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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

#251

Post by berkes »

WClayFerguson wrote: post #180
grishka wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network? That's exactly what I'm building (with ActivityPub). It's not yet production-ready though.

Your name 'grishka' looks familiar. I'm also an ActivityPub developer ( https://quanta.wiki ). What languages do you develop in, in case we can share code?

If you want to talk about sharing code or ideas on AP, https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ is the place to go.

(I'm there with my hn username. Building a decentralised professional social network-linkedin)

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#252

Post by berkes »

orbifold wrote: post #5

What I would prefer is a set of protocols that are interact in a well defined way with each others, like the Email or Usenet protocols, then you can write different clients for these and decentralisation is just a matter of running different servers clients that don't necessarily interact with each other. Something like the CapeProto RPC framework makes it relatively easy to declare the interface of a service.

Isn't activitypub, webfinger (and therefore HTTP etc) just that?

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#253

Post by new_guy »

nelsondev wrote: post #136
at_a_remove wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The author (OP) proposes community generated and shared block lists. I’m imagining an opt in block list, where with enough downvotes, if you are a member of the block list, the content is hidden. If the block list starts blocking content you want, you can fork it, keep the parts you want, remove the parts you don’t.

This is a genius idea, I'm adding it to my sites today!

Everyone knows one another, so if one person blocks a bad actor, it makes sense that everyone else will block them sooner or later.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#254

Post by Jetrel »

presentation wrote: post #235
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.

I'd like that, but consumers seem to like things being "all in one place" - mostly people who are pretty dedicated to niches these days are willing to go to other social sites, but I can't imagine that the mass market will become OK with having like 10 different portals with inconsistent user experiences, unless under some kind of umbrella - be that a centralized service like Reddit or something else.

As an observation, I think a great deal of this is because of the "depth of features" of things a really good service (like Discord) gets insanely right. There's just this mountain of really important quality-of-life things, or needed features available out of the box.

For example, I was scared when I started using discord, because it's entirely reasonable to think if I'm logged in in two places and start a voice chat, surely it'll start playing that audio anywhere I'm logged in, right? Everything else follows a "you do it on one machine you're logged in on, and you do it on all the others as well (such as writing a partial message, and not posting it - the same partial message is right there waiting if you grab a different device).

Well, not only do they correctly handle that one use case (audio chats) with a totally different 'you're doing it only in one place' model, they even track which machine you're currently live on. If you're actively using your home machine, they don't ring your phone - your phone which you might have left home. Or the session you accidentally left running on your office machine. They know you're actually live on a particular machine, and don't annoy or embarrass people by making the others ring.

There are just a lot of really, really important things like this they get right.

Forums did have a little bit of shared standardization, since a lot of people tend to use only a handful of highly popular forum apps, but kinda like the old 90s-style thing where there was always a roster of "must have" OS tweaks and apps you'd install on a new machine (and get to thinking 'geez, why don't they just make this part of the OS) - there's a similar thing with forums where there are a lot of sidecar things that ought to part of every forum, but simply aren't standardized. (Some of these are critical to doing certain jobs; some of them are, like accessibility features, critical to certain users, and difficult to make forum admins care about if they don't personally have the problem).

That, and what you're saying about "having it all in one place". It has a lot of benefits, like being able to cross-communicate and deeplink between communities.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#255

Post by zelly »

The most important part of a social network is the people on it. A decentralized social network will never be able to compete with the marketing of for-profit social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Without marketing, you will never get a critical mass of people on it, which means your social network would be missing the most important part of a social network.

At best you end up with a little hangout for you and a handful of people you already know, possibly people who were already on the mainstream for-profit social networks with you but you insisted they use this other one to contact you. At that point you have an overengineered group chat application.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#256

Post by cblconfederate »

Why don't we just extend SMTP for social networking stuff? Mailing lists are already social network lists, spam control exists, people understand email. It is also so distributed, that censorship (via refusal to federate) is very unlikely to occur

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#257

Post by grishka »

WClayFerguson wrote: post #180
grishka wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network? That's exactly what I'm building (with ActivityPub). It's not yet production-ready though.

Your name 'grishka' looks familiar. I'm also an ActivityPub developer ( https://quanta.wiki ). What languages do you develop in, in case we can share code?

Java for the back end, TypeScript for the very lightweight front end.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#258

Post by sneak »

jonfw wrote: post #52
sneak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The good part is that you can be your own site admin, or you can choose one who reflects your ideals. Moderation is great, the trouble is when a single moderation standard is used across a monopolized market.

I am my own site admin. The third largest instance's admin blocked my site (because I disagree with him about censorship), preventing 17,000 people from being able to follow me, or send or receive DMs from me. I also can't follow or read any of those users from my own server, despite their messages/profiles being public and available to the whole web.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#259

Post by sneak »

ars wrote: post #137
vorpalhex wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a feature many users want. Plenty of users never want to see things they disagree with or take objection to, and want to have someone else enforce that pattern. As long as it's optional - and in the fediverse design it is - then it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. Whether or not those instances actually survive and have any users or just immediately collapse into internal bickering is beyond the strict scop…

> Plenty of users never want to see things they disagree with or take objection to, and want to have someone else enforce that pattern. Am I unusual? When there is hate speech directed at me, I don't really care if I see it or not. But I do want to prevent other people from seeing that hate speech (I don't want the hate to grow).

It's supremely rude to decide that you can be permitted to read something, but other people can't.

Re: My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

#260

Post by esja »

vkou wrote: post #225
esja wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those are very good points but they don't change the fact that grouping by people in this way tends toward smaller and smaller groupings, and exacerbates the sort of division and "different realities" that is hurting social cohesion.
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