My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

Post by acatsdream » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 3:54 AM UTC

Ashanmaril wrote: post #171

whatshisface wrote: post #14

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…

Post by Sargos » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 4:01 AM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #135

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…

What we need is a distributed content distribution network, which just happens to be social. Something like a social bittorrent network with distributed search and inline website display.

Post by presentation » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

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.

Post by mch82 » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 4:20 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…

Post by radlad » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 4:32 AM UTC

tachyonbeam wrote: post #230

dageshi wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 folk…