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My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

carter.sande.duodecima.technology

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Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#31

Post by offtop5 »

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

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#32

Post by grahamburger »

e1ven wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#33

Post by fassssst »

helen___keller wrote: post #28

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…

Group chats are all you need for that.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#34

Post by crossroadsguy »

helen___keller wrote: post #28

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…

I really liked Path and Orkut while they lasted. Well, not always, but I did find them nice. Maybe because I was younger.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#35

Post by helen___keller »

chasd00 wrote: post #30
helen___keller wrote: post #28

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…

don't you setup you're own network in both FB and Twitter? i choose who my friends are in FB (I'm not on twitter)

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)

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#36

Post by nanomonkey »

helen___keller wrote: post #28

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…

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.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#38

Post by chipsa »

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…

Ask Signal.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#39

Post by hinkley »

e1ven wrote: post #15

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…

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.

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