My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network • Hacker News Board

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#11

Post by musingsole » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:14 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…

> 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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#12

Post by wayoutthere » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:14 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…

> 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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#13

Post by rolleiflex » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#14

Post by whatshisface » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

TameAntelope wrote: post #8

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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#15

Post by e1ven » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#16

Post by syshum » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

TameAntelope wrote: post #8

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.

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

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#17

Post by Naac » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:18 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…

>> The answer is yes - yes it is too much to ask for

How can that be so when we have websites like Wikipedia, or Openstreemap?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#18

Post by iib » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

musingsole wrote: post #11

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…

> 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.

https://wt.social/ [1]

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#19

Post by runjake » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#20

Post by andrewprock » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

Naac wrote: post #17

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…

>> The answer is yes - yes it is too much to ask for How can that be so when we have websites like Wikipedia, or Openstreemap?

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.