55 ms·

My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network

361 points by csande17 6y ago

generalizations 6y ago
I mean, that looks decently similar to bitmessage.
pwg 6y ago
The blog author appears to have never heard of Usenet.
- protomyth 6y ago
  To be fair, point 1 wasn't really Usenet and 3 was a pain sometimes. The author might want to think about DNS a bit. Google and Cloudflare could wreck havoc on any new social network by filtering their DNS and with web browsers bypassing the local system settings, that could take out a lot of nodes in your network. I actually think some rights organization might want to start looking at domain names that are not returning their proper results from the giants.
orbifold 6y ago
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.
- finder83 6y ago
  I'm curious if Skynet or something similar could be used for that? I don't pretend to understand any of the modern blockchain frameworks, but a peer-to-peer distributed and encrypted system seems to fit the bill (possibly non-blockchain related, I'm not sure). It was trending yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710151
  - redsolver 6y ago
    SkyFeed is a decentralized social network built on top of Skynet: https://skyfeed.hns.siasky.net https://skyfeed.hns.siasky.net
- mawise 6y ago
  RSS and Webmentions[1] do this pretty well on otherwise ordinary websites. The protocols exist, we just need to make them easier to use for non-engineers. [1]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention
- berkes 6y ago
  Isn't activitypub, webfinger (and therefore HTTP etc) just that?
lvspiff 6y ago
Essentially people want a free social network that doesn't use its users data for mining and advertising, doesn't track user data, doesn't archive their messages if they delete them/their account/they die, and free from moderation. Is that really too much to ask for? The answer is yes - yes it is too much to ask for - you don't get a free service without paying for it in some other way - mostly these days through the data mining/advertising side of things. If there's no way to turn a profit then why would someone pay for it to be setup?
- pydry 6y ago
  I'd rather host this and most other internet services on a box in my house, next to my router. Or, it could be my router. Either way. It's just really annoying to do that right now and the solutions that attempt to make it easy and slick aren't quite there. This type of thing could be made more popular with normal people if it's easy enough since popular features which "break" the business models of companies like Facebook become popular (e.g. filtering of news feed that under the users direct control or lossless storage of photos). I think most people would be happier owning the hardware than renting an online service.
  - adrianpike 6y ago
    Is that not just a blog?
    - cyberdelica 6y ago
      Before people abused the term "social network" to include all manner of things, including forums such as Reddit and Hacker News, using Twitter was referred to as "micro blogging".
  - shipstain 6y ago
    Opera browser had a feature at one point where you could basically have it as a server and browser. And if we all had transparent addressing on the network you could do that. I have the ability to host at home, but I'm not too keen about having my personal address on the Internet. I know that's an oxymoron, but I'd rather have someone attacking a cloud node than my personal network. And I still value my anonymity in places.
jellicle 6y ago
The primary requirement for a decentralized social network is "one app and it works". If your network requires anything other than installing a single application via the normal, easiest software installation pathway, it has failed and will never be adopted. No matter how l337 it is, if the installation instructions start with "Unzip this file, open port 999 on your router and prepare to edit the text file to start the server..." then it will never and can never work. Better yet if one can just open up a web browser (installing nothing!) and use it. ALL other requirements are secondary.
TameAntelope 6y ago
Regardless of technical viability, any service without moderation is a service mainstream society will shun, which really just means people won't use it, build tools for it, or generally accept others who use the service. People seem to both want a service that is immune from society and also used by society. That's a conflict that won't resolve.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Fortunately, the problem you're talking about has already been solved with the concept of federation. If the social media system is a protocol and not a company, then society can chase down individual bad actors, and blame them for their own crimes, instead of blaming you.
  - Ashanmaril 6y ago
    The issue is we're already doing too much chasing down individual "bad actors." It's like the #1 hobby these days, everyone is looking for the next person to step out of line so they can drag them into the village square for their stoning. There aren't enough "bad actors" to satiate the mob any more so the definition of "bad actor" has to be continually expanded by the day. Just the last week a musician tweeted something dumb about making his daughter learn how to use a can opener to open beans, and within a day, the very successful podcast he did the theme song for, where his track was used for the past like 10 years disowned him and stopped using the song. Then he was kicked off the cruise gathering where he was good friends with the guy who ran it and has been a regular headliner for years. The internet has created a culture problem that I'm not convinced decentralized social networks will fix. At best, if one was created that people actually used, we wouldn't have situations we've seen with Alex Jones and Trump where all the platforms unperson someone on the same day, cause they could still at least keep their audience on the decentralized platform.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      Well, there's bad actors, and then there's twitter-assigned villains. Really bad actors, as in people who are doing things that are clearly bad enough for there to be laws against them, need to be controlled somehow. That's what most moderation energy goes in to preventing.
rolleiflex 6y ago
I’m the maintainer or a project that does some of that. It’s called Aether (https://getaether.net https://getaether.net). User-customisable moderation and grassroots content delivery in particular, with less emphasis on total Tor-like anonymity, though we do still provide some.
- neuland 6y ago
  I was looking at your service recently while surveying the landscape of currently active P2P projects. Am I right in seeing that a monthly subscription is the only option to get a client and start using Aether?
  - rolleiflex 6y ago
    No, it’s free, you couldn’t even pay for it if you wanted. You might be confusing it with Aether Pro, which is a different app for a different purpose (remote collaboration) and is not P2P.
    - neuland 6y ago
      Ah ok. Yes, I was mistaking Aether Pro. You have excellent docs!
- amir734jj 6y ago
  +1 for Aether
e1ven 6y ago
I had written a toy social network a few years back the past which had these features - It worked very much like an encrypted version of usenet. This is probably my bias as an engineer showing, but the technology doesn't seem like the hard part- I always understood that having an resilient network means people will use it to post some bad things, but I don't know if I really internalized the scope of that until later. I had originally envisioned it might be useful in oppressive countries, where people needed a way to communicate - Recent events have shown how dangerous that can feel when you're in the midst of people who feel like that describes them. As another HN post pointed out, there are two natural audiences for such networks - Idealists, and those who can't get away with stuff on other networks.. And the second is going to be far more common. That will influence the culture, and help to drive other "good" people away from the service, amplifying the effect. Even if you have user-selectable moderators (Which I had, similar to the request the author makes), without a huge war-chest to hire a large team of default moderators, you'll never be able to keep up. The default experience for the average user will be terrible. Over and over, I ran into issues like that - It's relatively easy to built the technological network, but managing the social network aspect is an unsolved problem.
- grahamburger 6y ago
  IMO this is why federation is an important aspect of decentralized networks, and is commonly listed as a reason for use Mastodon / the fediverse. Each instance can set their own moderation policies and decide what other instances they want to federate with. Notably mastodon.social and the instances related to it haven't become cess pools of hate speech, because they do have strong moderation policies, but for users who want to post that stuff there are other instances they can find.
  - sneak 6y ago
    > 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.
runjake 6y ago
HTTPS + RSS + Webring/etc. Existing, well-defined protocols that are nimble and able to meet changing needs. I'm not sure why everyone wants to over-complicate this. If you want to make it easy enough to use for any mom and grandma, and you want any hope of gaining traction then you're going to need capital, which is going to necessitate a business. And perhaps it should require some effort, some learning, and some know-how before one can jump on their Internet soapbox. The signal to noise ratio is pretty low.
- AshamedCaptain 6y ago
  By the same rationale, why do you need a "social network" at all? What is wrong with email?
  - rektide 6y ago
    Email is a protocol for using the internet to transmit messages. Part of what I find interesting/valuable/different about "social networks" is that the content is & remains online. Email does not have this capability. Email is an exchange.
    - swiley 6y ago
      Mailing lists do this.
      - rektide 6y ago
        What kind of mailing list are you talking about? I don't think mailing lists do this. If someone comes by in 20 years to your "birdwatching" mailing list, for example, all they can do is sign up or ask for someone to copy them messages. Do you mean an online web system for sharing emails? If so, it's not really a mailing list. It's just an ad-hoc webserver system with poor standards for finding or doing anything. These systems are a joke imo, but to their credit, few web folks have come along to help them turn their loose jumbles of text into anything well structured & responsible. Even still, almost every one of these mailing lists would be well served by having an RSS feed of the activity, which is fairly direct to do. Not sure what you are talking about, would like some clarity, but feels like a non-answer to me.
deleted 6y ago
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markessien 6y ago
How about a timeline on peoples personal blog that follows other blogs (like the fb timeline)? This way, you write your own content on your own website, you read other peoples content on your own website in a consistent format. You tweet on your own website, and others who want to follow can follow from their own website.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Isn't that "trackback"? As popular in the first wave of '00s blogging.
egberts1 6y ago
Scuttlebutt protocol is a decentralized encrypted protocol where data-at-rest is encrypted by keys not on the chat server. Chat server can be scaled to many via docker. An average end-user can fire up such a chat server to cover his own group chat. Manyverse (Sweden) is that mobile app. I’ve toyed with it. Looks interesting. Very much like Gnutella except there are no seed servers, Manyverse instead uses cipher-link hash tags as a joining mechanism which often requires a posting at external websites to get started. Disclaimer: just a hobbyist, not a contributor to Manyverse nor Scuttlebutt.
- acatsdream 6y ago
  >requires a posting at external websites to get started. My understanding is that it is the same as seed servers
helen___keller 6y ago
I'd like to see a social network that tries to minimize the impact of "whale" nodes. I can go to twitter if I want to see what's on the mind of the world's top influencers. I can go to facebook if I want to see people mass-sharing news articles with 10,000 toxic comments about the latest political events. Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network? This would likely alleviate the moderation issue too. You aren't going to see filth and extremism unless it's posted by your social network, which decreases the incentive for bad actors to post it in the first place.
- chasd00 6y ago
  don't you setup you're own network in both FB and Twitter? i choose who my friends are in FB (I'm not on twitter)
  - helen___keller 6y ago
    Sure, in theory. But I feel like on both platform you end up just seeing tons of shares/retweets of whales/influencers. (particularly the way they reorder content on your timeline so it's presented by what they think you want to see)
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      Mastodon will let you turn off boosted posts on your home timeline. It will also not reorder anything, ever.
      - knicholes 6y ago
        It also won't post an advertisement every 3rd item in your news feed...
- fassssst 6y ago
  Group chats are all you need for that.
offtop5 6y ago
I don't think social media networks can scale at all. During quarantine I'm a part of several Online Social circles, which are basically bi-weekly zoom calls to crack jokes on. The owner of the group still needs to ban people from time to time for saying racist or sexist things. I honestly don't think it can scale much beyond 20 people, with 1 person determining if certain conduct is okay or not. And say you get kicked out for making a joke or whatever, then like in real life you have to find another Social circle
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
omarhaneef 6y ago
The key feature you want in a network: all your friends and/or people you want to follow should be on it. So in addition to privacy (the author addresses this) you want ease of use and a funding model, as well as some momentum.
hehehaha 6y ago
It should really be an open social network that government entities cannot shut down. The real test for anyone trying this will be the Great Wall of China. Until then...
- kube-system 6y ago
  That technology doesn't exist and never will. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ China's firewall is relatively open compared to North Korea, for instance.
potency 6y ago
Is there a place where people interested in this kind of tech gather and discuss possibilities/code? I'd love to participate in something like this.
IvanSologub 6y ago
I am a question about decentralized social networks in several communities and have not received much feedback. I think because I'm not a techie and considered completely different aspects. For example the aspect of ownership. Whether the account should belong to the person who registered it. Some people, for example, invest in design, promotion and content creation. It seems to me that the technical solutions proposed by you remove the issue of ownership. What do you think?
motohagiography 6y ago
Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something, but without the impetus that produced the original.It's the "make something people want," but more "make something they use for X." You need the original purpose. It has to be to make something that isn't itself. Myspace was mainly novelty and music, Facebook was for status minting from ivy colleges, other ones are for an exogenous purpose as well. Politics isn't a useful unifying principle. I helped run a progressive political precursor to one of the major ones about 20+ years ago, and it only existed because it was tolerated by part of the establishment, and it could not survive a truly hostile environment. Gamers made discord a thing because it was for playing games. Hipchat was about making code, and Slack was a way to manage people. Reddit was for sharing alternative/emerging culture. A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture, and the current generation of censors came up in divergent/alternative culture, so they have a more sophisticated idea of what nascent opposition looks like than the old ones. Short version is, we don't need a decentralized social network, we need new culture that produces networks, and courage to create that culture.
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  I might also add that a social network like Goodreads or Stack Overflow that is based around some purpose or topic, is so different in tone from general purpose social networks that lots of people don't even notice that it has essentially the same set of features. Also, way less toxic and icky feeling when you use it. Of course, special-purpose social networks never become nearly as big as Facebook, but in my mind that's a feature, not a bug.
  - halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
    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.
grishka 6y ago
P2P services like the article suggests are impractical in real life. It's of extreme importance that you should be able to view, and preferably interact with, something posted on a social media service with as little friction as possible — which means it has to have a web version, and that all content within must have permanent HTTP URLs. No one will be downloading a client and syncing it to the P2P network to view a post or to comment on one or to like one. This has never worked and never will, because it's inevitably a messy experience. ActivityPub is basically as far as one could push the decentralization of social media without severe UX compromises.
- konjin 6y ago
  And yet everyone downloaded the client for facebook on their mobile. This isn't the 00s, people don't expect the browser to the the only thing they use to connect to the world any more.
asdff 6y ago
What if we just went to email? “Follow my mailing list”
- anticristi 6y ago
  Yes, but then you would have a single Inbox, and a single place to triage and filter messages. You wouldn't be exposed to the myriads of VC-funded start-ups that degenerate into a text/video chat and news feed. In fact, you might have to install only your favourite tool, instead of 10s to keep up with the cool kids. You would likely be too focused on what's important to you, since noone is incentivised to artificially keep their "average session time" up. You would also not be tracked, hence miss out on important ads about stuff you don't need on a website that shouldn't know what you did last weekend. I think you suggest a terrible idea. If I sounded sarcastic, it's probably because I am.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Wouldn't want the world getting too productive, after all :)
- renewiltord 6y ago
  That's what substack aims to be.
xiphias2 6y ago
,, Some decentralized networks try to solve this problem with cryptocurrency schemes, but this means that anyone who wants to try out the network has to put their credit card information into a sketchy website and transfer money to a sketchy offshore bank account and do other sketchy cryptocurrency stuff.’’ This info looks outdated. Is Square really a sketchy website? Bitcoin needs 10-15 more years to be adopted, but it will make content delivery for money easier after it’s adopted. Right now its adoption rate is too small to build a social network on top of it.
slg 6y ago
I agree with this article that a social network without moderation is worthless. However what this describes is not moderation, it is filtering. There needs to be some form of moderation. Imagine a scenario in which a revenge porn image is posted to the site. Is the victim's primary recourse simply to block the image on their end? That would leave them without any power to prevent the poster from sharing that image with anyone and everyone the victim knows. The victim might not even be immediately aware of that harassment if they block the image. Putting the burden on the end user to control what they see is not moderation. There needs to be some way for that content to be removed from the system globally for moderation to be effective.
- robryk 6y ago
  The Web does not really have any such mechanisms (and certainly didn't have them back in the times where we had more search engines). Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it not require them, or that it suffers from their lack?
  - slg 6y ago
    > Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it not require them The web is a pull based model while social media is push based. That means social media is much more prone to this type of harassing behavior. I would also argue that the web as a whole doesn't address this problem well as is seen with what the NYT recently revealed about Pornhub.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  Yes, the purpose of moderation is far wider than "I don't want to see this post". It is there to protect people from malicious activities, and also very importantly, it is there to shape the community. Moderation is needed to set limits of what is and isn't accepted in a community. If those limits are not present, communities quickly succumb to its worst elements.
alwdgxzubpxnzcy 6y ago
I was just thinking about "customizable moderation" that this article mentioned earlier today. I came up with a similar idea of lists that you can opt into following just like AdBlock filter lists or Twitter shared blocklists just like he mentioned. In terms of feature set I had a couple ideas this this post didn't mention. There could be two levels of blocking that filter lists could set, warm before showing and never show. Also blocking could be applied on a per user or a per post basis.
chopin24 6y ago
>If a totally unmoderated platform isn’t overrun with spam yet, that just means it isn’t popular enough for spammers to notice it. This is my wish. For a social network that isn't popular enough for spammers to notice it. I'm a member of a few such websites, mainly related to music, and that suits me just fine. I have little reason for a massive town square like Facebook, etc. Little reason to be discoverable by anyone in the world. Scale is overrated.
- loceng 6y ago
  They're everywhere already - but just like them being not popular enough for spammers to notice them, they're not popular enough for you to notice them either.
swalsh 6y ago
My big wish, I want to truely own my own data. If I decide to delete something, I would hope there's not a hundred copies replicated in a hundred caches somewhere. When I delete my own data, I want it truely gone. If someones node is offline, I hope there's nothing of mine left on it.
- kevincox 6y ago
  This is really impossible to do perfectly. If you want to share something with someone they can take a copy. Unless you are going to go down the DRM route you really just have to accept that. There are definitely some decentralized system that encourage duplicating data, but even for those that don't you can't escape some users wanting to mirror or archive everything they see.
- neuland 6y ago
  This is difficult to balance with having data be available when you are offline. If your data is local to a user's device (laptop, desktop, tablet, phone), then it's not online 24/7. So, you need some way for other people to see it. If you require people to use a server, there's either problems onboarding and trusting that server operator. Or you make people host their own server and nobody uses it b/c that's too technical.
jmull 6y ago
Really interesting. These ideas are great, but need some work. E.g., "stick your head in the sand" moderation -- where I can decide what I don't see, but the content is still out there for anyone else to choose to see -- utterly fails at half the purpose of moderation. How is content moderated that is harmful to one set of people if available to another set of people? Child pornography, revenge pornography, doxxing, coordination of violent insurrections.
root_axis 6y ago
The internet is already decentralized, another layer of decentralization solves nothing. When the most popular nodes start banning people we're going to hear the exact same complaints from the usual suspects.
optimalsolver 6y ago
Look, any truly decentralized network will need to involve users hosting their own instances, along with using an entire suite of encryption and anonymity tools. No way the average person will be doing that. That means most/all of the people you'll be talking to on these networks would be hardcore techno-libertarians. A plus for some, a very strong negative for others. Semi-relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/191/ https://xkcd.com/191/
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  That's the unfortunate thing about this site's userbase. That because there is a technical solution, they feel the problem has been solved. However, the technical solution requires more investment and technical know-how than your base user cares to employ.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
Mastodon is the place to make this happen (IMHO): https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon
dboreham 6y ago
nntp?
unityByFreedom 6y ago
Does no one here know about https://notabug.io https://notabug.io ? Pretty sure that's decentralized.
_peeley 6y ago
Looks like there's a typo in the link for Urbit, should be https://urbit.org https://urbit.org if anyone wants to take a look. Personally it seems like vaporware to me, there's not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network. Probably the only reason anyone has even heard of it is because it's the pet project of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, known (somewhat infamously, a few of his talks at conferences have been pulled) for his association with the neo-reactionary political/philosophical movement.
- tylershuster 6y ago
  Arguably that's the reason most people stay away from it. If you can put aside your feelings about the now-departed founder and boot it, you may find that it's everything you're looking for. I'm totally dumbfounded at the rationale people are invoking in recent days not to use urbit but instead some other derivation of previously tried technology. It's not vaporware — I use it everyday to interact with many people. It's not where it hopes to be but it's going there at quite a clip.
- edouerd 6y ago
  > Personally it seems like vaporware to me, there's not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network. > not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network. You can literally set an urbit up and join a not-dead distributed social network right now, this second, in probably less than 3 minutes — it's explicitly not vaporware if people are using it to build thriving communities.
  - neuland 6y ago
    Where are you getting an Urbit ID in 3 minutes? I am not super familiar with Urbit. But my understanding is that even getting a temporary Urbit ID (a commet) takes hours.
    - cmelbye 6y ago
      I just booted with a new temporary ID and it took 50 seconds to generate the cryptographic key. After 3-4 minutes, Urbit had bootstrapped itself and was accessible over HTTP. You can try with these commands, using Mac in this example: mkdir urbit cd urbit curl -JLO https://urbit.org/install/mac/latest tar zxvf ./darwin.tgz --strip=1 ./urbit -c mycomet
hungryhobo 6y ago
I honestly do not understand this fetish with decentralization, do you really want a social network filled with child pornography, violence and other shady stuff? Because that's what's gonna happen guaranteed. People are just animals without rules
- random_dork1 6y ago
  Decentralisation is best exemplified by email or http. Yes, they enable all kind of things, including bad ones. They behave like infrastructure, just like roads. I enjoy Mastodon because I can find the instance I like best and still be in touch with people from other instances. My instance blocks other instances that they don't like and publicly explains why. When I won't like it any more, I will take my data and move somewhere else without looks my contacts or anything. Once Nextcloud will have a decent implementation of Activity Pub, I will start my own instance just for myself and I will only see content that I want to see.
- CivBase 6y ago
  > do you really want a social network filled with child pornography, violence and other shady stuff? You have just described the world wide web. I may not want that stuff to exist, but I also certainly don't want the world wide web to not exist.
  - hungryhobo 6y ago
    I mean you can try to share child pornography through your ISP's network and we can see what happens? Shady stuff are mostly shared through decentralized networks and its the centralized www that's preventing them. To me this decentralization fetish feels like people think government are stupid and inefficient so we should have no government at all
    - feanaro 6y ago
      How exactly is decentralisation related to the idea that there should be no governments? That said, governments are just organizations and very powerful organizations at that. Like any powerful organization, a government can become corrupt or tyrannical and start working against the populace. It is always a good idea to keep it in check so that its power cannot grow boundless.
xyst 6y ago
a decentralized social network already exists - it's called meeting face to face in your local community.
lazzlazzlazz 6y ago
It's absolutely staggering to me that people believe everyone will self-host the decentralized social network, without thinking through the economics of the incentive layer, let alone how to achieve consensus/verification on compute and storage layers. The first successful decentralized social network will be using the decentralized compute and storage systems being developed in the crypto space.
- WClayFerguson 6y ago
  You're right, if it weren't prohibitively expensive to store social media data on Ethereum (for example) then that's exactly what all the decentralized developers (including myself) would already be doing. I checked the Gas price on ETH and quickly concluded that's not even remotely sensible to use it for social media networks, and the bigger problem is that if something became hugely popular that could drive up ETH gas prices too, so building on that infrastructure seems risky from a cost perspective.
  - loceng 6y ago
    It will always be cheaper to not use the blockchain for storage - most things aren't critical, sensitive or important enough to necessitate being stored in such a way.
drummer 6y ago
> Content moderation on a social network could work in a very similar way, with different groups of moderators creating different lists of banned users and deleted posts. Serious vulnerability and potential for abuse and censorship. People could slip in the id for a user they want banned and anyone using that list would not easily realize they are prevented from seeing content from that user. Almost like reverse shadow banning.
turblety 6y ago
Have a look at MaidSafe. It's still not production or even testnet ready, but they're getting close.
egfx 6y ago
I created https://2fb.me https://2fb.me because I felt content was being confined by the constraints of the "network". There is no one network, or there shouldn't be as the author eludes, but an entirely new network will never reach the "network" effects it needs. Instead a protocol between the existing monoliths breaks through the confines and the content cannot be deleted all at once, as it will exist as a copy somewhere else. In short if the account goes down on Twitter then the existing tweet from that account will exist on Facebook unless it's deleted there too. IMO, this is how to to create a better social network where there isn't one authority, using what exists already.
TLightful 6y ago
Data independency. Social media companies to compete on features not the network effects. I feel like there needs to be a new internet standard. We have emails, phones, texts, etc ... Why can't we have a standard for social media and messaging which doesn't lock you in? Imagine if I could only use one phone provider because all my other friends and family use that one provider. Social media has been broken from the start. Someone please fix it. It's bullsh!t.
xmly 6y ago
Socialize and being anonymous at the same time...
Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
Regarding anonymity you don't need to use Tor and I2P just to stop actors like iknowwhatyoudownload.com from profiling you. Something like Dandelion/Dandelion++ is a more lightweight solution. That's what Monero uses to disassociate transactions and IP addresses (so that the transations cannot be linked together).
WClayFerguson 6y ago
One thing I'd add to what people need in a decentralized social network is the ability to own their own data, and be able to port it from place to place. So there needs to be some kind of data format that is accepted as the standard format everyone uses. I don't mean a protocol like ActivityPub, I mean something like JSON or XML tag names that describe and hold all social media posts and every other kind of microblog or personal data. I guess this is commonly called the "Semantic Web" and various parts of it already do exist.
DataSceince123 6y ago
any platform that allows free speech just breeds hate speech and america has to get past the first amendment ideals to fight this
sfblah 6y ago
Personally I'd just like to see _any_ kind of federated social network system that gets some market share. Kind of like how email is federated. Doesn't really matter to me the feature set. My thought is, if one could get to some kind of adoption, folks might see how much better things could be. You'd get to select your own "onramp" to the social network, follow people the same way you do on email (I'm following sfblah@hackernews or whatever), etc.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
  If you don't require a feature set, wouldn't the Internet or RSS feeds already qualify? What does it need to have on top of RSS feeds?
  - sfblah 6y ago
    Good question. I guess things like a comment/like/reply mechanic. And, RSS feeds don't really have a topological linking mechanic as far as I know. I mean, this stuff doesn't seem that hard. It's just that users prefer the walled garden approach, which is too bad. Email came around early enough to avoid that. If email were invented today, it would work like Snapchat or Slack or whatnot. Email is a much better system IMO.
austincheney 6y ago
My personal wish list: * Privacy. This means actual privacy and not some bullshit substitution, such as anonymity. If privacy were really important nothing would ever be anonymous, because you would always want to know who you are speaking to or otherwise deny access to the conversation. * Portability. Decentralization is too preoccupied with fixed addressing. If I move my laptop from one building to another the network has either failed to resolve my device or considers it a different/new user. You can have both portability and decentralization. * Services. There is so much more to a valid social experience than texts, which is 70s era computation. * Control. End users should have the ability to deny any output, or else this entire conversation about decentralization is moot. * Turing Complete. The application should be able to build an instance of itself that can then perform an end-to-end self-assessment via test automation upon that instance.
sedatk 6y ago
Aether (https://getaether.net https://getaether.net) has some of these features: - Distributed content delivery. Every Aether node hosts the content. There is no centralized server hosting the data. - Customizable moderation. You're free to ignore a moderator that who is being unfair and you don't see the results of their moderation. What they delete is only hidden to people who trust the moderator.
acatsdream 6y ago
The problems are more precise as stated in the article : Where is my community of people I want to publish and subscribe with ? Alike Twitter actually losing half of its userbase. What do I share with whom, do I give out much private information, would I get stalked or banndd, is there moderation, how is gatekeeping done ? All these points seem taken care of by federations like Mastodon and alike where everyone is free to chose and quit an instance if not adapted. Even the Twitter split is showing only different platforms for different people endeavours work. Now from an OSS point of view, Mastodon and alike are complicated to keep track of.
jszymborski 6y ago
6 or 7 years ago, my own wishlist for such a network would be similar. My top item these days, however, is actually bot or troll farm detection. Social media is cool because you get to participate and overhear conversations that you normally would never have anything to do with. However, bot abuse on website like Twitter and Facebook means that every interaction sooner or later gets brigaded by bots amplifying their message. The technology exists, and as far as I understand, it isn't particularly complex. Projects like BotSentinel do a surprisingly good job of identifying these bad actors. Perhaps all this falls under the "Customizable moderation" header, but part of me thinks this would be best addressed in combination of some sort of "proof of work", be it as simple (and inaccessible) as a $5 fee on sign-up or something more accessible but more complicated.
- worldsayshi 6y ago
  Hmm, can't there be a crypto currency deposit for each message that will then be returned after 24h? That or something similar. Then the average user would only need very minimal amount of currency but you can only spam if you have considerable capital. Maybe the deposit could also suffer a bit of value loss. Just enough to make spamming not worth it. I wonder what would be just enough here. It ought to be less than what would make it undesirable for almost all users? Edit: I feel like the main problem with social media innovation is that there's very little possibilities to experiment. You need a good amount of users to test something out and users will only go to established services.
  - knicholes 6y ago
    Or why not charge to make a post and NOT refund it? One benefit of this is posts are likely to be more thoughtful.
- mantap 6y ago
  Isn't this solving the wrong problem? e.g. I don't have any issue with bots on discord. Bots are a problem on twitter and Facebook because neither of those networks is truly social, it is just shouting into the void. Bots can react but they can't interact, make interaction not reaction the foundation of a social network and you nullify the power of bots.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
furi 6y ago
This exists. It's ZeroMe on the ZeroNet distributed network. It has optional Tor integration, Bittorrent style distributed file hosting, and block lists maintained by the community.
ermir 6y ago
What I feel is the missing piece that would tie a truly decentralized social network is a decentralized identity management system. I am ordinarily a massive blockchain skeptic, but it could possibly be usable here. It should be possible to create features like user creation, changing passwords, data querying using sone kind of blockchain that is not in control of a single entity. I feel such a service would be useful and can be made now, but I also feel like it would be quite hard to use as well. Think of something like Amazon Cognito or Okta, but decentralized and transparent.
lazyjones 6y ago
Serious question: what feature is missing for most people in order to replace sites like FB, Twitter with a messenger like Telegram, Signal? It seems to me that messengers more accurately match the "social network" paradigm these days, while FB and Twitter are more like TV or newspapers (though curated by "friends"). Is it the discovery of new people to "stalk" and eventually engage with? Or engaging with content outside your actual social network (commenting media articles etc.)? A desktop/web version? The feeling that you're not actually disturbing anyone directly by posting something because there's a chance it will not pop up in their feed? Something else?
fuckthemachine 6y ago
The notion that a platform is responsible for what I say on it is still a problem for decentralized 'instance' based networks like mastadon, the burden of removing content the culture of the day finds offensive moves to the local hacker who decided to setup an instance and host their friends. I want to be fully responsible for what I decide to say, if I break the law, that should be entirely on me. I want a protocol that allows me to host my own content on my website and let other people in the fediverse 'like', 'comment' and 'share' it.. So 'social media' becomes less about a service that does hosting and more about a client that does the aggregation and interacts with others I'm following
- icy 6y ago
  Sounds like you might be interested in the IndieWeb project: https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/
avivo 6y ago
It's useful to keep in mind the "magical decentralization fallacy": the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems. (more detail: https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy-69b426d16bdc https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy...)
- qwantim1 6y ago
  Organized scalable social moderation is as doable with centralized services as it is with P2P. The difference is that a centralized service has at least one person that must be responsible for content, whether or not they moderate it adequately, whereas, with a P2P service, each user may effectively run their own service and must be responsible for its content, whether or not they moderate it adequately. P2P would seem then to have more scalable user-invested moderation. Unfortunately, some using these services think they’re in the internet equivalent of a bohemian nudist colony. That’s not how it works, though. The responsibility is heightened, not lessened.
panny 6y ago
>network layer anonymity (like tor) >grassroots content deliver (like bittorrent) >customizable moderation (like ublock) All but perhaps the last one is a browser level concern, and you can do that today in Brave browser. That said, I wonder if I can use a magnet link in an img src on Brave. I'll have to try it sometime.
mullingitover 6y ago
Someone recently put it really well, and I'll try to paraphrase. Social networks are like bars. If you and some friends go to a bar and you see a bunch of Nazis getting kicked out, your reaction is probably not going to be "that bar doesn't allow Nazis, let's leave and go to the bar that will let anyone in."
f430 6y ago
unrelated but that bright yellow on black with lines really hurt my eyes and I didn't bother reading it.
aabbcc1241 6y ago
Using zeronet with tor is kinna meeting the 3 features.
zelly 6y ago
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.
cblconfederate 6y ago
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

361 points by csande17 6y ago

generalizations 6y ago

I mean, that looks decently similar to bitmessage.

pwg 6y ago

The blog author appears to have never heard of Usenet.

protomyth 6y ago
To be fair, point 1 wasn't really Usenet and 3 was a pain sometimes. The author might want to think about DNS a bit. Google and Cloudflare could wreck havoc on any new social network by filtering their DNS and with web browsers bypassing the local system settings, that could take out a lot of nodes in your network. I actually think some rights organization might want to start looking at domain names that are not returning their proper results from the giants.

orbifold 6y ago

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.

finder83 6y ago
I'm curious if Skynet or something similar could be used for that? I don't pretend to understand any of the modern blockchain frameworks, but a peer-to-peer distributed and encrypted system seems to fit the bill (possibly non-blockchain related, I'm not sure). It was trending yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710151
- redsolver 6y ago
  SkyFeed is a decentralized social network built on top of Skynet: https://skyfeed.hns.siasky.net https://skyfeed.hns.siasky.net
mawise 6y ago
RSS and Webmentions[1] do this pretty well on otherwise ordinary websites. The protocols exist, we just need to make them easier to use for non-engineers. [1]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention
berkes 6y ago
Isn't activitypub, webfinger (and therefore HTTP etc) just that?

lvspiff 6y ago

Essentially people want a free social network that doesn't use its users data for mining and advertising, doesn't track user data, doesn't archive their messages if they delete them/their account/they die, and free from moderation. Is that really too much to ask for? The answer is yes - yes it is too much to ask for - you don't get a free service without paying for it in some other way - mostly these days through the data mining/advertising side of things. If there's no way to turn a profit then why would someone pay for it to be setup?

pydry 6y ago
I'd rather host this and most other internet services on a box in my house, next to my router. Or, it could be my router. Either way. It's just really annoying to do that right now and the solutions that attempt to make it easy and slick aren't quite there. This type of thing could be made more popular with normal people if it's easy enough since popular features which "break" the business models of companies like Facebook become popular (e.g. filtering of news feed that under the users direct control or lossless storage of photos). I think most people would be happier owning the hardware than renting an online service.
- adrianpike 6y ago
  Is that not just a blog?
  - cyberdelica 6y ago
    Before people abused the term "social network" to include all manner of things, including forums such as Reddit and Hacker News, using Twitter was referred to as "micro blogging".
- shipstain 6y ago
  Opera browser had a feature at one point where you could basically have it as a server and browser. And if we all had transparent addressing on the network you could do that. I have the ability to host at home, but I'm not too keen about having my personal address on the Internet. I know that's an oxymoron, but I'd rather have someone attacking a cloud node than my personal network. And I still value my anonymity in places.

jellicle 6y ago

The primary requirement for a decentralized social network is "one app and it works". If your network requires anything other than installing a single application via the normal, easiest software installation pathway, it has failed and will never be adopted. No matter how l337 it is, if the installation instructions start with "Unzip this file, open port 999 on your router and prepare to edit the text file to start the server..." then it will never and can never work. Better yet if one can just open up a web browser (installing nothing!) and use it. ALL other requirements are secondary.

TameAntelope 6y ago

Regardless of technical viability, any service without moderation is a service mainstream society will shun, which really just means people won't use it, build tools for it, or generally accept others who use the service. People seem to both want a service that is immune from society and also used by society. That's a conflict that won't resolve.

whatshisface 6y ago
Fortunately, the problem you're talking about has already been solved with the concept of federation. If the social media system is a protocol and not a company, then society can chase down individual bad actors, and blame them for their own crimes, instead of blaming you.
- Ashanmaril 6y ago
  The issue is we're already doing too much chasing down individual "bad actors." It's like the #1 hobby these days, everyone is looking for the next person to step out of line so they can drag them into the village square for their stoning. There aren't enough "bad actors" to satiate the mob any more so the definition of "bad actor" has to be continually expanded by the day. Just the last week a musician tweeted something dumb about making his daughter learn how to use a can opener to open beans, and within a day, the very successful podcast he did the theme song for, where his track was used for the past like 10 years disowned him and stopped using the song. Then he was kicked off the cruise gathering where he was good friends with the guy who ran it and has been a regular headliner for years. The internet has created a culture problem that I'm not convinced decentralized social networks will fix. At best, if one was created that people actually used, we wouldn't have situations we've seen with Alex Jones and Trump where all the platforms unperson someone on the same day, cause they could still at least keep their audience on the decentralized platform.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    Well, there's bad actors, and then there's twitter-assigned villains. Really bad actors, as in people who are doing things that are clearly bad enough for there to be laws against them, need to be controlled somehow. That's what most moderation energy goes in to preventing.

rolleiflex 6y ago

I’m the maintainer or a project that does some of that. It’s called Aether (https://getaether.net https://getaether.net). User-customisable moderation and grassroots content delivery in particular, with less emphasis on total Tor-like anonymity, though we do still provide some.

neuland 6y ago
I was looking at your service recently while surveying the landscape of currently active P2P projects. Am I right in seeing that a monthly subscription is the only option to get a client and start using Aether?
- rolleiflex 6y ago
  No, it’s free, you couldn’t even pay for it if you wanted. You might be confusing it with Aether Pro, which is a different app for a different purpose (remote collaboration) and is not P2P.
  - neuland 6y ago
    Ah ok. Yes, I was mistaking Aether Pro. You have excellent docs!
amir734jj 6y ago
+1 for Aether

e1ven 6y ago

I had written a toy social network a few years back the past which had these features - It worked very much like an encrypted version of usenet. This is probably my bias as an engineer showing, but the technology doesn't seem like the hard part- I always understood that having an resilient network means people will use it to post some bad things, but I don't know if I really internalized the scope of that until later. I had originally envisioned it might be useful in oppressive countries, where people needed a way to communicate - Recent events have shown how dangerous that can feel when you're in the midst of people who feel like that describes them. As another HN post pointed out, there are two natural audiences for such networks - Idealists, and those who can't get away with stuff on other networks.. And the second is going to be far more common. That will influence the culture, and help to drive other "good" people away from the service, amplifying the effect. Even if you have user-selectable moderators (Which I had, similar to the request the author makes), without a huge war-chest to hire a large team of default moderators, you'll never be able to keep up. The default experience for the average user will be terrible. Over and over, I ran into issues like that - It's relatively easy to built the technological network, but managing the social network aspect is an unsolved problem.

grahamburger 6y ago
IMO this is why federation is an important aspect of decentralized networks, and is commonly listed as a reason for use Mastodon / the fediverse. Each instance can set their own moderation policies and decide what other instances they want to federate with. Notably mastodon.social and the instances related to it haven't become cess pools of hate speech, because they do have strong moderation policies, but for users who want to post that stuff there are other instances they can find.
- sneak 6y ago
  > 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.

runjake 6y ago

HTTPS + RSS + Webring/etc. Existing, well-defined protocols that are nimble and able to meet changing needs. I'm not sure why everyone wants to over-complicate this. If you want to make it easy enough to use for any mom and grandma, and you want any hope of gaining traction then you're going to need capital, which is going to necessitate a business. And perhaps it should require some effort, some learning, and some know-how before one can jump on their Internet soapbox. The signal to noise ratio is pretty low.

AshamedCaptain 6y ago
By the same rationale, why do you need a "social network" at all? What is wrong with email?
- rektide 6y ago
  Email is a protocol for using the internet to transmit messages. Part of what I find interesting/valuable/different about "social networks" is that the content is & remains online. Email does not have this capability. Email is an exchange.
  - swiley 6y ago
    Mailing lists do this.
    - rektide 6y ago
      What kind of mailing list are you talking about? I don't think mailing lists do this. If someone comes by in 20 years to your "birdwatching" mailing list, for example, all they can do is sign up or ask for someone to copy them messages. Do you mean an online web system for sharing emails? If so, it's not really a mailing list. It's just an ad-hoc webserver system with poor standards for finding or doing anything. These systems are a joke imo, but to their credit, few web folks have come along to help them turn their loose jumbles of text into anything well structured & responsible. Even still, almost every one of these mailing lists would be well served by having an RSS feed of the activity, which is fairly direct to do. Not sure what you are talking about, would like some clarity, but feels like a non-answer to me.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

markessien 6y ago

How about a timeline on peoples personal blog that follows other blogs (like the fb timeline)? This way, you write your own content on your own website, you read other peoples content on your own website in a consistent format. You tweet on your own website, and others who want to follow can follow from their own website.

pjc50 6y ago
Isn't that "trackback"? As popular in the first wave of '00s blogging.

egberts1 6y ago

Scuttlebutt protocol is a decentralized encrypted protocol where data-at-rest is encrypted by keys not on the chat server. Chat server can be scaled to many via docker. An average end-user can fire up such a chat server to cover his own group chat. Manyverse (Sweden) is that mobile app. I’ve toyed with it. Looks interesting. Very much like Gnutella except there are no seed servers, Manyverse instead uses cipher-link hash tags as a joining mechanism which often requires a posting at external websites to get started. Disclaimer: just a hobbyist, not a contributor to Manyverse nor Scuttlebutt.

acatsdream 6y ago
>requires a posting at external websites to get started. My understanding is that it is the same as seed servers

helen___keller 6y ago

I'd like to see a social network that tries to minimize the impact of "whale" nodes. I can go to twitter if I want to see what's on the mind of the world's top influencers. I can go to facebook if I want to see people mass-sharing news articles with 10,000 toxic comments about the latest political events. Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network? This would likely alleviate the moderation issue too. You aren't going to see filth and extremism unless it's posted by your social network, which decreases the incentive for bad actors to post it in the first place.

chasd00 6y ago
don't you setup you're own network in both FB and Twitter? i choose who my friends are in FB (I'm not on twitter)
- helen___keller 6y ago
  Sure, in theory. But I feel like on both platform you end up just seeing tons of shares/retweets of whales/influencers. (particularly the way they reorder content on your timeline so it's presented by what they think you want to see)
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    Mastodon will let you turn off boosted posts on your home timeline. It will also not reorder anything, ever.
    - knicholes 6y ago
      It also won't post an advertisement every 3rd item in your news feed...
fassssst 6y ago
Group chats are all you need for that.

offtop5 6y ago

I don't think social media networks can scale at all. During quarantine I'm a part of several Online Social circles, which are basically bi-weekly zoom calls to crack jokes on. The owner of the group still needs to ban people from time to time for saying racist or sexist things. I honestly don't think it can scale much beyond 20 people, with 1 person determining if certain conduct is okay or not. And say you get kicked out for making a joke or whatever, then like in real life you have to find another Social circle

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

omarhaneef 6y ago

The key feature you want in a network: all your friends and/or people you want to follow should be on it. So in addition to privacy (the author addresses this) you want ease of use and a funding model, as well as some momentum.

hehehaha 6y ago

It should really be an open social network that government entities cannot shut down. The real test for anyone trying this will be the Great Wall of China. Until then...

kube-system 6y ago
That technology doesn't exist and never will. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ China's firewall is relatively open compared to North Korea, for instance.

potency 6y ago

Is there a place where people interested in this kind of tech gather and discuss possibilities/code? I'd love to participate in something like this.

IvanSologub 6y ago

I am a question about decentralized social networks in several communities and have not received much feedback. I think because I'm not a techie and considered completely different aspects. For example the aspect of ownership. Whether the account should belong to the person who registered it. Some people, for example, invest in design, promotion and content creation. It seems to me that the technical solutions proposed by you remove the issue of ownership. What do you think?

motohagiography 6y ago

Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it's a copy of something, but without the impetus that produced the original.It's the "make something people want," but more "make something they use for X." You need the original purpose. It has to be to make something that isn't itself. Myspace was mainly novelty and music, Facebook was for status minting from ivy colleges, other ones are for an exogenous purpose as well. Politics isn't a useful unifying principle. I helped run a progressive political precursor to one of the major ones about 20+ years ago, and it only existed because it was tolerated by part of the establishment, and it could not survive a truly hostile environment. Gamers made discord a thing because it was for playing games. Hipchat was about making code, and Slack was a way to manage people. Reddit was for sharing alternative/emerging culture. A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture, and the current generation of censors came up in divergent/alternative culture, so they have a more sophisticated idea of what nascent opposition looks like than the old ones. Short version is, we don't need a decentralized social network, we need new culture that produces networks, and courage to create that culture.

rossdavidh 6y ago
I might also add that a social network like Goodreads or Stack Overflow that is based around some purpose or topic, is so different in tone from general purpose social networks that lots of people don't even notice that it has essentially the same set of features. Also, way less toxic and icky feeling when you use it. Of course, special-purpose social networks never become nearly as big as Facebook, but in my mind that's a feature, not a bug.
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  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.

grishka 6y ago

P2P services like the article suggests are impractical in real life. It's of extreme importance that you should be able to view, and preferably interact with, something posted on a social media service with as little friction as possible — which means it has to have a web version, and that all content within must have permanent HTTP URLs. No one will be downloading a client and syncing it to the P2P network to view a post or to comment on one or to like one. This has never worked and never will, because it's inevitably a messy experience. ActivityPub is basically as far as one could push the decentralization of social media without severe UX compromises.

konjin 6y ago
And yet everyone downloaded the client for facebook on their mobile. This isn't the 00s, people don't expect the browser to the the only thing they use to connect to the world any more.

asdff 6y ago

What if we just went to email? “Follow my mailing list”

anticristi 6y ago
Yes, but then you would have a single Inbox, and a single place to triage and filter messages. You wouldn't be exposed to the myriads of VC-funded start-ups that degenerate into a text/video chat and news feed. In fact, you might have to install only your favourite tool, instead of 10s to keep up with the cool kids. You would likely be too focused on what's important to you, since noone is incentivised to artificially keep their "average session time" up. You would also not be tracked, hence miss out on important ads about stuff you don't need on a website that shouldn't know what you did last weekend. I think you suggest a terrible idea. If I sounded sarcastic, it's probably because I am.
- asdff 6y ago
  Wouldn't want the world getting too productive, after all :)
renewiltord 6y ago
That's what substack aims to be.

xiphias2 6y ago

,, Some decentralized networks try to solve this problem with cryptocurrency schemes, but this means that anyone who wants to try out the network has to put their credit card information into a sketchy website and transfer money to a sketchy offshore bank account and do other sketchy cryptocurrency stuff.’’ This info looks outdated. Is Square really a sketchy website? Bitcoin needs 10-15 more years to be adopted, but it will make content delivery for money easier after it’s adopted. Right now its adoption rate is too small to build a social network on top of it.

slg 6y ago

I agree with this article that a social network without moderation is worthless. However what this describes is not moderation, it is filtering. There needs to be some form of moderation. Imagine a scenario in which a revenge porn image is posted to the site. Is the victim's primary recourse simply to block the image on their end? That would leave them without any power to prevent the poster from sharing that image with anyone and everyone the victim knows. The victim might not even be immediately aware of that harassment if they block the image. Putting the burden on the end user to control what they see is not moderation. There needs to be some way for that content to be removed from the system globally for moderation to be effective.

robryk 6y ago
The Web does not really have any such mechanisms (and certainly didn't have them back in the times where we had more search engines). Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it not require them, or that it suffers from their lack?
- slg 6y ago
  > Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it not require them The web is a pull based model while social media is push based. That means social media is much more prone to this type of harassing behavior. I would also argue that the web as a whole doesn't address this problem well as is seen with what the NYT recently revealed about Pornhub.
user-the-name 6y ago
Yes, the purpose of moderation is far wider than "I don't want to see this post". It is there to protect people from malicious activities, and also very importantly, it is there to shape the community. Moderation is needed to set limits of what is and isn't accepted in a community. If those limits are not present, communities quickly succumb to its worst elements.

alwdgxzubpxnzcy 6y ago

I was just thinking about "customizable moderation" that this article mentioned earlier today. I came up with a similar idea of lists that you can opt into following just like AdBlock filter lists or Twitter shared blocklists just like he mentioned. In terms of feature set I had a couple ideas this this post didn't mention. There could be two levels of blocking that filter lists could set, warm before showing and never show. Also blocking could be applied on a per user or a per post basis.

chopin24 6y ago

>If a totally unmoderated platform isn’t overrun with spam yet, that just means it isn’t popular enough for spammers to notice it. This is my wish. For a social network that isn't popular enough for spammers to notice it. I'm a member of a few such websites, mainly related to music, and that suits me just fine. I have little reason for a massive town square like Facebook, etc. Little reason to be discoverable by anyone in the world. Scale is overrated.

loceng 6y ago
They're everywhere already - but just like them being not popular enough for spammers to notice them, they're not popular enough for you to notice them either.

swalsh 6y ago

My big wish, I want to truely own my own data. If I decide to delete something, I would hope there's not a hundred copies replicated in a hundred caches somewhere. When I delete my own data, I want it truely gone. If someones node is offline, I hope there's nothing of mine left on it.

kevincox 6y ago
This is really impossible to do perfectly. If you want to share something with someone they can take a copy. Unless you are going to go down the DRM route you really just have to accept that. There are definitely some decentralized system that encourage duplicating data, but even for those that don't you can't escape some users wanting to mirror or archive everything they see.
neuland 6y ago
This is difficult to balance with having data be available when you are offline. If your data is local to a user's device (laptop, desktop, tablet, phone), then it's not online 24/7. So, you need some way for other people to see it. If you require people to use a server, there's either problems onboarding and trusting that server operator. Or you make people host their own server and nobody uses it b/c that's too technical.

jmull 6y ago

Really interesting. These ideas are great, but need some work. E.g., "stick your head in the sand" moderation -- where I can decide what I don't see, but the content is still out there for anyone else to choose to see -- utterly fails at half the purpose of moderation. How is content moderated that is harmful to one set of people if available to another set of people? Child pornography, revenge pornography, doxxing, coordination of violent insurrections.

root_axis 6y ago

The internet is already decentralized, another layer of decentralization solves nothing. When the most popular nodes start banning people we're going to hear the exact same complaints from the usual suspects.

optimalsolver 6y ago

Look, any truly decentralized network will need to involve users hosting their own instances, along with using an entire suite of encryption and anonymity tools. No way the average person will be doing that. That means most/all of the people you'll be talking to on these networks would be hardcore techno-libertarians. A plus for some, a very strong negative for others. Semi-relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/191/ https://xkcd.com/191/

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
That's the unfortunate thing about this site's userbase. That because there is a technical solution, they feel the problem has been solved. However, the technical solution requires more investment and technical know-how than your base user cares to employ.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

Mastodon is the place to make this happen (IMHO): https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

dboreham 6y ago

nntp?

unityByFreedom 6y ago

Does no one here know about https://notabug.io https://notabug.io ? Pretty sure that's decentralized.

_peeley 6y ago

Looks like there's a typo in the link for Urbit, should be https://urbit.org https://urbit.org if anyone wants to take a look. Personally it seems like vaporware to me, there's not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network. Probably the only reason anyone has even heard of it is because it's the pet project of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, known (somewhat infamously, a few of his talks at conferences have been pulled) for his association with the neo-reactionary political/philosophical movement.

tylershuster 6y ago
Arguably that's the reason most people stay away from it. If you can put aside your feelings about the now-departed founder and boot it, you may find that it's everything you're looking for. I'm totally dumbfounded at the rationale people are invoking in recent days not to use urbit but instead some other derivation of previously tried technology. It's not vaporware — I use it everyday to interact with many people. It's not where it hopes to be but it's going there at quite a clip.
edouerd 6y ago
> Personally it seems like vaporware to me, there's not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network. > not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network. You can literally set an urbit up and join a not-dead distributed social network right now, this second, in probably less than 3 minutes — it's explicitly not vaporware if people are using it to build thriving communities.
- neuland 6y ago
  Where are you getting an Urbit ID in 3 minutes? I am not super familiar with Urbit. But my understanding is that even getting a temporary Urbit ID (a commet) takes hours.
  - cmelbye 6y ago
    I just booted with a new temporary ID and it took 50 seconds to generate the cryptographic key. After 3-4 minutes, Urbit had bootstrapped itself and was accessible over HTTP. You can try with these commands, using Mac in this example: mkdir urbit cd urbit curl -JLO https://urbit.org/install/mac/latest tar zxvf ./darwin.tgz --strip=1 ./urbit -c mycomet

hungryhobo 6y ago

I honestly do not understand this fetish with decentralization, do you really want a social network filled with child pornography, violence and other shady stuff? Because that's what's gonna happen guaranteed. People are just animals without rules

random_dork1 6y ago
Decentralisation is best exemplified by email or http. Yes, they enable all kind of things, including bad ones. They behave like infrastructure, just like roads. I enjoy Mastodon because I can find the instance I like best and still be in touch with people from other instances. My instance blocks other instances that they don't like and publicly explains why. When I won't like it any more, I will take my data and move somewhere else without looks my contacts or anything. Once Nextcloud will have a decent implementation of Activity Pub, I will start my own instance just for myself and I will only see content that I want to see.
CivBase 6y ago
> do you really want a social network filled with child pornography, violence and other shady stuff? You have just described the world wide web. I may not want that stuff to exist, but I also certainly don't want the world wide web to not exist.
- hungryhobo 6y ago
  I mean you can try to share child pornography through your ISP's network and we can see what happens? Shady stuff are mostly shared through decentralized networks and its the centralized www that's preventing them. To me this decentralization fetish feels like people think government are stupid and inefficient so we should have no government at all
  - feanaro 6y ago
    How exactly is decentralisation related to the idea that there should be no governments? That said, governments are just organizations and very powerful organizations at that. Like any powerful organization, a government can become corrupt or tyrannical and start working against the populace. It is always a good idea to keep it in check so that its power cannot grow boundless.

xyst 6y ago

a decentralized social network already exists - it's called meeting face to face in your local community.

lazzlazzlazz 6y ago

It's absolutely staggering to me that people believe everyone will self-host the decentralized social network, without thinking through the economics of the incentive layer, let alone how to achieve consensus/verification on compute and storage layers. The first successful decentralized social network will be using the decentralized compute and storage systems being developed in the crypto space.

WClayFerguson 6y ago
You're right, if it weren't prohibitively expensive to store social media data on Ethereum (for example) then that's exactly what all the decentralized developers (including myself) would already be doing. I checked the Gas price on ETH and quickly concluded that's not even remotely sensible to use it for social media networks, and the bigger problem is that if something became hugely popular that could drive up ETH gas prices too, so building on that infrastructure seems risky from a cost perspective.
- loceng 6y ago
  It will always be cheaper to not use the blockchain for storage - most things aren't critical, sensitive or important enough to necessitate being stored in such a way.

drummer 6y ago

> Content moderation on a social network could work in a very similar way, with different groups of moderators creating different lists of banned users and deleted posts. Serious vulnerability and potential for abuse and censorship. People could slip in the id for a user they want banned and anyone using that list would not easily realize they are prevented from seeing content from that user. Almost like reverse shadow banning.

turblety 6y ago

Have a look at MaidSafe. It's still not production or even testnet ready, but they're getting close.

egfx 6y ago

I created https://2fb.me https://2fb.me because I felt content was being confined by the constraints of the "network". There is no one network, or there shouldn't be as the author eludes, but an entirely new network will never reach the "network" effects it needs. Instead a protocol between the existing monoliths breaks through the confines and the content cannot be deleted all at once, as it will exist as a copy somewhere else. In short if the account goes down on Twitter then the existing tweet from that account will exist on Facebook unless it's deleted there too. IMO, this is how to to create a better social network where there isn't one authority, using what exists already.

TLightful 6y ago

Data independency. Social media companies to compete on features not the network effects. I feel like there needs to be a new internet standard. We have emails, phones, texts, etc ... Why can't we have a standard for social media and messaging which doesn't lock you in? Imagine if I could only use one phone provider because all my other friends and family use that one provider. Social media has been broken from the start. Someone please fix it. It's bullsh!t.

xmly 6y ago

Socialize and being anonymous at the same time...

Acrobatic_Road 6y ago

Regarding anonymity you don't need to use Tor and I2P just to stop actors like iknowwhatyoudownload.com from profiling you. Something like Dandelion/Dandelion++ is a more lightweight solution. That's what Monero uses to disassociate transactions and IP addresses (so that the transations cannot be linked together).

WClayFerguson 6y ago

One thing I'd add to what people need in a decentralized social network is the ability to own their own data, and be able to port it from place to place. So there needs to be some kind of data format that is accepted as the standard format everyone uses. I don't mean a protocol like ActivityPub, I mean something like JSON or XML tag names that describe and hold all social media posts and every other kind of microblog or personal data. I guess this is commonly called the "Semantic Web" and various parts of it already do exist.

DataSceince123 6y ago

any platform that allows free speech just breeds hate speech and america has to get past the first amendment ideals to fight this

sfblah 6y ago

Personally I'd just like to see _any_ kind of federated social network system that gets some market share. Kind of like how email is federated. Doesn't really matter to me the feature set. My thought is, if one could get to some kind of adoption, folks might see how much better things could be. You'd get to select your own "onramp" to the social network, follow people the same way you do on email (I'm following sfblah@hackernews or whatever), etc.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
If you don't require a feature set, wouldn't the Internet or RSS feeds already qualify? What does it need to have on top of RSS feeds?
- sfblah 6y ago
  Good question. I guess things like a comment/like/reply mechanic. And, RSS feeds don't really have a topological linking mechanic as far as I know. I mean, this stuff doesn't seem that hard. It's just that users prefer the walled garden approach, which is too bad. Email came around early enough to avoid that. If email were invented today, it would work like Snapchat or Slack or whatnot. Email is a much better system IMO.

austincheney 6y ago

My personal wish list: * Privacy. This means actual privacy and not some bullshit substitution, such as anonymity. If privacy were really important nothing would ever be anonymous, because you would always want to know who you are speaking to or otherwise deny access to the conversation. * Portability. Decentralization is too preoccupied with fixed addressing. If I move my laptop from one building to another the network has either failed to resolve my device or considers it a different/new user. You can have both portability and decentralization. * Services. There is so much more to a valid social experience than texts, which is 70s era computation. * Control. End users should have the ability to deny any output, or else this entire conversation about decentralization is moot. * Turing Complete. The application should be able to build an instance of itself that can then perform an end-to-end self-assessment via test automation upon that instance.

sedatk 6y ago

Aether (https://getaether.net https://getaether.net) has some of these features: - Distributed content delivery. Every Aether node hosts the content. There is no centralized server hosting the data. - Customizable moderation. You're free to ignore a moderator that who is being unfair and you don't see the results of their moderation. What they delete is only hidden to people who trust the moderator.

acatsdream 6y ago

The problems are more precise as stated in the article : Where is my community of people I want to publish and subscribe with ? Alike Twitter actually losing half of its userbase. What do I share with whom, do I give out much private information, would I get stalked or banndd, is there moderation, how is gatekeeping done ? All these points seem taken care of by federations like Mastodon and alike where everyone is free to chose and quit an instance if not adapted. Even the Twitter split is showing only different platforms for different people endeavours work. Now from an OSS point of view, Mastodon and alike are complicated to keep track of.

jszymborski 6y ago

6 or 7 years ago, my own wishlist for such a network would be similar. My top item these days, however, is actually bot or troll farm detection. Social media is cool because you get to participate and overhear conversations that you normally would never have anything to do with. However, bot abuse on website like Twitter and Facebook means that every interaction sooner or later gets brigaded by bots amplifying their message. The technology exists, and as far as I understand, it isn't particularly complex. Projects like BotSentinel do a surprisingly good job of identifying these bad actors. Perhaps all this falls under the "Customizable moderation" header, but part of me thinks this would be best addressed in combination of some sort of "proof of work", be it as simple (and inaccessible) as a $5 fee on sign-up or something more accessible but more complicated.

worldsayshi 6y ago
Hmm, can't there be a crypto currency deposit for each message that will then be returned after 24h? That or something similar. Then the average user would only need very minimal amount of currency but you can only spam if you have considerable capital. Maybe the deposit could also suffer a bit of value loss. Just enough to make spamming not worth it. I wonder what would be just enough here. It ought to be less than what would make it undesirable for almost all users? Edit: I feel like the main problem with social media innovation is that there's very little possibilities to experiment. You need a good amount of users to test something out and users will only go to established services.
- knicholes 6y ago
  Or why not charge to make a post and NOT refund it? One benefit of this is posts are likely to be more thoughtful.
mantap 6y ago
Isn't this solving the wrong problem? e.g. I don't have any issue with bots on discord. Bots are a problem on twitter and Facebook because neither of those networks is truly social, it is just shouting into the void. Bots can react but they can't interact, make interaction not reaction the foundation of a social network and you nullify the power of bots.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

furi 6y ago

This exists. It's ZeroMe on the ZeroNet distributed network. It has optional Tor integration, Bittorrent style distributed file hosting, and block lists maintained by the community.

ermir 6y ago

What I feel is the missing piece that would tie a truly decentralized social network is a decentralized identity management system. I am ordinarily a massive blockchain skeptic, but it could possibly be usable here. It should be possible to create features like user creation, changing passwords, data querying using sone kind of blockchain that is not in control of a single entity. I feel such a service would be useful and can be made now, but I also feel like it would be quite hard to use as well. Think of something like Amazon Cognito or Okta, but decentralized and transparent.

lazyjones 6y ago

Serious question: what feature is missing for most people in order to replace sites like FB, Twitter with a messenger like Telegram, Signal? It seems to me that messengers more accurately match the "social network" paradigm these days, while FB and Twitter are more like TV or newspapers (though curated by "friends"). Is it the discovery of new people to "stalk" and eventually engage with? Or engaging with content outside your actual social network (commenting media articles etc.)? A desktop/web version? The feeling that you're not actually disturbing anyone directly by posting something because there's a chance it will not pop up in their feed? Something else?

fuckthemachine 6y ago

The notion that a platform is responsible for what I say on it is still a problem for decentralized 'instance' based networks like mastadon, the burden of removing content the culture of the day finds offensive moves to the local hacker who decided to setup an instance and host their friends. I want to be fully responsible for what I decide to say, if I break the law, that should be entirely on me. I want a protocol that allows me to host my own content on my website and let other people in the fediverse 'like', 'comment' and 'share' it.. So 'social media' becomes less about a service that does hosting and more about a client that does the aggregation and interacts with others I'm following

icy 6y ago
Sounds like you might be interested in the IndieWeb project: https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/

avivo 6y ago

It's useful to keep in mind the "magical decentralization fallacy": the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems. (more detail: https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy-69b426d16bdc https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy...)

qwantim1 6y ago
Organized scalable social moderation is as doable with centralized services as it is with P2P. The difference is that a centralized service has at least one person that must be responsible for content, whether or not they moderate it adequately, whereas, with a P2P service, each user may effectively run their own service and must be responsible for its content, whether or not they moderate it adequately. P2P would seem then to have more scalable user-invested moderation. Unfortunately, some using these services think they’re in the internet equivalent of a bohemian nudist colony. That’s not how it works, though. The responsibility is heightened, not lessened.

panny 6y ago

>network layer anonymity (like tor) >grassroots content deliver (like bittorrent) >customizable moderation (like ublock) All but perhaps the last one is a browser level concern, and you can do that today in Brave browser. That said, I wonder if I can use a magnet link in an img src on Brave. I'll have to try it sometime.

mullingitover 6y ago

Someone recently put it really well, and I'll try to paraphrase. Social networks are like bars. If you and some friends go to a bar and you see a bunch of Nazis getting kicked out, your reaction is probably not going to be "that bar doesn't allow Nazis, let's leave and go to the bar that will let anyone in."

f430 6y ago

unrelated but that bright yellow on black with lines really hurt my eyes and I didn't bother reading it.

aabbcc1241 6y ago

Using zeronet with tor is kinna meeting the 3 features.

zelly 6y ago

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.

cblconfederate 6y ago

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