5 ms·

I've dreamed of a social network where I could sort and filter the feed—where I control what I see, not the network. Anyone want to build it with me?

lostmsu 7y ago
Currently, it is relatively easy to mirror Facebook into an RSS feed + static website. I even had a pet project doing exactly that some time ago. If you really want, you can even mirror your friend's posts. Might be easier, than to convince people to move.
RangerScience 7y ago
We've got something like Roam Research (except geared towards narrative rather than academics) that we want to explore adding a social network and feed capabilities to.
yodon 7y ago
I'm pretty sure it's a pipe dream to have that feature in a social network that matters. We're pretty well past the era where non-commercial social networks could grow much past the curiosity stage, and commercial social networks need a way to monetize themselves. Since asking users to pay to join a social network is a non-starter that leaves ads as the monetization mechanism. It's easy to build what you describe from a tech standpoint, very hard to do so from a social network standpoint.
- jonas21 7y ago
  Wasn't that the premise behind Jimmy Wales' WT:Social [1]? I wonder how they're doing. [1] https://wt.social/ https://wt.social/
  - yodon 7y ago
    If you have to ask it's probably still pretty niche, almost by definition
wayneftw 7y ago
I would like that and also forum comments that are ranked by what I would find agreeable instead of what some anonymous, amorphous, majority of the moment finds agreeable. Why should the user always be made to feel like the majority view is the "best" or "most accurate" view of things? At the core, I would do this by building a network graph of users who I've upvoted and users they've upvoted, and so on maybe a few levels deep. If anyone in that group of users has upvoted a comment, I want it on top - sorted by how many degrees of separation there are between me and the upvoter. The very simplistic, single-faceted comment rankings that most places implement right now is, including Hacker News, is simply brain-dead IMO. I've brought this up before and 100% of the time, one of the responses I get is "sounds like a good way to build an echo chamber". It's not a bad thing actually. I think it more accurately models real life where we don't hang around with a bunch of people that we find disagreeable, even if they are in the majority and even if they're "right". With a system like the one I propose, everybody can feel comfortable, say what they want and things will most likely be way, way easier to moderate if they don't just moderate themselves.
- sifar 7y ago
  >> Why should the user always be made to feel like the majority view is the "best" or "most accurate" view of things? er may be because of ... markets,democracy :). The majority have been trained to believe that the majority view is good.
aklemm 7y ago
Get on the IndieWeb and into the Fediverse. http://indieweb.org http://indieweb.org http://fediverse.party http://fediverse.party
marcus_holmes 7y ago
The important part isn't the feed, but the business model. If your users' needs are important to you, then your users need to be your customers - i.e. they need to be paying you. If someone else is your customer, then their opinions and needs become more important than your users' opinions and needs. The problem with Facebook is that advertisers are their customers and therefore they're the people that Facebook needs to keep happy. Providing a great experience for their users is secondary. As users we get annoyed by this, but we're stuck with it until Facebook starts giving us the option to pay for our FB accounts. Which Zuck promised he'd never do. So for your new shiny social network, the important question, as always, is: who's going to pay for it?
- zrm 7y ago
  I think the flaw in your question is the assumption that a social network needs a business model. It's like asking what the business model is for SMTP. It shouldn't be under the control of a single entity so it shouldn't need a single specific business model. Then you have a market for providers even though it's still all the same network.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    The business model of SMTP is that e-mail providers leverage their compliance with SMTP to draw users in but then derive value some other way (either by luring users into their ad-powered ecosystem like most consumer e-mail providers or making them pay like business e-mail providers). A protocol by itself indeed doesn't need a business model but clients for the protocol do need one.
    - zrm 7y ago
      > A protocol by itself indeed doesn't need a business model but clients for the protocol do need one. They still don't need one, there can be many. Even if most people still end up with the gmail model, it's meaningfully different, because the switching cost is lower. You don't have to convince everybody you know to switch too. Now suppose you're trying to solve the original problem. You've got feeds from a hundred users and you want a way to filter them yourself. If any service exists that provides this, using any business model, you can use it even if hardly anybody else does. You can also develop your own client that does this or commission someone to add the feature to an existing client. More than that, if this is a feature many people want, now the ad-supported providers will need it too, because now they have to compete for users with the providers who are treating you as the customer instead of being insulated from competition by the network effect when they own the entire network.
Pmop 7y ago
Federated RSS?
searchableguy 7y ago
Actually would love to talk about this. Feeds in social media are severely limited for when you need to filter the content you want. What if you let people program their own filters and gave them enough flexibility. There could be some way to share and reuse those filters maybe built on top of existing social networks as well so you won't miss out anything. I would be able to switch to patio's feed for a week then someone else and check what they are reading. Could work as a subscription model. Content creators or influencers can sell their feed filter as a service. What they see from twitter, reddit or hn, you can see it too.
solarkraft 7y ago
You don't need to build a new network - one called the Fediverse (mostly made up of Mastodon and Pleroma and powered by the W3C standard ActivityPub) already exists and lots of cool people are on there. It is however sorely lacking a way to give silent Bobs more attention - who posts more just gets more attention. Luckily it doesn't have a business model that would prevent one from building something cool on top of it. I think it'd be pretty cool to have a curation algorithm that the user can control.
- snisarenko 7y ago
  I am actually kind of interested in the problem of surfacing, high signal content on fediverse. Currently I built a few simple aggregators: https://pixelfed.club https://pixelfed.club https://mastodonia.club https://mastodonia.club But I am thinking of adding features to filter and surface, high signal/quality content.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Lists work fairly well. I keep a set of three, by priority. "Top" is about 20 people I care to hear from, who post either rarely or very high quality. "Medium" is much less selective, and "Voluable" are overactive. I usually have the first two visible, frequently with "Home" (all followed profiles) as the 3rd stream. I add, move, & remove frequently. Another interesting dynamic on services permitting blocking is that, over time, the set of variously blocked accounts builds. This can go either way (submitter blocks follower, vice versa), but tends to result in interesting graph partitions over time.
kamiheku 7y ago
Anybody remember the name of that open source browser-based RSS / social media feed aggregator from a while back? It had a really unique (colourful but simplistic) visual style and IIRC the domain had a novelty TLD. It had support for RSS feeds as well as plugins (?) for different social media sites. As far as I remember, one of the main talking points the author presented was the idea of being in control of the content you consume. Edit: Found it! https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/ From the author: > Fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/) is a delightful browser extension for following people on the interwebs. It's an easy-to-use yet hackable, FOSS, privacy-respecting, and experimental next-generation feed aggregator and reader. Not every platform offers RSS, so Fraidycat tries to build those bridges for you, scraping and packaging it up for you automagically. It aims to enable you to tailor your own feeds, priorities, and timelines from across the web in your browser. > Instead of being beholden to cycling through endless applications and platforms to follow people: use Fraidycat to simplify, defragment, and take ownership of your window into the lives of others on the web. Fraidycat is afraid of what the web has become (and is becoming), and it's savagely fighting back. > I want to bypass the treadmills and middlemen which aim to commodify my attention span and the pipelines between me and others. I don't want my browser to become just some surveilled thin-client dehumanizingly displaying a walled-garden web engineered by whatever an oligarchy of corporations chooses for me. Fraidycat allows me to more independently use my resources to track and represent people on the web for me. I'm convinced it gives the power of surfing and taking the pulse of the web back to the user. > You own the aggregation process with Fraidycat because it runs in your browser. Political and technological autonomy requires turnkey tooling for users to actively shape the algorithms which pick out what they find salient on their own terms and devices. We have to shape our own filter-bubbles and how we feed ourselves information. Fraidycat is the kind of a lens-crafting tool we need.
amelius 7y ago
While you're at it, please fix recommendations on youtube.

lostmsu 7y ago

Currently, it is relatively easy to mirror Facebook into an RSS feed + static website. I even had a pet project doing exactly that some time ago. If you really want, you can even mirror your friend's posts. Might be easier, than to convince people to move.

RangerScience 7y ago

We've got something like Roam Research (except geared towards narrative rather than academics) that we want to explore adding a social network and feed capabilities to.

yodon 7y ago

I'm pretty sure it's a pipe dream to have that feature in a social network that matters. We're pretty well past the era where non-commercial social networks could grow much past the curiosity stage, and commercial social networks need a way to monetize themselves. Since asking users to pay to join a social network is a non-starter that leaves ads as the monetization mechanism. It's easy to build what you describe from a tech standpoint, very hard to do so from a social network standpoint.

jonas21 7y ago
Wasn't that the premise behind Jimmy Wales' WT:Social [1]? I wonder how they're doing. [1] https://wt.social/ https://wt.social/
- yodon 7y ago
  If you have to ask it's probably still pretty niche, almost by definition

wayneftw 7y ago

I would like that and also forum comments that are ranked by what I would find agreeable instead of what some anonymous, amorphous, majority of the moment finds agreeable. Why should the user always be made to feel like the majority view is the "best" or "most accurate" view of things? At the core, I would do this by building a network graph of users who I've upvoted and users they've upvoted, and so on maybe a few levels deep. If anyone in that group of users has upvoted a comment, I want it on top - sorted by how many degrees of separation there are between me and the upvoter. The very simplistic, single-faceted comment rankings that most places implement right now is, including Hacker News, is simply brain-dead IMO. I've brought this up before and 100% of the time, one of the responses I get is "sounds like a good way to build an echo chamber". It's not a bad thing actually. I think it more accurately models real life where we don't hang around with a bunch of people that we find disagreeable, even if they are in the majority and even if they're "right". With a system like the one I propose, everybody can feel comfortable, say what they want and things will most likely be way, way easier to moderate if they don't just moderate themselves.

sifar 7y ago
>> Why should the user always be made to feel like the majority view is the "best" or "most accurate" view of things? er may be because of ... markets,democracy :). The majority have been trained to believe that the majority view is good.

aklemm 7y ago

Get on the IndieWeb and into the Fediverse. http://indieweb.org http://indieweb.org http://fediverse.party http://fediverse.party

marcus_holmes 7y ago

The important part isn't the feed, but the business model. If your users' needs are important to you, then your users need to be your customers - i.e. they need to be paying you. If someone else is your customer, then their opinions and needs become more important than your users' opinions and needs. The problem with Facebook is that advertisers are their customers and therefore they're the people that Facebook needs to keep happy. Providing a great experience for their users is secondary. As users we get annoyed by this, but we're stuck with it until Facebook starts giving us the option to pay for our FB accounts. Which Zuck promised he'd never do. So for your new shiny social network, the important question, as always, is: who's going to pay for it?

zrm 7y ago
I think the flaw in your question is the assumption that a social network needs a business model. It's like asking what the business model is for SMTP. It shouldn't be under the control of a single entity so it shouldn't need a single specific business model. Then you have a market for providers even though it's still all the same network.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  The business model of SMTP is that e-mail providers leverage their compliance with SMTP to draw users in but then derive value some other way (either by luring users into their ad-powered ecosystem like most consumer e-mail providers or making them pay like business e-mail providers). A protocol by itself indeed doesn't need a business model but clients for the protocol do need one.
  - zrm 7y ago
    > A protocol by itself indeed doesn't need a business model but clients for the protocol do need one. They still don't need one, there can be many. Even if most people still end up with the gmail model, it's meaningfully different, because the switching cost is lower. You don't have to convince everybody you know to switch too. Now suppose you're trying to solve the original problem. You've got feeds from a hundred users and you want a way to filter them yourself. If any service exists that provides this, using any business model, you can use it even if hardly anybody else does. You can also develop your own client that does this or commission someone to add the feature to an existing client. More than that, if this is a feature many people want, now the ad-supported providers will need it too, because now they have to compete for users with the providers who are treating you as the customer instead of being insulated from competition by the network effect when they own the entire network.

Pmop 7y ago

Federated RSS?

searchableguy 7y ago

Actually would love to talk about this. Feeds in social media are severely limited for when you need to filter the content you want. What if you let people program their own filters and gave them enough flexibility. There could be some way to share and reuse those filters maybe built on top of existing social networks as well so you won't miss out anything. I would be able to switch to patio's feed for a week then someone else and check what they are reading. Could work as a subscription model. Content creators or influencers can sell their feed filter as a service. What they see from twitter, reddit or hn, you can see it too.

solarkraft 7y ago

You don't need to build a new network - one called the Fediverse (mostly made up of Mastodon and Pleroma and powered by the W3C standard ActivityPub) already exists and lots of cool people are on there. It is however sorely lacking a way to give silent Bobs more attention - who posts more just gets more attention. Luckily it doesn't have a business model that would prevent one from building something cool on top of it. I think it'd be pretty cool to have a curation algorithm that the user can control.

snisarenko 7y ago
I am actually kind of interested in the problem of surfacing, high signal content on fediverse. Currently I built a few simple aggregators: https://pixelfed.club https://pixelfed.club https://mastodonia.club https://mastodonia.club But I am thinking of adding features to filter and surface, high signal/quality content.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Lists work fairly well. I keep a set of three, by priority. "Top" is about 20 people I care to hear from, who post either rarely or very high quality. "Medium" is much less selective, and "Voluable" are overactive. I usually have the first two visible, frequently with "Home" (all followed profiles) as the 3rd stream. I add, move, & remove frequently. Another interesting dynamic on services permitting blocking is that, over time, the set of variously blocked accounts builds. This can go either way (submitter blocks follower, vice versa), but tends to result in interesting graph partitions over time.

kamiheku 7y ago

Anybody remember the name of that open source browser-based RSS / social media feed aggregator from a while back? It had a really unique (colourful but simplistic) visual style and IIRC the domain had a novelty TLD. It had support for RSS feeds as well as plugins (?) for different social media sites. As far as I remember, one of the main talking points the author presented was the idea of being in control of the content you consume. Edit: Found it! https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/ From the author: > Fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/) is a delightful browser extension for following people on the interwebs. It's an easy-to-use yet hackable, FOSS, privacy-respecting, and experimental next-generation feed aggregator and reader. Not every platform offers RSS, so Fraidycat tries to build those bridges for you, scraping and packaging it up for you automagically. It aims to enable you to tailor your own feeds, priorities, and timelines from across the web in your browser. > Instead of being beholden to cycling through endless applications and platforms to follow people: use Fraidycat to simplify, defragment, and take ownership of your window into the lives of others on the web. Fraidycat is afraid of what the web has become (and is becoming), and it's savagely fighting back. > I want to bypass the treadmills and middlemen which aim to commodify my attention span and the pipelines between me and others. I don't want my browser to become just some surveilled thin-client dehumanizingly displaying a walled-garden web engineered by whatever an oligarchy of corporations chooses for me. Fraidycat allows me to more independently use my resources to track and represent people on the web for me. I'm convinced it gives the power of surfing and taking the pulse of the web back to the user. > You own the aggregation process with Fraidycat because it runs in your browser. Political and technological autonomy requires turnkey tooling for users to actively shape the algorithms which pick out what they find salient on their own terms and devices. We have to shape our own filter-bubbles and how we feed ourselves information. Fraidycat is the kind of a lens-crafting tool we need.

amelius 7y ago

While you're at it, please fix recommendations on youtube.