<story><title>My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network</title><url>https://carter.sande.duodecima.technology/decentralized-wishlist/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>e1ven</author><text>I had written a toy social network a few years back the past which had these features - It worked very much like an encrypted version of usenet.&lt;p&gt;This is probably my bias as an engineer showing, but the technology doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like the hard part-&lt;p&gt;I always understood that having an resilient network means people will use it to post some bad things, but I don&amp;#x27;t know if I really internalized the scope of that until later.&lt;p&gt;I had originally envisioned it might be useful in oppressive countries, where people needed a way to communicate - Recent events have shown how dangerous that can feel when you&amp;#x27;re in the midst of people who feel like that describes them.&lt;p&gt;As another HN post pointed out, there are two natural audiences for such networks - Idealists, and those who can&amp;#x27;t get away with stuff on other networks.. And the second is going to be far more common. That will influence the culture, and help to drive other &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; people away from the service, amplifying the effect.&lt;p&gt;Even if you have user-selectable moderators (Which I had, similar to the request the author makes), without a huge war-chest to hire a large team of default moderators, you&amp;#x27;ll never be able to keep up. The default experience for the average user will be terrible.&lt;p&gt;Over and over, I ran into issues like that - It&amp;#x27;s relatively easy to built the technological network, but managing the social network aspect is an unsolved problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>at_a_remove</author><text>If you have an old-ish head unit in your car, it may receive an RDS (Radio Data System) feed that could tell you what station it is or what song is playing.  However, many stations around here are using it to advertise Club Fitness and Golden Oak lending.  If you cast further back into the mists of time, anyone could send you a webcam or chatroom invite ... this was naturally exploited by spammers approximately ten milliseconds after its invention.&lt;p&gt;I have since formulated the concept that any communications channel, any at all, where it does not cost to transmit per message will eventually be colonized by the advertising fungal organism.  Even low-cost messaging can be colonized, but the lower the cost, the faster it comes.&lt;p&gt;Similarly, like FreeNet, any communications channel that can be used to post Things You Do Not Like &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; be used to do so.  And that once you implement some kind of wide-scale filter against that, absolutely nothing can be done to stop someone from attempting to take over, to add and subtract to that filter, for their own purposes and their own ideology.&lt;p&gt;I have no solutions for this.</text></comment>
<story><title>My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network</title><url>https://carter.sande.duodecima.technology/decentralized-wishlist/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>e1ven</author><text>I had written a toy social network a few years back the past which had these features - It worked very much like an encrypted version of usenet.&lt;p&gt;This is probably my bias as an engineer showing, but the technology doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like the hard part-&lt;p&gt;I always understood that having an resilient network means people will use it to post some bad things, but I don&amp;#x27;t know if I really internalized the scope of that until later.&lt;p&gt;I had originally envisioned it might be useful in oppressive countries, where people needed a way to communicate - Recent events have shown how dangerous that can feel when you&amp;#x27;re in the midst of people who feel like that describes them.&lt;p&gt;As another HN post pointed out, there are two natural audiences for such networks - Idealists, and those who can&amp;#x27;t get away with stuff on other networks.. And the second is going to be far more common. That will influence the culture, and help to drive other &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; people away from the service, amplifying the effect.&lt;p&gt;Even if you have user-selectable moderators (Which I had, similar to the request the author makes), without a huge war-chest to hire a large team of default moderators, you&amp;#x27;ll never be able to keep up. The default experience for the average user will be terrible.&lt;p&gt;Over and over, I ran into issues like that - It&amp;#x27;s relatively easy to built the technological network, but managing the social network aspect is an unsolved problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grahamburger</author><text>IMO this is why federation is an important aspect of decentralized networks, and is commonly listed as a reason for use Mastodon &amp;#x2F; the fediverse. Each instance can set their own moderation policies and decide what other instances they want to federate with. Notably mastodon.social and the instances related to it haven&amp;#x27;t become cess pools of hate speech, because they do have strong moderation policies, but for users who want to post that stuff there are other instances they can find.</text></comment>