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A social network designed on social interactions

jma@mbuf.net (jma) — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 00:00:00 Z

## Intro

When we mention social network, most users of Internet will think about Facebook, Twitter, TokTok, Instagram, SnapChat.

What is a social network? Human is a social being. We need to interact with other people. Communicating and sharing with a group of friends, friends of a group of friends, etc.. (reucrring function ;-). All of this feels so natural to us, such as with our family, coworkers, and so on…

## Early days

In the early days of public Internet, a pionneer protocol emerged called NNTP. Usenet, as it was called, the protocol was published in 1986. NNTP permits news articles from news servers to share with each news server that wanted to subscribe in some categories and a list of peers.

internet service providers, assiocations, could run their own Usenet server and integrate the newsgroup network. People could then debate for any kind of topic, react about a published article, share pictures of their cats. (Yes cat pictures have been present from the early days of Internet).

There was no central server that would decide what to publish or not. Each Usenet server administrator could decide what to block or filter. This was a normal design of using Internet and provide services by relying on communities to setup their nodes and integrating Usenet network.

This led many Usenet servers to come up, in many different countries, many different cities, many different communities. Each managing their own way their Usenet server.

Internet architecture natively encourages such design that follows the interconnection of different groups of people. It follows what is the human social interaction.

## Profit model

Some commercial actors, such as the popular called social networks people can cite by heart, created closed and proprietary networks. Goal was to lock their users in the company’s service and ensure they remain connected as much as possible. Profit could then come from finance with advertisment, personal data exploitation.

Online services do cost money, online means hardware and electricity, both need to be paid. So, if you don’t directly pay the service with your money, a profit-driven model gets their money by exploiting your attention, presence, and personal data. terms of service didn’t read will give you some insights about the online services you may be using without paying with your money.

Profit growth is then proportional to the sum of users and the total time spent. Behaviour-based content and UI can then exploit our cognitive biases to meet these goals for even more profit. Encourage emotions, quick reactions, … As the more profit you gain, the more you seek, the deeper you fell in such loop.

This is as much social as green in green energy.

## Discover Secure Scuttlebutt

Secure scuttlebutt is a FOSS libre project. It is a decentralised social network, taking advantage of the architecture of the Internet. Shortly summarized: a database protocol for unforgeable append-only message feeds. This protocol permits development of applications…a social network for instance!

Main concept: users should own their personal data and control the exploitation of it. User data is stored in the user device, there is no central company to keep them. You can then decide to use whatever data preservation strategy fits the best your needs. Let the user decide, this is a real change, you are not anymore a powerless consumer.

your social account is just a cryptographic keypair (your identity) plus a log of messages (your feed) stored in a local database. SSB becomes a social network when those local feeds are shared among computers through the internet or through local networks. Secure Scuttlebutt, SSB, uses the gossip protocol over a peer to peer network architecture. Your SSB application, when online, tries to sync with your friends, contacts, family, also using SSB.

Assuming you have close friends, you may meet them regularly at different locations. SSB can sync directly over the same WIFI.

A nicely made video describes how is SSB different from other social networks we use to know by showing a use case.

SSB can be independant of Internet. You contacts/friends in your diary shows their public key. You could save updates on a USB stick, give the stick to a friend & they could get the updated content. This would then work for sneakernets.

You can travel where there is no Internet access, post your messages during the travel, and SSB will sync whenever you come back connected to Internet. You can consult at any time your content, received posts, offline, this has no dependance to a connected server.

Doesn’t it sound like an application that respects your time offline? It is up to you to decide when you’re online or not. No algorithm to ensure you become addict to stay connected at all times.

This also means that SSB is a good fit for areas where the Internet connection is unreliable. We need to also consider all the different areas of the world.

There is no global directory of users. You have to know the public id of someone to interact with. As such, groups, communities, evolve as in the real world, there is no enforcement for a global group. SSB can remain very local if your group is only local. As said, SSB will support what the user decides, no the other way around.

Once you have a friend on SSB.

you see her posts
you see posts from people she follows This, again, fits what we do in real life.

Pubs: public nodes that user can follow. bots that’ll follow you back, allowing you to see the profiles of others connected to them. Think like real pubs where you meet your friends or new people.

SSB is a young social network, multidevice is not yet supported.

It is an append-only log. This means that once you post a message it cannot be deleted. This provides advantages against censhorship, but also highlights the fact that you must pay attention to what you post. But think of it, your posts will remain in the database of your friends, and possibly friends of friends, but not further. They won’t have a global visiblity, because there won’t be a central server to get a copy of it. Private posts are end-to-end encrypted so nobody else as your recipient can read them.

peer-to-peer exposition: as you directly connect with your contacts, they will know you real public ip address, as they will reveal it to you. Well…the same that is revealed to any website with ad trackers you connect to. If you require privacy of a certain degree, this won’t involve only SSB, then you should be using a VPN all the times, or you already know how to use Tor to decouple your public ip address.

No giving off the impression that everything is perfect and that anyone is better than anyone. It feels, well, real, which is something online socializing has been sorely lacking.

Centralized social media platforms have failed society in many respects. misinformation, ego-driven content (the constant thirst for likes and followers), groupthink, and the fact that people don’t really listen to one another on platforms like Facebook and Twitter

Scuttlebutt removes the selfish incentives of social media, as we currently know it, by purposefully narrowing your network. using Scuttlebutt (and its apps, like Manyverse) is to escape the rat race of mainstream social media and find a quieter, less pressured place to connect to other people Scuttlebutt is by definition not always-on, like Twitter or Facebook. It’s sometimes-on, to give you time to enjoy life off the grid — on a boat, or otherwise.

SSB has the concept of rooms. This provides a server that can act like TURN for VoIP. To ease the connections of each user, wordaround the NAT or double NAT issues, a dedicated ssb node, self-hosted, can privide invite links, in an open way or private mode. Each user will connect to that room server. Contacts will then be able to sync with each other in an end-to-end-encrypted tunnel relayed by the room server.

The room feature provides an intermediate solution to pure peer-to-peer connections that may be difficult in some network configurations. With rooms, no peer can directly know your ip address as communication is relayed via the room server.

Pubs hold copies of several SSB user accounts. If those are your friends, you can sync with them, while they are offline. Pubs permit to discover new people.

Rooms do not store any data. Online friends connect to each other via the room host.

It all started in nodejs for programming, but different languages are coming into the scene such as Go and Rust.

SSB won’t be mainstream, and has no goal of become the one. However it provides a human-based design respectful social network that people are free to join. This a great FOSS project that gives power to the users and does consider real life offline as a great time to live.

Why twitter users keep complaining about censorship?

jma@mbuf.net (jma) — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 00:00:00 Z

## Intro

This article will only consider a short message service over ther Internet to build a social network. We assume private and high privacy is not required, so end-to-end encryption is not mandatory, users post public-oriented messages. User accounts are not meant to be hidden, nor anonymous at all.

## Twitter model

Twitter is a proprietary and fully centralized model. Terms of service didn’t read is a nice web site that summarizes complex terms of service, most users never read and care about.

This is the result for Twitter:

Now, would you still consider fair to complain against Twitter that they apply the terms of service you just accepted to use the service? Isn’t that weird to pressure Twitter directors to disrespect their terms of service just because you disagree?

Sure you didn’t care for the terms of service when you started using it, sure you don’t care for legal contexts, sure you only complain when something happens against you interest.

As in many areas, if a recurrent issue occurs, don’t point at people, but consider the model you are using and the model you contribute to sustain.

Proprietary centralized models can only lead to such censorship situations. So why use it and persist using it? Whoever is at the board of directors, the centralized proprietary model work with profit and does not care about freedom of information.

A small group of people cannot decide for everyone, that just doesn’t work, because we all have different interest, desires, goals, and groups sharing same goals will oppose at a certain time to other groups. So letting a small group lead a centralized model, means you rely on their decisions.

It is a very popular platform, this is true. But popular doesn’t enforce you to use it. Or let’s put this way: as long as so many people don’t care about censorship power in the hands of Twitter directors (whoever they are or will be), Twitter will continue to be so popular.

So, assuming people turn to another service, most users will be reachable on another service. And…what if this other service provides a magic concept, Internet has brought for its resilience,

interoperability?…Hey that could be cool…this would mean any application built this this interoperability mechanism can communicate with another….like…email…

Every Internet user has probably at leat one email address. However there are many many different email services on the Internet. Nobody cares who is the hosting email service, it just works with anyone having an email address. This is plain stupid for any usual user.

This is interoperability : you don’t care who provides the email service, as long as the email service is interoperable with the others.

Before Internet became popular, it was the war of proprietary networks and systems. For the older readers, remember PC vs Mac war? You wouldn’t be able to share documents easily. If you had subscribed to network A, you could not connect to network B, and so on.. It was a fight to who would enslave most consumers. Doesn’t this sound like proprietary online services today?….think twice…

Do you really want to use and support models of communication from the 80s? Or would you prefer to take advantage of the benefits of modern features Internet permit? Because…yes..Twitter is a model of communication from the 80s…event 70s… I mention twitter in this article, but Instagram, tiktok, all share the same old model. They have built a model from the 80s on top on Internet…..ahem…what revolution…

## Mastodon model

mastodon is a federated, decentralized model of social network for short messages (500 characters). It is build of a free software license that protects from a company to be bought and become a proprietary platform.

Mastodon is built is the all the modern concept, features, and advantages Internet permit. It does not lie to you as being new while being what people used in the 80s.

Federated means, as for email, that anyone can run a mastodon server, being someone into computers, an association, a club, a group of friends, a school, a university, a family, a city hall, you-name-it..

So there are a lot of mastodon servers on the Internet, but those do not belong, as oppose for Twitter to the same board of directors or sharehlders should I say, to be more accurate. Each mastodon server, or group of servers, belong to a different entity.

Each entity has different interests, rules, policies. So you can select an existing instance of a mastodon server, or run you own, self-hosted, or community hosted, managed.

Each mastodon server can then interact with the others and build a global social network, as email today build a global network of email servers but run by many any different entities.

Federation is built dynamically and rely on the users of a server to follow people from other server instances. As long as you follow a user from another server instance, or, some from another server instance follow you, The mastodon server will share posts with the other server instance. This means that the interaction with other mastodon servers evolves, as much as user interact with other user account across the social network. It follows users habits.

Now, with this big picture in mind, do you see that interoperability is key to federated models, federated models are important keys to fight against censorship? One director of an entity cannot decide for other entities.

Mastodon uses a protocol called ActivityPub, W3C standard since 2018, so public 4 years since this article post. This protocol permits interoperability with any application also using the same public protocol. This means that Posts (Toots) from Mastodon can also be received from other social networks, and Mastodon users can follow user from others social networks.

Hey! But this is cool, so I don’t fear losing my friends if they use a different social network!! Correct. So what other social networks provide that awesome modern Internet feature?

Friendica social network
Nextcloud file sharing and management application
PeerTube federated video streaming network
PixelFed Instagram-like in the libre-free-software world
Misskey social network like Mastodon
Plume federated blogging
Hubzilla web sites federation
Socialhome social network
Pleroma social network

Fediverse is the social network. Find here the map of the network.

So…you see that this a completely different model from Twitter, ActivityPub ensures you can continue to interact with users of all these applications/services.

To be fair, the principal mastodon server reported via tosdr.org is not the best:

But there are many different server that you can subscribe to with their own policies, you’ll find one that satisfies your needs and expectations, or you can self-host your own instance also.

The huge difference with Twitter is that you can find a server that meets you policy needs, or you can run your instance. Of course some entities will deny some contents others will accept, but that’s completely different to a global censorship.

Find the interesting mastodon instance, this will guide you and help you find the interesting servers. Prefer a small-moderate size than a huge server.

Mastodon also helps you to migrate your user account from a server to another. So you’re not lost alone if you want to change the server.

## Mastodon…hopefully…won’t replace Twitter

There is a trend, many legacy Twitter users seek to create a user account on some Mastdon instances. Some admins must increase the resources of their mastodon servers. But Mastodon must never grow towards vertical silo such as Twitter.

Mastodon in the fediverse network is meant for federation of many many servers, managed by different communities. As such, no global directory of users, no incentive to be the most popular user in the social network.

Mastodon is not designed to replace Twitter, no content managed by algorithms, no ads, no money-profit (bad buzz won’t give you money). Global diffusion is much less efficient, as any mastodon server administrator can filter, block, based on her decision, local site policy. Also, a mastodon server will only interact with other mastodon servers, if a local user follows a user from the remote mastodon server, there is no global broadcasting. All interactions depend on user interactions.

As such, the usual Twitter user won’t meet the same usage, the same icentives. Mastodon, while also carrying good and bad quality posts (toots), as users as real people, won’t empower bad contents in the same way as a global managed communication service. For instance medium-small size mastodon servers will easily block contents/users/servers they disagree with, so viral toots won’t experience the same consequences.

Hopefully, the new users will learn to appreciate better content at a lower pace, without pressure on users, generated by content algorithms. Hopefully, users will have a better understanding of all the benefits from decentralised services.