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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

#221

Post by icy »

fuckthemachine wrote: post #219

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…

Sounds like you might be interested in the IndieWeb project: https://indieweb.org/

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#223

Post by neuland »

rolleiflex wrote: post #201
neuland wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah ok. Yes, I was mistaking Aether Pro. You have excellent docs!

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#224

Post by qwantim1 »

avivo wrote: post #222

It's useful to keep in mind the "magical decentralization fallacy": the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems. (more detail: https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy... )

Organized scalable social moderation is as doable with centralized services as it is with P2P.

The difference is that a centralized service has at least one person that must be responsible for content, whether or not they moderate it adequately, whereas, with a P2P service, each user may effectively run their own service and must be responsible for its content, whether or not they moderate it adequately.

P2P would seem then to have more scalable user-invested moderation. Unfortunately, some using these services think they’re in the internet equivalent of a bohemian nudist colony. That’s not how it works, though. The responsibility is heightened, not lessened.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#225

Post by vkou »

esja wrote: post #165
pjkundert wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lim…

In real life, there is both internal pressure to not be a dick, and if you push things too far, the threat of external pressure.

On the internet, there is little of the former (Our monkey brains are not default-wired to treat text we read on a computer with respect and empathy), and none of the latter.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#226

Post by panny »

>network layer anonymity (like tor)

>grassroots content deliver (like bittorrent)

>customizable moderation (like ublock)

All but perhaps the last one is a browser level concern, and you can do that today in Brave browser. That said, I wonder if I can use a magnet link in an img src on Brave. I'll have to try it sometime.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#227

Post by leppr »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #207
rossdavidh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We had that before with forums. Customizable rules, mechanisms and moderation could get you quite far. People like general social networks because they value the specific human connections more than the topics of interest.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#228

Post by intrasight »

at_a_remove wrote: post #47
e1ven wrote: 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…

Made me laugh and weep ;)

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#229

Post by chrisweekly »

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 just learned about Perkeep and in my fantasy world it or something exactly like it plays a key role in putting people back in control of their content.

https://perkeep.org/doc/overview

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#230

Post by tachyonbeam »

dageshi wrote: post #151
tachyonbeam wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think what we had in the last 6 or so years was actually a lot worse than some "darknet chat platform", because honestly the equivalent of that in terms of usenet/forums has always existed. What we had more recently was a kind of social media conveyor belt and sieve system that found, nudged and filtered people into a specific direction until there were enough deluded/lunatic/trolls/whatever you want to call them c…

My response would be that while it's true that clearnet forums have more reach than darknet forums, there is a risk that pushing people away into really isolated corners radicalizes them even more. If you have a really big open discussion platform, maybe you get assholes saying that Texas should secede or making racist statements, but you probably also have some amount of normalization from regular right-leaning folks who disagree with that. However, if you ban some political opinions, maybe you end up with isolated islands with fewer people that hold much more extreme views, and nobody to tell them that they are going off the rails and pull them back to reality.
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