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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

#61

Post by grishka »

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…

> Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network?

That's exactly what I'm building (with ActivityPub). It's not yet production-ready though.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#62

Post by breuleux »

convolvatron wrote: post #44
grahamburger wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It could still address bubbles in a small way, by making them more accessible: if you can switch the overlay easily, you can get a peek at what other people see and understand their point of view a little better. You can also see what your favorite overlay is censoring and decide whether you're okay with that.

Also, one avenue to radicalization is a feeling that your views are being censored. If you get to choose your bubble, that argument is undermined, so extreme bubbles might have a harder time growing.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#64

Post by laumars »

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?

Quite a lot of people (myself included) do actually pay for Wikipedia.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#65

Post by notJim »

sneak wrote: post #45
grahamburger wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't quite have to work like that, necessarily. Your instance could provide higher-quality tools for users to moderate their own feeds. Or there could be different degrees of opt-in to the site-wide moderation. Or the moderation could be community driven.

I think there is actually a lot of room for experimentation around how we interact online, and moderation is one of the most important areas. We need to think harder, rather than retreating to one of the two default positions.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#66

Post by rossdavidh »

motohagiography wrote: post #55

Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something, but without the impetus that produced the original.It's the "make something people want," but more "make something they use for X." You need the original purpose. It has to be to make something that isn't itself. Myspace was mainly novelty and music, Facebook was for status minting from ivy colleges, other ones are for an exo…

I might also add that a social network like Goodreads or Stack Overflow that is based around some purpose or topic, is so different in tone from general purpose social networks that lots of people don't even notice that it has essentially the same set of features. Also, way less toxic and icky feeling when you use it.

Of course, special-purpose social networks never become nearly as big as Facebook, but in my mind that's a feature, not a bug.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#67

Post by pjkundert »

esja wrote: post #59
_yid9 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ea…

Grouping by user rather than by content has a major weakness. Grandma can be lovely 99% of the time and a horrible racist the other 1%.

I assume that's what people want!

Having been on the 'Net since before the Eternal September, I haven't been able to quite understand this drive to purge "things I don't like" from public forums.

If grandma is really lovely, but has some bad habits from her youth or a different time or something -- then don't mark her post as "racist".

I don't believe, either, that people are incapable of learning. If she spews hateful invective and then doesn't get happy-birthday wishes, she'll learn! Sheesh.

Remember, your K-means Clustering will be public; its easy to see where you stand, and why you got there! If people in your preferred group prefer to not see people spouting the N-word, you might want to consider reforming your habits and beliefs, if you want to remain a functioning part of that group!

The problem is not moderation: it's the belief in a consequence-free existence.

Restore evidence-based reality == restore civilized society.

But, there are a lot of people who don't like that idea.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#68

Post by folkrav »

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…

Doesn't this basically boil down to the model we currently have, but decentralized, or am I misunderstanding?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#69

Post by xiphias2 »

,, Some decentralized networks try to solve this problem with cryptocurrency schemes, but this means that anyone who wants to try out the network has to put their credit card information into a sketchy website and transfer money to a sketchy offshore bank account and do other sketchy cryptocurrency stuff.’’

This info looks outdated. Is Square really a sketchy website?

Bitcoin needs 10-15 more years to be adopted, but it will make content delivery for money easier after it’s adopted. Right now its adoption rate is too small to build a social network on top of it.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#70

Post by rohan1024 »

motohagiography wrote: post #55

Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something, but without the impetus that produced the original.It's the "make something people want," but more "make something they use for X." You need the original purpose. It has to be to make something that isn't itself. Myspace was mainly novelty and music, Facebook was for status minting from ivy colleges, other ones are for an exo…

I feel like a piece is missing in the current Internet infrastructure although I have no idea what it is.

Consider this, WhatsApp stories are not much different than personal blog but putting up stories takes few clicks while self hosting is whole new endeavor. Ideally everyone should own a blog/self host. This would solve the issues with centralization.

The problem is hosting a blog and discovering it is still not as easy as creating WhatsApp/Insta stories. Nor the users are ready to pay the price for running that blog. Centralized services solve all these problems. If some platform ever solves issues with self hosting and makes it easy to self host for minimal cost, I think we will have changed the face of Internet forever.

tl;dr We haven't achieved the required level of software/hardware abstraction for everyone to self host

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