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Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems

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Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems

#31

Post by pjc50 »

evolve2k wrote: post #18
throwaway127831 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not all of my friends and family are willing to pay a subscription fee :-/

Would you pay to be a power user who can invite and manage say a dozen family & friends? In this model it might be possible to assist uptake by having a class of power user who can manage their group over onto an ad free network. Example: I have a private github account with repos I share with various friends who are not paying github users but are nonetheless now engaged in the github platform.

Yes, this is an under-appreciated idea that may be critical to having the whole thing work. If it's a paid service users should be able to pay for other users to use it.

Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems

#32

Post by drdaeman »

RSSify wrote: post #28
fake-name wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be fine, but a bunch of RSS feeds is in no way a social network. A group of people who all subscribe to each other could be a minimalist network, but how would things like conversations work?

RSS feeds are enough for a social network if you only care for conversations between people you follow. If you want to support conversations with people you don't follow then you need to add support to your RSS feed for comments or pingbacks.

The technical problem I see is that with monolithic systems, they can have better spam filtering (I'm only talking about spam here, in this comment) because they see the large picture of all communications, and can have more sophisticated data models.

Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems

#33

Post by saurik »

pjc50 wrote: post #30
RSSify wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS feeds are enough for a social network if you only care for conversations between people you follow. If you want to support conversations with people you don't follow then you need to add support to your RSS feed for comments or pingbacks.

.. and as soon as you allow conversations with people you don't already know all the badness turns up and you have to build an anti-spam and anti-abuse system.

But that isn't really use the case for a typical social network. Most people I know post the vast majority of their posts as "friends only", and even those that make public posts usually limit comments to friends only. The only form of communication that should be allowed by non-friends is "friend request", and really: once you've been using a strong social network for any period of time, you can turn on "only allow friend requests from friends of friends" without much consequence (of course, it will take a new network time for that to be viable).

Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems

#34

Post by RSSify »

jancsika wrote: post #17

How do I find Waldo? On Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Google, Github, GnuCentral, etc., I type in Waldo's name and instantly discover Waldo's profile. On Facebook it even shows me Waldo's profile before I consider discovering him. Also, how does the system make it likely that when I search for Waldo I get Waldo and not his evil twin Odlaw? Also, how do you incentivize adoption so that the community doesn't en…

How do you find people's email addresses?

Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems

#35

Post by drdaeman »

pjc50 wrote: post #30
RSSify wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS feeds are enough for a social network if you only care for conversations between people you follow. If you want to support conversations with people you don't follow then you need to add support to your RSS feed for comments or pingbacks.

.. and as soon as you allow conversations with people you don't already know all the badness turns up and you have to build an anti-spam and anti-abuse system.

I don't think anti-abuse systems exist in centralized solutions. If there's some nuthead who's persistent to post their important opinion (or whatever they have to post), the only thing that works reliably is restricting commenting to "friends only". Which should be possible regardless of the architecture, as long as system has ACLs and poster identification.

There are some obstacles (like phone number verification) that centralized systems can benefit from and that are harder to have in a distributed systems because of trust issues - but they're not really working at any scale and only thwart least persistent persons.

Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems

#36

Post by Asdfbla »

While I like the distributed approach technically, it solves none of the social problems that social networks bring.

Filter bubbles, propaganda and competition for users' attention with clickbait and other cheap stories might even become worse, since a centralized platform could at least tweak their recommendations algorithms to break the bubbles (which Facebook doesn't seem to do, but it could).

Basically, I'm pessimistic because a distributed network only solves the (comparatively) easy technical challenge without addressing the problems of social networks.

Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems

#37

Post by tscs37 »

wjnc wrote: post #24
rolleiflex wrote: post #22

It seems there's a lot of people working on this area, just looking at this thread. I did something similar to this in 2013 and I got to around 20k users: https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5150758/aether-aims-to-b... Two things that need to be solved: a) The structure of moderation. No moderation does not work. Been there, done that, it gets very ugly very fast. But what can be done is to make moderation more visib…

Robert Nozicks' "Anarchy, State and Utopia" (1974) describes how a system of multiple concurring "governments" could work. Quite a stretch from social networks but first thing that came to my mind when reading your comment. Moderation is a form of social network government, right? One could subscribe to a government / moderation scheme and the governments form meta-governments to decide which content from competing g…

That's somewhat what federation solves. You pick out an instance which represents a particular way of moderating. You can still listen in on (most) of the other network.

If you don't like the moderation/government of your instance, you pick another.

Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems

#38

Post by adrianN »

fake-name wrote: post #21
hodl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users mod their feeds as per RSS you just unsubscribe from idiots. Its a bit like the internet itself. Lots of shoddy sites, but no one needs to visit them. Search spam is the exception but let a Google handle that.

That would be fine, but a bunch of RSS feeds is in no way a social network. A group of people who all subscribe to each other could be a minimalist network, but how would things like conversations work?

The Blogosphere solved that problem via some linkback mechanism, usually pingbacks.

Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems

#40

Post by xorcist »

fake-name wrote: post #12

If you're thinking about building a distributed social network, you HAVE to have answers to the question: How do you moderate it? (Or how do the users moderate what they consume, if you will) Basically, think of the most annoying person you can imagine, give them infinite free time, and a uncontrollable urge to do EVERYTHING they can think of to make your life miserable on said social network (doxxing, abusive messag…

So, in your view, email and the web are examples of garbage networks?

Decentralized networks (such as the web) work differently from centralized network (such as cable TV and Facebook) and have different strategies for coping with misuse. You can not moderate a permissionless network. That's literally part of the meaning.

In a decentralized network, I follow you by subscribing to your data. Conversations usually follows that data naturally, just like a mailing list is centralized but email is not.

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