
Reinvent the Social Web - alannallama
https://staltz.com/reinvent-the-social-web.html
======
xte
Really?

Well IMVHO the best "re-invention" of social web, actually social internet is
already there for long, long time, respond to the name of "usenet". No-one
"own" it, it's an open and well-know standard so we have various
client&servers and we can build other if someone wish. All interested posts
can be kept on our personal computers, locally indexed for fully offline
search (the best guarantee of censorship-resistance and the simpler and
quicker solution), both client and servers are far simpler than modern
webapps, ...

That's the social, free, people-centric internet. Reinventing the wheel with
complex and less effective solutions is not a good idea IMVHO...

Sorry for being rude and for my poor English.

~~~
gweinberg
I really don't understand why Usenet died out, when the replacements were all
worse.

~~~
jasode
_> , when the replacements were all worse._

Better or worse has multidimensional factors.

You have to separate out what some techies like vs what the typical web surfer
likes. Usenet doesn't have:

1) upvote/downvote and algorithmic ranking -- which is what Digg and Reddit
were good at. Typical web surfers like to see the most upvoted stories and
most upvoted comments. In contrast on Usenet, it requires a separate newsgroup
reader and configuring filters and manual curation. This is too much techie
work for regular folks that want a quick dopamine hit of random web content.

2) good spam control. No system is perfect but web forums like reddit and HN
have less spam than Usenet.

3) rich text and formatting. The private web-based forums software like
vBulletin and PhpBB are good at this. E.g. upload photos, add colorful smiley
faces, avatars, etc.

4) no easy way to be "lurker" with Usenet (at least in the 1990s). To retrieve
the latest Usenet posts, your newsgroup reader software had to have an
"account id". Reddit and HN don't need any sign up just to read posts; just
point the browser at a url. Therefore, instant gratification.

Usenet is "worse" in some dimensions when considering multiple dimensions of
convenience and usability.

Yes, Usenet is better on some dimensions such as offline reading and non-
central ownership. However, I think we can agree that _typical_ web surfers
don't care about those attributes.

~~~
xte
Well... Spam was not a real thing at the usenet golden age, killfile largely
suffice. Today thanks to the experience we have from emails we can easily
apply antispam to usenet.

On rich text... Well, while I welcome an org-mode-formatted usenet I still do
not see any point in having text formatting capabilities, most of formatted
text on the web looks really ugly and it does not help reading. Also if we re-
learn to write down text in terms of formatting (for instance knowing that
more than 80 columns start to be hard to read, using short URLs etc), with the
classic netiquette rules we write down better contents, and perhaps with more
attention. Try only to compare readability of modern web-platforms respect of
ancient usenet posts in a good client and also compare the "medium quality" of
posts. Photos can be a problem often circumvented by base64-encode stuff,
fidocad etc, however when you really need to insert an image or video in
something you post?

On upvotes, well personally I think gamification in general as a really bad
idea and in general anything that pave the way to aggregators a bad idea. To
let ideas, thoughts flow without soft-censorship we need to control us,
individually, our information flow. That's why I favor RSS/Atom instead of
modern aggregators, that's why I dislike HN interface etc.

Generally speaking if you make a business well you have to follow or try to
drive client's interests but if you make a free software o technical stuff you
have to do what you think it's technically best, didactically best. Think for
instance about child educations, or simpler think about Ubuntu's Unity
desktop: nearly all of us GNU/Linux users from few years _before_ Unity we
start to put "launchers" on left or right side of the screen simply because we
feel the need of more vertical space and we know that too long/big launchers
list it's practically unuseful like having classic dummy users forest of
desktop icons, we all have ha small top bar from Fluxbox to Gnome or
Enlightenment. Unity devs see this and "force a bit" their users to choose
this superior model. At first it was not much welcomed, now it's "The
Standard" of modern GNU/Linux desktop, same for "hit a key, type something,
hit enter on first mach" workflow vs classic menu-based searches. That's
"education". Usenet is about users, a free software/protocol, not a commercial
product.

Of course it have rooms for improvements, but improvements does not means
reinvent the wheel in a limited and anti-users way.

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
What you are describing is how a social web designed for the best interests of
users that care should be. And here lies the problem, that people don't care.

------
frio
I've been trying to get my head around the idea of smashing SSB (the
underlying networkable append-only log store, rather than the social network)
together with some of the concepts from Camlistore, IPFS and Tim Berners-Lee's
SOLID stack. I'm imagining a personal database that exists on my phone, on my
desktop, and on some agent somewhere in the cloud (or even a Raspberry Pi at
home). Applications -- local or networked -- could request access to append
certain messages to the SSB queue, and provide a series of reducers/schemas to
reify those messages into a collection of views useful for the application.
It'd mean that my digital life would effectively belong to one replicatable,
content-addressed database, instead of the current thing where we have a mix
of files and online services that hold my data in their private databases.
It's a personal database that's offline-first; it's backed up; it's
distributed, and it means I'd be able to interact with my data as I see fit.

It seems like an impossibly vast and intimidating project. I think the main
takeaway from this ramble is that I think the new tools emerging to re-
decentralize the web are really, really cool :).

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
I'm in. Gonna start researching the stack while waiting for my firstborn to
arrive. What's next for you?

~~~
frio
Hope that someone builds it for me ;). I can't really do anything with that
concept, because life is very full for me currently and is likely to remain so
for the next year. It's just something I've been scribbling down on paper and
prodding at occasionally. I suspect it's a semi-natural idea that'll occur to
a lot of people when they start looking at Dat, IPFS, SSB, SOLID, ActivityPub
etc. and trying to find where commonalities may exist.

------
0x8BADF00D
Scuttlebot seems really neat. It’s very much message oriented, which means you
can easily hook in JSON or protobuf. Seems quite useful as a messaging system.

------
10-6
The author explains a few problems with the current state of the Web under the
section The Five Lacks:

\- "On the closed social web... We lack freedom, innovation, trust, respect,
and transparency."

\- "Innovation on these platforms is dying."

\- "And there’s little transparency. All of the data is locked up or rate
limited to a prohibitive degree."

While some of these may or not even be true (innovation dying, really?), I
think the author makes a large leap from his premises to the conclusion. So
just because the author claims there are issues with the current state of the
web, that doesn't mean the solution is to completely ditch "the tech giants in
control suppress our freedom" and remove yourself from the current web
platform and applications (e.g. fb, google, etc.)

The best way to determine whether this is a viable and useful solution, and
whether or not some of the apps are actually something people want and find
useful is to see how many people ditch applications from the "tech giants"
start using these new apps built for the social web.

A lot of ideas sounds great in theory, but then don't hold up years down the
line. Plenty of new applications and social networks have been created over
the years with great explanations and a "Our Philosophy" section, but what
actually matters is whether or not people change their habits and start using
these new applications.

The problems the author listed in The Five Lacks section are completely real
problems on a lot of the applications on the Web, but I don't think any of
these social web apps listed in the article are the solution.

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
It's easiest for me to approach these projects because I'm betting those
developing such projects are willing to hear my user story and jam on healing-
centered design for recovering information addicts such as myself.

My reason for mentioning these things is to help start the conversations
around then.

I think any app with infinite scroll, which I think Patchwork might have,
isn't respecting how repetitive motions like that lead to addictive behaviors
and/or repetitive stress issues.

Also, I'd like to see other design patterns useful for addicting users to be
publicly and loudly set aside.

Since these apps are open source, I can at least start the conversation & I
can do it with pull requests.

I also think the metric of conversion is misguided for determining if it's
successful. I think it's time to start measuring software design based on
subjective well-being. Allow users to see metrics related to their well-being,
like how much time is spent using the apps and in what ways.

I think people are first going to populate a new app ecosystem with iterations
of what's popular outside the ecosystem before doing the serious work of
addressing all the ways we software wrong beyond what's kept in mind when
designing the ecosystem. Could that be what you're talking about?

~~~
rorykoehler
It can't work. If you don't design for addicting behaviors none of the 80% of
users who aren't addicts will use your service more than once. It's a catch
22. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
This is a limiting belief. I no longer choose to hold such beliefs because
they engage cognitive biases away from imagining ways it can happen.

I hypothesize an approach oriented around human needs can be immediately
valuable and can grow in value for an individual user, even if they never
connect to another user. Even if I haven't yet imagined it.

Choosing my beliefs intentionally is a skill I developed on my own and think a
social app that simultaneously taught such a useful skill might be something
people choose to learn. I've cultivated a set of skills I use to stay sane in
the face of a weird world where accurately judging what's true is getting
harder. I bet others could benefit from learning how to not be gaslit by
politicians, for example. I think an app teaching such skills would go viral
and spread as long as it remained useful.

~~~
rorykoehler
Lots of people are heavy on beliefs and light on reality these days. I prefer
to stay grounded and to study actual real world phenomena instead. It's better
to use the best proven tools and methods to enact the change you want to see
than to swim upstream with ineffective methods because reality makes you feel
uncomfortable.

------
BorisMelnik
like most things in the world - assets are getting consolidated including the
web, but I dont think the www will ever fully consolidate. there will always
be small blogs, websites, and social networks. I really think in the next few
years we are going to see a massive disruptions in the www infrastructure a
lot of p2p solutions out there that look really attractive so the slate might
get wiped clean soon regardless.

------
GroSacASacs
What are the benefits compared to Mastodon social network ?

~~~
lancew
For me it is quite different to Mastodon as it's not just a twitter
replacement run on different servers. It has entirely possible to run this
completely without a server, so if in an isolated network, the local LAN could
be your sole connection.

Then perhaps one person goes out to another town and connects to the internet,
they collect many many messages from internet.

They then come back to the isolated network and connect, everyone gets the
messages they collected. I have seen this effect happen when using both laptop
client and mobile phone client.

When internet was down, my phone was able to get messages. Then it connected
also to the wifi and my laptop (on the wifi) was not getting messages from
internet; but got from my phone.

~~~
TheJoYo
i might be missing your point but i can host a local instance of mastodon via
docker with minimal effort.
[https://hub.docker.com/r/gargron/mastodon/](https://hub.docker.com/r/gargron/mastodon/)

Running a service "without a server" misunderstands the client-server model.

Perhaps you are referring to delay tolerant messaging.

------
cutler
The author seems to miss the one thing which made the HTML web such a success
- simplicity. There's nothing DIY about this new alternative. In fact with 20
years in tech behind me I found it hard to understand. Sorry, this will remain
the pastime of a few dedicated geeks. I see nothing which a less-than-
technical user can get a handle on.

~~~
programmarchy
I don't remember the HTML web being very simple when I was first starting out.
Procuring a server host, FTP logins, broken links, wrangling some godforsaken
HTML editor and eventually falling back on Notepad...

Anyway, JSON messages are pretty simple to hack on. For DIY stuff, your
message schema can be as simple or complex as you want it to be.

Less-than-technical users can have a similar experience to Twitter, Facebook,
or NextDoor. Still lots of UX work to get to that point though.

------
tschellenbach
Cake has some interesting concepts. Scobleizer wrote about it
([https://www.cake.co/conversations/t2MT5Yr/can-cake-clean-
up-...](https://www.cake.co/conversations/t2MT5Yr/can-cake-clean-up-silicon-
valley-s-social-problem))

------
rocky1138
The fediverse has become my new homepage. I run my own GNU Social instance
(other people are of course welcome to join) on my own server. It's faster
than my older blog for thought-stream stuff and I've upped the character limit
to something I'll never hit.

Anyone else do something similar?

------
megaman8
i liked the idea of sharding your private key amongst 3 people you trust.
seems like an interesting way to solve that problem.

