To be fair, point 1 wasn't really Usenet and 3 was a pain sometimes.
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.
What I would prefer is a set of protocols that are interact in a well defined way with each others, like the Email or Usenet protocols, then you can write different clients for these and decentralisation is just a matter of running different servers clients that don't necessarily interact with each other. Something like the CapeProto RPC framework makes it relatively easy to declare the interface of a service.
I'm curious if Skynet or something similar could be used for that? I don't pretend to understand any of the modern blockchain frameworks, but a peer-to-peer distributed and encrypted system seems to fit the bill (possibly non-blockchain related, I'm not sure). It was trending yesterday:
RSS and Webmentions[1] do this pretty well on otherwise ordinary websites. The protocols exist, we just need to make them easier to use for non-engineers.
Essentially people want a free social network that doesn't use its users data for mining and advertising, doesn't track user data, doesn't archive their messages if they delete them/their account/they die, and free from moderation. Is that really too much to ask for?
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?
I'd rather host this and most other internet services on a box in my house, next to my router. Or, it could be my router. Either way.
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.
Before people abused the term "social network" to include all manner of things, including forums such as Reddit and Hacker News, using Twitter was referred to as "micro blogging".
Opera browser had a feature at one point where you could basically have it as a server and browser. And if we all had transparent addressing on the network you could do that. I have the ability to host at home, but I'm not too keen about having my personal address on the Internet. I know that's an oxymoron, but I'd rather have someone attacking a cloud node than my personal network. And I still value my anonymity in places.
> If there's no way to turn a profit then why would someone pay for it to be setup?
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.
I think this attempt by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (but unrelated to Wikipedia itself) comes close [1].
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 there's no way to turn a profit then why would someone pay for it to be setup?
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.
I'm not sure about Openstreetmap, but Wikipedia has a huge budget. It does get paid for, and the people paying for it definitely consider what it is they are supporting.
It is a messaging service, but it's also free, with a non-trivial server requirement, and with no monetization available for the service (neither ads nor subscription).
The primary requirement for a decentralized social network is "one app and it works". If your network requires anything other than installing a single application via the normal, easiest software installation pathway, it has failed and will never be adopted. No matter how l337 it is, if the installation instructions start with "Unzip this file, open port 999 on your router and prepare to edit the text file to start the server..." then it will never and can never work.
Better yet if one can just open up a web browser (installing nothing!) and use it.
Regardless of technical viability, any service without moderation is a service mainstream society will shun, which really just means people won't use it, build tools for it, or generally accept others who use the service.
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.
Fortunately, the problem you're talking about has already been solved with the concept of federation. If the social media system is a protocol and not a company, then society can chase down individual bad actors, and blame them for their own crimes, instead of blaming you.
The issue is we're already doing too much chasing down individual "bad actors." It's like the #1 hobby these days, everyone is looking for the next person to step out of line so they can drag them into the village square for their stoning. There aren't enough "bad actors" to satiate the mob any more so the definition of "bad actor" has to be continually expanded by the day.
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.
Well, there's bad actors, and then there's twitter-assigned villains. Really bad actors, as in people who are doing things that are clearly bad enough for there to be laws against them, need to be controlled somehow. That's what most moderation energy goes in to preventing.
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:
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.
There are different types of moderation, personally I find with platforms offering tools to their users to define the type of content they want to see, sure that can and will end with people in echo chambers of their own making but that is preferred to Platform level moderation where the platform chooses what is allowed and no allows ending with the entire platform being one ideological echo chamber instead if just user silo's with in the platform
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.
Yes, it will resolve, and in fact has been solved.
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.
I don't think your system gets you to the result you want.
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.
In real life, there is both internal pressure to not be a dick, and if you push things too far, the threat of external pressure.
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.
Those are very good points but they don't change the fact that grouping by people in this way tends toward smaller and smaller groupings, and exacerbates the sort of division and "different realities" that is hurting social cohesion.
Bubbles are odd, and you forget they are even there. It sometimes only becomes evident went you stray into an unfamiliar one.
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.
Also, remember: the ratings, themselves, have different meanings to different K-means clusters.
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 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!
This is a strawman, and is generally unhelpful to a good-faith discussion of politics, speech, and moderation.
> 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?
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.
>However, this does give repugnant ideas a place to spread. It normalizes 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.
Have a conversation that's more reasonable. Instead of "Do black people deserve to live" which we all agree with, we can have talks of, "What are the reasons for poverty and violence in the black community." And maybe not calling everyone with a non-woke perspective a racist or an uncle Tom.
Uhhm... I'm wondering how you reach the conclusion that the police don't trawl social media looking for things. This is precisely what they're doing. Maybe keep up with current events!
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.
> 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.
The events of Jan 6 show that leaves a rather huge problem unsolved.
The problem of Jan 6 being that a narcissistic buffoon got elected as president of the united states?
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.
I think what we had in the last 6 or so years was actually a lot worse than some "darknet chat platform", because honestly the equivalent of that in terms of usenet/forums has always existed.
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.
My response would be that while it's true that clearnet forums have more reach than darknet forums, there is a risk that pushing people away into really isolated corners radicalizes them even more. If you have a really big open discussion platform, maybe you get assholes saying that Texas should secede or making racist statements, but you probably also have some amount of normalization from regular right-leaning folks who disagree with that. However, if you ban some political opinions, maybe you end up with isolated islands with fewer people that hold much more extreme views, and nobody to tell them that they are going off the rails and pull them back to reality.
> If you have a really big open discussion platform, maybe you get assholes saying that Texas should secede or making racist statements, but you probably also have some amount of normalization from regular right-leaning folks who disagree with that.
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.
It is certainly an unresolvable conflict, my major concern is to what extent those that control the "Freedom From" internet will go to prevent the harm done by the "Freedom To" internet. Will my Verizon connection be shutdown if I have a node running?
We still use email, blogs and the telephone network (including sms/mms). And newer decentralized systems like Mastodon.
These kind of have moderation but it's decentralized and island specific (also regulated in case of the telephone network).
These forms also don’t have a giant corporation attempting to monetize your attention. Telecoms for example simply charge a monthly fee. I truly believe the micro targeted ad driven and “gets the most clicks “ optimizations have been extremely powerful and destructive
I’m the maintainer or a project that does some of that. It’s called Aether (https://getaether.net). User-customisable moderation and grassroots content delivery in particular, with less emphasis on total Tor-like anonymity, though we do still provide some.
I had written a toy social network a few years back the past which had these features - It worked very much like an encrypted version of usenet.
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.
IMO this is why federation is an important aspect of decentralized networks, and is commonly listed as a reason for use Mastodon / the fediverse. Each instance can set their own moderation policies and decide what other instances they want to federate with. Notably mastodon.social and the instances related to it haven't become cess pools of hate speech, because they do have strong moderation policies, but for users who want to post that stuff there are other instances they can find.
more importantly, moderation is an overlay. instead of worrying about what and what isn't acceptable speech, let subcommunities form with their own policies and they can curate their own worldview
that doesn't at all address bubbleism, but trying to decide which set of statements is 'ok' for everyone seems like a lost cause
It could still address bubbles in a small way, by making them more accessible: if you can switch the overlay easily, you can get a peek at what other people see and understand their point of view a little better. You can also see what your favorite overlay is censoring and decide whether you're okay with that.
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.
Bubbles by themselves aren’t necessarily the problem. I could live in art related bubble with fellow artists, and there is no problem there.
Insulated bubbles are the problem I think, these echo chambers are a problem, especially unmoderated or those thriving by hate, aggrevation and/or exclusion.
You just invented Reddit. The same thing will always happen: you say "communities should moderate themselves" and then you get "communities" that scream that 'libtards' need to be murdered, etc etc etc.. So then what?
The difference is that each instance is a completely separate entity. They live or die on their own. They have to secure their own hosting, figure out their own revenue stream, and deal with law enforcement on their own. It's reddit minus reddit.
The main difference with mastodon is that there isn't just one server hosting all of the material ; you can create your own mastodon instance, and likewise, if a hateful/illegal mastodon instance is found, people can avoid it and/or law enforcement can find it and squash it.
It's more analogous to email and shutting down an email server than shutting down reddit.
I like the default HN approach (Slashdot used to do this too): users can upvote/downvote, and by default you don't see content that's downvoted far enough, but if you want to see everything, you have the option. That seems to work well enough against spammers.
That's the same as reddit's system. HN hasn't fallen into the pit of lowest common denominator jokes is the strong moderation, but the system still has inherent issues with high-quality posts losing visibility because they're less appealing.
Well, no, reddit "supplements" it by banning pretty much every forum whose regulars don't match the owner's political ideology. There's no "uncheck this box to see all the stuff I didn't like" option there. I remember Reddit before they got ban-happy, and it was a much friendlier place then - and actually less overtaken by extremists.
I am my own site admin. The third largest instance's admin blocked my site (because I disagree with him about censorship), preventing 17,000 people from being able to follow me, or send or receive DMs from me. I also can't follow or read any of those users from my own server, despite their messages/profiles being public and available to the whole web.
This seems strictly better than what we have, though, where Twitter or Facebook decide the same. At least you can move instances, or start your own.
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.
It doesn't quite have to work like that, necessarily. Your instance could provide higher-quality tools for users to moderate their own feeds. Or there could be different degrees of opt-in to the site-wide moderation. Or the moderation could be community driven.
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.
That's a feature many users want. Plenty of users never want to see things they disagree with or take objection to, and want to have someone else enforce that pattern.
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.
> Your site admin shouldn't be the one deciding who you can DM, or which people can follow your feed.
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.
There is certainly an argument for preventing unsolicited messages being received from unknown users, but rarely do people value a spam filter which prevents them from sending messages to people. (I suppose there are some corporate filters which try to prevent accidental sending of sensitive information to unauthorised recipients, but that's not the "feature" we are talking about here).
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.
Isn't Gab exactly that? They seem to have "taken off" quite successfully among their own audience. Parler simply made a different choice wrt. whether to support interop and federation.
They were for a bit but they've defederated and the software is a huge mess. There are right wing free speech instances but they don't have any of the media attention.
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.
Before I decided that 'game developer' was not in my future prospects, I discovered the concept of reckless entitlement, where people will do anything the system allows, and a persistent subset of those people will rationalize that if you didn't want me to do that, then you should have written the code differently.
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.
If you have an old-ish head unit in your car, it may receive an RDS (Radio Data System) feed that could tell you what station it is or what song is playing. However, many stations around here are using it to advertise Club Fitness and Golden Oak lending. If you cast further back into the mists of time, anyone could send you a webcam or chatroom invite ... this was naturally exploited by spammers approximately ten milliseconds after its invention.
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.
There's another dimension that nobody seems to talk about, and that's what happens with access to content is restricted. There is basically no censorship and no abuse from "those who can't get away with stuff on other networks" in the realm of SMS (or WhatsApp/WeChat/whatever your country uses). You can have a very healthy network if the authors are responsible for access control to their content. That's the idea behind my side-project of an easy-to-use, easy-to-selfhost private blog.[1]
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.
HTTPS + RSS + Webring/etc. Existing, well-defined protocols that are nimble and able to meet changing needs.
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.
Email is a protocol for using the internet to transmit messages. Part of what I find interesting/valuable/different about "social networks" is that the content is & remains online. Email does not have this capability. Email is an exchange.
What kind of mailing list are you talking about? I don't think mailing lists do this. If someone comes by in 20 years to your "birdwatching" mailing list, for example, all they can do is sign up or ask for someone to copy them messages.
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.
How about a timeline on peoples personal blog that follows other blogs (like the fb timeline)? This way, you write your own content on your own website, you read other peoples content on your own website in a consistent format. You tweet on your own website, and others who want to follow can follow from their own website.
Scuttlebutt protocol is a decentralized encrypted protocol where data-at-rest is encrypted by keys not on the chat server.
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.
I'd like to see a social network that tries to minimize the impact of "whale" nodes. I can go to twitter if I want to see what's on the mind of the world's top influencers. I can go to facebook if I want to see people mass-sharing news articles with 10,000 toxic comments about the latest political events. Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network?
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.
Sure, in theory. But I feel like on both platform you end up just seeing tons of shares/retweets of whales/influencers. (particularly the way they reorder content on your timeline so it's presented by what they think you want to see)
Group chats work well for a fixed set of users looking for all-to-all broadcast, but that's hardly a social network.
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.
This is how Scuttlebutt works. The problem is that when you download the client software, you have no content to read until you build up your network. This confuses most people that are looking to find new friends and augment their current social network with something global. The solution that I found was to go to hacker spaces and meetups and turn on the client and see who else was on the local network. Not everyone has that option.
Default content is difficult to manage, especially if the goal is to avoid cults of personality, or recreating Slashdot/Digg/Reddit on your platform.
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.
I was having a similar problem with SSB but resolved it by subscribing to an SSB Room I ran across online that was for folks generically into tech, and that bootstrapped my experience really well, as I now have lots of channels and pubs that I can access. I agree it's quite hurdle to get over compared to what most everyone is used to, though.
Your name 'grishka' looks familiar. I'm also an ActivityPub developer (https://quanta.wiki). What languages do you develop in, in case we can share code?
I don't think social media networks can scale at all. During quarantine I'm a part of several Online Social circles, which are basically bi-weekly zoom calls to crack jokes on. The owner of the group still needs to ban people from time to time for saying racist or sexist things.
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
It should really be an open social network that government entities cannot shut down. The real test for anyone trying this will be the Great Wall of China. Until then...
I am a question about decentralized social networks in several communities and have not received much feedback. I think because I'm not a techie and considered completely different aspects.
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?
Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something, but without the impetus that produced the original.It's the "make something people want," but more "make something they use for X."
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.
I might also add that a social network like Goodreads or Stack Overflow that is based around some purpose or topic, is so different in tone from general purpose social networks that lots of people don't even notice that it has essentially the same set of features. Also, way less toxic and icky feeling when you use it.
Of course, special-purpose social networks never become nearly as big as Facebook, but in my mind that's a feature, not a bug.
And might even be the future. Do we need something as big as Facebook? Maybe social networks in the future proliferate on "topic" lines where each network is tailored to whatever topic.
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.
We had that before with forums. Customizable rules, mechanisms and moderation could get you quite far. People like general social networks because they value the specific human connections more than the topics of interest.
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.
I'd like that, but consumers seem to like things being "all in one place" - mostly people who are pretty dedicated to niches these days are willing to go to other social sites, but I can't imagine that the mass market will become OK with having like 10 different portals with inconsistent user experiences, unless under some kind of umbrella - be that a centralized service like Reddit or something else.
As an observation, I think a great deal of this is because of the "depth of features" of things a really good service (like Discord) gets insanely right. There's just this mountain of really important quality-of-life things, or needed features available out of the box.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I partially agree with you. Right now the people most likely to switch are going to be the people who have no home. The crackdown has started, but it's pretty early. The people kicked, or leaving at this point are not the ones you want to be the early founders of your social network. Remember, the first users set the tone for the community.
Your last point isn’t a truism as networks approach global scale. Early users of Facebook and Twitter have not set the tone - they may have influenced it, but particularly in Facebooks cause, any such influence has been largely diluted away.
True about Facebook. But didn't they completely re-invent themselves once the white suburban soccer moms took over, and then again when all the drunk racist uncles came on?
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.
You don't seem to understand that these good people would never run afoul of the current or future regimes and so would never see their data or companies or livelihoods erased on a whim.
> Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something,
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?
Old people need to yell at each other? FB has peaked I think. Their endgame looks like Equifaxbook.
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.
What we need is a distributed content distribution network, which just happens to be social. Something like a social bittorrent network with distributed search and inline website display.
Tell that to MySpace, Friendster, etc. There is room for prove product disruption if the iteration adds significant value, or if the quality of service of the current leader drops off.
I think you’re right. This is the thesis behind my current startup. Before you build anything, you have to know what community is being underserved. I’ve believed one of those areas is esports but over time generalized that to current events. Decentralization will only work out if it benefits that community somehow.
Shameless plug: my social network is in alpha if anyone wants to offer feedback. https://trophy.gg
Bingo: this is the heart of why a better tech solution won’t appeal to the majority. People need to feel like they’re partaking in some particular culture or counter culture. On clubhouse for example, people feel like they’re casually mingling with the elite. So that, in particular, those without country club memberships assign a premium value to it.
> 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.
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).
P2P services like the article suggests are impractical in real life. It's of extreme importance that you should be able to view, and preferably interact with, something posted on a social media service with as little friction as possible — which means it has to have a web version, and that all content within must have permanent HTTP URLs. No one will be downloading a client and syncing it to the P2P network to view a post or to comment on one or to like one. This has never worked and never will, because it's inevitably a messy experience.
ActivityPub is basically as far as one could push the decentralization of social media without severe UX compromises.
Yes, but then you would have a single Inbox, and a single place to triage and filter messages. You wouldn't be exposed to the myriads of VC-funded start-ups that degenerate into a text/video chat and news feed. In fact, you might have to install only your favourite tool, instead of 10s to keep up with the cool kids.
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.
,, Some decentralized networks try to solve this problem with cryptocurrency schemes, but this means that anyone who wants to try out the network has to put their credit card information into a sketchy website and transfer money to a sketchy offshore bank account and do other sketchy cryptocurrency stuff.’’
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 agree with this article that a social network without moderation is worthless. However what this describes is not moderation, it is filtering. There needs to be some form of moderation.
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 does not really have any such mechanisms (and certainly didn't have them back in the times where we had more search engines). Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it not require them, or that it suffers from their lack?
> Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it not require them
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.
Yes, the purpose of moderation is far wider than "I don't want to see this post". It is there to protect people from malicious activities, and also very importantly, it is there to shape the community. Moderation is needed to set limits of what is and isn't accepted in a community. If those limits are not present, communities quickly succumb to its worst elements.
I was just thinking about "customizable moderation" that this article mentioned earlier today. I came up with a similar idea of lists that you can opt into following just like AdBlock filter lists or Twitter shared blocklists just like he mentioned. In terms of feature set I had a couple ideas this this post didn't mention. There could be two levels of blocking that filter lists could set, warm before showing and never show. Also blocking could be applied on a per user or a per post basis.
270 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadThe 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710151
[1]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
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.
https://wt.social/ [1]
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.
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!
Hilarious when coming from someone losing their shit about the pushback against white supremacy.
So, are you saying that being brittle, sensitive and easily-triggered is a viable life strategy, and should be supported at all costs?
Also, you should probably read up on Kristallnacht before clumsily using it in metaphors. Maybe start here:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-he...
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://github.com/mawise/simpleblog
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.
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
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://quanta.wiki
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!
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
So in addition to privacy (the author addresses this) you want ease of use and a funding model, as well as some momentum.
China's firewall is relatively open compared to North Korea, for instance.
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?
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...
[1]: http://doc.replicated.cc:8080/%5EWiki/owner.sm
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.
[0] https://solidproject.org/
https://quanta.wiki
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.
https://perkeep.org/doc/overview
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735243
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.