A better social network?

I’m just spit-balling ideas here so bare with me:

Random thought on funding a new Social media platform… How about bundling the site with services that people might actually be willing to pay for like a VPN, Anonymous payment services, Encrypted End to End E-mail, Encrypted Communication App, Disposable Email addresses, Virtual Phone Numbers, etc.

Then anyone using paid services can have invites for free accounts that they can use to bring other people on to the social media portions of the platform. Also the invite model is unique whereas, everyone else is responsible for who they invite and you can keep track of that. Someone brings on a spammer or something and you can ban both. Might keep people more civil.

Everyone else here is right, funding this new platform is going to take a stream of money. And we’re not even talking about making the platform profitable, we’re mostly talking keeping the lights on.

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I haven’t heard of it, I’ll check it out.

Interesting Idea here, I like it. Privacy is the main focus on this site. So this isn’t anything bad at all.

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This is a great idea.

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There are a bunch of these advertisement companies. Heres another very common (Buzzfeed) one that my partner used to watch before she followed me in removing herself off social media.

Here is a video on how bad these channels are by a professional cook.

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Ham Radio?

This forum? idk :confused:

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The days of a quintessential monolithic social network is breaking down to smaller interests groups. Facebook is past its prime and IMHO will be obscure within a few years as the active users shifts to something else i.e smaller and fits their social needs, or perhaps stop using FB actively.

Of course there will be those with narcissistic traits whom will be screaming out in the void to 5 people and to the other 500 “friends” whom have muted them, and those who are late to the party.

Apologies for spelling and possibly not being coherent. I am really drunk after a New Years party.

Two other thoughts came to my mind when I read this thread. What is Tim Berners Lee doing with his project? I can’t say that I understand his very convoluted text but giving back the control to the user sounds like a good idea (if it works).

Youtuber N-O-D-E posted something about helping a project that concerns a decentralized web. For really small groups that share and interest that could be a way forward to regain privacy/ being anonymous on internet. If its technically possible.

I tried to set up a diaspora pod yesterday and couldn’t get the Centos instructions to work.

Failed when it went to download the thing with CURL.

I’ll give it another go, but maybe their instructions are broken.

Specifically, this step fails:

[diaspora@diaspora ~]$ curl -L https://s.diaspora.software/1t | bash
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:01:00 --:--:--     0

ref: https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Installation/CentOS/7#Creating_a_user_for_DB

edit:

Giving it another shot, looks like i’m getting progress, will update a bit later. Maybe was a network problem yesterday somewhere.

I’ve been thinking of how to deal with user verification over the last few days without having to use an ID or DL to verify the users.

The only thing I could really come up with was for some trusted initial users to send out invites and have them verify the new users since they would be somebody that they know, but this really hampers the growth of the site and I’m not sure if it is something I wanna go forward with.

Yes, this is a hard problem to solve. I feel that people would be willing to pay a small fee for a advertisement free, premium social experience that still values your privacy.

We don’t want to know everything about you, just what content you want to be provided. We can shape the ads and site experience around that.

Sure, facebook makes a killing off of knowing EVERYTHING about you, and they source content for your feed to build interactions.

We’re doing kinda the opposite. You tell us what YOU want to see, we’ll do our best to bring it to you. You remain in control of your feed, content, and account at all times. Facebook owns all the content you post, upload, share even if you share those silly posts about ‘I don’t give facebook permission’ blah blah blah stuff.

Sounds like you’re working on a clone of Silence. With encryption, I would advise against reinventing the wheel unless you really know what you are doing.
If there is something that Silence does not do well enough, maybe work on a patch for that and try submitting it upstream?

As for the distributed sites thing, you might want to take a look at how much Hubzilla overlaps with what you have in mind; it tries to be a bit more general-purpose than Diaspora AFAIK.

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Silence isn’t readily available on all app stores and lacks a number of features. It is also a fork of what is now known as Signal. Signal being a little more feature rich though lacking again in some areas. It also relies on a third party server. They are also only supporting a handful of countries. There are also some discrepancies between the git repo for Silence and the actual app. Network connections being made where there shouldn’t be, calling home from my tests.

The largest thing these apps are missing is self destructive SMS, similar to Wickr. I personally don’t see any reason why either of them should require internet access.

Edit, it appears Silence is in the app store, though not for me locally. It also appears to have fallen with regards to updates and no longer functions for a number of people

I’m curious, are you talking about the F-droid version? IIRC, F-droid actually builds the app on the server-side; do you mean that the F-droid source tarball is different from the repo on Github or it’s source releases?

If so, that might be worth warning F-droid about.

I have been looking at Hubzilla for a while it is made from one of the ones behind Friendica and Diaspora, it has nomadic accounts which means you can download all your info and move to another.
Also you can have other accounts which are connected to your current one.

It’s somewhat of a forum and social media baked into one with very extensive control of who and what others can see, similar to google+.

But i personally think we’r going more towards a chat systems like xmpp, matrix or others.

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Yeah, Hubzilla looks pretty interesting.
Imagine if at some point the L1T, LTT, GN, and other forums were federated together with that, or a similar protocol, so that you could reply to LTT posts with your L1T account and vice versa.

I at least, think a federated forum network would be pretty cool.


Also cool, I think I saw somewhere that because of the protocols that PeerTube supports, you can post comments to it from your “fediverse” account.

This medium post does go through most of the features of Hubzilla Link

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Yeah, I also ran into Hubzilla today, via https://disroot.org/en . Sounds really nice – had tried diaspora before, but it didn’t click.

I haven’t read everyone’s replies. I haven’t read the thread. i will after i post this, but i just sort of want to throw this out to OP, my thoughts on social networks.

I don’t think there is a such thing as a better social network, as far as online communities go.

social networking online, has; as a whole, been a net negative for society. period, full stop.

there is an entire generation that is basically fucked, their sense of self worth is entirely externalized, tied to what other people think of them.

I think In the next 10-15 years suicide rates are going to fucking skyrocket because of “social networking” online.

i don’t think there is a such thing as a better social network, only less shitty or damaging.]

reading into op’s post…
cambridge analytica is irrelevant. the whole “russians manipulated us through social media to influence our elections” bullshit is irrelevant.

there is a much bigger problem.
Facebook,google,etc all of these advertising driven companies are merely side effects of one simple fact. Human beings are dumb fucking animals. We can be emotionally manipulated, because thats how we work.

the aforementioned companies/political entities leveraged that for profit and personal gain.
that is the downside of capitalism, where commandment #1 is fuck thy neighbor before they can fuck you. before you call me some commie/antifa/etc bullshit I’ll quote dave mustaine and just say “if theres a new way, i’ll be the first in line, but it better work this time”

a little insight from a 30 year old boomer, people need some sort of motivation, a purpose in life.

some people, want to make shitloads of money, because money matters and shitting on the poorfags keeps them in their place, some people want to travel the world and enjoy being a tourist getting a skin deep view of the world, and think basically all people are all the same because we all eat sleep shit and bleed and eventually die…
some people get all religious, etc, some people fight in nam and realize the world is a fucking scam man, its all bullshit to pad someone else’s wallet

in some way or another all these various people clutch to a nugget of truth.

the fact is, most likely, the shit that matters to you isn’t really all that important in the global sense, and only matters to you because its happening to you.
human beings don’t live that long, and we’re really shortsighted, despite the fact that we’re insanely goddamned powerful.

{drunken sidetrack} human beings are followed by beavers, and probably are slightly behind ants.

we don’t really follow evolution anymore. we dont adapt to our environment… we terraform that motherfucker to whatever makes our butthole tingle today.

beavers can build dams, change entire ecosystems, etc… we can fuck up entire planets if we’re feeling really shitty.

ants are only ahead of of us because they’re so fucking tiny, and instead of the internet they’ve got a hormone/pheromone hivemind instead of the interbutts

[sort of back to the point]

people wanna flex on other people on the internet. they want to feel important.

nobody posts pictures of their shitty underwear when they go out partying and winds up shitting themselves… they post vacation pictures on a beach somewhere.

social networking online is bad. Its basically jerking off in public.

stop it, let it die the horrible flaming port-o-potty death it deserves… don’t try to save it.

Social networking was a bad idea, move on. please.

Is this because of communication via social networks, or is it by unrealistic expectations pushed down from the media and media glorification of celebrities?

Social networks are a tool, they are not inherently evil or damaging.

Blaming social networks for the narcissism of today’s youth is like blaming non-self-driving cars for vehicular manslaughter.

My argument would be that social networks are not responsible for the behaviour they’re merely a platform for expressing it.

If you’re going to blame social networks, you may as well start blaming the front facing mobile phone camera…