
Ask HN: What do you think of a decentralize social media - ProtocolAuthor
I wrote this quickly. I&#x27;m not sure if anyone is interested. If this gets a lot of attention I&#x27;d be willing to write more specifies and a protocol spec that you all can share your opinions on<p>-----<p>They say social media makes roughly $6 per user per quarter. We all know a number of social media companies collect enough data to make us uncomfortable. In 2018 it was revealed that companies took that data and use it to swing elections in a number of countries to the biggest buyer. Data has real world consequence. After the reveal people haven&#x27;t significantly decrease use of social media and globally it grew<p>$6 per quarter isn&#x27;t a lot. With that money we can easily fund an open source decentralized social media. There has been a number of attempts but for one reason or another the average internet user has never used any of the open source. Some issues are lack or poor quality of web&#x2F;mobile&#x2F;desktop apps, no easy to use service to get start and lack of moderation to prevent abuse (scams, bullying, noise to distract and degrade performance or user experience, etc)<p>What I&#x27;d like is to fund a set of protocols (not specific to social media) and apps to improve programmers lives then see if we can proceed to repurpose some of them for a decentralized social media. The following is a list of what I think would be popular and I have a draft of each protocol if people are interested. Each of these should be usable from a command line app and from the web.<p>- Authenticate (with a discovery extension). Allow users to authenticate a device and give them per app permissions. ie my desktop may be a full admin, my phone will have read&#x2F;write (but not overwrite&#x2F;delete) on file sharing (so I can archive photos) and my raspberry pi may have read only permission on few apps and no permissions on others.<p>(continued in comment)
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ProtocolAuthor
\- Friend Authenticate. Same idea as above but for giving permissions to users
who are not you and authenticating/verifying the data that comes back as
them/valid.

\- Event, file and SQL database. Apps running several device can
publish/subscribe to events so they can synchronize with eachother. For
example I may select a number of photos on my phone and 'share' it to my file
server. It will also publish an event so my desktop can download them so I'll
either A) have a copy on my desktop for fun or B) have a copy so I can start
editing the moment I sit down.

This can be further optimize with a discovery protocol. If the file server is
remote and your desktop is on the same network the desktop and phone start
syncing via local network

\- Public event and database. Same as above (per app basis) but more
complicated and restrictive due to it being shared with public/unverified
users and friends. Your friends may have permissions to write comments and
edit/delete their own but a stranger attempting it will have their
comment/data ignored

\- Data discover: Your friend may have written a comment or review on a third
party page. The third party does not want to moderate comments/reviews however
the app supports it. This piece allows users to write about third parties and
their friends to discover it

(This will be at a later stage) \- File Caching, balancing and a peer to peer
extension: If a file becomes popular it may be cached on several networks and
users may have better download speeds due to accessing a closer network or
from pulling files from a less busy network. This may be more noticeable in
places where internet access is slower outside the continent or if the user is
on an island

Apps that might be built:

\- An RSS like feed so people can subscribe to eachothers blogs, podcast or to
consume events \- A calendar app for teams or married couples that have
different apps on the different OSes they used \- Sharing comments on an
unmoderated video site (ie videos might be moderated but comments are only
seen if your friends with the comment author or if their friends with the
content poster) \- An email like system that uses the file sharing protocol to
retract emails and attachments)

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verdverm
All about it, we should pass a law (like we did with FHIR and healthcare in
the US) to force these companies to be interoperable. Then we can separate the
data/event tier from the interfaces and business model (there are
complexities). This should lead to competition and natural breakdown (or not)
via market forces. The key is to make it interoperable for real, so one can
leave the platform without losing the network, and also merge their separate
profiles. Which gets us to the bigger idea of self sovereign identity...

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ProtocolAuthor
I haven't been on this site much. Any idea how I can post in a way that gets
more attention? Maybe I need a better title

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verdverm
You can search here (or Google) there are all sorts of analytics about what
does well when, but it probably changes with time and current events

