Reinvent the Social Web

https://staltz.com/reinvent-the-social-web.html

by alannallama • 8 years ago

107 54 8 years ago

xte11• 8 years ago

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.

gweinberg3• 8 years ago

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

scoggs4• 8 years ago

Maybe it was off putting to the less tech savvy? In a similar way to how people react to reddit the first few times they see it. You know, something like "How do I use this website? It's just tons of text. It's confusing and ugly.

If I go to Google Images and search "usenet" it looks more like an FTP program than any sort of "social" website or social anything.

It might be a case of people just not getting or knowing that Usenet is in fact a "social bulletin board" of sorts?

xte11• 8 years ago

Simply "sheep effect" + ignorance.

usenet is text-based and normally used with a desktop client. People start to see colorful webapps and go for them without thinking. Consider that most "web users" now do not really know the difference between a browser and a webapp. Do not care about freedom as long as they feel free.

It's the classic Chomsky frog, now water start to be a bit hot but still ok for most people, when it will boil... It will be simply too late to came back.

An example scenario, GMail now is a semi-standard mail service (not really standard IMAP but can work with substantially any MUA) and a WebUI. If most people only know WebUI and tomorrow Alphabet decide to drop external IMAP+smtp support? If after decide to make service paid? What you have in hand with all your messages on Google servers? Another scenario, what if a government start to censor? Usenet can be blocked (and blocks circumvented) but still no one can really own it. A proprietary platform can be owned. Even if you have the code you still need server, users etc, with usenet you only need your PC.

jasode• 8 years ago

, 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.

oiuew83• 8 years ago

Read or watch the news to understand why: jobs, market growth, yadda yadda.

JoshMnem• 8 years ago

It rapidly declined when Google pulled all the content into Google Groups. I'm pretty sure that's what killed it. Until that point it was great. It was an interesting kind of discussion forum that was worth paying for.

scoggs4• 8 years ago

You are not rude at all! Your English, while not 100% perfect, is very close to perfect and still easy to understand. If you want some help understanding where you made mistakes I'm glad to help. I'm always envious of non-English speakers seeming to speak English so well and apologizing for their bad English. Not many people I know (and of course myself) have an easy time learning 2nd and even 3rd languages. I can barely stumble around making conversation in Spanish but I try. I'd never be able to participate on HN if it were a Spanish-speaking website, though.

xte11• 8 years ago

Thanks! While here is not the right place I always welcome corrections not only about my English but in general, corrections and constructive critics are a fundamental and terribly effective ontological path :-)

A thing these days we somewhat lost unfortunately...

programmarchy2• 8 years ago

There's not really a social graph for usenet, though, is there? Usenet is "file first", not "people first" like Andre discussed in his talk.

Usenet seem too brittle, too centralized to ultimately become a decentralized social network. To achieve the use cases proposed in the video you'd have to implement a whole new layer on top of Usenet anyway.

0x8BADF00D• 8 years ago

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.

BorisMelnik• 8 years ago

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.

megaman8• 8 years ago

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

GroSacASacs• 8 years ago

What are the benefits compared to Mastodon social network ?

lancew• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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/

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

Perhaps you are referring to delay tolerant messaging.

mxuribe• 8 years ago

I actually think that mastodon, scuttlebutt, and other platforms and protocols (ActivityPub, etc.) represent the beginning of an evolution/revolution towards more decentralization - ok federation in some cases. And, the next versions of these platforms will either begin to converge...Or, there will be yet a new platform that will combine the best aspects of each of these. I can imagine a platform that has a neat UI like mastodon, leverages ActivityPub while online, and scuttlebutt when offline, etc. I'm excited about the work going on around all of this...so for now, your question is valid. But eventually, there might be less and less differences.

By the way, to answer your question, both mastodon - and other platforms that leverage the ActivityPub protocol - as well as scuttlebutt are similar in that they're either federated or decentralized; basically do not need to rely on any centralized controlling entity. They differe in numerous ways, but the biggest would be that mastodon - and other ActivityPub servers -expect to operate online, while scuttlebutt takes the "offline first" approach. Sure, there are other differences like UI, etc...But that might be the gist you're looking for.

10-6• 8 years ago

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.

crawfordcomeaux3• 8 years ago

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?

rorykoehler2• 8 years ago

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.

tschellenbach• 8 years ago

Cake has some interesting concepts. Scobleizer wrote about it (https://www.cake.co/conversations/t2MT5Yr/can-cake-clean-up-...)

frio2• 8 years ago

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 :).

crawfordcomeaux3• 8 years ago

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

frio2• 8 years ago

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.

Vendan• 8 years ago

SSB's root is just "hash chain + signatures", and is relatively trivial to implement. Most of the actual protocol is flawed in several ways, and there's tough issues they are still trying to solve. I'd say something based off of IPFS for bulk storage (SSB suffers from bloat, and there's multiple proposals to move actual data off the append only log and into "blobs", which are already WAY better implemented in IPFS, IMHO), with some form of "here's the bits that make up my profile" thing, possibly similar to SSB, but with a cleaner implementation. A few things that should be high priority, IMHO:

- Allow for profile "compaction"/data removal (SSB says you should never delete anything, which is frankly untenable, IMO)

- Allow for multiple devices/apps to manipulate your profile concurrently (Complex, but SSB has been criticized multiple times for vigorously arguing against this capability)

- Use a data protocol that is well formed and structured (SSB uses "node.js formatted" json serialization, and then verifies signature after deserializing and reserializing, meaning you must match node.js's serialization perfectly to interact with the rest of the ecosystem)

rocky1138• 8 years ago

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?

cutler• 8 years ago

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.

programmarchy2• 8 years ago

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.

Reinvent the Social Web

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