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My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

carter.sande.duodecima.technology

131–140 of 271 posts

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#131
Looks like there's a typo in the link for Urbit, should be https://urbit.org if anyone wants to take a look. Personally it seems like vaporware to me, there's not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network.

Probably the only reason anyone has even heard of it is because it's the pet project of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, known (somewhat infamously, a few of his talks at conferences have been pulled) for his association with the neo-reactionary political/philosophical movement.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#132
post #111

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?

TikTok was not a copy. It was unique in a way it was a short video platform for dancing when it started.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#133

Looks like there's a typo in the link for Urbit, should be https://urbit.org if anyone wants to take a look. Personally it seems like vaporware to me, there's not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network. Probably the only reason anyone has even heard of it is because it's the pet project of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, known (somewhat infamously, a few of his talks at conferences ha…

Arguably that's the reason most people stay away from it. If you can put aside your feelings about the now-departed founder and boot it, you may find that it's everything you're looking for. I'm totally dumbfounded at the rationale people are invoking in recent days not to use urbit but instead some other derivation of previously tried technology.

It's not vaporware — I use it everyday to interact with many people. It's not where it hopes to be but it's going there at quite a clip.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#135

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…

What we need is a distributed content distribution network, which just happens to be social. Something like a social bittorrent network with distributed search and inline website display.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#136
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…

If you have an old-ish head unit in your car, it may receive an RDS (Radio Data System) feed that could tell you what station it is or what song is playing. However, many stations around here are using it to advertise Club Fitness and Golden Oak lending. If you cast further back into the mists of time, anyone could send you a webcam or chatroom invite ... this was naturally exploited by spammers approximately ten mil…

The author (OP) proposes community generated and shared block lists.

I’m imagining an opt in block list, where with enough downvotes, if you are a member of the block list, the content is hidden.

If the block list starts blocking content you want, you can fork it, keep the parts you want, remove the parts you don’t.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#137
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.

That's a feature many users want. Plenty of users never want to see things they disagree with or take objection to, and want to have someone else enforce that pattern. As long as it's optional - and in the fediverse design it is - then it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. Whether or not those instances actually survive and have any users or just immediately collapse into internal bickering is beyond the strict scop…

> Plenty of users never want to see things they disagree with or take objection to, and want to have someone else enforce that pattern.

Am I unusual? When there is hate speech directed at me, I don't really care if I see it or not.

But I do want to prevent other people from seeing that hate speech (I don't want the hate to grow).

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#138

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…

What we need is a distributed content distribution network, which just happens to be social. Something like a social bittorrent network with distributed search and inline website display.

Isn't this what Diaspora is?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#139

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…

This platform doesn't exactly match everything on the wishlist, but it matches what you've written here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735243

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we need is a distributed content distribution network, which just happens to be social. Something like a social bittorrent network with distributed search and inline website display.

Isn't this what Diaspora is?

Does Diaspora have torrent sharing built in now? I don't see any mention.
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