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Ask HN: Who is working on fully decentralized social networking?
I imagine that the news about Parler having its plugs pulled both from app stores and AWS hosting has many of us thinking: what will it take to build a solution where that's simply not possible?
I know of Matrix, Mastodon, and PixelFed (and use the first two), but is there a 'facebook killer' in development right now?
My concern is that, while seizing control of social networking from big corporations is surely a great idea, it may be initially inundated (and thus, socially formulated) by the same whackjob culture that flocked to Parler from Twitter.
How can we ensure that balanced and healthy communities form on the decentralized web?
- PaulHoule 6y agoUse XMPP the same way that cops and soldiers do.
- edoceo 6y agoCan you say more? This seems neat
- _wldu 6y agoThey probably use OTR.
- PaulHoule 6y agoXMPP is an open protocol for chat, just like email. Sheeple seem to be completely allergic to open chat so they run from one proprietary service to another like * AIM * ICQ * Paltalk * Skype * Lynq * MSN Messenger * Google Talk (and I think a few others from Google) * Skype for Business * Facebook Messenger * Go2Meeting * Zoom * What's App * Signal * Apple Messenger * Discord * Slack This is the road to ruin however because these platforms go through a cycle like: * Platforms reach a certain level of quality and then start to decay (remember when Skype worked as well as Zoom does now?) * Because of the "two-sided network" effect people tend to stick with the chat services that other people use so that chat services have no reason to fight that decay; * Every so often somebody finds an opportunity and gets a new product in, often with a new idea or two and the rough edges sanded away (remember how Skype used to "just work"; Zoom "just works" now but once it is a market leader you're going to put up with it no matter how bad it is.) * Big companies like AOL, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc. periodically come out with chat programs that "innovate" by connecting to their networks, but for the most part you could squint and AOL Messenger looks the same as Facebook messenger. * Some big companies in a further fit of mindlessness produce or buy an endless series of incompatible chat applications. So long as you go down the road that somebody is going to administer this big server, the company is someday going to get bought and go bad. ---- Most people seem to think that using an open network is like putting your hand in a toilet. (Think of the "freedom" to wreck your hands with a mouse from the Apple 1984 ad) The simple fact is that you could get a better client for a server IF there is a competition for clients. Twitter, Discord, et al.will just shut you down if you make a better client. In the "police/military" sector communication with chat is widespread (e.g. most cops have a computer with an XMPP client in their car) They might tap out a message and it goes into Lotus Notes, be handled with a workflow, looked at by intelligence folks, etc. XMPP has all kinds of extensions such as: fill out something like an HTML form and send it somebody that serve those people well. (e.g. fill out a form about what happened on patrol today) Contrast the continuous decline of proprietary chat w/ interoperable phone calls, SMS, you just take it for granted you can call a Verizon phone from AT&T and it is because the government got involved. Europeans concerned about falling behind would be well advised to mandate interoperability for chat clients and servers -- the one problem is their privacy minimalism works in the favor of centralized companies like Facebook (which legislators might think they can control) opposed to a distributed network where somebody can record what goes by and have no respect for "the right to be forgotten."
- b3u 6y agoI've heard of [friendica](https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/) as a decentralized facebook alternative. I assume you need friends who are actually using it, which is why I don't myself.
- mcv 6y agoYour friends don't need to use friendica. It can also share with Diaspora, Mastodon, Hubzilla and others.
- austincheney 6y agoI am, starting with file system access.
- pasdechance 6y agoThere is all of the Fediverse stuff https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
- mindcrime 6y agoI was working on that idea a long time ago. Got away from it, but I still have an OSS project I work on here and there which is a "FB like" social network product, and another which is a "Reddit like". Neither currently has a lot of specific support for decentralization / federation, other than use of RSS and ActivityStrea.ms at the moment. But I would like to pick up some activity in this area again at some point and work on integrating with the "Fediverse" and maybe look at TBL's SOLID and see if there's anything there to incorporate. Time is the biggest challenge, unfortunately.
- rriepe 6y ago> the same whackjob culture that flocked to Parler from Twitter As long as people are primed to viscerally pre-hate any competitor, it won't work.
- claudiulodro 6y agoI sort-of am. I'm playing-around/working-on a decentralized messaging network using WordPress sites as the nodes. The advantage here is that WordPress sites are easy and standardized to host.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoThe problem with decentralized social networking is that there would also be no control; you NEED people with elevated access that can remove content, else it'll end up as a platform for hate speech and child pornography (I know, 'think of the children' is a tired argument, but if you cannot moderate, it will end up as a cesspool).
- nwienert 6y agoAny different from the internet itself?
- evgen 6y agoTry to run a child pornography site on the internet and let us know how hard it was for you to be moderated out of existence (and into a small box with bars on the doors.)
- mcv 6y agoThat is also an issue. It probably can't be anonymous. If someone else hosts your content, they decide what you're allowed to post. If you host your own content, the authorities need to be able to find you.
- nwienert 6y agoThat was my point, really. No one says there can’t be some level of moderation or hierarchy built in. Decentralized != immutable != non-heirarchical. And like sibling, it need not be entirely anonymous either. The feds would allow it if they had some level of legal access to manipulate it, which would in turn be what most people who want decentralized social networking seem to want: to at least have a somewhat democratically elected body governing it, not an arbitrary private company.
- jMyles 6y agoIs it possible to achieve this level of control over the internet? Seems like hubris to me. And if it were, is it even desirable? It seems to me that we're headed for a land where data and ideas, once promulgated, become immutable, but that voluntary moderation regimes laid over those data can be utilized to keep the humans sane.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SubGenius 6y agoI'm in the middle of tweaking Gurlic to use Matrix(Dendrite) as a backend. It's a ton of work unfortunately, with the limited time I have. It's codenamed Hummingbard and I hope to release something in a few weeks. It'll take a while for it to reach feature-parity with Gurlic though... https://gurlic.com https://gurlic.com
- edoceo 6y agoI was hoping to build something. Every publisher/user runs their own node, or from a node-service provider. And then you "friend" and follow built around RSS with signed or crypted items in the feed. Other nodes operate as aggregators and discovery services.
- oever 6y agoSigning posts, comments and likes is essential for federation. That way fake messages can be prevented. And it allows users to do their own calculation of what to show in a feed. E.g. only likes by whitelisted people could be considered. It's technically not possible to avoid leaking private messages, but metadata like license and level of confidentiality in the posts should at least provide hooks for legal enforcement.
- StellarTabi 6y agoKind of sounds like blogs and RSS as it already is.
- swebs 6y agoNow you know why Google wanted to kill off Reader.
- edoceo 6y agoIt is. The "trick" is to make that whole process as simple/easy as an FB/Twitter.
- pbx 6y agoExcept blogs as a social space are pretty well moribund. Comments are overrun by spam, and additional social features like pingbacks are practically unknown.
- rglover 6y agoLong-term, it will take ownership of physical hardware/networking for hosting and in the short-term, usage of a distributed DB like IPFS or Sia's SkyDB.
- kennu 6y agoI've used Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/) and Aether (https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/) which are P2P apps, but I never really started using them. Didn't find interesting content or communities to keep me engaged. It's not easy to build a vibrant social network from scratch.
- StavrosK 6y agoI had the same problem so I made an "HN users" pub yesterday, come say hi: hnpub.stavros.io:38213:@PJtGRbz9IwtobscVq+i4a8y0zZBc2j220D5jsoyKgaw=.ed25519~OezW1tkZu9dX/x7uhDLL/7m5xUosz68NeoqfDjhnYXQ=
- incrudible 6y agoI looked at this yesterday, but if I have to download something just to look at it, that's a huge barrier of entry. It needs to (also) work over ordinary HTTP/HTML and needs to be indexed by search engines, just like Twitter. The guys at STEEM.IT or LBRY.IO have figured this out. Also, somehow these sites aren't Neonazi cesspools. Not sure how moderation works over there.
- Kototama 6y agoI know of https://planetary.social/ https://planetary.social/. It's based on Scuttlebutt.
- fedorhk 6y ago> My concern is that, while seizing control of social networking from big corporations is surely a great idea, it may be initially inundated (and thus, socially formulated) by the same whackjob culture that flocked to Parler from Twitter. > How can we ensure that balanced and healthy communities form on the decentralized web? Sigh. The problem with all decentralized platforms/solutions is that they're focused on "decentralized", not on "platform". So high level plan should be: 1. Make platform that actually compete with w/ FB, Twitter, etc. 2. Decentralize it.
- mlatu 6y agoMaybe I read too much leftist theory but it is my opinion that: You can't build a successful platform and then decentralize it. The means must fit the ends. Why do you want decentralized infrastructure? Why would users want it? Why should they care about the problems you see with centralized systems? How do you monetize your platform? Let's put this on it's head and pretend we are GAFAM: Q: Why is our successful platform centrally governed? A: So we can more easily extract data from the accumulated userbase. Remember, our product isn't the service, but the data extracted from the users. And the users aren't our customers either, they are livestock. And our actual customers are the advertisers that pay us. This means, for a successful new platform: you need a product. You need something that is valueable for the user from the getgo. After you found something useful, you can think about how to connect the insular instances of your application to make the product even better without compromising the users' control over their content.
- new_realist 6y agoPlease don't work on fully decentralized social networking. Humans social evolution is thrown way out of whack by social media, which makes it unstable and dangerous. When it does need to be regulated, it should be possible. We are a society of laws.
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoPlease expound on and clarify the term "social evolution".
- dnautics 6y agoHow do you know it isn't that human society and evolution are thrown out of whack by laws?
- keiferski 6y agoI wouldn’t consider myself “technical”, so I don’t know if this is possible, but: What about designing the entire system around tagging and filtering? Anyone can post anything, but users can choose which tags they want automatically hidden. Example - any post with the word Trump in it gets automatically tagged with Trump, politics, etc. This would remove the “filled with whackjobs” problem while simultaneously allowing for free speech.
- bawolff 6y agoThat assumes your users are tagging things correctly and arent intentionally trying to maliciously bypass the system. What you're suggesting isn't all that different from usenet, which largely failed due to the spam problem.
- Hitton 6y agoHow would you suggest to actually do that without just moving problem from moderating content to moderating tags? How would be people motivated to correctly tag their own posts or alternatively prevented from maliciously tagging posts they don't like?
- keiferski 6y agoI didn’t mean for users to tag their own posts. The system itself would just tag everything. Of course you may still get people trying to get around this, but I think you could avoid most outright awful stuff.
- cprogs 6y agoI am. I working on creating an "API-first" social network that doesn't specify implementation, only interface. This way everyone/anyone can run their own server that exposes their own content through the API. They can run this on their own domain and using whatever technology and implementation they want. Other users can choose to follow you and receive notifications directly from you. You can also use whatever security, moderation, throttling, and architecture you want. This may sound like it places a lot of burden on the individual but I plan on having reference implementations from super simple all the way up to clustered nodes ready to run in Docker containers. And hopefully with it all be open source and API-specified only, people can contribute other implementations. The API is extremely simple. It is REST based and easy to comprehend. Anyone could write a simple server and reader who can program PHP, Node Express, or anything else. The driving idea is to put individuals in complete control of their data and experience, and maximize interoperability. Much like an HTML img tag only has a src attribute, but the browser know how to retrieve the image from a server (which knows how to serve it) and then display it in the browser. Conceptually pretty simple. If anyone is interested in knowing more, please ping me. I would like to release an API specification soon for discussion and refinement. Email in bio.
- maxfurman 6y agoNot to be discouraging, but isn't this the role ActivityPub already fills?
- cprogs 6y agoYes, but I am shooting for something even simpler. Like going from SOAP to REST. I think a simple API will encourage more implementations. My vision is also something a little more narrow, such as: profile -> follow|unfollow, post, post -> comment|like|reply set of uses cases. It's not trying to cover all possibilities of social media interactions.
- robjan 6y agoIf you're doing that, it may be good for the API to be an abstraction over the existing protocols rather than creating a new protocol as well. That way you get the simplification and interoperability with the existing fediverse.
- mcv 6y agoI moved to Diaspora after Google Plus was killed. It's mostly good, if small, but with one really big problem: you can block trolls, but trolls can always create new accounts and come back. It's probably impossible to create a decentralised social network where don't constantly have to reblock the same trolls but also don't get locked into a tiny closed community. I want to be able to talk and share with the whole world, but I don't want to have to block the same assholes over and over again because they keep making new accounts. And I assure you that trolls can get pretty bad on any open, decentralised system. They certainly do on Diaspora. Maybe something where your network only expands through trusted nodes in your network: if a friend follows a lot of trolls, maybe keep him as a friend, but don't allow your network to expand that way. But someone else might follow a lot of interesting people, so open up your network a bit more in that direction.
- dnautics 6y agoJust make it $1/yr per account. Sure there will be trolls, but they have to pay for the privilege of each sock puppet account
- sliken 6y agoI think it would be better to make all communications require an acceptance. Like accepting a facebook friend, of google hangouts. Then charge for acceptances, even $0.10 per user would likely be not a big deal for users, but prohibitive for spammers who want to message millions and only a very small fraction will be gullible enough to pay for whatever the spammer is selling.
- mcv 6y agoBut who does the money go to if it's fully decentralised?
- jMyles 6y agoSimply burning it is an option. (Though I must say, I don't care for this entire line of thinking - it just gives spamming advantages to the wealthy, which is exactly the reason for crafting an alternative to facebook in the first place.)
- _wldu 6y agoA good first start is to own/control a domain (such as whatever.com) and use a web hosting provider that supports its clients. I strongly encourage people to use Nearly Free Speech. They've been great to me over the last 15 years or so. Beyond that, I think originating your content on your property is key. If someone repeats it on a social network, that's fine. Just don't create it there.
- aklemm 6y agoNot sure why you got downvoted, but the idea of individuals owning their own domains is an important pillar of a decentralized social experience. The indieweb is built on the idea.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jackfoxy 6y agoUrbit https://urbit.org/ https://urbit.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M04AKTCDavc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M04AKTCDavc
- dnautics 6y agoI have a thought about building a generic p2p system over webrtc. As a hoster, I am incapable of moderating content since I don't keep the data (it's all in people's own hard drives, e.g.). The hard part though is that getting people to write webrtc-based apps is unreasonable, instead I'd let you get apps that expose html/js data and serve html/js over RTC.
- anyonecancode 6y agoThe things I feel are broken about social media won't be fixed by decentralization. They'll be fixed by better business models. What most concerns me about social media is: - privacy is not only not respected, but in fact actively and aggressively undermined - online culture is increasingly polarized and extremist. Misinformation and disinformation are symptoms of this. The reason for this, as I see it, is that social media platforms make their money off the actual online conversations. So to make money, they need to get more and more people on their platforms, they need to trigger strong emotional responses to "engage" their users, and they need to mine as much personal information from their users so that they can sell that to advertisers and other interested parties. Contrast that with pre-digital social networks and hubs, like bars and pubs. The business model there is to sell food and drink, with the providing of a social place as an ancillary service, not the main product. To make money as a pub, you provide food and drink people actually want and an atmosphere they enjoy, but you're not attempting to directly monetize your customers' conversations. I'd like to see a decentralized social network in the sense of online conversation hubs attached to actual businesses. No "global" platform, just thousands of smaller hubs where certain online shops get known for hosting good online conversations which draws an audience who _then buys things_. Social networks need to go back to being a way to attract customers, not actually being a direct source of income.
- aklemm 6y agoWhatever you do, please work off Activity Pub, IndieAuth, Webmentions and other protocols that already have traction. This is largely a UX/traction/business problem not a technical problem at this point.
- jwalton 6y agoThe problem with ActivityPub is that federation is a poor substitute for real decentralization. I suspect anything based on ActivityPub will end with a small number of servers dominating the landscape, who will eventually turn off ActivityPub to try to convert to a walled garden, similar to how Slack killed off IRC/XMPP support.
- khawkins 6y agoI don't think this is ever going to work in practice because there is a significant incentives misalignment. The people moving to other platforms are doing so because the tech giants are trying to stamp out free speech. Someone who uses the platform for anything other than political speech has little reason to jump platforms to something that has significantly fewer people and an underdeveloped interface. You're guaranteed to create echo chambers of only the speech you sought to expunge. More importantly, we should all revisit the world politic of exactly 10 years ago, where the biggest story was the Arab Spring--anti-government protests in the middle east. At the time, social media was heralded as a major factor in spurring the protests, despite tens of thousands eventually dying in the conflict. Governments were condemned for blocking access to the sites and many free-speech advocates attempted to develop work-arounds. Social media enabled the self-determination of the people in the middle east, something we should all care about. Regardless of how people feel about the capitol riots, the war on free speech from silicon valley should scare the shit out of all of us. They are setting the precedent now for curbing any revolution in the future. The idea that "healthy communities" are the target really depends on who's doing the diagnosis.
- jMyles 6y ago> Someone who uses the platform for anything other than political speech has little reason to jump platforms to something that has significantly fewer people and an underdeveloped interface. In addition to qualms about the idea that there is a significant amount of speech that is truly "other than political speech", I think you're missing a huge (in fact, the biggest) reason for flight from social networks: the mass-scale gaslighting that happens when closed-source algorithms decide to depict the lives of your friends in a way that's designed to produce consumer behavior rather than to give you insight over your community. To me, the reason to herald the rise of more decentralized social networking is to separate the profit motive from the feed.
- gfodor 6y agoAll new networks bootstrap off of a niche, by definition. This is a particularly volatile niche, for the reasons you mention, but I've often felt given the wider trajectories it was inevitable that politically suppressed speech would bootstrap the communication analog to bitcoin, must like illicit transactions did the same for that decentralized system.
- inetsee 6y agoI wonder whether the solution to the problem of being overwhelmed by whackjobs / trolls is to create clients with the capability of recognizing these toxic individuals and blocking or isolating them automatically. Essentially create a filterbubble that protects you from individuals you would avoid in real life. Spam filters exist that block bad emails, that makes me think that a filter could be created to block bad posts in a decentralized social network.
- mariusor 6y agoI know of Smithereen[1] that is an attempt at a full fledged social network similar to VK on top of the ActivityPub vocabulary. [1] https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen
- abramN 6y agoI have been thinking about this. My idea, that I dubbed "The Mesh" basically has each person's profile data as a blob "somewhere" on the internet. The person's profile would have different tiers for the type of data - personal, professional, etc. Inviting someone to communicate or collaborate with would be a transfer of keys that would allow you to access a particular tier. The user would then use a web browser client or native app to access/update their own profile data, communicate with other profiles they have keys for, upload their own profile data, etc... Clearly, though, taking control over their own data, and not allowing a FB or similar to own it would require an investment on that person's part. Either hosting their own data or finding an online host they could use would require $$$.
- mlatu 6y agoI am currently working on a VR IDE. My plan is to get some code editing functionality going, add VR support, build cool stuff in it and expand functionality slowly towards a VR OS-shell (think Windows 3.1). Eventually I want to also build some sort of network experience which will require communication with other instances. You can follow my progress here: https://www.awesemble.de/cgi-bin/fossil/public/vrkbnch/home https://www.awesemble.de/cgi-bin/fossil/public/vrkbnch/home At the moment I'm cleaning up another repo with experiments and salvaging what I can before I rewrite my AST visualizer.
- jMyles 6y agoThis sounds very interesting. As I've seen others voice here on occasion, the IDE use case for VR is the one that speaks most to me. Adding a collaborative element sounds wonderful.
- mlatu 6y agoI imagine this VR OS-Shell will be a VR space that represents your personal system behind the scenes. Eventually I want to be able to connect to other systems I own and manipulate files via 9P (for example). There'd be a workbench for manipulating code and a filing cabinet for browsing files. You'd mount a sourcefile on the workbench and manipulate its AST. There will be a way to add a 2D/3D scene to your project and open a viewport into it as you are manipulating its source code and assets. Longterm vision is to add a door to a public scene, a lobby if you will, for allowing other users in, with an airlock (to allow multiple users to enter together as a party) to enter your exhibited scenes. Later there could be another door added to the lobby to connect all the lobbies with a public and open space. So there are: personal spaces: e.g. your workbench, only authenticated users have access private spaces: your lobby and standalone systems in the public space, here you can invite friends over to explore an experience you built together. I think if monetization comes into play you will have to authenticate yourself with your public key to enter a payed-experience. and one public space: the world, (you would be anonymous here) you can set up standalone systems that run private spaces with experiences for passersby to explore. The location of said systems should be a function of their proximity to you in regards to lag. Well. Something like that ^^
- motiw 6y agoFew years ago I experimented with a social media in which User-submitted posts become visible only after filtered and ranked by random anonymous polls sent to sub group of the community. It requires members to vote once in a while but eliminates biases and increase diversity. I got some activity but did not have the time to keep alive and experiment. I still think the concept have potential, maybe someone will refine it one days.