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Let's build a decentralized social network together with Logseq
- onebot 4y agoI very much think this is a pragmatic approach. I also truly wish for a LinkedIn and Facebook without a single corporate entity profiting in the middle (decentralized/web3). However, for this to ever truly work, the UX just has to be heads and shoulders above this approach, imo.
- rektide 4y agoDont underestimate the value of a community of enthusiastic avid folk! This can work & do great things & have amazing value & be awesome, without having to scale to a billion people. I agree a lot that this is a super pragmatic approach. Loqseq users are, by and large, enthusiasts, who already are willing to go far. Giving them some conventions for how to express social metadata, and then letting the existing graph based product do it's thing, building some books of queries people can use: it seems like a wonderful organic strategy. It invents very little, and rides on the strength of what already is.
- bribri 4y agoLogseq has a super powerful plugin system that can have whole react apps in it. Once people get set up with public profiles, a plugin could be built to make it easier to create profiles, friends, browse, etc. Just some simple buttons and fields to start.
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoWhy not use twtxt? It looks like you're inventing a similar protocol here.
- nominusllc 4y agoDear HN: Please stop making this comment, or phrase it differently. People are allowed to be different and things are allowed to exist without being practical.
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoPlease stop making comments asking people not to make comments whose intent you can't discern. Either: The author hasn't heard of twtxt, and might be intrigued at the possibility of compatibility, or they have heard of it and may have reasons for being different which may add to the discussion. Your comment assumes the worst intent (I never said or suggested differences shouldn't be allowed) and deadends good discussion.
- synctext 4y agoAll these attempts are not as easy to use as the dominant network. Friction-free is very hard. Are the masses going to switch purely for privacy preservation? See our Internet-deployed social network from 13 years ago. Without any server and no gatekeepers. Its fully self-organising. It lacks polish. You simply can not compete against the thousands of engineers which polish the dominant social network. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221015322_A_Gossip-Based_Distributed_Social_Networking_System https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221015322_A_Gossip-...
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoSo twtxt is a text protocol for sharing social media posts which can be shared by hosting a plaintext file. I bring it up because it's extremely close to what the author proposed.
- TuringTest 4y agoIt doesn't look that close; the model of interaction seems to be completely different. twtxt is a command line tool with flat files and no obvious way of linking content, and logseq is an outliner with hierarchical files and bidirectional links created with wiki-like syntax. Someone without advanced knowledge of the command line would not know how to start using twtxt, while using logseq is as simple as any plain text editor.
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoTwtxt is more of a sharing standard that can be statically hosted rather than a command line tool: Yarn.social, for instance, is a web app that uses Twtxt format for social microblogging.
- rektide 4y agoWhat do you see about twtxt that seems similar to you? Logseq doesn't have "posts" as such, nor is there a protocol here for sharing. There's nothing graph related in twtxt. It also doesn't integrate with the personal knowledgebase people are already using. I'm not sure why twtxt would come to mind as similar.
- bribri 4y agoDefinitely some good ideas in here and similar ideas of just hosting flat data on the internet with a spec. https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html Since everything is just data, if you wanted to write a logseq query to transform and export your graph in this format to be compatible with their CLI, you could (especially with the new graph as api tools) This is the most similar project I've seen to what I'm thinking https://anagora.org/agora-editor https://anagora.org/agora-editor
- malfist 4y agoWhy would you want a social network platform with even LESS moderation? More spam, more misinformation, more hate speech, more everything bad. Sure, you get, maybe, some more privacy. But you can get that by just staying off social media.
- ajvs 4y agoUnless filtering algorithms are transparent, can be configured by users and errs towards allowing speech that is acceptable globally instead of just in Silicon Valley, then it just incites feelings of biased censorship.
- hungryhobo 4y agohave you thought of the possibility that transparent algorithms are easily game-able and thus would lose all effectiveness
- TuringTest 4y ago> More spam, more misinformation, more hate speech, more everything bad. I don't think you would get all that from a network like this. You only see content from people you follow, there is no algorithm pushing viraliced posts and advertisements on your "feed" of "things you want to see". If you are careful about who you follow, it could work like a BBS or a web forum.
- hamuraijack 4y agoThat's the problem. The already loud echo chamber will just become louder and more consolidated. Misinformation doesn't just come from bots.
- groby_b 4y agoTrue, it also comes from the algorithmic feed. The "echo chamber" is a made up thing. We've always mostly socialized with people close to us. What makes it toxic is the existence of reward systems that specifically target the most outrageous statements because we need to goose those enragement numbers. Misinformation gets pushed because it generates clicks. As a result, it floats up in everybody's stream. More eyeballs -> more clicks -> more visibility -> more eyeballs. Will there be small groups that traffic in misinfo? Yes, absolutely - but the large scale impact is gone once you remove the ability to artificially boost visibility.
- jerojero 4y agoI think we need to see more implementations of the already existing federated protocols. We need that one app that will truly explode and bring the fediverse to the masses. Mastodon is okay but it's just a microblogging platform; it's not really too innovative.
- Xeoncross 4y agoI would agree, but encryption (let alone end-to-end) is totally absent from specs like https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/. The word isn't even mentioned once. I don't just want federation, I want to know that my/friend/family's information (or at least private messages) is private because I know they won't "self host".
- nominusllc 4y agoMaybe the solution, instead, is to create a simple browser plugin that accepts ciphertext and keys and decrypts blobs of text. It's ugly, but you could render it in place with some creative tagging of the blobs. 1. define a schema for the blob. recipient pubkey, signature, hash, etc 2. define a delineator or symbol of some sort to encapsulate the serialized blob so our plugin recognizes it 3. parse blob into readable text for the user 4. provide interface to manage/create keys/messages and load the blob to the clipboard for users to paste into whatever. voila. please hold your applause, I'm going to need one of you to MVP this by the end of the week.
- random_kris 4y agoLet's do it. I have similar ideas and we can use blockchain to anchor some stuff there so that the extension doesn't need any servers to get data, only Blockchain node to connect to
- rakoo 4y agoIt's been done already, see https://wiki.bitmessage.org/ https://wiki.bitmessage.org/
- velcrovan 4y agoThere are so many ways to build decentralized social networks. It’s a 1000% solved problem at this point. They never get traction because they always require more learning and work than 99% of people are willing or able to fit into their lives. You jump through more hoops to reach fewer people.
- rektide 4y agoThis isn't a conventional social network. This is a knowledge-graph system, building conventions to link to other knowledge-graph systems. This effort is to enhance an already existing cherished information system, to make it more expressive, and to seed some very basic interconnectivity which was not possible. Logseq is a wonderful digital garden[1], a personal place people tend, and I don't think anyone in this space would tell you this is a solved problem, that we are done exploring & understanding how to do this knowledgebase work, how to digital garden. These personal-knowledgebases are rich & personal platforms. But so far, they have largely been alone & isolated. Different patches. FedWiki[2] is perhaps the lone counter-example, of an interconnected knowledgebase, but it has it's limitations with what it is & how it interconnects. Taking another best-of-breed product, like Logseq, and layering in some minimal, small conventions for how to define interconnect, how to make a blogroll: it seems pure & un-objectionable to me. [1] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history [2] http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors
- bribri 4y agoNice! I couldn't have said it better myself. I did use a linkbaity title like "Decentralized social network" to get people interested. It's more of a simple link ring. But since profiles are public queryable structured static data, you can do a lot more with it in the future.
- TuringTest 4y agoThat's right. What the current batch of social networks are missing is good tools for knowledge consolidation; there are no tools more complex than the single thread intermixed with comments. A knowledge graph would work more as a Wikipedia of personal projects and topics of interest, with the possibility to build special data visualizations on top of it. For example, this could be the perfect medium for building distributed discourse aggregators of opinions and rational debates, like Kialo[1] and Parlia[2] but without a single company controlling the content. Social networks transform these debates into confrontations, while a structured knowledge tool could create a structured knowledge base from this kind of exalted conflicting positions. [1] https://www.kialo.com/ https://www.kialo.com/ [2] https://www.parlia.com/ https://www.parlia.com/
- cm42 4y agoI've been playing with Logseq for something similar - using the Zotero integration to share research notes (and sometimes blog). The attributes and queries are super clever, too. I'm not sure it'll ever replace Facebook/Twitter/et al, but it is nice to have a semi-private network of people who can have grown-up discussions, or express thoughts deeper, or with more nuance, than 100-some characters. There were only a few Facebook groups that I ever got any value out of, which were mostly small professional groups that banned political bickering. My mental health has definitely improved by going back to old-school forums, and I've noticed a lot of others doing the same over the past year or so - especially with Lemmy, which is maybe even a bit easier to set up.
- bribri 4y agoAnother thing I like a about logseq is you can link and refer to individual sentences, which makes discussion easier. So it's good for the POSSE philosophy, in which you're writing about it on your site and sharing/commenting it on social media. https://briansunter.com/graph/#/page/62a6cc7b-e921-4890-813a-6556373b2781 https://briansunter.com/graph/#/page/62a6cc7b-e921-4890-813a...
- bribri 4y agoHey Everyone! Really appreciate this discussion. Here's some extra context. Logseq is an open source notetaking app (similar to Roam) that has a feature where you can publish your notes as a static site. It has some advanced features where you can attach data to pages and bullet points (like some basic bio info, like name, site, twitter, tags) that you can query. There are some public graphs out there, but they're hard to find and figure out who made them. The main goal is just to create a "link ring" where we can find each other. This spec suggests a standard page on each graph called [[logseq-social/profile]] That way, when you find a public graph, you can go there to find out about its author and who they follow. You can download that page to your notes, and a simple logseq query makes the bio information of each user you save show up on your follower list. The idea is really simple, just agreeing on a convention for a "profile" page on logseq that has some standard tags. Logseq has a really powerful plugin system that can have a whole react app in it, so down the line you could make a UI for friending, browsing, etc when more people have public graphs. Plus, there's now tooling to host your logseq notes as a programmatic api. So having some metadata standards opens up some interesting possibilities. https://github.com/logseq/nbb-logseq/tree/main/examples/fly-io https://github.com/logseq/nbb-logseq/tree/main/examples/fly-... There's lots of other stuff out there like this, but since this is just public static data there's hopefully a way to make it interoperable with existing solutions. If anyone knows of a good existing "bio" or link ring schema, I would be interested in taking a look. I have other fun ideas like hosting graphs on IPFS, or even some day having every logseq bullet point block be an immutable record on ipfs for use by everyone. Another example out there is agora, which seems to be somewhat compatible with markdown flat files that logseq uses https://anagora.org/agora-editor https://anagora.org/agora-editor
- chrisco255 4y agoHey Brian! Long time no see old friend! Love the broad direction, and I'm interested in digging into this area myself (decentralized social networks and applications). Recently been studying Lens Protocol a bit (https://lens.xyz/ https://lens.xyz/) which has a social graph system that records to the blockchain (Polygon in this case). Check that out and let me know what you think of it. I like the idea of hosting logseq graphs on IPFS. It does seem that with other decentralized networks I've looked at, that scaling up to Facebook level would not be practical as the size of the graph grows. It almost seems like you have to sacrifice decentralization for a centralized database. Do you think logseq would perform on that scale or would it be limited to niche social networks? Either way, signed up for the newsletter, looking forward to following your progress on this! And always down for a chat with an old friend!
- dafty4 4y agoCool! Can I easily post self-hosted photos? :)
- bribri 4y agoYup its easy to add an image in the logseq editor, and have the image included in the bundle where you self host it.
- bribri 4y agoI'm also tweeting my logseq graph pages here https://twitter.com/Bsunter https://twitter.com/Bsunter and curating those tweets in a newsletter here, if anyone is interested in following my "feed" of my public logseq learning experiments https://www.getrevue.co/profile/bsunter/issues/weekly-newsletter-of-brian-sunter-issue-1-1220479 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/bsunter/issues/weekly-newsle... If anyone sets this up definitely contact me on twitter so I can add you to my following list.
- mro_name 4y agoif it's not for Jane Doe it's not 'social'. Is it? And I believe the self-hosting option inevitable. Including your own name (domain).