Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

carter.sande.duodecima.technology

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 271 posts

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#201

Post by rolleiflex »

neuland wrote: post #191
rolleiflex wrote: post #13

I’m the maintainer or a project that does some of that. It’s called Aether ( https://getaether.net ). User-customisable moderation and grassroots content delivery in particular, with less emphasis on total Tor-like anonymity, though we do still provide some.

I was looking at your service recently while surveying the landscape of currently active P2P projects. Am I right in seeing that a monthly subscription is the only option to get a client and start using Aether?

No, it’s free, you couldn’t even pay for it if you wanted.

You might be confusing it with Aether Pro, which is a different app for a different purpose (remote collaboration) and is not P2P.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#202

Post by jszymborski »

6 or 7 years ago, my own wishlist for such a network would be similar.

My top item these days, however, is actually bot or troll farm detection.

Social media is cool because you get to participate and overhear conversations that you normally would never have anything to do with. However, bot abuse on website like Twitter and Facebook means that every interaction sooner or later gets brigaded by bots amplifying their message.

The technology exists, and as far as I understand, it isn't particularly complex. Projects like BotSentinel do a surprisingly good job of identifying these bad actors.

Perhaps all this falls under the "Customizable moderation" header, but part of me thinks this would be best addressed in combination of some sort of "proof of work", be it as simple (and inaccessible) as a $5 fee on sign-up or something more accessible but more complicated.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#204

Post by worldsayshi »

jszymborski wrote: post #202

6 or 7 years ago, my own wishlist for such a network would be similar. My top item these days, however, is actually bot or troll farm detection. Social media is cool because you get to participate and overhear conversations that you normally would never have anything to do with. However, bot abuse on website like Twitter and Facebook means that every interaction sooner or later gets brigaded by bots amplifying their…

Hmm, can't there be a crypto currency deposit for each message that will then be returned after 24h? That or something similar. Then the average user would only need very minimal amount of currency but you can only spam if you have considerable capital.

Maybe the deposit could also suffer a bit of value loss. Just enough to make spamming not worth it. I wonder what would be just enough here. It ought to be less than what would make it undesirable for almost all users?

Edit: I feel like the main problem with social media innovation is that there's very little possibilities to experiment. You need a good amount of users to test something out and users will only go to established services.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#205

Post by knicholes »

worldsayshi wrote: post #204
jszymborski wrote: post #202

6 or 7 years ago, my own wishlist for such a network would be similar. My top item these days, however, is actually bot or troll farm detection. Social media is cool because you get to participate and overhear conversations that you normally would never have anything to do with. However, bot abuse on website like Twitter and Facebook means that every interaction sooner or later gets brigaded by bots amplifying their…

Hmm, can't there be a crypto currency deposit for each message that will then be returned after 24h? That or something similar. Then the average user would only need very minimal amount of currency but you can only spam if you have considerable capital. Maybe the deposit could also suffer a bit of value loss. Just enough to make spamming not worth it. I wonder what would be just enough here. It ought to be less than…

Or why not charge to make a post and NOT refund it? One benefit of this is posts are likely to be more thoughtful.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#206

Post by knicholes »

user-the-name wrote: post #82
helen___keller wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, in theory. But I feel like on both platform you end up just seeing tons of shares/retweets of whales/influencers. (particularly the way they reorder content on your timeline so it's presented by what they think you want to see)

Mastodon will let you turn off boosted posts on your home timeline. It will also not reorder anything, ever.

It also won't post an advertisement every 3rd item in your news feed...

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#207

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

rossdavidh wrote: post #66
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 might also add that a social network like Goodreads or Stack Overflow that is based around some purpose or topic, is so different in tone from general purpose social networks that lots of people don't even notice that it has essentially the same set of features. Also, way less toxic and icky feeling when you use it. Of course, special-purpose social networks never become nearly as big as Facebook, but in my mind th…

And might even be the future. Do we need something as big as Facebook? Maybe social networks in the future proliferate on "topic" lines where each network is tailored to whatever topic.

I'm working on a social-ish network for TV. Is Facebook good for live discussions about TV? No. Is Reddit? No. Is Twitter, kinda but not really. That's the problem I'm trying to solve just for TV.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#209

Post by xiaolingxiao »

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…

Bingo: this is the heart of why a better tech solution won’t appeal to the majority. People need to feel like they’re partaking in some particular culture or counter culture. On clubhouse for example, people feel like they’re casually mingling with the elite. So that, in particular, those without country club memberships assign a premium value to it.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#210

Post by konjin »

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…

I can pay for it by running a local node.

Aether works that way. It is missing the anonymity OP wants but everything else is there.

Post reply on HN