The intention was to provide hosting for web pages relating to university societies, with good facilities for transfer of ownership (since there was annual turnover of the society administrators). Nowadays this role would be filled by Facebook pages, but the SRCF is still there and still useful.
I believe if you want to get the co-op model off the ground you have to start with a particular user community that you're a member of. Then you can start scaling it to other communities. But crucially this process must be lead by thinking of the user community and their needs, not the technology - the technology is secondary and you can always tape together a solution somehow.
(We "nearly" came up with Facebook, called people.ucam.org, but we weren't even the only people in the university looking at the question of "how to stay in touch with your friends after graduating"; it was a common problem of the time)
Another example of a community-driven content hosting site / social network is "Archive of our own": AO3, for fanfic (often NSFW)
I don't know what the root of that evil is, but there are undoubtedly multiple factors involved. First of all, most people have WhatsApp already.
Secondly, it is effortless to use. With federated systems, you always have to choose a provider. Once you have overcome that hurdle, the privacy-sensitive people like us do not want to share their address book with the server so finding your people is a manual setup for everyone (another hurdle).
Last but not least, the client landscape of XMPP is still far from perfect. If you want to use end-to-end encryption (e.g., OMEMO) there are finally some clients which work with each other (Android: Conversations, iOS: ChatSecure, Desktop: Gajim), but configuring all that stuff (Server + Clients), is not as easy as pushing a button. Other features like video calls are still very fragmented and rarely work if different clients are involved.
I think it would take ten dedicated developers about a year to fix all those problems (if they would agree on common goals and focus on those) and even after that, we would still have to sell the product.
What the big platforms have done is eliminate friction at all the critical parts, to make it easy for users to onboard, easy to share, easy to grow within the platform, and of course hard to leave.
I've been thinking about a low cost but not free platform too. If it ever happens, it will have to be AT LEAST as frictionless and enticing as the existing platforms. The table stakes are very high. Since cost in of itself is a source of friction, that means the rest of the platform needs to be even MORE frictionless.
That said, the fact is that the mainstream alternatives are handicapped by their own success and are afraid to change anything of their core features. Starting a new platform would be an opportunity to revisit many of the original design choices, and perhaps one could do surprising new things at that point.
I think the co-operative model is interesting economically as well because as far as I can tell, there are at least some cases where it does work out to be economically stable on a reasonably long term basis (decades anyway), and I presume it changes things a lot, organizationally, if the main goal isn't just "lowest common denominator software for the sake of maximal mass adoption and growth."
Facebook and Instagram had no trouble stealing the concept of 'stories' from Snapchat and Facebook also copied their augmented face masks.
Did WhatsApp use a lot of open source stuff under the covers that we could leverage in building our own secure person to person/ group chat platform?
A disrupter would have to have even less friction but would be competing against a product that already has a significant network effect and a very generous backing by Facebook. I'm speculating that FB will eventually nudge WhatsApp users to Messenger, or find a way to gradually merge the services to the point where they are identical, especially w.r.t. advertisement.
In that respect, it was brilliant of FB to acquire WhatsApp: not just for the users, but to make it hard for any newcommer to disrupt things (hard to compete againsts free and frictionless).
There are many (open-source) solutions for building your own secure messaging system, XMPP and others.
I'm happily running (I should also disclose: developing) my own server and talking with friends and family who use e.g. Conversations as an alternative to WhatsApp.
The only friction to the end-user is the same email/password request every other service makes, but you want to use CL because it's the de facto place for listing your apartment or whatever.
The table stakes are another reason why this endeavour won't happen as a small effort.
I think it would be better to build something that was sufficiently compelling and had enough new features/UX that people would want to use it all on its own, as something better than the existing ad-supported options, and then we would enable federated options as an alternative form of access. But I think the primary UX has to be "log in to web app" or "install mobile clients," not "fiddle with XMPP settings" (because that is too fiddly, like you're saying, and you have to meet people where they are).
This being said — it's excellent that you run your own server and managed to get some of your social network to actually use it!
I also run XMPP server for friends and family and actually all of them are very happy with it. With Conversations this entire experience looks like any other modern messenger.
Network effects are of course a problem in any decentralized environments but looking at how quickly companies drop their solutions (Google?) or abuse the data you give them (Facebook?) I don't see any other reasonable option. Today Signal is nice and kind, tomorrow they are bought by Facebook and start "fiddling" with the app...
Does Conversations do something extra to support sending messages to people who are offline? If so, how well does it work? Because that's what I find to be the biggest gripe people have (myself included) with XMPP.
Conversations can display a "tick" on the sender's side so you know that a message has been delivered to the user (not just stored on a server).
I guess it works well as I've never heard about a lost message.
You can check the server with compliance tester: https://compliance.conversations.im
Well, then it will never happen :D
The server doesn't really have to support end-to-end encryption as that is part of the clients (in fact, there are some server-side extensions which have to be present, but those are mostly enabled by default).
Afaik, the default ejabberd configuration is very close to what you need, and there is just one part that you have to remove to enable OMEMO [1]. I don't understand why but recently the ejabberd devs introduced that part to their default configuration which makes it harder to use end-to-end encryption.
Nevertheless, if you are very interested in a detailed guide, I could write one as I am thinking about setting up a secondary server as a testing environment.
[1]: https://github.com/processone/ejabberd/blob/master/ejabberd....
EDIT: Moreover, trust is not binary. So while your family might trust you, maybe your dad doesn't want you to be able to read everything he writes your mom or so (you get the idea).
I would like it if my local government funded an alternative to Nextdoor, for instance.
I agree that the issue arises for current systems that allow broadcast (one-to-all) communications such as this forum. I also acknowledge that it exists for email (one-to-one), but I think only because in that case it's so cheap and easy to mass mail something that one-to-one has effectively been automated into one-to-almost-all. I'd also note that modern spam filters are quite good at their job.
But for example, SMS isn't meaningfully moderated in any way yet when was the last time you had cause to blacklist a number?
I don't see any reason why a newly designed system couldn't apply different techniques to (mostly) avoid the problem. Just off the top of my head there's personal whitelists and blacklists, federated systems (pick the centralized ruleset that works for you), community moderation (ex StackExchange), web of trust, the subscription blacklist model that adblockers use...
There is no way for me to stop the US postal office from delivering me giant catalogues of advertisements multiple times a week. I regularly get mail addressed to "current resident." I ought to be able to go to the postal office and say, "If someone doesn't know my name, just don't deliver the letter." It's friendlier for the environment, it would make the experience of checking my mail more pleasant.
The reason I can't do that is because spam is a giant source of revenue for the US Postal service. Coincidentally, the US Postal service has a number of services specifically designed to make it easier for advertisers to get mail into my mailbox. There is, in my mind, no reason to believe that a nationally owned social media platform would have any different incentives than Facebook would.
Email, a federated service that doesn't really make the government any money, doesn't have those incentives. So open protocols that are unaffiliated with any single organization (government or company) work better in my experience, unless whatever service is created is isolated from making profits in traditional ways. There are some good examples of that, but I'm not completely sure the Post Office is one of them.
The good thing is that it relies on XMPP for all the communication, therefore all the instances are still connected to each others allowing communication between all the users of the network and with all the existing XMPP applications.
It offers social features (publications, blog, comments), chat (chatrooms, stickers...) and video-conferencing.
P.S. I'm one of the contributor of the project.
I think facebook has each user valued at about $200USD/year. A 2016 article from the Guardian puts it at $60/year... so I'm not sure which number to believe.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11661387/heres-how-much-you-are-wo...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-...
In my dreams, if the price point were low enough, like "the cost of two coffees per year" or something, and it wasn't irritating to pay it, there are plenty of people who want out of FB and could afford that.
When I started using privacy.com, I found it a lot easier to fund stuff because it was frictionless to generate a CC and drop it into a payment form automatically.
North American and European users are worth a lot more than users in developing countries.
No fees, no development needed, lightweight and has been working for decades:
A listserv.
Everything else is just candy.
> you all pay some nominal membership fee (could you fund servers and developers on $5/year/user?)
People individually run "pubs", which are servers (with hosting costs), but every user also acts as a potential server, caching and proxying encrypted communications on behalf of other users, which acts as a sort of "cost", though it's not directly monetary.
> software would then be developed to fit the agreed-upon needs of the community, without dark patterns or behavior modification projects, openly, and with some kind of community governance
Apart from the central protocol, niche needs are met by various clients—e.g. there is a dedicated chess client for users who just want to play chess over the social network.
> need not be exclusive of technical leadership
While the SSBC is in no way dictatorial and even often jokey, I think their clients demonstrate exceptional technical leadership. The strategy of having a protocol with many clients usually leads to having many disparate clients of low quality. On the contrary, most users use Patchwork, the main stable SSBC-maintained client; it's the most "Facebook-ish" of the clients and is very intuitive.
A co-op social network sounds an interesting idea. Doubly so if it gave only the sort of features early Facebook had - i.e. the ones useful to the users, before it became about the algorithm, engagement and so on. Wouldn't be surprised if there's something along those lines on github.
It would be really nice to have some choices that actively reject the "users are data cattle" model, even if it goes back to the BBS world of lots of little, barely connected, islands.
And as with all the forms of surveillance, kids are escaping it.
I'm in SE Asia right now, in a country where Facebook Zero makes it available to everyone regardless of income, and guess what? Not only does everybody have a Facebook account, many women have at least three: one for friends, one for family, and one that is anonymous to hide their activity from their friends and family.
I know it's against Facebook's TOS, but it's so easy to create a pseudonymous username. So it's the same for American teenage kids: they just create a new account with a fake name. If they are abandoning Facebook it's because they like Instagram or Snapchat more, not because their parents are on Facebook.
In there, you can have some communities that run co-op and some that are free to use. It also makes the ecosystem more open compared to centrally managed software, even if it's transparent and without dark patterns.
(Plus, how do you police it if you're talking about a company that is well versed in the art of 'taking it over the line by 1 inch per year')
But you have to actually have the communities before you can do the federation (this is also how it works in the offline world — it's not like people design interoperability protocols and THEN found villages).
It's more like: we could build nicer, community-funded, sanely run social software, and alongside them we could support XMPP type features for hackers who are able to use them, or to interoperate with other alternative online communities that may be emerging.
I think, specifically, of the lesswrong site and the collection of tools and user-created content that are collected under a single site there.
If you have a thousand unconnected small networks, you're going to be unable to compete with worldwide networks.
Of course, for some communities the value is that all your friends aren't there, but in general even if I was willing to pay for that service (and it would probably have to be 5 usd/month, not per year due to scale) most of the people I know wouldn't be willing to pay that and so the idea is DOA.
It is however quite possible that model would work for other types of software -- after all that model was exactly what Danish farmers used to fund the companies that could process their milk.
So, effectively it is more work per user to manage smaller groups than larger ones -- which is fine, if you find people who want to do this task. Another approach might be a community driven model -- where detractors could be ostracized. For very small groups this might work out well, but as the group gets larger, the potential for misuse rises also.
Lanier certainly has the chops, the background and the deliverables to be taken seriously.
I think those guys are super important as a counterweight to the fawning and gushing (in general) tech press and I for one wish that they have far more reach, impact and influence.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30724899-radical-technol...
Some tasks of our life can be taken over by software, but others should stay with us.
Especially with the advent of AI, engineers are racing to automate everything: from suggesting us new friends, new music, with which dresses we look smart, and so on. Automating everything will cause the atrophying of our skills and we will become a bunch of lonely depressed, smartly dressed users with thousands of virtual friends and perfect music playlists that never deviate from our preferred music.
Automation is fine and dandy, but not for everything.
The idea that we're all being duped and manipulated into using something we don't need so that we'll view ads is overblown. It's not false, it's just not a new thing and it's not a problem.
Media has been intertwined with market research, ratings, feedback, and advertising since before the electronic age. Advertising platforms have been getting incrementally better at learning what people want, how to push their psychological buttons, and how to retain customers.
There's a tendency to treat social media users as helpless victims of an evil empire who don't realize their personal details are being used to target them for exploitation. People aren't that stupid. They know what they're trading for these great free products we all use.
> People aren't that stupid. They know what they're trading for these great free products we all use.
Maybe for most HN readers, but I don't think that is the case for most users.
I would say the average user has no idea what exactly they are trading for.
Also: we don't need software for most things in life. But we like software, as it usually makes things better.
Searched for it on ddg and here is what the excerpt from Wikipedia says: "App.net was an ad-free online social networking service and microblogging service which enabled its users to write messages of up to 256 characters."
Turns out that they did a lot of stuff later that I would have liked but by then I was probably using WhatsApp.
My thought is that something new would need to not replicate the UX of existing social software, but would need to think of better alternatives. Competing with existing giants on their own terms, but with a different business model, is a hard sell, probably too hard.
so if getting more users means getting more money, then the focus could be just on making the best service possible instead of focusing on ads and tracking to keep things running
But in foundations and donation-based nonprofits, what you see is that they become organizationally focused on chasing donations, they have more and more irritating "please donate to us" fundraising staff, they may have to bend their mission towards whatever can please the local philanthropists, and they sometimes end up seeming more worried about organizational survival (via procuring money) than with whatever their mission is supposed to be. Another way of putting this is that it seems pretty hard to make voluntary donations provide stability, and organizations like stability.
I'm open to having my mind changed about this, but it seems to me that it creates some major new organizational failure modes when you decouple the mission from the source of revenue.
The plain truth of it is that most people[1] want their internet fix for free, and are prepared to expose all manner of personal information in order for it to STAY free. The moment Facebook actually starts charging for features, people will start to jump ship en-mass to the next free social platform.
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[1] Us lot on HN are not 'most people'.
I live where HN has absolutely no audience, think middle of nowhere midwest. And I can 100% say that not one person I talk to has any idea what data is available about them, for sale, right now. They don't even understand why it's important to know what permissions your apps on your phone ask for.
I think if tech folks made an effort to get people to understand, in language they can access, what data is out there, we would see a massive (attempt at a) shift in how people use the internet
Edit: Proof of what I say, that i just remembered. My father is extremely right wing, pro-Trump. He was told, by whatever 'news' agency he happens to listen to on AM radio (Maybe Laura Ingram?) that Facebook was doing awful things and they explained, in the most basic terms, what kind of data Facebook may have on you. So father dear deleted his Facebook account.
And opened an Instagram.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
2) it would make abuse much harder: registering 1M fake users becomes costly, and the payment leaves a track to a real credit card.
Obviously this would probably never get the global reach of a no-fee Facebook, but I would use something like this in a second, many of my friends would too, and I sometimes daydream about what I would need to do to get it off the ground.