Thursday, December 06, 2018

Next Social

Current social is just breaking down.

We need to have multiple identities to explore ourselves.
We need to make niche communities.
We need to share.
We need to be safe. From mobs. From censorship. From convention. From intrusion. From lies.
We need to stop being made to believe absurdities lest we commit atrocities.

The next social app must

  • Run on the phone and serve the content off it--it's where we make all the stuff we want to share
  • Allow users to cleanly decide who sees what, as if they are holding the phone up or speaking personally to someone or small groups of people. No accidental broadcasting.
  • Not have a central server. No central authority. All peer-to-peer
  • Have an extensive plug-in architecture
  • Be able to authenticate you, but not make you identify yourself. Our naked selfies and our work impressions have to be seem to come from separate people and stay in different spheres
  • Fuck off with passwords and tokens. It's too difficult. Passwords don't work anymore
  • Allow commerce and small stores, but not store credit cards on some server. No central servers
  • Making a connection should probably proximity based. The depth of the connection should probably be based on amount of interaction. The kind of content shared will need a pro-active AI assistant to stop you from sending nudes to work contacts and cat gifs to your family group
  • Will show us various activity streams, and allows resharing, curating, remixing, adding, threading, blocking, filtering, shadow-banning, keyword-muting, not public by default, and strong user-controls over what kind of people's content you get to see
  • Nobody gets to publicly @ you without an invitation.  It's just been a nightmare of abuse and overwhelming on Twitter. I'm starting to think there should be no public free-for-all stream
It's basically some form of WeChat / WhatsApp on Solid combined with with some ontology of relationships overlayed and thus millions of groups and stores.

And yeah, I don't know what to do about content factories and nazis yet. We know WhatsApp has been misused to ferment social unrest, but that sword cuts both ways to allow democratic movements and violent racism. I have not seen anything decentralised work for that.