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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

#41

Post by helen___keller »

fassssst wrote: post #33
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.

Group chats work well for a fixed set of users looking for all-to-all broadcast, but that's hardly a social network.

Something like Discord gets even closer. I'd say Discord actually makes a pretty good social network, although most people don't treat it as such. In my experience, the biggest issue with discord-as-a-social-network is the binary nature of discord server membership. I've had my one "friends group" server split into 3 or 4 servers (each with 80% membership overlap) over some people who had drama, and this makes it much less manageable as a social network because you tend to spend most of your time on one or maybe two servers.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#42

Post by lvspiff »

chipsa wrote: post #38
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.

Signal is a messaging service not a social network

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#44

Post by convolvatron »

grahamburger wrote: post #32
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 w…

more importantly, moderation is an overlay. instead of worrying about what and what isn't acceptable speech, let subcommunities form with their own policies and they can curate their own worldview

that doesn't at all address bubbleism, but trying to decide which set of statements is 'ok' for everyone seems like a lost cause

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#45

Post by sneak »

grahamburger wrote: post #32
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 w…

> Each instance can set their own moderation policies and decide what other instances they want to federate with.

Yeah, this is why the fediverse is terrible, too. Your site admin shouldn't be the one deciding who you can DM, or which people can follow your feed.

Imagine if email worked that way.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#46

Post by hinkley »

nanomonkey wrote: post #36
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 everyon…

Default content is difficult to manage, especially if the goal is to avoid cults of personality, or recreating Slashdot/Digg/Reddit on your platform.

I think this is why everyone who started a MySpace account has the founder as a friend. You have one example of how the thing works, and he's too busy doing other stuff to turn it into a soap box.

I think the right solution is exhibited in the way people use Slack servers for niche communities. You don't install Slack because you heard Slack is neat. You install Slack because someone sends you an invite link.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#47

Post by at_a_remove »

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…

If you have an old-ish head unit in your car, it may receive an RDS (Radio Data System) feed that could tell you what station it is or what song is playing. However, many stations around here are using it to advertise Club Fitness and Golden Oak lending. If you cast further back into the mists of time, anyone could send you a webcam or chatroom invite ... this was naturally exploited by spammers approximately ten milliseconds after its invention.

I have since formulated the concept that any communications channel, any at all, where it does not cost to transmit per message will eventually be colonized by the advertising fungal organism. Even low-cost messaging can be colonized, but the lower the cost, the faster it comes.

Similarly, like FreeNet, any communications channel that can be used to post Things You Do Not Like will be used to do so. And that once you implement some kind of wide-scale filter against that, absolutely nothing can be done to stop someone from attempting to take over, to add and subtract to that filter, for their own purposes and their own ideology.

I have no solutions for this.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#48

Post by _yid9 »

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.

Yes, it will resolve, and in fact has been solved.

K-means clustering.

This will scale, is compatible with machine learning, and yields an effect that is good for the users of a service -- but is not useful to owners of a service that maximizes profit and control over user happiness.

If trolls, jackasses, and idiots (by each users independent definition) get automatically segregated into groups where they see only each-others posts, and out-groups just never see their posts: problem solved.

Now, you might say "I don't want a service where neo-Nazis congregate!". I say: why, again, don't you want your police service to be able to infiltrate these groups and observe these people, and arrest them as they see fit?

Hmmm. I wonder.

Once it becomes clear to "evildoers" that the site is not "friendly" to their evil -- toleration doesn't equal agreement -- and that they are not hidden from justice, they will go elsewhere (at least the smart ones), and you can round up the dumb ones at your leisure.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#50

Post by dsr_ »

syshum wrote: post #16
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 u…

There's three levels of moderation.

The platform needs to insulate itself from attacks: DDOS, illegal content, reputation attacks.

The groups/fora/subreddits need local moderation that keep it on-topic and restrict trolls, flamers, spammers and other bad actors that destroy the utility of the group. (There are occasional groups that exist to be an outlet for off-topic discussion from others, or to out-troll each other, or rant.)

Third is individual content control. Everybody needs to have easy access to a killfile: I don't want to see that idiot; I don't want to see any thread that idiot started; I don't want to see any thread that idiot contributed to; I don't want to see an article or thread with these keywords.

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