Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

carter.sande.duodecima.technology

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 271 posts

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#91

Post by virgil_disgr4ce »

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

You just invented Reddit. The same thing will always happen: you say "communities should moderate themselves" and then you get "communities" that scream that 'libtards' need to be murdered, etc etc etc.. So then what?

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#92

Post by koalaman »

rohan1024 wrote: post #70
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 a…

I think 'Social Networking' is really just a bad name for an internet identity and sharing model no different from the same problem in Operating Systems. The internet is the computer but it's missing identity and acls. With those things anybody could write an indexer that could build a feed for you.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#93

Post by cyberdelica »

adrianpike wrote: post #10
pydry wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather host this and most other internet services on a box in my house, next to my router. Or, it could be my router. Either way. It's just really annoying to do that right now and the solutions that attempt to make it easy and slick aren't quite there. This type of thing could be made more popular with normal people if it's easy enough since popular features which "break" the business models of companies like Fa…

Is that not just a blog?

Before people abused the term "social network" to include all manner of things, including forums such as Reddit and Hacker News, using Twitter was referred to as "micro blogging".

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#94

Post by prox »

rohan1024 wrote: post #70
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 a…

And there has never been the incentive. People complain about walled gardens, but unless you dedicated to FOSS, any commercial venture (with a few exceptions) produces apps and tools that feed the master and excludes other parties.

It might even be profitable to start a venture that allows complete easy self hosting of content.

Wasn’t Berners-Lee working on something like this with his pods?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#95

Post by swalsh »

gfodor wrote: post #90
swalsh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not going to get to Facebook/Twitter scale without good content in the beginning.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#96

Post by dane-pgp »

zozbot234 wrote: post #75
sneak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Your site admin shouldn't be the one deciding who you can DM, or which people can follow your feed. That's a necessary affordance, given the technology. A mail server could indeed refuse to forward some of your emails, and this could even make some sense e.g. as part of spam prevention policy.

There is certainly an argument for preventing unsolicited messages being received from unknown users, but rarely do people value a spam filter which prevents them from sending messages to people. (I suppose there are some corporate filters which try to prevent accidental sending of sensitive information to unauthorised recipients, but that's not the "feature" we are talking about here).

It is perfectly reasonable for a user to want to DM someone on an instance that has different moderation policies from their own, and it is equally reasonable to want to receive replies to those DMs.

If the specifications or implementations don't allow that, then I suppose it has to be justified by saying that the DMs could be used for sharing copyright infringing material (or worse), and admins don't want to run the legal risk of hosting that on their servers. Legally, though, that doesn't seem any different to operating a mail server, which don't typically have Content ID matching systems on them. Perhaps the implementation of end-to-end encrypted DMs would assuage some of these concerns a little.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#97

Post by gfodor »

swalsh wrote: post #95
gfodor wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not going to get to Facebook/Twitter scale without good content in the beginning.

Agree if that was your point it’s well made.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#98

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

user-the-name wrote: post #80
_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…

> 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? That is not how it works. The police does not need this. They also will not really use it. However, this does give repugnant ideas a place to spread. It normalises them. It makes things much, much worse.

>However, this does give repugnant ideas a place to spread. It normalizes them. It makes things much, much worse.

I get where you are coming from, but, can we look at three historical examples of repugnant ideas?

1. The earth does not revolve around the sun.

2. Slavery is immoral and man should never own another.

3. Women should take part in the voting process.

There are millions I'm sure from "You need to wash your hands to stop the spread of invisible things that kill people" to "Public executions as decided on by a King are not good for our society" to "The indigenous people here should have the same rights and protections we afford ourselves".

We are wrong about stuff all the fucking time! The humans in society that argued for the worst things, were the same as us. What if we are drastically wrong about any event in the last year? Where do we discuss it without fear of reprisal?

I do not think it's a good idea to "pre-decide" on what is a "repugnant idea". This is what conversation is supposed to be for.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#99

Post by swalsh »

My big wish, I want to truely own my own data. If I decide to delete something, I would hope there's not a hundred copies replicated in a hundred caches somewhere. When I delete my own data, I want it truely gone. If someones node is offline, I hope there's nothing of mine left on it.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#100

Post by rohan1024 »

prox wrote: post #94
rohan1024 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

And there has never been the incentive. People complain about walled gardens, but unless you dedicated to FOSS, any commercial venture (with a few exceptions) produces apps and tools that feed the master and excludes other parties. It might even be profitable to start a venture that allows complete easy self hosting of content. Wasn’t Berners-Lee working on something like this with his pods?

> And there has never been the incentive.

For FAANG. Instead of improving standards such as XMPP and RSS, they actively ditched them to create walled gardens..

Post reply on HN