6 ms·

It would be nice if we could evacuate walled-garden social media platforms and return to individual websites/blogs + RSS. RSS clients that empower the user to f

It would be nice if we could evacuate walled-garden social media platforms and return to individual websites/blogs + RSS. RSS clients that empower the user to follow, sort, filter, and control their "news feed" of content from individual websites/blogs.

leephillips 4y ago
Is anything preventing you from just doing it? There are plenty of RSS/Atom readers.
- ghaff 4y ago
  At least one complaint is that a lot of content has moved on. And maybe you can just ignore that content. Which I'm not sure would be wrong.
  - atestu 4y ago
    That's fair. There are a lot of big news sites that don't have RSS anymore, like axios.com
    - ghaff 4y ago
      And a lot of people who blogged more now do twitter threads. Or they just don't get started doing blogs.
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      But, they do: https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss
      - giobox 4y ago
        Your mileage may vary, but I only ever wanted RSS feeds that provide the actual article content. Just spitting out a feed of links back to the site with headlines is not how I or many others used RSS and RSS readers wayback when. Full article feeds have all but died out now anyway, another nail in the RSS coffin for me.
        IncRnd 4y ago
        That's my issue as well with the RSS feeds I use. None of them are full article feeds anymore. These sorts of RSS feeds are a way I can still centralize my feed data, even though they isn't true offline copies. I think this has to do with monetization and wanting to change the text of pages ad-hoc.
        giobox 4y ago
        It's of course monetization. Everyone jumped on giving away their content via RSS/public APIs in the early rush to web2.0 style standards, then of course retreated from that position when it became clear directing eyeballs to the actual site and keeping those eyeballs there for as long as possible was required to maximize ad revenues, especially for sites giving away written content. The only full content feeds that really survive are the occasional blog or site that offers it as a bonus to paying subscribers.
      - atestu 4y ago
        I don't know how you found this but I stand corrected!
        IncRnd 4y ago
        No worries. I did this search on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=axios+rss https://www.google.com/search?q=axios+rss I've found this helps to find these sorts of feeds that don't easily show on the site's themselves.
- giobox 4y ago
  In my experience, RSS isn't close to the level of widespread high quality support it had in the early "web2.0" days on the server side - picking an RSS client even with the demise of Google Reader hasn't been my issue with RSS in recent years anyway, its just the content isn't there anymore like it once was.
- lancesells 4y ago
  I don't use any social media and I've found that many businesses at least neglect their website and quite understandably resort to posting on social media. The few local news sites that I use usually will have an article about a business or a news story and then link to instagram or twitter rather than their website. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything but the usefulness of the web lessens year over year. Now that the platforms have locked down even viewing an instagram or twitter fee without an account I almost wish I could just get rid of all links pointing to them. The easiest thing would be to give in an make an account but I'm too stubborn ha.
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    During the pandemic lockdowns I found that reactivating my Facebook account was the best way to figure out if a shop did still exist and how they changed their opening hours ... websites unmaintained all in the walled garden. And looking at my "news feed" reminded me that I don't really miss anything from there.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I figure that any business that effectively only communicates using social media is a business that actively doesn't want me as a customer. Good riddance.
    - lancesells 4y ago
      I don't agree with that and think you should reconsider. There are only so many hours a day for most small businesses and they get the most out of social media compared to their website plus theirs a strong chance they themselves or their employees can use instagram compared to something like squarespace.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        I have no moral obligation to support social media companies (who I have serious ethical issues with) simply because there are businesses who choose to use them as their sole communications platforms.
- rakoo 4y ago
  People I want to follow don't have the technical chops to self-host. One can say it's sad, but I think it's worse that one needs technical chops to self-host. Come up with a way for anyone to publish content from their phone, with no subscription, and no need for an always-on server, and you'll have the basis for something less centralized.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    How do you discover people in this system, though? And at the end of the day, there has to be some kind of server somewhere. Even if it's using SMS or DNS or something to accomplish this.
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    Tumblr's owned by Automattic now, and they're throwing in some Indieweb features ([this] doesn't look official, but it actually is!). It also has proper RSS. Using a platform like that rather than a totally closed one like FB seems to me like a step up. [this]: https://github.com/indieweb/tumblr https://github.com/indieweb/tumblr
- Barrin92 4y ago
  that nobody else is doing it. There's a reason it's called a social network. The value is in the connections, hence the dominance of platforms.
  - n3storm 4y ago
    How do you call it when the platform replaces the social network? 80% of the content is created to acquire relevance in/to the platform not to create or consolidate meaningful relationships.
dylan604 4y ago
nonrandomstring 4y ago
I like your use of the word "evacuate". Recently I came upon the the phrase "cloud repatriation", which seemed a fresh angle on a word that's fallen on hard times. Evacuate! Yes we need a Dunkirk for those helpless souls left on the beaches of Facebook. The idea that they're going to swim, one by one, back the safety of personal web pages is silly.
function_seven 4y ago
Bring back MySpace exactly as it was in 2005. Yeah, even with the XSS and other craziness. That was part of the adventure! (Okay, okay, maybe a bit more work on security, but don't go so far as to make it bland.) Maybe I my lenses are rose tinted, but that era of social media was fun.
- chestervonwinch 4y ago
  I'm upset they lost all their photo and music data. Going back to old pages feels like visiting an abandoned mall.
- xwdv 4y ago
  We did. It was called spacehey.com and for a while it was a novelty then people got bored and left.
- 800xl 4y ago
  Part of the fun of MySpace was customizing your page with backgrounds, music, moving your top 10 friends around, etc. I sometimes think there is a niche market for this kind of social media again, adapted for mobile devices.
lkrubner 4y ago
I think this cannot be done with IP/TCP because of the reliance on each individual to pay for both active web servers and some kind of DNS config. It's possible to imagine other protocols that could force at least text messaging to flow over other networks. Simple text, over a simpler network protocol, might be possible. The governments could potentially force all cable companies to support it, as a requirement of being licensed. That would allow something like the text exchange that universities enjoyed in the 1980s, when the Internet was confined to universities and subsidized by the Nation Science Foundation. Or, for that matter, the government could directly subsidize something similar. But I think the protocol would have to be simpler. Just plain text, I think. Merely keeping the current system, but wishing consumers would use it differently, is a utopian dream that is unlikely to come true. You need to look at why consumers behave the way in the current system, and then you have to imagine a different system, and that different system cannot look anything like IP/TCP/UDP. We currently have like 8,000 RFCs. We've designed the world's most flexible system. It is very complex. I think you'd need a system simple enough that you could specify the whole thing in a 50 page document. That kind of simplicity. The simplicity should allow it to be cheap, and therefore easy to subsidize, either by the government or out of the profits of cable or phone or network companies.
- immibis 4y ago
  IPv4 doesn't help. If every PC had an IP address, you could have a blog on your own PC, leaving it on overnight - even a laptop.
  - lkrubner 4y ago
    Absolutely. That used to be much more possible back around 1993. The limitations of IPv4 are certainly a contributing factor.
- wwweston 4y ago
  > I think this cannot be done with IP/TCP because of the reliance on each individual to pay for both active web servers and some kind of DNS config. You can pay someone for that, somewhere around the order of $5 a month, probably less, or free but ad-supported. And that's more or less what Facebook is, except we pay with our data and attention on the back end rather than our dollars up front. The product might be rather different if we did pay in dollars, and for that reason I suspect digital protocols aren't the fundamental problem.
foresto 4y ago
I would love this, or something like it, but I don't think it can happen until hosting is effectively free and managing it is dead easy. Not everyone has access to a $100 server, reliable power, and unmetered internet, let alone the knowledge and time to be their own sysadmin. What if organizations in a position to do so, from mobile phone operators to ISPs to public libraries, provided some basic level of content hosting with standardized content management APIs? People with the means and motivation could host their own, but most people wouldn't have to. Perhaps that could pave the way for universal front-end tools and independence from the social media giants? Related: It looks like someone is trying to address the issue by layering a social media experience atop an existing distributed messaging system (Matrix): https://www.kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/ https://www.kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Federated protocols serve this purpose, and fediverse has clients with many of the features people use in social media. Then for actual social networks, things like briar or manyverse are perfectly functional and only lack network effect.
  - ggariepy 4y ago
    The problem is the network effect IS the game. Without it, you can have a perfectly functional but essentially useless social media application. MeWe comes to mind for me. I thought it would be a perfect Facebook replacement. I thought wrong. With a user community in the mere hundreds of thousands (last I checked) virtually nobody you know is on MeWe, even though technically they have all the bells and whistles Facebook does, and they pledge not to sell your information.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Another private company is just going to do the same things, pledge or no. For actually community owned protocols (an example is matrix or fediverse), someone has to go first. May as well be you. Make an account, ask a community group to be contactable without signing over your private info, get a couple of friends to do the same.
_carbyau_ 4y ago
My thoughts are to get rid of the "network" effect. IE have a DNS where anyone can register whatever they like. That way you can send a message direct to your friend's phone with no middleman. My invariably naïve thoughts on the SuperSimpleSecretsServer: - Alice generates 2 publicPrivate key pairs. 1 for the SSSS and 2 for their own use. - Alice contacts SSSS with PublicKey1. - SSSS responds with randomstring. - Alice privatekey1 encrypts the random string and privateKey2 encrypts her IPv6 address and sends both to SSSS. - SSSS authenticates and stores the encrypted-IPv6-blob against that publickey. Bob does same. Alice and Bob exchange (PublicKey1 and PublicKey2) however they do. Alice and Bob can now query SSSS for IPv6 of the respective key(aka person they want to talk to) whenever they want. But I honestly don't know much about crypto, security, scaling, routing, replication, who'd run it etc etc etc. I just plain don't know much....
- f1refly 4y ago
  Such a thing already exists: https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html
  - _carbyau_ 4y ago
    Well for this GNS... 1. the focus is still on human readable names and converting that to an IP. 2. the IP address seems plain text to anyone who requests it. Not a key encrypted blob. So. Not really like what I was describing at all. Maybe it could be tweaked to behave like I wish and it could solve the other aspects of such a service already.
    - f1refly 4y ago
      There are some Video presentations to GNUNet and the newest one on the GNS subcomponent mentions "Record confidentiality" - Values in the Table are signed and encrypted by the zone owner. To query a zone you'd first have to get the key of the zone owner, accomplishing what you requested, right? https://www.gnunet.org/en/video.html https://www.gnunet.org/en/video.html The Videos are kind of hard to watch, so maybe the slides are enough to understand how it's supposed to work: https://git.gnunet.org/presentations.git/plain/icann66/20191105_icann66_gns.pdf https://git.gnunet.org/presentations.git/plain/icann66/20191...

leephillips 4y ago

Is anything preventing you from just doing it? There are plenty of RSS/Atom readers.

ghaff 4y ago
At least one complaint is that a lot of content has moved on. And maybe you can just ignore that content. Which I'm not sure would be wrong.
- atestu 4y ago
  That's fair. There are a lot of big news sites that don't have RSS anymore, like axios.com
  - ghaff 4y ago
    And a lot of people who blogged more now do twitter threads. Or they just don't get started doing blogs.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    But, they do: https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss
    - giobox 4y ago
      Your mileage may vary, but I only ever wanted RSS feeds that provide the actual article content. Just spitting out a feed of links back to the site with headlines is not how I or many others used RSS and RSS readers wayback when. Full article feeds have all but died out now anyway, another nail in the RSS coffin for me.
      - IncRnd 4y ago
        That's my issue as well with the RSS feeds I use. None of them are full article feeds anymore. These sorts of RSS feeds are a way I can still centralize my feed data, even though they isn't true offline copies. I think this has to do with monetization and wanting to change the text of pages ad-hoc.
        giobox 4y ago
        It's of course monetization. Everyone jumped on giving away their content via RSS/public APIs in the early rush to web2.0 style standards, then of course retreated from that position when it became clear directing eyeballs to the actual site and keeping those eyeballs there for as long as possible was required to maximize ad revenues, especially for sites giving away written content. The only full content feeds that really survive are the occasional blog or site that offers it as a bonus to paying subscribers.
    - atestu 4y ago
      I don't know how you found this but I stand corrected!
      - IncRnd 4y ago
        No worries. I did this search on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=axios+rss https://www.google.com/search?q=axios+rss I've found this helps to find these sorts of feeds that don't easily show on the site's themselves.
giobox 4y ago
In my experience, RSS isn't close to the level of widespread high quality support it had in the early "web2.0" days on the server side - picking an RSS client even with the demise of Google Reader hasn't been my issue with RSS in recent years anyway, its just the content isn't there anymore like it once was.
lancesells 4y ago
I don't use any social media and I've found that many businesses at least neglect their website and quite understandably resort to posting on social media. The few local news sites that I use usually will have an article about a business or a news story and then link to instagram or twitter rather than their website. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything but the usefulness of the web lessens year over year. Now that the platforms have locked down even viewing an instagram or twitter fee without an account I almost wish I could just get rid of all links pointing to them. The easiest thing would be to give in an make an account but I'm too stubborn ha.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  During the pandemic lockdowns I found that reactivating my Facebook account was the best way to figure out if a shop did still exist and how they changed their opening hours ... websites unmaintained all in the walled garden. And looking at my "news feed" reminded me that I don't really miss anything from there.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I figure that any business that effectively only communicates using social media is a business that actively doesn't want me as a customer. Good riddance.
  - lancesells 4y ago
    I don't agree with that and think you should reconsider. There are only so many hours a day for most small businesses and they get the most out of social media compared to their website plus theirs a strong chance they themselves or their employees can use instagram compared to something like squarespace.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      I have no moral obligation to support social media companies (who I have serious ethical issues with) simply because there are businesses who choose to use them as their sole communications platforms.
rakoo 4y ago
People I want to follow don't have the technical chops to self-host. One can say it's sad, but I think it's worse that one needs technical chops to self-host. Come up with a way for anyone to publish content from their phone, with no subscription, and no need for an always-on server, and you'll have the basis for something less centralized.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  How do you discover people in this system, though? And at the end of the day, there has to be some kind of server somewhere. Even if it's using SMS or DNS or something to accomplish this.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  Tumblr's owned by Automattic now, and they're throwing in some Indieweb features ([this] doesn't look official, but it actually is!). It also has proper RSS. Using a platform like that rather than a totally closed one like FB seems to me like a step up. [this]: https://github.com/indieweb/tumblr https://github.com/indieweb/tumblr
Barrin92 4y ago
that nobody else is doing it. There's a reason it's called a social network. The value is in the connections, hence the dominance of platforms.
- n3storm 4y ago
  How do you call it when the platform replaces the social network? 80% of the content is created to acquire relevance in/to the platform not to create or consolidate meaningful relationships.

dylan604 4y ago

nonrandomstring 4y ago

I like your use of the word "evacuate". Recently I came upon the the phrase "cloud repatriation", which seemed a fresh angle on a word that's fallen on hard times. Evacuate! Yes we need a Dunkirk for those helpless souls left on the beaches of Facebook. The idea that they're going to swim, one by one, back the safety of personal web pages is silly.

function_seven 4y ago

Bring back MySpace exactly as it was in 2005. Yeah, even with the XSS and other craziness. That was part of the adventure! (Okay, okay, maybe a bit more work on security, but don't go so far as to make it bland.) Maybe I my lenses are rose tinted, but that era of social media was fun.

chestervonwinch 4y ago
I'm upset they lost all their photo and music data. Going back to old pages feels like visiting an abandoned mall.
xwdv 4y ago
We did. It was called spacehey.com and for a while it was a novelty then people got bored and left.
800xl 4y ago
Part of the fun of MySpace was customizing your page with backgrounds, music, moving your top 10 friends around, etc. I sometimes think there is a niche market for this kind of social media again, adapted for mobile devices.

lkrubner 4y ago

I think this cannot be done with IP/TCP because of the reliance on each individual to pay for both active web servers and some kind of DNS config. It's possible to imagine other protocols that could force at least text messaging to flow over other networks. Simple text, over a simpler network protocol, might be possible. The governments could potentially force all cable companies to support it, as a requirement of being licensed. That would allow something like the text exchange that universities enjoyed in the 1980s, when the Internet was confined to universities and subsidized by the Nation Science Foundation. Or, for that matter, the government could directly subsidize something similar. But I think the protocol would have to be simpler. Just plain text, I think. Merely keeping the current system, but wishing consumers would use it differently, is a utopian dream that is unlikely to come true. You need to look at why consumers behave the way in the current system, and then you have to imagine a different system, and that different system cannot look anything like IP/TCP/UDP. We currently have like 8,000 RFCs. We've designed the world's most flexible system. It is very complex. I think you'd need a system simple enough that you could specify the whole thing in a 50 page document. That kind of simplicity. The simplicity should allow it to be cheap, and therefore easy to subsidize, either by the government or out of the profits of cable or phone or network companies.

immibis 4y ago
IPv4 doesn't help. If every PC had an IP address, you could have a blog on your own PC, leaving it on overnight - even a laptop.
- lkrubner 4y ago
  Absolutely. That used to be much more possible back around 1993. The limitations of IPv4 are certainly a contributing factor.
wwweston 4y ago
> I think this cannot be done with IP/TCP because of the reliance on each individual to pay for both active web servers and some kind of DNS config. You can pay someone for that, somewhere around the order of $5 a month, probably less, or free but ad-supported. And that's more or less what Facebook is, except we pay with our data and attention on the back end rather than our dollars up front. The product might be rather different if we did pay in dollars, and for that reason I suspect digital protocols aren't the fundamental problem.

foresto 4y ago

I would love this, or something like it, but I don't think it can happen until hosting is effectively free and managing it is dead easy. Not everyone has access to a $100 server, reliable power, and unmetered internet, let alone the knowledge and time to be their own sysadmin. What if organizations in a position to do so, from mobile phone operators to ISPs to public libraries, provided some basic level of content hosting with standardized content management APIs? People with the means and motivation could host their own, but most people wouldn't have to. Perhaps that could pave the way for universal front-end tools and independence from the social media giants? Related: It looks like someone is trying to address the issue by layering a social media experience atop an existing distributed messaging system (Matrix): https://www.kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/ https://www.kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Federated protocols serve this purpose, and fediverse has clients with many of the features people use in social media. Then for actual social networks, things like briar or manyverse are perfectly functional and only lack network effect.
- ggariepy 4y ago
  The problem is the network effect IS the game. Without it, you can have a perfectly functional but essentially useless social media application. MeWe comes to mind for me. I thought it would be a perfect Facebook replacement. I thought wrong. With a user community in the mere hundreds of thousands (last I checked) virtually nobody you know is on MeWe, even though technically they have all the bells and whistles Facebook does, and they pledge not to sell your information.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Another private company is just going to do the same things, pledge or no. For actually community owned protocols (an example is matrix or fediverse), someone has to go first. May as well be you. Make an account, ask a community group to be contactable without signing over your private info, get a couple of friends to do the same.

_carbyau_ 4y ago

My thoughts are to get rid of the "network" effect. IE have a DNS where anyone can register whatever they like. That way you can send a message direct to your friend's phone with no middleman. My invariably naïve thoughts on the SuperSimpleSecretsServer: - Alice generates 2 publicPrivate key pairs. 1 for the SSSS and 2 for their own use. - Alice contacts SSSS with PublicKey1. - SSSS responds with randomstring. - Alice privatekey1 encrypts the random string and privateKey2 encrypts her IPv6 address and sends both to SSSS. - SSSS authenticates and stores the encrypted-IPv6-blob against that publickey. Bob does same. Alice and Bob exchange (PublicKey1 and PublicKey2) however they do. Alice and Bob can now query SSSS for IPv6 of the respective key(aka person they want to talk to) whenever they want. But I honestly don't know much about crypto, security, scaling, routing, replication, who'd run it etc etc etc. I just plain don't know much....

f1refly 4y ago
Such a thing already exists: https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  Well for this GNS... 1. the focus is still on human readable names and converting that to an IP. 2. the IP address seems plain text to anyone who requests it. Not a key encrypted blob. So. Not really like what I was describing at all. Maybe it could be tweaked to behave like I wish and it could solve the other aspects of such a service already.
  - f1refly 4y ago
    There are some Video presentations to GNUNet and the newest one on the GNS subcomponent mentions "Record confidentiality" - Values in the Table are signed and encrypted by the zone owner. To query a zone you'd first have to get the key of the zone owner, accomplishing what you requested, right? https://www.gnunet.org/en/video.html https://www.gnunet.org/en/video.html The Videos are kind of hard to watch, so maybe the slides are enough to understand how it's supposed to work: https://git.gnunet.org/presentations.git/plain/icann66/20191105_icann66_gns.pdf https://git.gnunet.org/presentations.git/plain/icann66/20191...