Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place?
(carlnewton.github.io)
from carlnewton@feddit.uk to fediverse@lemmy.world on 13 Apr 2024 11:24
https://feddit.uk/post/10422101
from carlnewton@feddit.uk to fediverse@lemmy.world on 13 Apr 2024 11:24
https://feddit.uk/post/10422101
Over the past year or so I’ve been playing with the idea of a decentralised social platform based on your location. By putting physical location at the centre of the experience, such a platform could be used to bring communities together and provide a source of local information when travelling. Please let me know what you guys think.
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So basically “NextDoor: Fediverse Edition”.
I’m not against but I think uptake will be difficult because, depending on your starting region you may be competing with an established product and because there is a heavy venn overlap between people who care about decentralization and those who care about privacy and wouldn’t want an app tracking and to some degree giving away their location.
(Clarity Edit: I have a cold, my ending was guessable , but technically gibberish.)
Hey, thanks the feedback.
That would be one of the ways that I’d use the home functionality, but the categorisation would allow for more niche subjects than just generic local conversation, such as treasure hunting games or historical photos etc. Also, the nearby feature would make it more of a utility for travelling and sightseeing.
I think you’re right in that uptake would be a challenge, but I personally think that would primarily be due to the paradox of not joining a community because it’s empty. It’s something that I mention in the article. I don’t know if it’s something that can be overcome, but I wouldn’t mind giving it a go.
I spent several weeks thinking about this exact idea.
Federation is cool. You could set up each instance to only federate with instances for nearby towns and cities. Maybe a “2 district” radius. Users would only see content for their local communities. Local news stays local. Local government could officially participate if they wish. People you talk to are actually neighbors you might see in person. Larger regions like counties, states, provinces, or even countries, could also have dedicated instances and federate similarly. I think this is the big appeal and it sounds awesome!
There are a few problems 🙂
First is a little bit of confusion with posting. Let’s say that I see a post about a cool new restaurant in my town. I share it with a friend who lives a few towns away and that’s outside the “federation radius”. I can’t share the post with that friend very easily. Maybe the tools could be enhanced to make this viable?
Second is a matter of privacy. How do you know that new accounts belong to people associated with the geographic location of each instance? If you don’t validate, the system will certainly be abused. If you do validate, then users need to supply some real info! Home address, ID, etc. that’s a big deal for users and instance admins.
Third. What happens if you move? Do you have to abandon your old account and start over? Again, the system itself can be developed further to solve this. But that’ll take time and money.
Next is the operating costs. You would need to build thousands of instances to build this system up. And each one would have to be tied to a geographic region. You need new features to handle signups this way. You have the simple cost of running these servers. You probably need a lot of staff to manage it all. This is an expensive platform for one party to run. Alternatively…
It doesn’t have to be one party running this entire system. That’s the point of the Fediverse, right? The operational costs go way down if anyone can run their own instance. But how do you enforce the rules of federating with instances for geographically nearby locations? I don’t see a reasonable way to solve this one.
I could probably keep listing issues. But these are the big ones IMO. If you solve these, the system is viable and could be amazing.
Yeah what if you plan to go on holiday, can you peak into that country or state’s instance ahead of time to see what things are happening? Can you join that instance while you’re physically on vacation?
I detail that the benefit of this idea is that you can do exactly this using the Nearby feed.
Hey, it’s good to know that others have been considering this sort of thing.
My article does detail solutions to some of the issues you’ve raised here, but I’ll go over them each just to see where our visions differ:
All posts will have a publicly available URL. I don’t think it would be good to create closed communities, only solutions that would show the user local posts.
I don’t believe we should validate that people actually live in the community. I think administration of blocking malicious users should work just like Lemmy, but I don’t think the potential for abuse is quite as high, given that the reward for a spammer would be to spam to such a small amount of people. There’s less work in spamming to a larger group by choosing just about any other type of community.
You don’t, just like Lemmy and Mastodon, your account on one instance could be used to interact with other instances. The Connecting Instances section of the article details how this could work from a technical point.
Distributed cost and administration is exactly how I see it. I would only care to host my local instance.
After reading your responses, it seems like we’re describing two different methods of building this system.
Your ideas seems to depend on having many instances for various regions, where all instances are federated with each other. So my local instance somewhere in the US would still be federated with for example, an instance in Germany. But the content I receive would be heavily focused on “nearby” content. Interesting
My ideas are based on an important difference. An instance for my town would only federate with instances for the surrounding towns. Maybe one or two more “hops” away. So sharing content between my local instance and one in Germany would be impossible. Content on my local instance would only be accessible to users in nearby instances. Local content enforced by local federation.
Yes, what I’m describing is federating with all instances, unless of course, you decide to block one. Using the method I’ve described, there would be only one hop necessary from your local to the instance relevant to your location. I can’t picture the benefit of a solution in which you would only federate with local instances, given that the downside would be that you would be restricted to posting in your own location. Let me know if I’m missing something. I appreciate all of this feedback.
I’m generally not a big fan of big social media like e.g. Facebook where you might have many thousands of followers, purposefully grow the numbers, etc. I personally think these things are an everyday evil. Yes, it’s a bit melodramatic 🙂but that’s how I feel. Reddit, and now Lemmy are about as far as I like to go with it.
So the isolation of geo-local-only federation is a feature. The feature, actually. I want an entire social media platform that isn’t capable of focusing on single accounts. Where you are near guaranteed to interact with your local community only. Where it would take a dramatic effort for a single actor to influence global opinions. I want a social media platform that isn’t so easy to manipulate. I could go on and on.
Hey, thanks for this. I think I want the same. I don’t think the idea of being able to follow a profile to see what else someone has posted, or to even be able to private message someone on the platform. The focus being only the place of interest.
you could just design an alogorithm that heavily favors any posts physically close to you. the closer they are, the higher in your feed.
I’d like to see this experiment carried out at a sufficient scale. I feel like there would be a benefit to a gravity like component that takes density and distance into account so that people in sparsely “populated” regions aren’t just effectively seeing an unprioritized feed of the entire network.
I like this! This is an interesting and probably an effective idea for addressing the issue of desolate communities. It does introduce a new issue though. Let’s say for the sake of argument, I created an instance where I lived, and it engulfed the British isles, and then after some time, a new instance was created in Scotland. The posts that were previously made in my (now England) instance that are geographically located in Scotland would need to be transferred to the Scottish instance, because otherwise, they would never be found using the relevant instance finding technique that I’ve described. This doesn’t sound like a terrible technical issue (though probably not an entirely trivial one given that you don’t want to have all of your posts hijacked by a bad actor), but it does sound like a data/privacy issue, in that the users who posted that data have essentially had it transferred to the ownership (and moderation decisions) of somebody else without permission. An interesting thought none the less. I’d prefer the platform to be as simple as possible but if it can’t be picked up due to a lack of interest then that would be a design flaw. On the other hand, I suppose it’ll be in the interest of each owner to foster their own community.
Build it yourself. Stash several mini computers connected to Lora radios around town. Connect to form a mesh all focused on the same fediverse page. Connect wifi hotspots to those servers, connecting phones to the hosted page, not to the internet.
You'd get a localized community site that by design can't be infiltrated by people from across the country hating on you (e.g., San Francisco and Texas).
No idea on feasibility or how much work, but seems to address your question at least.
This is where I thought it was going and, the ideas needn’t be incompatible. If you went local (down to say a zip code/postcode) the individual resources required would be minimal. I wonder if people would be able to contribute a smidge of storage/bandwidth like they do with things like SETI. The local instance/mesh would essentially know your location and sign you up to the right one.
I think something like Nostr would work, as each user would be a node (some allowing broadcast and networking), so moving house or even going on holiday wouldn’t be an issue.
Loving this concept. May I make a suggestion? Show this to and discuss this with your local library. That strikes me as a good potential partner, and a model that can be replicated in most places to potentially help with everything from hosting to community resources access.
Thanks! I’ll take all the suggestions I can get! This is interesting, and something I’ve never really considered for any local project. Is it common for libraries to take an interest in online platforms like this? Which country do you live in by the way? I’m not sure if it’s a knowledge gap on my part or just something that libraries in the UK wouldn’t get involved with.
I live in the UK, but am from Norway. I know a few librarians though, and I know that community libraries are usually (or at least often) interested in projects that can connect their communities and help them with outreach. Something like this certainly could do that, and with libraries existing in most communities there is a built in network for broader proliferation there.
I’m also just very keen on the idea of libraries having a central role to play in the future of the broader fediverse ecosystem.
Edit: It may be key to pitch this to them not as a platform, but as a decentralised community network.
Thanks for this. I like the idea of local libraries being the hub of community connection. If I get a strong impression that people would want this, and if I get the impression that I can do a better job of building such a platform than anyone else willing to do so, I’ll be sure to contact my local library. At the moment, I’m still on the fence on both counts, given that I don’t believe the idea has yet garnered the attention of anyone who has experience developing for decentralised platforms. I’m hopeful though. It sounds like a fun project, but it would be a shame to get to the end of it without help and nobody actually wants it, or to work away at it and find something I’ve overlooked will prevent it from happening. I’ll keep my ear to the ground for a little while.
Yes, I would use this a lot! That’s an incredibly exciting idea and something that I think is desperately needed for the fediverse. I hate to say it, but I think this is something that other (currently more popular) platforms still have an advantage over.
As someone that travels for work, it’s not always easy for me to learn where and what my resources are. I could see a platform like this being able to help out immensely.
Buying/selling/donating groups are something that immediately comes to mind too.
It’s such a joy to read this kind of feedback, and to know that not only would it be enjoyable to have such a platform, but you can foresee that it would be useful. I think I might ask some developers who have experience with building decentralised platforms to see if they think there would be technical issues.
Absolutely! I’m no developer, but I’d be happy to give feedback or help any way that I can, just let me know. Keep us updated too!
Hey, you asked to be kept updated, so I thought I’d let you know that I have been working on Habitat: carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
Awesome! Thanks for the update, I’ll check it out 😁
I have been thinking about this for a while. I want an online community that encourages meet-ups and face-to-face time. No so much twitter-esq, but more event based. Maybe with a feed that shows small announcements, news and reports in a magazine style?
It would be super cool if many towns and cities have their own online meeting place, that can also interact with neighbouring places!
I haven’t look to much into it, but maybe @bonfire@indieweb.social can provide this?
EDIT: Their webpage: bonfirenetworks.org
Is that a matrix address? I don’t know what this is, I’ll look into it. Thanks for the feedback. It isn’t quite how I envision it but it sounds like a lot of people are in favour of local communities, and it appears we don’t have a solution on the fediverse for that yet.
It is a Mastodon username, but I see that it doesn’t resolve correctly.
A federated Nextdoor or local Facebook group seems a great idea as it is clearly popular. My only issue is with dividing Home and Nearby by distance. That works well in ideal cases but can get weird in others.
So I live on the coast at the mouth of a big river. If I look up events near me they are done as the crow flies and it can offer up locations on the other side of the estuary. However, to get their by land involves a long U shaped journey through a tunnel, so what appears to be 5 minutes away is 30+ and of little interest to me.
Another example might be city vs country. In the city 5 miles would drag in a large population, in the country it might not even get you to the next village.
A better solution might be postcodes/zip codes (or equivalent) - they’re usually designed to encompass similar population numbers, so change in size depending on population density. The data is also freely available (it is on OpenStreetMap, for example) and it should be easy enough to crunch through the data and create a database that defines the adjacent areas for a specific postcode (looking them over, it tends to be 5 or 6).
Other than that, I think the main issue would be getting enough people involved as a quiet feed would kill it dead.
This is a really interesting point regarding road Vs actual distances, and large areas that are thinly populated being considered local. Australia certainly comes to mind. I suppose the right thing to do about the latter would be to give both users and owners control over search and area sizes.
The quiet feed point is my biggest concern to be honest. It worked out for Lemmy and Mastodon, but it took revolts from their privately owned counterparts to get them to the place they are now.
It would make defining the extent of any one instance confusing and any level.of confusion is a filter (it’s one of the barriers to widespread adoption of the Fediverse). If you go with something well understood, like postcodes, it would be clear to people what the area covered is.
Perhaps we need to await the enshittification of NextDoor…
fear that every country might have it’s own unique problems, but I’ll look into postcodes, thanks.
Oh, they will have different systems but postal codes are widespread and where they aren’t you can find other alternatives - when a country hits a certain level it needs bureaucratic divisions to ensure everything can be parcelled up and administration devolved. These tend to run on population density as it means that no one area is overwhelmed.
If you rolled out to North America, Europe and Australia/New Zealand (and probably most former British Empire countries as this became a problem in the 19th Century) you could then get good coverage using postal codes and then look at how the other countries do it.
Hey, I’ve been looking into the idea of using population density as an indicator of how big a community should be, but it didn’t feel right that the platform would be deciding the boundaries of each community. I then thought about the idea that the owner, upon setup, would draw a shape on a map that would indicate the boundaries of their desired community. How do you feel that solution would that solution work around your river?
That’s the point of postcodes, they tend to based on population density and, unlike electoral wards, they remain pretty fixed. If you look at the postcode areas for Liverpool (or Manchester) you’ll see the size is small in the city centre, larger as you get to the suburbs by the Green Belt and then they expand out into rural areas. If you go north you can see more rural areas with towns, like PR and LA.
The sizes also reflect the range of someone’s interest - in the countryside you could travel 20+ miles to go shopping, in a town it may only be a few miles.
There are currently 160 countries using postal code systems, some of which follow administrative boundaries too and such boundaries could be used in places that don’t have them. Essentially, all the work has been done here (often by the Victorians as they found an expanding postal system was unviable without it) and they are well-understood, so I don’t see any need to reinvent the wheel or make things unnecessarily clunky.
They also have other advantages as they may contain a code that identifies a larger area (UK: counties/cities; France: departments; Australia: states) or you can group codes manually, which could give an option for a larger area sort (Home, Nearby and Region).
app.traveltime.com
Oh indeed, there are ways and means of doing it, it just doesn’t tend to get done that way because examples like mine are figuratively and literally, edge cases.
It can’t really address the other point, in that you may have to allow for population density.
If there were more like-minded people around my local area IRL, I wouldn’t be on the internet looking for like-minded people; I’d be at a bar.
😃 well, tbf I feel that we have plenty of solutions for finding like-minded people. Social platforms for hobbies etc. We’re communicating on one right now, but a local platform would be for communicating with people that might not necessarily be like-minded, but would still have the same interest in mind. The interest of how much parking is, or what the opening hours are, or what this weird statue in the woods is all about. The interest is the place and that alone is what would connect people.
Invite only app maybe? If you get the sign up process to be an NFC or QR code type thing you could effectively limit it to people in that area that know each other or that see the qr code. You could even have the signin do imprecise GPS checking if you wanted to limit it further (not fool proof, but does it have to be?)
You could have something like the described in the digital bonfires idea and have a regularly scheduled means of moving things from local to people just passing through.
Thanks for this. Perhaps invite only could work. When I signed up to my Lemmy instance, I was asked to say something nice about the UK to prove that I wasn’t a bot. I imagine this could work with a local quiz. But I personally favour the idea of it being open and communities being so small that it wouldn’t really benefit anyone to abuse. But it would certainly be nice to have the administration tools to quickly put a stop to it if it does occur. Something to think about. Thanks
I hope it’s helpful! I think your idea is definitely cool, I would love to see something like it take off tbh!
There was a nonfederated one. Elk talk, or Oxes. Anyway, most useful on college campuses. Pointing this out for reseach.
Sounds great!
Edit: It was yikyak!
I hadn’t heard of Yikyak, but it looks very similar to my mock-up. Thanks
Oh it was a glorious shit show. Look into what happened. In my area it wound up basically grindr
I think that’s the beauty of the fediverse though. Any community can be anything you want it to be. If some users don’t like how an instance is being used, they could create a competing instance that’s more aimed that their wants and needs.
Lots of people with similar ideas so there is probably demand. When I was thinking of ways to bring people together I had considered a platform so to speak that lets you join different communities, and over time or once verified you gain voting weight. Like lemmy or other website have communities and you can join or watch without playing and they can hose meetups, except the system I had in mind doesn’t have the same style of ‘voting’ on things that sites your used to are. There are chains of trust to build voting weight or reputation.
I’ll post my rambling thoughts here:
The idea here is for a ‘consensus engine’ which results in many applications and a universal voting method. As the current repository of these posts is about to be deleted I am copying them here, separated by three dots such as … June 7th 2023 From small clubs to nations to solar systems, we can bring people together through similarities of feeling and thought. Share ideas and information how modern social media does, bounded by whatever group you chose, which can be rebuffed if needed. If you managed to read the sticky post on the universal voting system then it will help to see how this Consensus Engine can be used.
I think it could supplement a future social media if need be in the sense that you can connect with your friends, or anyone you know or don’t and place whoever in whatever groups you chose and then interact with just that group. From sharing 3D home videos to posts about their feelings it allows open communication. However the communication goes both ways. When anything is posted then every aspect of it can be judged by others. From how truthful it is, to how it stays on topic or does not, to how poetic it sounds, as well as how it might appear like a paid ad, and so on. Individual sections of posts can be judged separately.
part of the goal of this is to use it for scientific research and to establish a chain of trust. This is done by having experiments that are reproducible and thus increasing the weight of that users locally, in the related groups to that subject, a weight that diminishes over time but can increase as reproductions and positive judgements on their works are had. The goal is to allow experiments to documents every step of the process and to do so openly so that humans as a whole can learn. Also to allow others to chime in and offer their ideas.
The system could store parts of the comment or post, then the weights of those posts could be changed by others. When the OP goes offline their system saves a chunk of data regarding the last status of the thing, and when they come back they ask the network what that status was so the weight of their comment and themselves in that group can be updated. This is done by saving some data of other users when they save their own data, when they come back online they are now the network which can update the other data to the latest of their download. The bleeding edge of consensus will be fuzzy, but overtime it can emerge and even change when new data comes in. It can allow for people to find things in common like ‘I’d like to have all my needs met,’ to ‘I don’t like it when people steal from me.’ and working up one common thing at a time we can find where some people are okay with pulling a gun on a 6 year old looking for a lost kitten and how some people can justify giving money to know grifters. We want to make the truth provable and connect it clearly to actions and ideas. If some people who are religious or very us right wing ‘wake up’ and see what they have done, maybe they can change and help everyone.
Another thing it can do it to lay out future plans and past history for tv show writers, town charters, and whole civilizations. People can decide they want to stop the growth of their city or increase housing density like normal voting, but they can plan for things father out like working together as one world to build colonies on Mars or something. They can do that by outlining all the steps needs to do something, each step broken down by other steps, and each step facing a many potential 0poor outcomes and the steps needed to provide against them.
Elections on things from single and specific issues to worldwide issues can be voted on by anyone, and those that have the most positive involvement based on what has consensus as fact have high weight to their own votes than others who, when asked questions about the subject they are voting on, disagree with the consensus.
When a comment is made others can vote on it, to vote on something you must vote on a second thing as well. You have the option of going deeper than the question you are asked. Things like, do you agree with this, are these two things similar/the same. All sorts of classifying questions and web of relation questions are asked. when someone answers they are asked if the
and that’s all that will fit in one comment but you get the idea, it’s not an idea I have an ability to follow through on
How to keep it from becoming disgusting like Topix? Vile things were said on those forums.
I can’t seem to find anything relevant when I search for Topix, but I think we learn to moderate our local communities effectively. Just like here on Lemmy. The difference being that owners will have fewer people to moderate, so it should in theory be easier. If an owner is vile, create a competing instance.
I wonder if there would be enough people locally who want to moderate? That’s the biggest issue imo, along with it being taken over by concerns about schools and/or gross gossip.
I believe Topix was completely anonymous and unmoderated, and it was a train wreck. As a citizen of my town I was embarrassed that it existed. I remember specifically that any time a local principal made any changes at her school vile comments and threats would be posted about her. It was a major concern in her life until the whole site was taken down.
Ha! Funnily enough I just responded to a different comment along these same lines: that’s the beauty of the fediverse. If a community of moaners exist, they could have their own instance. Or in the case of Lemmy (and the very theoretical Habitat), their own categories that other users can tune out from. I think you’re going to have places in which moderation is a success and places in which it isn’t. Anything that isn’t moderated appropriately and gets taken down as a result of something actually illegal won’t affect the communities that are appropriately moderated, because it can all be separated. It seems to be working well enough for Lemmy.
@carlnewton@feddit.uk one advantage to a system like this, is that you don't need it to catch on in a bunch of different communities for it to work. It can catch on even in one place, and it will already be useful for the people there.
Yes, I discovered this for myself yesterday after getting a lot of suggestions that it won’t catch on. I can do my best to foster my own community. If others do the same, that’s a bonus!