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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

#111

Post by r00fus »

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…

> Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something,

TikTok would beg to differ.

You are correct about having a base, but once you grow out of that base, you can compete as a general purpose social network (ultimately an advertising/lead channel - even if only for the market of ideas).

It's all about execution and as you said, purpose. So what's FB's purpose anymore?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#114

Post by claudiawerner »

_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…

>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!

This is a strawman, and is generally unhelpful to a good-faith discussion of politics, speech, and moderation.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#115

Post by grahamburger »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #91
convolvatron wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference is that each instance is a completely separate entity. They live or die on their own. They have to secure their own hosting, figure out their own revenue stream, and deal with law enforcement on their own. It's reddit minus reddit.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#116

Post by tachyonbeam »

jmull wrote: post #104
_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…

> 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. The events of Jan 6 show that leaves a rather huge problem unsolved.

The problem of Jan 6 being that a narcissistic buffoon got elected as president of the united states?

I don't know if any amount of internet censorship can ever stop sects from forming. You have to realize that "drinking the kool aid" is an idiom that long predates the internet going mainstream [0]. You can try to push these people off of mainstream platforms, but what will that accomplish? Ultimately, someone will create an easy to use darknet chat platform, and the more radicalized people will use that. In some ways, it's best if we can shine some daylight at the neo nazis. At least then we have some idea who they are and what they are planning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#117

Post by kevincox »

swalsh wrote: post #99

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.

This is really impossible to do perfectly. If you want to share something with someone they can take a copy. Unless you are going to go down the DRM route you really just have to accept that. There are definitely some decentralized system that encourage duplicating data, but even for those that don't you can't escape some users wanting to mirror or archive everything they see.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#118

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

motohagiography wrote: post #110
koalaman wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the salient point. When you re-frame social media as collaboration tools, the answer to the question, "collaboration on what?" comes to the fore. What is the underlying project that requires collaboration? I have a few ideas, but I hope framing that way yields ideas for others.

>What is the underlying project that requires collaboration?

Gossip.

I'm not being (entirely) snide: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/106939711455438...

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#119

Post by anticristi »

asdff wrote: post #63

What if we just went to email? “Follow my mailing list”

Yes, but then you would have a single Inbox, and a single place to triage and filter messages. You wouldn't be exposed to the myriads of VC-funded start-ups that degenerate into a text/video chat and news feed. In fact, you might have to install only your favourite tool, instead of 10s to keep up with the cool kids.

You would likely be too focused on what's important to you, since noone is incentivised to artificially keep their "average session time" up. You would also not be tracked, hence miss out on important ads about stuff you don't need on a website that shouldn't know what you did last weekend.

I think you suggest a terrible idea. If I sounded sarcastic, it's probably because I am.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#120

Post by paul_f »

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…

"Free from moderation" Isn't that what got Parler in trouble? Is it possible to have an unmoderated social network anymore?
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