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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

#121

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

optimalsolver wrote: post #109

Look, any truly decentralized network will need to involve users hosting their own instances, along with using an entire suite of encryption and anonymity tools. No way the average person will be doing that. That means most/all of the people you'll be talking to on these networks would be hardcore techno-libertarians. A plus for some, a very strong negative for others. Semi-relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/191/

That's the unfortunate thing about this site's userbase. That because there is a technical solution, they feel the problem has been solved. However, the technical solution requires more investment and technical know-how than your base user cares to employ.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#122

Post by user-the-name »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #98
user-the-name wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So what is it you're wanting to have a "conversation" about?

Whether black people should be allowed to live? Gay people? Trans people?

Who is it you still need to have a conversation about whether they are allowed to have human rights?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#123

Post by gritzko »

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.

Eventually, all what media does is information routing from producer to consumer. The existing Big Tech paradigm is just one of [many][1], if you think that way.

[1]: http://doc.replicated.cc:8080/%5EWiki/owner.sm

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#125

Post by commandlinefan »

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

I like the default HN approach (Slashdot used to do this too): users can upvote/downvote, and by default you don't see content that's downvoted far enough, but if you want to see everything, you have the option. That seems to work well enough against spammers.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#126

Post by necrotic_comp »

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 main difference with mastodon is that there isn't just one server hosting all of the material ; you can create your own mastodon instance, and likewise, if a hateful/illegal mastodon instance is found, people can avoid it and/or law enforcement can find it and squash it.

It's more analogous to email and shutting down an email server than shutting down reddit.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#127

Post by imesh »

user-the-name wrote: post #122
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

So what is it you're wanting to have a "conversation" about? Whether black people should be allowed to live? Gay people? Trans people? Who is it you still need to have a conversation about whether they are allowed to have human rights?

Have a conversation that's more reasonable. Instead of "Do black people deserve to live" which we all agree with, we can have talks of, "What are the reasons for poverty and violence in the black community." And maybe not calling everyone with a non-woke perspective a racist or an uncle Tom.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#128

Post by noizejoy »

r00fus wrote: post #111
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?

Parent post also said the following

> A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture

And arguably TikTok found that.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#129

Post by didibus »

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 don't think the missing bit is the "ease" of self-hosting a blog.

The missing piece is that social networks are not about publishing your thoughts ideas or knowledge, they are about propagating your thoughts ideas and knowledge to others. The emphasis of a social network is on "propagation" aka, propaganda.

Social networks push opinions into people's face, it promotes, markets and advertises messages in ways that people can't avoid reading even if they're not looking for it.

They're not designed to make accessible information for those looking for it, but to allow you to advertise yourself and your ideas to others. And definitely not designed in any way to filter for accurate and high quality information.

What social networks do is make it really easy to voluntarily subscribe to propaganda and be subjected to it day in/day out. It's bonkers when you think about it that we all agree to participate in this.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#130

Post by motohagiography »

r00fus wrote: post #111
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?

Old people need to yell at each other? FB has peaked I think. Their endgame looks like Equifaxbook.

Smart view on TikTok though. I thought the purpose of TikTok was for teenagers to be on a platform without their parents checking up on them, and the CCP was right there to collect kompromat on the next generation of potential western leaders.

I am suddenly very optimistic about the purposes for how new platforms will emerge. Younger people will figure it out.

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