The Next Social Networking Community—How We Ended Up With This Dumpster Fire & Where to Go From Here
By Michael Heller, President & CEO SocioProphet
I’ll use this blog series to both establish a historical understanding of social networks on the internet and use this understanding to diagnose some of the problems we see today. My hope is that we can all use this common understanding to build something better; and, in doing so become a better community.
I think it pays a lot of dividends to understand some of the history of the past so that we can learn from them as we look to build something better for the future, so I’ve decided to publish some of my thoughts on this topic and also share some of my findings with the community so that nobody has to go down this massive rabbit hole again in the near term.
Internet History
“The collection of people, hardware, and software - the multiaccess computer together with its local community of users — will become a node in a geographically distributed computer network. Let us assume for a moment that such a network has been formed.”
– J.C.R. Licklider, Robert Taylor, The Computer as a Communication Device, 1968.
One of the best readings on this topic is here: almost a library about the history of the net and Netizens.
As I put this together, I couldn’t help but think about the irony of the fact that in the past 2 weeks broadbandnow.com decided that now was the best time to purge all of the awesome content that they hosted related to our collective internet history and free speech which I hoped to link for you as part of this post.
Now that the purge has begun, we should start to ask questions about the information being purged like, “Why would any company decide to take down their rich collection of content that was dedicated to the history of the internet.”
The cost to host these articles is nearly free so I can’t imagine it was a problem of costs… in fact I’m happy to host them myself and hope to do so and make content like this freely available so that we can learn about how we’ve driven the internet and arrived in the biggest social dumpster fire the world has ever known!
Some Essential Readings on this Topic:
I wanted to share the links below with the group, as they were helpful for me as I developed my own ideas and their inspiration helped to inspire my own — it’s only fair to give credit where it is due.
https://october.substack.com/p/part-i-the-next-great-online-community
https://october.substack.com/p/part-ii-usenet-a-genuinely-public
https://october.substack.com/p/part-iii-slashdot-and-advogato-lets
https://october.substack.com/p/yik-yak-secret-and-the-minimal-state
https://october.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-demise-of-branch
While we are here discussing the topic of social networks, it also makes a lot of sense for us to understand what the current set of alernatives looks like, and then we can have an informed discussion based on our newly formed world-view from a perspective of both social-desirability and its technical merits / implications.
First, Please have a review of the medium article below, as I think it gives the reader a good background and overview of what exists and the primary merits thereof.
https://medium.com/hackernoon/so-you-want-to-leave-facebook-1ab3603f164a
I’ve included the links below to document some of the more recent events in social networking — even among the independent, federated and P2P social networks — that have paved the way to hell despite the best intentions for doing so.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/cage-the-mastodon/
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastodon/
Second, I think it makes sense to understand the technical aspects and distributed systems aspect of what privacy and trust mean across some of the protocols used by these networks that are discussed. Data Privacy and Trust are big considerations for any new social network to overcome — especially for a community where social connectedness as it’s primary goal!
The technically savy reader can read about the technical implications and trade-offs related to the design of some of these networks in the article below — this is the best survey I’ve come across while researching this topic!
Peer-to-Peer based Social Networks: A Comprehensive Survey
“Online social networks, such as Facebook and twitter, are a growing phenomenon in today’s world, with various platforms providing capabilities for individuals to collaborate through messaging and chatting as well as sharing of content such as videos and photos. Most, if not all, of these platforms are based on centralized computing systems, meaning that the control and management of the systems lies in the hand of one provider, which must be trusted to treat the data and communication traces securely.”
“While users aim for privacy and data sovereignty, often the providers aim to monetize the data they store. Even federated privately run social networks require a few enthusiasts that serve the community and have, through that, access to the data they manage. As a zero-trust alternative, peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies promise networks that are self organizing and secure-by-design, in which the final data sovereignty lies at the corresponding user. Such networks support end-to-end communication, uncompromising access control, anonymity and resilience against censorship and massive data leaks through misused trust.”
“The goals of this survey are three-fold. Firstly, the survey elaborates the properties of P2P-based online social networks and defines the requirements for such (zero-trust) platforms. Secondly, it elaborates on the building blocks for P2P frameworks that allow the creation of such sophisticated and demanding applications, such as user/identity management, reliable data storage, secure communication, access control and general-purpose extensibility, features that are not addressed in other P2P surveys. As a third point, it gives an overview of proposed P2P-based online social network applications, frameworks and architectures. In specific, it explores the technical details, inter-dependencies and maturity of the available solutions.”
Here’s the thing, if you are anything like me, once you read all of this stuff you begin to get the idea that this problem is actually bigger than just a social networking platform — there are lots of these and yet as every Netizen can see, the problems still exist.
The fabric of our problems isn’t so much that we don’t have the technology to solve the problems of our times — the issue is that if we want to solve this problem for good it almost requires that we burn down the existing system in order to make the world a better place!
But even as we seem to be finding our way to the technological foundations of a potential solution, we appear to be repeating some of the mistakes from our social and political past instead of building on the conclusions and lessons that we’ve learned from the pain of our the past. How quickly we all forget!
BUT WAIT!!!
Before we think about burning it all down, I think there are a few things that we should consider first and, of course, there will be lots more links and examples along the way! One thing that I want to emphasize as we go on this journey, is that form must fit function — up until now, I think social networking and it’s controlled/heavy-handed evolutionary path has left a rather sour taste in the mouths of many.
The Doomer Scenario that we seem to be heading toward is pretty bleak — one of the best reads on this topic is from Jonathan Zitrain at MIT and I’ve included a link for the interested reader below — I bought myself a copy before I realized I could get it for free but at least you all don’t need to repeat my outlandish pecuniary mistake :P
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4455262/Zittrain_Future+of+the+Internet.pdf?sequence=1
Whatever the end solution is, it must help us to do a better job in the future and build on the lessons we learn instead of devolving into the dumpster fire we see now. And with that, I will leave you to consider how to solve for trust in a globally distributed often anonymous online environment.
Stay tuned for my next piece where I will start to describe the solution space!
~ M
