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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

#241

Post by tachyonbeam »

radlad wrote: post #239
tachyonbeam wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. While this sounds reasonable, it is not at all clear that it is truly the case.

I agree. I would like to see (serious) sociological research on this topic.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#242

Post by acatsdream »

egberts1 wrote: post #27

Scuttlebutt protocol is a decentralized encrypted protocol where data-at-rest is encrypted by keys not on the chat server. Chat server can be scaled to many via docker. An average end-user can fire up such a chat server to cover his own group chat. Manyverse (Sweden) is that mobile app. I’ve toyed with it. Looks interesting. Very much like Gnutella except there are no seed servers, Manyverse instead uses cipher-link…

>requires a posting at external websites to get started.

My understanding is that it is the same as seed servers

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#243

Post by conradev »

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…

My favorite social network in this category is Strava. Browsing the feed is super motivating and great for generating route ideas.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#244

Post by hakfoo »

leppr wrote: post #227
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SOME people do.

There are some audiences that go gaga for that type of connection. They love unprompted (over)sharing and friend collecting. I suspect you get a base of that on a service like Facebook, and since they're the heaviest users, the platform will eventually warp to appeal to their needs.

I always got a lot more value out of vertical communities like forums and newsgroups, just because there was typically specific valuable content and opportunities for deeper discussion.

But I suppose I was never the sort who was hugely motivated by "reconnect with your high school buddies/distant relatives" which was the default pitch for general purpose social networks.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#245

Post by redisman »

fulafel wrote: post #108
TameAntelope wrote: post #8

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.

We still use email, blogs and the telephone network (including sms/mms). And newer decentralized systems like Mastodon. These kind of have moderation but it's decentralized and island specific (also regulated in case of the telephone network).

These forms also don’t have a giant corporation attempting to monetize your attention. Telecoms for example simply charge a monthly fee. I truly believe the micro targeted ad driven and “gets the most clicks “ optimizations have been extremely powerful and destructive

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#246

Post by fulafel »

redisman wrote: post #245
fulafel wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still use email, blogs and the telephone network (including sms/mms). And newer decentralized systems like Mastodon. These kind of have moderation but it's decentralized and island specific (also regulated in case of the telephone network).

These forms also don’t have a giant corporation attempting to monetize your attention. Telecoms for example simply charge a monthly fee. I truly believe the micro targeted ad driven and “gets the most clicks “ optimizations have been extremely powerful and destructive

Exactly, the main issue is social networks under corporate control.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#248

Post by UShouldBWorking »

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.

Lol, I'm doing the same for audiobooks. Several hundred users a day after three+ years building.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#249

Post by amir734jj »

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.

+1 for Aether

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#250

Post by berkes »

sneak wrote: post #45
grahamburger wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO this is why federation is an important aspect of decentralized networks, and is commonly listed as a reason for use Mastodon / the fediverse. Each instance can set their own moderation policies and decide what other instances they want to federate with. Notably mastodon.social and the instances related to it haven't become cess pools of hate speech, because they do have strong moderation policies, but for users w…

> Each instance can set their own moderation policies and decide what other instances they want to federate with. Yeah, this is why the fediverse is terrible, too. Your site admin shouldn't be the one deciding who you can DM, or which people can follow your feed. Imagine if email worked that way.

But email does work that way.

On my mailserver, I make the rules. I decide how my spamfilters, greylisting and blacklisting is tuned. I decide who is allowed to have an account. And therefore, I decide what is allowed to be sent and received.

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