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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

#161

Post by Schoolmeister »

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 you might want to look at something like Solid[0]. It resembles your idea, but is more general. People host their data in a personal data store (a pod, which can be either self-hosted or by a 3rd party) and Web applications read to/write from this data store. It is more general in the sense that this data can then also be used by other applications to provide their own features (which is a hard problem to tackle, since you don't want to restrict all current and future different types of data to one interface).

E.g. When you create a new blog post this is stored in a pod of whichever data provider you chose. The fact that you wrote this blog post can then be discovered e.g. on your social media, after which people can read it in their favorite blog post reader.

I find the implications of such a platform to be the most interesting thing. It effectively creates two different markets: that of data providers, which compete to provide the best service, and of application providers, which compete to provide the best features.

[0] https://solidproject.org/

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#163

Post by hungryhobo »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #155
hungryhobo wrote: post #134

I honestly do not understand this fetish with decentralization, do you really want a social network filled with child pornography, violence and other shady stuff? Because that's what's gonna happen guaranteed. People are just animals without rules

All of that terrible stuff exists on the decentralized internet, yet through a combination of selecting the right platforms and right client software, I never have to see it. You don't want a centralized internet and trust someone else to control it for you. You want control over your connection to a decentralized internet.

Thank you, that gives me a better understanding.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#164

Post by feanaro »

hungryhobo wrote: post #154
CivBase wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do you really want a social network filled with child pornography, violence and other shady stuff? You have just described the world wide web. I may not want that stuff to exist, but I also certainly don't want the world wide web to not exist.

I mean you can try to share child pornography through your ISP's network and we can see what happens? Shady stuff are mostly shared through decentralized networks and its the centralized www that's preventing them. To me this decentralization fetish feels like people think government are stupid and inefficient so we should have no government at all

How exactly is decentralisation related to the idea that there should be no governments?

That said, governments are just organizations and very powerful organizations at that. Like any powerful organization, a government can become corrupt or tyrannical and start working against the populace. It is always a good idea to keep it in check so that its power cannot grow boundless.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#165

Post by esja »

pjkundert wrote: post #67
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%.

I assume that's what people want! Having been on the 'Net since before the Eternal September, I haven't been able to quite understand this drive to purge "things I don't like" from public forums. If grandma is really lovely, but has some bad habits from her youth or a different time or something -- then don't mark her post as "racist". I don't believe, either, that people are incapable of learning. If she spews hatef…

I don't think your system gets you to the result you want.

Most people are like Grandma, just on different topics. The extreme but possible endgame for your system is everyone stuck in clusters of one, because they've banned everyone else for different offences (or those people have banned them).

In real life people take the bad with the good and learn to ignore minor disagreements (and some big ones too, up to a limit). That is a stable system which has worked pretty well for a very long time.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#166

Post by Acrobatic_Road »

Regarding anonymity you don't need to use Tor and I2P just to stop actors like iknowwhatyoudownload.com from profiling you. Something like Dandelion/Dandelion++ is a more lightweight solution. That's what Monero uses to disassociate transactions and IP addresses (so that the transations cannot be linked together).

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#167

Post by CivBase »

hungryhobo wrote: post #154
CivBase wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do you really want a social network filled with child pornography, violence and other shady stuff? You have just described the world wide web. I may not want that stuff to exist, but I also certainly don't want the world wide web to not exist.

I mean you can try to share child pornography through your ISP's network and we can see what happens? Shady stuff are mostly shared through decentralized networks and its the centralized www that's preventing them. To me this decentralization fetish feels like people think government are stupid and inefficient so we should have no government at all

Any reason why an ISP couldn't shut you down for sharing child porn on a decentralized social network?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#168

Post by didibus »

rohan1024 wrote: post #145
didibus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> they are about propagating your thoughts ideas and knowledge to others. The emphasis of a social network is on "propagation" aka, propaganda. That is the issue with centralization: you have no control over your feed, no control over your data, no control over discussion on your content. On the other hand blogs/websites are all federated by design. You can control who views your content, shares your content. You con…

You missed my point, I'm saying that the reason for social networks being popular is because they allow various actors to submit others to their propaganda.

The reason people prefer posting to facebook or twitter (or even medium) say compared to their own blog, isn't the challenges in setting up a personal blog. It's because on facebook and twitter they can push their post to a big audience, even if no one is searching for the kind of content they're publishing.

A self hosted blog/website does not have this feature.

Just as an example, the government does have an official self-hosted blog: whitehouse.gov and the President could have simply published all their thoughts and messages there instead of Twitter. They could also easily have a personal self-hosted blog. But why didn't and don't they? Instead choosing to post to Twitter?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#169

Post by fuzxi »

commandlinefan wrote: post #125
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

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.

That's the same as reddit's system. HN hasn't fallen into the pit of lowest common denominator jokes is the strong moderation, but the system still has inherent issues with high-quality posts losing visibility because they're less appealing.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#170

Post by deft »

zozbot234 wrote: post #72
notJim wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea why Parler took off rather than a right-wing instance of Mastodon? Is it about framing?

Isn't Gab exactly that? They seem to have "taken off" quite successfully among their own audience. Parler simply made a different choice wrt. whether to support interop and federation.

They were for a bit but they've defederated and the software is a huge mess. There are right wing free speech instances but they don't have any of the media attention.
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