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How to run a small social network site for your friends

runyourown.social

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Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#81

Post by Kaotique »

kody wrote: post #6

I wish there were a way to broadcast "I am a in " and generate a decentralized forum (i.e. phpbb 15 years ago). Growing up, all online friends lived hundreds of miles away; as an adult, all my friends have wildly different interests. Nowadays Discord is The Answer but it's not nearly as intimate as a good message board. Maybe that's a function of growing up, but I can't help but feel disillusioned that $someone hasn'…

I spend a lot of time on forums before and recently I googled those communities again and all has been lost. Forums contained very valuable information and function as a history archive. Too bad most of that has been replaced with temporary solutions that get pushed down timelines never to be seen again.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#82

Post by indigochill »

INTPenis wrote: post #41
hemloc_io wrote: post #13

I have what I think is a unique perspective on this. Private small self run social media already exists. It's personal Minecraft servers. When I was younger I ran a Minecraft server out of my toaster of a PC. Friends hopped on, made their own little houses, built stuff and talked. Friends would pass in and out and in order to get in you had to be invited! I'd say max there were 10-20 people on there somewhat consiste…

Yes games have been a social forum for over 2 decades. But they're not federated like ActivityPub nodes are.

IMO this is what a metaverse should be: just a federated game.

Actually, Open Simulator (an open source implementation of Second Life's protocol) is kind of already that, although one might debate whether it's a game and the tech is pretty dated by this point.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#83

Post by Nextgrid »

endisneigh wrote: post #67
hemloc_io wrote: post #13

I have what I think is a unique perspective on this. Private small self run social media already exists. It's personal Minecraft servers. When I was younger I ran a Minecraft server out of my toaster of a PC. Friends hopped on, made their own little houses, built stuff and talked. Friends would pass in and out and in order to get in you had to be invited! I'd say max there were 10-20 people on there somewhat consiste…

You can’t even send photos with Minecraft though. It’s certainly a social experience but in no way comparable to say, Facebook or instagram like Friendcamp in the article

The advantage of Minecraft (or any other game for that matter) is that you are focused on the game. You can enjoy playing it with people even if you otherwise have nothing in common and/or disagree with their views/opinions.

When it comes to photos specifically, not being able to send media is also a huge advantage when dealing with creeps or other malicious people. Spam is pretty much non-existent in most games because you generally can't click on links, and the worst "malware" incident is typically a troll telling you to Alt+F4 to fix a bug.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#84

Post by dmje »

jkepler wrote: post #54
dmje wrote: post #30

Really great perspective from a community point of view (if you want a good read, check out the 20-year-old "Design for communities" book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Community-Derek-Powazek/dp/0... ). From a software pov I'm less convinced. Seems to me that "just make a Telegram / WhatsApp / whatever" group is where most online communities seem to be coalescing...?

Problem is, Telegram stores all conversation data in their cloud with homemade encryption, and WhatsApp is proprietary, owned by Facebook, and has been target of numerous security breaches... So, something encrypted via open standards and self-hostable (matrix anyone?) does a better job guarding data privacy and security.

Yeh, agree in theory. In practice (sadly) I don't think most local groups care about privacy or security...

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#85

Post by streamofdigits »

Small social networks is the real "web3" opportunity. The contours and requirements to reach that next stage are still somewhat blurry:

* how to make them ubiquitous (easy hosting, maintenance, moderation)

* how to federate flexibly and effectively (private/public boundaries, social graph discovery, integrate different media, polymorphic clients)

* how to nudge behavior, extract people from their digital prisons and reboot them into more sane behaviors - not trivial, some real social scientist input required

* how to make them self-financing without creating distorted incentives for any stakeholder

etc. there are lots of things to work out but its clear we've been through an centralized web / walled garden aberration period that inflicted untold damage to the broader "digital transformation" enterprise and legitimized / rewarded abusive practices that can not persist as a permanent pattern

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#86

Post by [deleted] »

streamofdigits wrote: post #85

Small social networks is the real "web3" opportunity. The contours and requirements to reach that next stage are still somewhat blurry: * how to make them ubiquitous (easy hosting, maintenance, moderation) * how to federate flexibly and effectively (private/public boundaries, social graph discovery, integrate different media, polymorphic clients) * how to nudge behavior, extract people from their digital prisons and…

[deleted]

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#87

Post by pjc50 »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #77
upofadown wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't the person running the forum simply not abuse their users by not exploiting their personal data for commercial gain? How hard is that?

GDPR is harder than that, there is a bunch of legal stuff and having to have someone legally responsible to follow the more vague parts of the GDPR. GDPR is not just "not exploiting their personal data for commercial gain" but a lot of busy work with massive fines if you make any mistakes. How is most community forums going to work with that?

Fines are proportional to turnover, and you don't get fined if you don't have any turnover. People are very scared of GDPR in a way that doesn't reflect the actual enforcement!

You do have to avoid leaking, though; it's effectively a requirement to do information security.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#88

Post by DarylZero »

bertil wrote: post #73
andreyk wrote: post #44

I actually tried to do this with Diaspora and a couple dozen of my closest friends. We tweaked it to not have like buttons, and like other fun stuff. The idea being that it'd be our own little space and we could be weird on there and design it as we felt like. Sadly, it just did not catch on, people were not invested enough in it. These days, I'm not too sure there is a point to this kind of thing instead of a group…

A lot of people criticise the Growth efforts are social media company —and they tend to do some shady things— but their work leads to large groups of people being active and findable on the same platform. That’s hard, requires a lot of effort and in genuinely valuable. If people included that in discussions about whether the bad habits was worth it, we could have more meaningful conversation about the role of social…

It's only hard because it's zero sum competition against others doing the same. It seems to happen quite naturally.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#89

Post by pjc50 »

brnt wrote: post #55
drorco wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been like that with many multiplayer games to some extent before the age of matchmaking. Someone sets up a dedicated server with certain mods/game configuration, and that would be yours and other randoms favorite server. Over time, you'd actually become a community. I've gone back to play Unreal Tournament 2004 this past year in such dedicated servers, and it made me realize how badly matchmaking ruined the…

Perhaps it isn't surprising that when interaction is designed to be disposable and replaceable, i.e. matchmaking, no real community can form.

This is rather bad news as an implication for Tinder.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#90

Post by cocoflunchy »

mariusor wrote: post #39
kody wrote: post #6

I wish there were a way to broadcast "I am a in " and generate a decentralized forum (i.e. phpbb 15 years ago). Growing up, all online friends lived hundreds of miles away; as an adult, all my friends have wildly different interests. Nowadays Discord is The Answer but it's not nearly as intimate as a good message board. Maybe that's a function of growing up, but I can't help but feel disillusioned that $someone hasn'…

I'm not really there yet, but I'm working on having something close to this possible in the near future. It's not exactly in a forum format, I am partial more to old reddit's interface paradigm, but it will allow a person or a community to easily bootstrap a discussion platform that speaks ActivityPub (the same thing Mastodon does) and that can be plugged into the bigger Fediverse ecosystem. An example instance is at…

Quick feedback: that name is not very inviting...
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