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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

#81

Post by chartpath »

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…

True about Facebook. But didn't they completely re-invent themselves once the white suburban soccer moms took over, and then again when all the drunk racist uncles came on?

I feel like you are right about the need for an original purpose. And would add that at such a momentous time when everyone can see the consequences of private, centralized media selling attention so efficiently, is it really impossible that the situation rises to that level of original purpose? The seed of a new community might just need a great spark.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#82

Post by user-the-name »

helen___keller wrote: post #35
chasd00 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Mastodon will let you turn off boosted posts on your home timeline. It will also not reorder anything, ever.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#83

Post by chopin24 »

>If a totally unmoderated platform isn’t overrun with spam yet, that just means it isn’t popular enough for spammers to notice it.

This is my wish. For a social network that isn't popular enough for spammers to notice it. I'm a member of a few such websites, mainly related to music, and that suits me just fine. I have little reason for a massive town square like Facebook, etc. Little reason to be discoverable by anyone in the world. Scale is overrated.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#84

Post by user-the-name »

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

Mastodon exists. It is what you described. It is paid for either by generous individuals or by donations.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#85

Post by DanBC »

_yid9 wrote: post #74
esja wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

Also, remember: the ratings, themselves, have different meanings to different K-means clusters. This insane drive to change the meanings of words (eg. every traditionally conservative leaning person is now a Nazi, and everyone proud of their unique cultural heritage is now a Racist, so long as they are also white) is no problem! A member of a brittle, sensitive, easily-triggered group will quickly find themselves iso…

> A member of a brittle, sensitive, easily-triggered group

Hilarious when coming from someone losing their shit about the pushback against white supremacy.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#86

Post by slg »

robryk wrote: post #77
slg wrote: post #73

I agree with this article that a social network without moderation is worthless. However what this describes is not moderation, it is filtering. There needs to be some form of moderation. Imagine a scenario in which a revenge porn image is posted to the site. Is the victim's primary recourse simply to block the image on their end? That would leave them without any power to prevent the poster from sharing that image w…

The Web does not really have any such mechanisms (and certainly didn't have them back in the times where we had more search engines). Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it not require them, or that it suffers from their lack?

> Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it not require them

The web is a pull based model while social media is push based. That means social media is much more prone to this type of harassing behavior. I would also argue that the web as a whole doesn't address this problem well as is seen with what the NYT recently revealed about Pornhub.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#87

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#88

Post by pjkundert »

DanBC wrote: post #85
_yid9 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, remember: the ratings, themselves, have different meanings to different K-means clusters. This insane drive to change the meanings of words (eg. every traditionally conservative leaning person is now a Nazi, and everyone proud of their unique cultural heritage is now a Racist, so long as they are also white) is no problem! A member of a brittle, sensitive, easily-triggered group will quickly find themselves iso…

> A member of a brittle, sensitive, easily-triggered group Hilarious when coming from someone losing their shit about the pushback against white supremacy.

Who's that you're referring to? I don't agree with any "supremacy", let alone "white".

So, are you saying that being brittle, sensitive and easily-triggered is a viable life strategy, and should be supported at all costs?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#89

Post by gfodor »

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…

The product feature of intellectual freedom is suddenly a real value proposition.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#90

Post by gfodor »

swalsh wrote: post #78
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 partially agree with you. Right now the people most likely to switch are going to be the people who have no home. The crackdown has started, but it's pretty early. The people kicked, or leaving at this point are not the ones you want to be the early founders of your social network. Remember, the first users set the tone for the community.

Your last point isn’t a truism as networks approach global scale. Early users of Facebook and Twitter have not set the tone - they may have influenced it, but particularly in Facebooks cause, any such influence has been largely diluted away.
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