My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#5

Post by orbifold » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#6

Post by lvspiff » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

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?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#7

Post by jellicle » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

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.

ALL other requirements are secondary.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#8

Post by TameAntelope » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#9

Post by pydry » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

lvspiff wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#10

Post by adrianpike » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #9

lvspiff wrote: post #6

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…

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 Fa…

Is that not just a blog?