Facebook Alternative, Looking for Collaborators.

Central I need help
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Hi All,

I am looking for collaborators to build a User-Centric and Decentralized alternative to Facebook (and more). In short, the technology is finally mature enough and the demand strong enough. It is going to take a diverse team that can tackle this multidisciplinary effort, an unconventional and purpose-driven business model, and investors who share the vision. Here is some of my thinking, https://mosaic.social/.

If this sounds interesting let’s talk and see if there is an opportunity to join forces.

Kind Regards,

Adam

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Social media is the dregs of society, we need less not more imo.

All the social ailments of today this site focuses on are driven by big tech and many of these companies are in social media.

I was peer pressured into joining by friends when I moved continents to stay in touch. Facebook horrifies me but they were babes I would have done anything they said.

We lost touch and my feed became news articles with false info and people I went to high school with bragging about material wealth they don’t have and lust for.

Echo chamber, bullying, driving false narrative, propaganda, incitement to terror, beheadings are fine but nude art breaks the rules?

IMO all social media is akin to mental cancer in humans and however well intent it is evil and will always be.

No one was more excited for gab than me when it came out. Finally a place without censorship and advertising. You can pay if you want and get perks and be supportive or just be free account loudmouth and mooch their service, which is what I did after leaving fb years ago for my mental and spiritual wellbeing. Ran out of reasons to keep my account.

So after about a month, the nazis and islamofascists became the majority and they built spam bots to push blood libel and all their fave tropes with links to snopes or whatever lazy rubes like to confirm their false narrative by these days.

And after a few more through the computer death threats from people who don’t like my posts (most were satire or sarcastic humor but whatever…) I left gab too. Maybe my account exists still but that taught me about good intentions and social media and how this whole ball of wax needs to be stopped.

Imagine if Hitler or Stalin had this power to manipulate people or spy on them with touch of a button?

All that is stopping the “turn key tyranny” Snowden warned us about is the right asshole with his finger on the button. Arguing over which elite or group or politician is going to turn it is irrelevant. I am tired of feeding the beast that is killing us!

No more social media. If you crave interaction maybe actually socialize. It’s less profitable but actually benefits the user sometimes.

My 2 cent take or leave… No offense to anyone meant just my opinion and nowhere else listens.

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I am just wondering what are the consequences on the proposed project if some of the technologies being supposedly to be utilized were partly funded by the government considering today’s context. Just my thoughts.

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Social media is a tool, it depends how we use it, how we design it, and how it is governed. This forum is social media.

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P.S. I happen to agree with much of what you wrote I just don’t think most of the issues are inherent to social media. Part of the reason that I want to build an alternative is because I don’t think people will stop using social media and Facebook and the like it a structural threat to a free and open society.

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This seems to be another issue where social media is defined in a kind of ambiguous way. I didn’t think I used any social media but I put screen tracking on my devices and they say huge percent of my time is on social like 40% and they qualify texting and any chat or text app as “social media” even though its 100% text based.

So to me it means twitter, facebook, there is a popular one in russia VK same things, stuff like that where you voluntarily reveal private info to show off.

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Hi @creatinglake, welcome to our community!

A very beautiful site you have put together. I am fully behind most of the technology choices I see there, though they are complex technologies and many still in their infancy. The peer-to-peer, decentralized web movement is still very fragmented and facing lotsa challenges.

I am also on the Solid forum and wrote something about their most important challenge as I see it: The biggest challenges for Solid are not technical in nature. Most Solid devs are in academic circles, people formerly involved and still longing for Semantic Web. They are not really all that interested in ActivityPub, whose devs can be found mostly on Mastodon.

The standardization behind the technology stack is also problematic. The power of W3C has waned, and you find mostly just some loose community groups working on the standards. ActivityPub is full of holes and building an interoperable fediverse app requires studying the codebases of other implementations.

Regarding DAG, I am curious if you have particular technologies / projects in mind. Some interesting P2P technologies like datproject.org (and beakerbrowser.com) and also scuttlebot.io completely went their own way in their tech stack and they are incompatible with Solid, ActivityPub et al. Also they are implemented in NodeJS and will not work (well) on mobile for any time to come.

How do you intend to set up your project / platform? I would think that in F(L)OSS realms you will find most collaborators, and they value you being an open initiative and having OSS codebases too. I see you mention investment partners. But in that case opencollective.com or liberapay.com might be a better fit.

You may like my Investigating privacy-respecting online identity, data ownership & control solutions posts, and I am curious about your feedback. Also in the past we had a thread Towards the Vision of The Decentralized Web! that you may find interesting.

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@aschrijver thanks for your thoughtful and thorough reply. It appears we are onto many of the same technologies and communities. Will you be at the Rebooting Web of Trust event in Prague in September? Colleagues from my company will be.

As far as the technical complexity, that is true but having direct experience with many of with them I feel they are mature enough to begin bringing them together to create a truly viable decentralized social media platform.

I am in complete agreement about Solid’s academic nature. I lean towards verifiable credentials, decentralized identifiers, and secure data hubs as a solution set but still think the general Solid approach of decoupling app data from apps, and the credibility of TBL, are imporatnt pieces to the puzzle. Acticity Pub is great in spirit but it is not yet actualy self-sovereign it is hub sovereign. The architecture is incomplete and I think that community generally overlooks the need for a business model (an ethical one).

As far as the setup I think the base layer (the Web-based operating system if you will) needs to be open source or something similar. In many ways this base layer is just a set of standards. I don’t see a way, or even have the desire, to make the whole plaform open source, particiulary the apps that run on base OS. Since everything is based on standards users people will have choice. Revenue is required to run the infrastructure–“there is no free lunch”. I don’t think donation-based revenue using Libre Pay would be sufficient to support the scale of such a project but running Mosaic as an Open Collective is a compelling idea. I can share more about my thoughts on revenue, business model, open-source, and governance if you are interested.

I want to leave you with the idea that the various communities/people/funding sources exist to make this happen. It’s a matter of bringing them together around a shared vision.

Thanks again,
Adam

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Here is a DID Blockchain project that I am working on. https://veres.one/

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Check out because there are many out there

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I did a scan of p2p/decentralization technologies in early 2017 and found a landscape strewn with mostly dead and unmaintained projects, and very-promising-looking but technically very immature blockchain projects (littered with scams or unfeasible altogether).

For any project with this scope standardization is key, and I am happy with what Rebooting WoT is doing. I’ll not be at their conference in Prague. Am really following the developments from a distance now.

As for blockchain… I was shocked and disconcerted what I found in my scan and decided blockchain would not be for me for at least 3 to 5 years of furthering maturity. I only read up on blockchain developments now on Hacker News where they are not all-too positive about its future still. I guess for digital identities you’ll find the best use cases for blockchain, though.

Regarding DID I asked about applications without blockchain in this GH issue:

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As you can see in the github thread you don’t need a blockchain to have a DID, it is just one way to implement a DID network. DIDs are versatile in that way. There could be a way to implement DIDs as a WebID if you can afford your own domain name or if there is a cooperative or some other purpose-driven business model controlling the parent domain.

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My first thread on finding the forums here. Thanks to both @aschrijver & @creatinglake for some useful links and promising thoughts.

I’ve fantasized for awhile about a “Meta Social Network” ecosystem.
A key element being an app (or many sharing underlying architecture) that makes it easy to post to (and potentially follow) most of the major “walled gardens”. This could help draw users and make the transition from the behemoths of surveillance capitalism to a more humane, ideally decentralized networks easier & more worthwhile for them.

I still ponder about potential details (friendliness to TOR, encryption, & anonymity for certain interactions / areas with various verification options elsewhere) from time to time, but my mind has been moving toward curation and “attention algorithms”.

How best to tilt the machine learning based balance of power away from the surveillance capitalists. Many ideas swirling here. Must need to percolate more to find the right words &/or forum / threat to be shared.

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Hey everyone,

sorry, I’m also new here and searching for the right thread with a list of corresponding projects.

Another one to add which covers some aspects, is


‘knowledge, social, and action forum’, mainly for non-profits, open source, donation-funded (slow growth), ethical use codex (keeps hate at bay), a host of discussion features, based in Germany and compliant with data protection law, not sure about the tech specs, apparently scalable now;
interface and algorithm not yet attention-optimized, nor citizen-centric data (rather sparse data collection),
could benefit from a collaboration with humane tech seniors.

Cheers!

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Take a look at: https://maatricks.wordpress.com/2019/08/29/on-your-mark/
I/We are working on a new social learning network for health, wealth, love and inspiration for NE India youth (first) then select cities/countries world-wide.
The idea is really simple… but there is a learning curve to navigate.
:smiley: