My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network • Hacker News Board

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#211

Post by konjin » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 12:53 AM UTC

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

Nothing if you encrypt it.

So do we ban the internet or encryption?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#212

Post by konjin » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 12:55 AM UTC

grishka wrote: post #56

P2P services like the article suggests are impractical in real life. It's of extreme importance that you should be able to view, and preferably interact with, something posted on a social media service with as little friction as possible — which means it has to have a web version, and that all content within must have permanent HTTP URLs. No one will be downloading a client and syncing it to the P2P network to view a…

And yet everyone downloaded the client for facebook on their mobile.

This isn't the 00s, people don't expect the browser to the the only thing they use to connect to the world any more.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#213

Post by ermir » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 12:56 AM UTC

What I feel is the missing piece that would tie a truly decentralized social network is a decentralized identity management system. I am ordinarily a massive blockchain skeptic, but it could possibly be usable here. It should be possible to create features like user creation, changing passwords, data querying using sone kind of blockchain that is not in control of a single entity. I feel such a service would be useful and can be made now, but I also feel like it would be quite hard to use as well.

Think of something like Amazon Cognito or Okta, but decentralized and transparent.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#214

Post by mynameishere » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 12:57 AM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #89

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…

The product feature of intellectual freedom is suddenly a real value proposition.

You don't seem to understand that these good people would never run afoul of the current or future regimes and so would never see their data or companies or livelihoods erased on a whim.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#215

Post by lazyjones » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:02 AM UTC

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

Decentralization doesn't mean you get to see or even host the bad stuff. There could be filtering rules or moderation entities you could subscribe to (or even pay) to keep your view of the network clean.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#216

Post by lonelyasacloud » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

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…

If based on a single cooperative user, writing a blog/photo sharing Facebook/Twitter lite site is relatively straightforward. Equally, spinning up its backend (pico-)services with Kubernetes and Docker is also far easier than it used to be, albeit missing the App Store install experience just yet.

No, what's missing is that outside of mining their data to sell ads, or possibly having it as a nascent feature of expensive walled garden phones, no one has figured out how to get consumers to pay for those services as a standalone offering - yet.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#217

Post by lmm » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:09 AM UTC

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…

> Gamers made discord a thing because it was for playing games. Hipchat was about making code, and Slack was a way to manage people. Reddit was for sharing alternative/emerging culture.

Disagree. There were plenty of gaming chat tools. The first group I got into Discord with wasn't playing games, the first group I got into Hipchat with wasn't particularly code-oriented, the first group I got into Slack with wasn't the kind of group that had management, and the first subreddits I got involved with were nothing to do with that kind of culture. Those tools succeeded not because they were doing something new but because they made something that didn't suck. Sometimes that's all it takes.

I remember talking with friends 2-3 years before Slack et al about how all the existing chat tools sucked and maybe we should build a better one. We concluded that there must be some fundamental reason why Skype etc. were so bad, something that we were missing. But we were wrong, and Slack proved that.

(This isn't an argument that Facebook can be replaced the same way, because Facebook has a great UX. My point is just that you don't always have to do something different. Sometimes "x, but better" is enough).

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#218

Post by lazyjones » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

Serious question: what feature is missing for most people in order to replace sites like FB, Twitter with a messenger like Telegram, Signal?

It seems to me that messengers more accurately match the "social network" paradigm these days, while FB and Twitter are more like TV or newspapers (though curated by "friends").

Is it the discovery of new people to "stalk" and eventually engage with? Or engaging with content outside your actual social network (commenting media articles etc.)? A desktop/web version? The feeling that you're not actually disturbing anyone directly by posting something because there's a chance it will not pop up in their feed? Something else?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#219

Post by fuckthemachine » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

The notion that a platform is responsible for what I say on it is still a problem for decentralized 'instance' based networks like mastadon, the burden of removing content the culture of the day finds offensive moves to the local hacker who decided to setup an instance and host their friends.

I want to be fully responsible for what I decide to say, if I break the law, that should be entirely on me.

I want a protocol that allows me to host my own content on my website and let other people in the fediverse 'like', 'comment' and 'share' it.. So 'social media' becomes less about a service that does hosting and more about a client that does the aggregation and interacts with others I'm following

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#220

Post by mantap » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

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…

Isn't this solving the wrong problem? e.g. I don't have any issue with bots on discord.

Bots are a problem on twitter and Facebook because neither of those networks is truly social, it is just shouting into the void.

Bots can react but they can't interact, make interaction not reaction the foundation of a social network and you nullify the power of bots.