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My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

carter.sande.duodecima.technology

171–180 of 271 posts

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#171

Regardless of technical viability, any service without moderation is a service mainstream society will shun, which really just means people won't use it, build tools for it, or generally accept others who use the service. People seem to both want a service that is immune from society and also used by society. That's a conflict that won't resolve.

Fortunately, the problem you're talking about has already been solved with the concept of federation. If the social media system is a protocol and not a company, then society can chase down individual bad actors, and blame them for their own crimes, instead of blaming you.

The issue is we're already doing too much chasing down individual "bad actors." It's like the #1 hobby these days, everyone is looking for the next person to step out of line so they can drag them into the village square for their stoning. There aren't enough "bad actors" to satiate the mob any more so the definition of "bad actor" has to be continually expanded by the day.

Just the last week a musician tweeted something dumb about making his daughter learn how to use a can opener to open beans, and within a day, the very successful podcast he did the theme song for, where his track was used for the past like 10 years disowned him and stopped using the song. Then he was kicked off the cruise gathering where he was good friends with the guy who ran it and has been a regular headliner for years.

The internet has created a culture problem that I'm not convinced decentralized social networks will fix. At best, if one was created that people actually used, we wouldn't have situations we've seen with Alex Jones and Trump where all the platforms unperson someone on the same day, cause they could still at least keep their audience on the decentralized platform.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#172
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, no, reddit "supplements" it by banning pretty much every forum whose regulars don't match the owner's political ideology. There's no "uncheck this box to see all the stuff I didn't like" option there. I remember Reddit before they got ban-happy, and it was a much friendlier place then - and actually less overtaken by extremists.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#173

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've spent years creating my version of what I think is missing: It's here:

https://quanta.wiki

One narrow incomplete summary of Quanta is that it's Federated Social Media.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#174
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

Well, I know where the phrase comes from.

One day I walk in the house and see my mother crying, watching TV, and pictures of a lot of people laying down. My mother was NOT a crier, so this scared the crap out of me as a child, and is probably why I remember it so starkly today. At some point years later I came to learn what was actually going on that day. (My mother was also not an explainer.)

I wince when I hear the phrase used casually. But of course, people have largely forgotten the deeply dark connotations it has.

Anyway, even though we can’t ensure radicalized sects don’t form, simply ignoring them as the post above mine suggested, is not any kind of solution. As we’ve seen, such groups won’t necessarily be satisfied to just talk among themselves.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, the problem you're talking about has already been solved with the concept of federation. If the social media system is a protocol and not a company, then society can chase down individual bad actors, and blame them for their own crimes, instead of blaming you.

The issue is we're already doing too much chasing down individual "bad actors." It's like the #1 hobby these days, everyone is looking for the next person to step out of line so they can drag them into the village square for their stoning. There aren't enough "bad actors" to satiate the mob any more so the definition of "bad actor" has to be continually expanded by the day. Just the last week a musician tweeted somet…

Well, there's bad actors, and then there's twitter-assigned villains. Really bad actors, as in people who are doing things that are clearly bad enough for there to be laws against them, need to be controlled somehow. That's what most moderation energy goes in to preventing.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#176
One thing I'd add to what people need in a decentralized social network is the ability to own their own data, and be able to port it from place to place.

So there needs to be some kind of data format that is accepted as the standard format everyone uses. I don't mean a protocol like ActivityPub, I mean something like JSON or XML tag names that describe and hold all social media posts and every other kind of microblog or personal data.

I guess this is commonly called the "Semantic Web" and various parts of it already do exist.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#177

I'd like to see a social network that tries to minimize the impact of "whale" nodes. I can go to twitter if I want to see what's on the mind of the world's top influencers. I can go to facebook if I want to see people mass-sharing news articles with 10,000 toxic comments about the latest political events. Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network ? This would likely…

This is how Scuttlebutt works. The problem is that when you download the client software, you have no content to read until you build up your network. This confuses most people that are looking to find new friends and augment their current social network with something global. The solution that I found was to go to hacker spaces and meetups and turn on the client and see who else was on the local network. Not everyon…

I was having a similar problem with SSB but resolved it by subscribing to an SSB Room I ran across online that was for folks generically into tech, and that bootstrapped my experience really well, as I now have lots of channels and pubs that I can access. I agree it's quite hurdle to get over compared to what most everyone is used to, though.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#179

I'd like to see a social network that tries to minimize the impact of "whale" nodes. I can go to twitter if I want to see what's on the mind of the world's top influencers. I can go to facebook if I want to see people mass-sharing news articles with 10,000 toxic comments about the latest political events. Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network ? This would likely…

You're describing the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc)

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#180
post #61

I'd like to see a social network that tries to minimize the impact of "whale" nodes. I can go to twitter if I want to see what's on the mind of the world's top influencers. I can go to facebook if I want to see people mass-sharing news articles with 10,000 toxic comments about the latest political events. Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network ? This would likely…

> Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network? That's exactly what I'm building (with ActivityPub). It's not yet production-ready though.

Your name 'grishka' looks familiar. I'm also an ActivityPub developer (https://quanta.wiki). What languages do you develop in, in case we can share code?
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