We made a mistake, argues developer Andrew Duensing. We let the world's social networks become profit-driven enterprises. "We don't really tolerate it for almost any other centers of community (like book clubs, churches/mosques/temples, running groups, schools)," Duensing says. "But for some reason, we tolerate it as soon as it becomes 1s and 0s?
"I want to show that there isn't necessarily an economic reason it has to be that way."
He's one of several developers who've discovered another secret about social networks: they're actually really easy to build. The article identifies at least three developers who have now coded up their own social networks, just for friends and interaction (and never for profit). Like a backyard barbecue that didn't feel the need for a sponsor.
And because they're privately owned, they can explore entirely new ideas. Alex Ghiculescu and Jillian Schuller are the creators of a special social network designed to be checked just once a week -- on Sunday.
Robert Louis Stevenson once argued that to know what you prefer, "instead of humbly saying 'Amen' to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to keep your soul alive." And in the same way, after crafting her own social media platform, Schuller acknowledges that "the experience in building it was very cathartic, and the most contented I've ever felt, building something that I knew was worthwhile."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @05:25PM (12 children)
Clearly the article author isn't familiar with the US Evangelical megachurches.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @06:00PM
Or the Jewish love of profits.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @07:19PM (10 children)
Yup, and some animals are horses, so by your illogic, all animals are horses.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @07:52PM (4 children)
Perhaps the logic might not be generally applicable, but it does apply when you're talking about the megachurches. Nothing says Blessed are you who are poor like private jets and Lamborghinis [usatoday.com].
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @08:21PM (3 children)
So all "megachurches" are corrupt and driven by evil, greed, immorality, etc? Or maybe just the ones you hear about? You know, sensationalism sells, right?
To be fair, some are very good for many years, and something bad/evil happens. But that doesn't make the entire existence of said megachurch bad, right?
Again, are you saying all megachurches are bad, hiding evil, always?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Opportunist on Saturday May 07 2022, @08:44PM (2 children)
You have a counter example? I couldn't find one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @11:57PM
Evidence would suggest that, yes.
But of course, evil and immorality are concepts defined by said churches and by their own definitions they probably are not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @05:14AM
A "good" mega-church. Yes, but it was quite some years ago and NOT in the U.S.A. They are super rare!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @09:09PM (2 children)
All horses are animals
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday May 08 2022, @01:27AM (1 child)
Even hobby horses, sawhorses, and seahorses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @03:16AM
You forgot the Pummel Horse, or is it the Pommel Horse? The Horse with handles that lithe young men in skimpy clothing vault upon, you know!
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Sunday May 08 2022, @02:39PM (1 child)
Drawing a parallel is not equivocation, you're strawmanning GP. And this analogy sucks anyway, horse is a narrow subclass of the very broad category animal which includes sponges, while megachurch and social media corporation are both specific type of thing that have a fair bit of similarity between them. If you have to make an equine analogy, it's more like making assumptions about the kinematic properties of horses based on dogs or some other animal with a vaguely similar body structure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @06:55PM
Way to miss the point. As intelligent as you seem to be, or at least possess an above-average command of linguistics, you've failed in the "conflating analogy specifics with the actual point being made by the analogy." Kind of sad.
If you need it explained: just because there are some examples of bad "megachurches", does not in any way mean they are all bad, evil, greedy, corrupt, criminal.
And to those who can't find the good ones, consider this (and not just for churches, but anything you try to research): you're likely doing a websearch and you're only going to find the examples of corrupt churches. The good ones: nothing to report, so you just get nothing. Researchers / reporters don't make much money reporting "all is well, nothing to report here". But that seems very obvious, no?
Of course, it all depends on your political and religious views: you may consider all churches to be corrupt if you're atheistic, or of some religion that doesn't tolerate other religious beliefs.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @06:09PM
Besides, SN don't need such snakeoil bullshit "story" - what do you think SN is?
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @07:03PM (6 children)
No. Social Networks can only be created by mega-corporations with closed platforms using pixie dust.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday May 07 2022, @08:38PM (5 children)
It's less the pixie dust, it's more the reach. What good is a social media platform nobody knows about?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @10:03PM (3 children)
No trolls, no scammers, no ads, no algorithmic feed, no dark patterns, no privacy invasion, just people you actually know and communicate with?
Yeah, useless.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Opportunist on Sunday May 08 2022, @08:26AM
What now, no trolls and scammers or people I know and communicate with?
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Sunday May 08 2022, @02:43PM (1 child)
No access to the modern-day public square either.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @08:25PM
If you think a communication has to have global reach to be important, you are already surrendering to the hyper-global-megas. There is nothing wrong with changing one mind at a time.
Also, if you think that by posting on twitter, youtube, facebook, etc., you are giving your post global reach, you are deluding yourself. Such media only have global reach for "influencers."
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday May 09 2022, @02:59PM
Which is why I love Soylent News!
...is people!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mmlj4 on Saturday May 07 2022, @07:20PM (4 children)
I've been working on SafeGreet for a decade now, in my copious spare time. I did a proof-of-concept in the beginning, dropped it for like 4 years, then picked it up again and started on a ground-up refactor. I've had to learn a lot of concepts, which is basically the point, The main site is only a placeholder, but the dev version is at https://newsg.flockbox.net [flockbox.net] . If you play with it, you'll think it works OK, but the groups functionality is half-implemented, plus there is no support for Unicode as of yet.
Need a Linux consultant [joeykelly.net] in New Orleans?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @11:53PM
That's a BIG plus! Sign me up!
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @07:50AM (2 children)
Free Speech (Definition): Speech that does not allow criticism of , 'patriotic Americans', some political views and Christianity.
(Score: 2, Funny) by mmlj4 on Sunday May 08 2022, @03:42PM
What was your username again?
Need a Linux consultant [joeykelly.net] in New Orleans?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @06:39PM
you know it's going to be some hilarious bullshit with a name like SafeGreet. Why not CowardBoogers?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Saturday May 07 2022, @07:26PM (2 children)
Nobody's [diasporafoundation.org] ever [soylentnews.org] considered [humhub.com] that [elgg.org] before [opensource-socialnetwork.org]!
The tech isn't the hard part of creating a successful social network. People are. And have been since at leas t the days when the online social network was called "Usenet".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @04:02AM
> when the online social network was called "Usenet".
..or FidoNet
..or RTTY CBMs (Computer Based Messaging--the term used before "BBS") and pre-computer SEL-CALL, that's been around since the 1950s (at least)
(and there's no argument that the earliest CW Nets before the 1920s were social networks..)
> The tech isn't the hard part of creating a successful social network. People are.
I wrote and still run a distributed decentralized BBS that works over the APRS Digipeater mesh network two years ago. I test it regularly to check it's accessibility from a Baofeng, and the span of the network is half the country. I'm still the only user :(
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @03:59PM
thanks for all the examples.
methinks the main problem is "scalability".
if it is centralized, infrastructure must grow and will incur more and more costs? "want it free? welcome ADs and we blame people paying for ADs for the intrusion 2 to your privacy..."
it should also not be called "social media" but the "permission-2-write-2-remote media" 'cause it all hinges on having (limited?) writing permissions on a foreign (not under your control) server.
2 other problems need to be solved also before:
1) so-called domains. these are centrally administered. you need foreign approval to get a identity/domain.
if we can work together and help each other "somehow" to give/retain identities, more services can be hosted on infra that is under your control?
onions already do this? excellent solution would work over changing IPs.
2) the purge of "push" email. we need email to be "pull". we think we are pulling email when we login to web-email but in reality we are fetching something that has already been pushed. thus we get the problem of SPAM.
if above 1) can be solved and we retain "push" email then foreign users can write to our email via push.
one solution to minimize SPAM is via "pull" email which would look something like getting a minimal token to your ownZ server and the token allows access to foreign-senders storage to "pull" the email. thus the bulk of the SPAM would reside physically (ones and zeros) on the SPAMmers storage infra.
i think with these 2 "upgrades" to the internet many problems plaguing (centralization, censorship, for-profit-2-hell-with-everything-else, privacy loss, etc, ?) internet today could be solved?
one special one would be a minimal simple way to setup a direct one-2-one encrypted coms channel?
observation: for popular torrents (>1000 seeders) i saw less then 10 seconds to get *.torrent via a magnetlink and DHT ONLY and no central tracker involved.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @07:39PM
Is the MSM really promoting the fediverse and free software? What's the catch?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday May 07 2022, @08:24PM (6 children)
Social networks are not made of code, and are not "built." Social networks are groups of people who interact with one another, and can use an online tool for doing so.
It may be easy to build something usable by people, but that doesn't mean that it's easy to build a network of social people who will use it. Just the opposite, in fact.
If it were easy to build a social network, facebook would sink into oblivion overnight in favor of less oppressive options.
But guess where the people (my high school, college, and military peers, for example) are? I'll give you a hint, they are not on mastodon nor gnu-social.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @09:32PM
FTFY.
If there existed an API allowing people to control their own data on social networks using third-party tools, then less oppressive options would not have any problems. The way dreamwidth.org presently serves for the users of livejournal.org as an escape from heavy-handed Russian censorship.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Saturday May 07 2022, @09:54PM (2 children)
One feature I'd like is namespacing. I'd like a main account, but be able to join groups and stuff as e.g., myusername.sibling, myusername.work, myusername.fun, myusername.tech, myusername.faith, myusername.politics so I can clearly separate my concerns from each other. And possibly close/delete/suspend/lurk with just one while still keeping the others active. And then be able to view communications related to one or a few of those spaces at a time, to provide better scope and context when trying to go deep on an area of concern.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @10:05PM (1 child)
You could call them "circles"?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday May 09 2022, @12:34AM
I do miss g++.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Sunday May 08 2022, @03:06AM
Netzero was huge once. Myspace was too.
There's more than a couple few people who would walk on facebook for a non commercial means of socializing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @05:36PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @05:30AM (1 child)
...as the Author.
We had this time in the Internet. Every smaller or larger project had its forum, its "planet" composed of user content, sometimes curated by the maintainer, sometimes in form of directory. Registering on such forums caused not much to be feared of - any alias e-mail could be used, there was no phone or address verification and of course pages had no tracking instruments to bind traffic from one site to the user of another site. While it was quite commercial, usually the most active users did a yearly chip-in for the server which, even if modern hardware is better, was cheaper than today.
But social media is made of users. Today if you put the forum, you will not get a community, you will get nothing as there will not be any users. Commercial social networks are just more efficient in addicting users than such sites, just like a cigarette is more addictive than eating salt crackers.
Additionally, many things revolve about the possibility. If it is possible to do some more, as they now call it, "monetisation", it will be done. In the epoch of forums, when some op sold data it was a violation of netiquette and it was quite a scandal. Now it is a normal thing that the sponsors can break netiquette as they want. If data can be sold, they will be sold.
So, sorry, this train left the station, we will not be going back to user-controlled or distributed social platforms, because now we have social platforms instead of communities, and social media are not communities.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @03:00PM
We Built A Garden
The problem is the bullies, corporations and the police.
We planted a garden. A wonderful rose garden. And there were people stopping to look at it and say "hey, that's neat!" and we, the good natured fools we are, thought it would be great to open our garden to the public, so they can come in and enjoy it. And hey, who knows, maybe some of them might want to plant a few roses themselves? We can only benefit from it, right?
So we let them in, even showed them how to plant roses. And while they were not really too good gardeners, we handed them a few tools to make the work easier for them. And some of them (ok, a handful of them) actually went and built something nice. Most just wandered about and smelled a few roses. We even built them a few paths they could wander on so they don't accidentally stumble upon that field we built that camo net over, ya know, with our "special spices".
A few came in and trampled all over the roses. We shrugged and grabbed them and threw them out, because we not only know how to plant roses, we also know how to use their thorns to smack those bullies about and give them a wedgie on their way out. We build this garden after all, and we know every plant and every bush here, you can't hide from us! Well, ok, I admit, some of us thought it's fun to make fools out of the idiots that have no idea how to plant roses and snuck into their gardens when they weren't looking (and too stupid to close the door so people can only look but not touch), dyed their roses pink and blue polkadotted, mostly for fun and to ridicule them. It was good natured fun, hey, we did that to each other too and we really had a good laugh!
One cardinal mistake we made is that we built a few paths to the camo net patches, too, because, hey, they're nice folks and wanna have some of the good stuff too, what's the harm in giving them some? Well, there's not really a problem with that, but when the bullies trampled across our fields, they also trampled through the fields of those that can't defend themselves, and these guys started to call for the police. And they eventually stumbled towards our camo net patches and, well, erh... well, they decided that it's a problem, ya know? If we hadn't built paths to them, only we would have found our way to those "special places", through the hedges and the overgrown paths that need machetes to get to. Few policemen had those machetes...
Also along came the corporations who found out that people love to wander in our nice garden and started to built there too. At first, we didn't bother to worry. Like the native americans didn't worry when the first whities came along, we let them settle in our garden. Until suddenly we were told that we can't go to a few places of our garden anymore because that's now off limits. In our own garden! Not to mention that they were crying bloody murder if you went and polkadotted their roses!
And now we're sitting here, in our ever shrinking corner of our once wonderful garden, trampled down by the masses, broken up into lots by corporations with a policemen at every corner making sure you don't plant where you're not supposed to, and of course that you don't try to camo net anything.
If there's any lesson to learn, than that we should not let the masses in next time we build a garden. The seeds will be more expensive, granted, but at least we can grow what we want and keep the harvest.
-
Those who do not remember the past do not understand their present and have no future except to repeat mistakes.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @12:11PM
"they're actually really easy to build."
I can see that it might be easy to connect a small group of cooperating folks.
But connecting folks to a worldwide stream of competing ideas might be a wee bit more complex.
Unless you can read from a super human firehose, some sort of filter is needed to select what to read.
(As in trusted folks you know and journalists?)
Smells like a rating system, just one that's purpose isn't to make more clicks.
To scale, somehow, these new systems need to incorporate rating. Maybe the rating system for rating posts is also rated by the same rating system?
(Does that make the ratings 'meta' posts. Now where have I heard that word before?)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Sunday May 08 2022, @05:40PM
I've ocasionally thought about "what if" back in the day I had tried to create some kind of social network like Facefuck or Twatter before they were around.
It always comes back to: I wouldn't have.
First of all, as a programmer I could write all the code in the world and that isn't going to do anything at all. Even if I had had piles of money to invest in servers, high speed network connections, and advertising to bring people in, what would be the point? What would such a network even DO? How would I profit from it? Just make the world a better place by letting people share what they had for breakfast? I don't know.
The key to social media was when they figured out how to use it to spy, mine user data, manipulate people, and enhance advertising. Then all of a sudden investors were throwing money at them.
Back then I would have assumed this was all illegal, if not just so unethical that nobody would touch it. Well, somehow turned out it isn't, and dumfucks love getting their privacy raped.
The big problem about creating anything like that today is it will just get slurped up. Several forums and sites I regularly visit are hurting as activity seems to slowly be moving to Facefuck.
Good luck trying to overthrow existing social media sites, or even just existing along side them. Unless you are creating something even more evil, it probably won't go anywhere.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @06:59PM
Twitter has been controlled by censors for years and no one bats an eye.
Flush with cash guy buys it and proclaims "freedom of speech" and everyone loses their minds.