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>The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same

>The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). We already have a model for this: email. You and I can use whoever we want as email providers, including hosting our own, and if you don't think I'm a trustworthy provider, you can drop my messages. The system isn't without it's corner cases, but it's certainly proven to be a robust model over the last ~30 years. The only thing it requires is standards. We already have one for facebook messenger: XMPP. Facebook and Google used to support it, but they both shut it down because they wanted to lock their users in harder. We have CalDav for events, but again, none of the big players want to know about it. We could have a "social status" standard, allowing you to send a robustly versioned life update to other servers from whatever social service manager you'd prefer, but you and I know that no amount of user outcry could persuade any of the major players to adopt it. Network effects, peer pressure and social expectation (e.g. please submit a snapchat along with your job interview) power their meteoric growth. What we need is a "Regulating the Gauge of Railways Act 1846" for the digital age. We need international bodies to review software that has become mandatory to the modern world, distill it down to a set of living specifications, and then ram it down the throats of software vendors.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago
The W3C Social Web Working Group [1] is working on this. Relevant standards through that lens include Micropub [2] and Activity Streams [3]. [1] https://www.w3.org/Social/WG https://www.w3.org/Social/WG [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ [3] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
- Sir_Substance 9y ago
  I didn't know that, but that's excellent. I've got some reading to do!
skybrian 9y ago
Email is insecure and was overwhelmed by spam, driving people to use systems (such as Gmail) that are good at filtering spam. Any distributed system will need to figure out how to deal with spam and abuse. That's hard to do without there being a dedicated team to deal with flagged messages.
- wmeredith 9y ago
  Eh, if you set up your social email client like Twitter, you only get messages from those people you follow. Done.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    That's a rather simplistic model of how Twitter works. People use @ replies and hashtags for impromptu communication between strangers. It's not how email works either.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Then you miss out on the social discovery aspect which is a key part of social networking. You're just avoiding the problem of where to go by cutting off your own legs.
    - marmaduke 9y ago
      Seems contextual whether that's good or bad: one theory of sleep is that we lose consciousness so that we don't go out and get ourselves killed in low visibility conditions.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        Social discovery is obviously something people want or they wouldn't use social media services in the first place. Pointing to the existence of other contexts where that doesn't matter is neither relevant nor insightful. It's like saying 'why worry about these problems, just don't don't use the the internet at all.' I still like paper books and other things and usually spend a day a week off the internet but that doesn't help anyone who's trying to solve an internet problem, does it?
skewart 9y ago
> We already have a model for this: email. Come to think of it, you could build a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter clone on top of email pretty easily. All it would take is a slightly reimagined client. Just whitelist addresses of people you "follow" and display their emails in a separate, more visually rich feed (e.g. automatically downloading and displaying images). Make the UI/UX of "posting" an email to your feed feel more like composing a social media post (e.g. "post a photo" instead of "add an attachment"). You could have a separate inbox for emails from people you weren't following/connected to, which would be just a traditional email inbox.
- marmaduke 9y ago
  How would you keep rich messages from polluting the traditional inbox? I mean, I'd want to keep my existing address and use it as regular email, too
  - Sir_Substance 9y ago
    There are a bunch of email headers you could backwards shoe-horn into serving the purpose of allowing clients to recognize the difference between a life update and a traditional mail, or you could create a new one. You could then make it standard behavior to handle emails with that header via a social client if one is available, and otherwise discard/hide them.
    - marmaduke 9y ago
      my question is, how to keep a standard email from being completely overwhelmed by traffic of the social network, assuming it isn't aware of the headers? Or, you'd just have to tell users to set up a suitable filter? I think we already see some of these things to some extent like Github pull requests having a lot of usability via email.
      - skewart 9y ago
        I'm assuming that people participating in this network are all using a new kind of email client designed to work with these feeds. On the receiver or "follower" side of things the client would filter emails coming from addresses you follow into a separate social feed box. All your other emails (e.g. from other random people, or the notification that the shoes you just bought online have been shipped) would be displayed in your standard, traditional inbox. Your list of actual, non-social-update emails would never be polluted by all the noise from your social update feed. On the sender or "poster" side of things when you post something it would just send emails to your list of followers. Presumably all these people are using clients that are designed to filter the emails into either the social feed or the standard inbox. So you'd never end up spamming people with photos of your lunch on a Greek island with people who haven't signed up to see it. Of course, it could get tricky if, say, alice@example.com is following bob@example.com and bob wants to send alice a plain old email that isn't part of his social feed. Using headers, as suggested above, could be great. Or maybe the social feed would be set up as a mailing list, and posts would go through a reflector address. Or else, maybe people would just set up a new email address from which to send posts to their network? Or, maybe I'm misunderstanding your question? I dunno. I haven't thought through everything, but I'm pretty confident that existing email infrastructure has all the raw material you'd need to build a workable social network.
digi_owl 9y ago
Except that gmail is an ever bigger influence on email...
- piaste 9y ago
  How do you mean? Whatever EEE-type strategy they may be pursuing, you can still switch from GMail to another provider and keep corresponding with the same email users without any effort. This is not true for modern social media.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

The W3C Social Web Working Group [1] is working on this. Relevant standards through that lens include Micropub [2] and Activity Streams [3]. [1] https://www.w3.org/Social/WG https://www.w3.org/Social/WG [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ [3] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/

Sir_Substance 9y ago
I didn't know that, but that's excellent. I've got some reading to do!

skybrian 9y ago

Email is insecure and was overwhelmed by spam, driving people to use systems (such as Gmail) that are good at filtering spam. Any distributed system will need to figure out how to deal with spam and abuse. That's hard to do without there being a dedicated team to deal with flagged messages.

wmeredith 9y ago
Eh, if you set up your social email client like Twitter, you only get messages from those people you follow. Done.
- skybrian 9y ago
  That's a rather simplistic model of how Twitter works. People use @ replies and hashtags for impromptu communication between strangers. It's not how email works either.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Then you miss out on the social discovery aspect which is a key part of social networking. You're just avoiding the problem of where to go by cutting off your own legs.
  - marmaduke 9y ago
    Seems contextual whether that's good or bad: one theory of sleep is that we lose consciousness so that we don't go out and get ourselves killed in low visibility conditions.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Social discovery is obviously something people want or they wouldn't use social media services in the first place. Pointing to the existence of other contexts where that doesn't matter is neither relevant nor insightful. It's like saying 'why worry about these problems, just don't don't use the the internet at all.' I still like paper books and other things and usually spend a day a week off the internet but that doesn't help anyone who's trying to solve an internet problem, does it?

skewart 9y ago

> We already have a model for this: email. Come to think of it, you could build a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter clone on top of email pretty easily. All it would take is a slightly reimagined client. Just whitelist addresses of people you "follow" and display their emails in a separate, more visually rich feed (e.g. automatically downloading and displaying images). Make the UI/UX of "posting" an email to your feed feel more like composing a social media post (e.g. "post a photo" instead of "add an attachment"). You could have a separate inbox for emails from people you weren't following/connected to, which would be just a traditional email inbox.

marmaduke 9y ago
How would you keep rich messages from polluting the traditional inbox? I mean, I'd want to keep my existing address and use it as regular email, too
- Sir_Substance 9y ago
  There are a bunch of email headers you could backwards shoe-horn into serving the purpose of allowing clients to recognize the difference between a life update and a traditional mail, or you could create a new one. You could then make it standard behavior to handle emails with that header via a social client if one is available, and otherwise discard/hide them.
  - marmaduke 9y ago
    my question is, how to keep a standard email from being completely overwhelmed by traffic of the social network, assuming it isn't aware of the headers? Or, you'd just have to tell users to set up a suitable filter? I think we already see some of these things to some extent like Github pull requests having a lot of usability via email.
    - skewart 9y ago
      I'm assuming that people participating in this network are all using a new kind of email client designed to work with these feeds. On the receiver or "follower" side of things the client would filter emails coming from addresses you follow into a separate social feed box. All your other emails (e.g. from other random people, or the notification that the shoes you just bought online have been shipped) would be displayed in your standard, traditional inbox. Your list of actual, non-social-update emails would never be polluted by all the noise from your social update feed. On the sender or "poster" side of things when you post something it would just send emails to your list of followers. Presumably all these people are using clients that are designed to filter the emails into either the social feed or the standard inbox. So you'd never end up spamming people with photos of your lunch on a Greek island with people who haven't signed up to see it. Of course, it could get tricky if, say, alice@example.com is following bob@example.com and bob wants to send alice a plain old email that isn't part of his social feed. Using headers, as suggested above, could be great. Or maybe the social feed would be set up as a mailing list, and posts would go through a reflector address. Or else, maybe people would just set up a new email address from which to send posts to their network? Or, maybe I'm misunderstanding your question? I dunno. I haven't thought through everything, but I'm pretty confident that existing email infrastructure has all the raw material you'd need to build a workable social network.

digi_owl 9y ago

Except that gmail is an ever bigger influence on email...

piaste 9y ago
How do you mean? Whatever EEE-type strategy they may be pursuing, you can still switch from GMail to another provider and keep corresponding with the same email users without any effort. This is not true for modern social media.