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They say social media makes roughly $6 per user per quarter. We all know a number of social media companies collect enough data to make us uncomfortable. In 2018 it was revealed that companies took that data and use it to swing elections in a number of countries to the biggest buyer. Data has real world consequence. After the reveal people haven't significantly decrease use of social media and globally it grew
$6 per quarter isn't a lot. With that money we can easily fund an open source decentralized social media. There has been a number of attempts but for one reason or another the average internet user has never used any of the open source. Some issues are lack or poor quality of web/mobile/desktop apps, no easy to use service to get start and lack of moderation to prevent abuse (scams, bullying, noise to distract and degrade performance or user experience, etc)
What I'd like is to fund a set of protocols (not specific to social media) and apps to improve programmers lives then see if we can proceed to repurpose some of them for a decentralized social media. The following is a list of what I think would be popular and I have a draft of each protocol if people are interested. Each of these should be usable from a command line app and from the web.
- Authenticate (with a discovery extension). Allow users to authenticate a device and give them per app permissions. ie my desktop may be a full admin, my phone will have read/write (but not overwrite/delete) on file sharing (so I can archive photos) and my raspberry pi may have read only permission on few apps and no permissions on others.
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- Event, file and SQL database. Apps running several device can publish/subscribe to events so they can synchronize with eachother. For example I may select a number of photos on my phone and 'share' it to my file server. It will also publish an event so my desktop can download them so I'll either A) have a copy on my desktop for fun or B) have a copy so I can start editing the moment I sit down.
This can be further optimize with a discovery protocol. If the file server is remote and your desktop is on the same network the desktop and phone start syncing via local network
- Public event and database. Same as above (per app basis) but more complicated and restrictive due to it being shared with public/unverified users and friends. Your friends may have permissions to write comments and edit/delete their own but a stranger attempting it will have their comment/data ignored
- Data discover: Your friend may have written a comment or review on a third party page. The third party does not want to moderate comments/reviews however the app supports it. This piece allows users to write about third parties and their friends to discover it
(This will be at a later stage) - File Caching, balancing and a peer to peer extension: If a file becomes popular it may be cached on several networks and users may have better download speeds due to accessing a closer network or from pulling files from a less busy network. This may be more noticeable in places where internet access is slower outside the continent or if the user is on an island
Apps that might be built:
- An RSS like feed so people can subscribe to eachothers blogs, podcast or to consume events - A calendar app for teams or married couples that have different apps on the different OSes they used - Sharing comments on an unmoderated video site (ie videos might be moderated but comments are only seen if your friends with the comment author or if their friends with the content poster) - An email like system that uses the file sharing protocol to retract emails and attachments)