Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media

It's a noble goal.

To achieve it, the author suggests that people buy a domain name, spend $4 a month on web hosting, and manually install Wordpress. The author leaves out ssl, so I assume either the person is going to pay some more for a cert or spend time learning about LetsEncrypt and installing CertBot.

Add to that Wordpress maintenance time and time installing plugins.

Subtract from that the ability to write polemics on any of these topics:

* geopolitics wrt Ukraine

* diversity in tech/gaming

* China's policy on Tibet

* probably others that I'm missing.

Because if rile up anyone with even slight hacking skills (or anyone who could pay such a person) your $5 a month website is toast.

And we're apparently replacing the attention economy with "directly checking your site," RSS, and email newsletters.

If we're going to entertain technical-user fantasies like this make-the-internet-great-again piece does, can't we as technologist at least imagine a less boring future?

* it should cost $0 to publish

* the more popular/polemical one's writing, the faster it it should be to retrieve the document. You know, technology that has existed for close to two decades now

* it should be as easy to use the software of our fantasies as it is to use the awful social media networks we're decrying. Drudgery shouldn't be a badge of ethics.

* it should also probably be able to deliver publicly-funded scientific journal articles at $0 cost to the user.

Actually that last one is key. If someone thinks they've got a Facebook-killer, don't describe the technical underpinnings to me. Just give me a search bar to find publicly-funded scientific journal articles on your system. If I can discover them and read them and they haven't disappeared after a month, I'll then consider using your system to express myself.

However, the real innovation would be in managing the cryptographic keys in a way that is both secure (within parameters) and dead simple for end users.

This is the part where someone starts shouting "blockchain!" Not sure if that's the solution, but with enough smart minds thinking about it I'm sure a there's a way.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

1. We started with the idea that actually social tools would let you get in, get out and get on with life. They would help you coordinate your actual social life in the real world instead of sucking up your time online. A minute spent on the app would result in hours socializing in the real world, not the other way around. Group activities would form like snowballs leading to an actual goal, not random chatting. Thus came the first part of our mission: Empowering People.

2. We also realized very soon that communities wanted to install our software themselves. The flipside of letting people actually get together on their own time, is that we can help unite their members and engage them. Universities and Buildings, for example, release their own social app to their Students and Tenants, and allow them to find one another and connect on their own time. (See https://qbix.com/communities). Thus we cane upon the second part of our mission: Uniting Communities

3. We realized there is actually no good open source alternative to Facebook, that communities can install the same way they can install Wordpress for blogs. We wanted to change the world and have developers and startups build social apps as easily as Wordpress plugins. We wanted communities to run our platform and apps even on a mesh network or router disconnected from the Internet - REAL decentralization, to be used in countries with censorship, or on a cruise or remote village to plan dinners, date, etc.

But the world has changed since blogs and we had to build and maintain literally thousands of features, from user signup to data access to payments. We recently got a security audit by an outside firm and are proud to say that they found (and since patched) only three, very hard to exploit, vulnerabilities in the entire platform. The code is at (https://github.com/Qbix/Platform). We don't have a slogan for this part of our mission yet :)

It's totally free and open source, and we will begin growing a community around it in 2018. If you want to join or find out more, contact me -- the email is greg and the domain is qbix.com

See a 7 minute video about it to understand fully the how and why:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

The problem its hard when not social media to get visibility.

Its easy to start a blog (wordpress/blogger/tumblr etc.. ), its harder to get people to go to it and periodically check it out. RSS aggregators/ google reader was a good way to do this, but they've fallen out of favor. There is a ghost town of abandoned blogs on the internet presumably because they didn't get the reads/ interaction.

Its almost like you need to announce your new blogpost on twitter/ fb..

But I think there are solutions.

I saw this open source groupware on hn a while back and am starting to get in installed for an art non-profit. There are probably others, but I'm going install and see how it goes:

https://www.agorakit.org/en/

My grandparents didn't set up their own Facebook account either. We (mainly my mom, I think) did it for them. You could help your grandparents set up a blog, then show them how to post to it (think something like WordPress or Ghost, not a static site using Markdown and Git). After all, they had to learn the Facebook interface too.