an ancillary service, not the main product. To make money as a pub, you provide food and drink people actually want and an atmosphere they enjoy, but you're not attempting to directly monetize your customers' conversations.
I'd like to see a decentralized social network in the sense of online conversation hubs attached to actual businesses. No "global" platform, just thousands of smaller hubs where certain online shops get known for hosting good online conversations which draws an audience who _then buys things_. Social networks need to go back to being a way to attract customers, not actually being a direct source of income.
More importantly, we should all revisit the world politic of exactly 10 years ago, where the biggest story was the Arab Spring--anti-government protests in the middle east. At the time, social media was heralded as a major factor in spurring the protests, despite tens of thousands eventually dying in the conflict. Governments were condemned for blocking access to the sites and many free-speech advocates attempted to develop work-arounds. Social media enabled the self-determination of the people in the middle east, something we should all care about.
Regardless of how people feel about the capitol riots, the war on free speech from silicon valley should scare the shit out of all of us. They are setting the precedent now for curbing any revolution in the future. The idea that "healthy communities" are the target really depends on who's doing the diagnosis.
In addition to qualms about the idea that there is a significant amount of speech that is truly "other than political speech", I think you're missing a huge (in fact, the biggest) reason for flight from social networks: the mass-scale gaslighting that happens when closed-source algorithms decide to depict the lives of your friends in a way that's designed to produce consumer behavior rather than to give you insight over your community.
To me, the reason to herald the rise of more decentralized social networking is to separate the profit motive from the feed.
I just want to keep up with my real life friends without everything having to be snooped and datamined by Zuckerburg, Dorsey, Bezos, et al. The fact that they're now trying to control how people think is just an extra reason.
I thought they were controlling what people could post on the platforms whose terms require consent, not controlling the thinking of those people. Controlling how people think, now that *would* be impressive tech.