Decentralizing Social Networks
19 April 2008I've been pondering the problems of creäting decentralized equivalents to social network sites such as LiveJournal.
A 'blog per se comes fairly cheap. At the low end, one could form or join a syndicate, jointly register a second-level domain name (eg, oursyndicate.com
) with GoDaddy for about $10 per year, jointly lease 500 GB of housing from AN Hosting for about $85 per year, distribute third-level domains (eg, winky.oursyndicate.com
) amongst as many syndicate members as you might have, and install WordPress for free. Give everybody a whole gigabyte, and we're still talking just 20¢ per person per year. (Let everyone have his-or-her own second-level domain, and 25 GB, and we're talking about $14.25 per person per year.)
The challenge is in giving such 'blogs — across second- and third-level domains — the connectivity of Friendships, and of Interests.
As a first-pass approximation, imagine each 'blog as having a link that will deliver two data: an OpenID associated with the 'blog, and a reference (pointer) to an RSS feed for the 'blog. These data allow one to distinguish the 'blog owner, and in some sense beFriend him or her.
Friends pageFriends, and leave aggregation to the visitor's software, or to assemble a Friends page at one's own site. The advantage of the latter is that the visitor needn't have aggregation software; the disadvantage is that either the page will have to be aggregated on-the-fly, or it must always exclude protected entries. I'm inclined to opt for aggregation on one's own site and for aggregation on-the-fly. However, a standard could support all of these options, leaving it to a given 'blog to decide whether to deliver just references, just Friends pages, or both, an whether any Friends page were aggregated on-the-fly.
The next piece is Interests. A perfect decentralization of these is possible but (as I think) not reasonable; it would involve shipping copies of a large dB repeatedly to each 'blog. My thinking is that, instead, we should accept there being Interests servers, at which 'blog owners could register their 'blogs as corresponding to given Interests. However, no 'blog need be dependent upon just one particular Interests server; it should be possible to register with multiple servers, so that any Interest-search censorship on the part of one server could be overcome by merely additionally registering with another server that did not censor that Interest. It might be possible for these servers to be supported charitably; but, frankly, I imagine them supported by advertising or by registration fees.
Tags: decentralization, decentralizing, social networking, social networks
So I read this back when you first posted it and have been thinking about it ever since. I don't know what that says about me, but anyway. I like it, it's hard to see a problem with it like you do on other social networking sites, but I'm guessing that when you have as many users as livejournal something would happen. Maybe.
The major hurdle is getting a critical mass of 'bloggers to agree on standard formats for the data here.
If I get enthusiastic, then I may write a specification for a format, and then one or two WordPress plugins conforming to that specification. (Putting all the functionality into one plugin would made installation easy; spreading it across two — one for transmission and one for reception — would allow the user to use an alternative plugin for some of that functionality.)
I am not sure how this would work now. I would really like to have a decentralized, P2P social networking system, incorporating the Web and Twitter and more.
Maybe it is time to set up a whole new realm and protocol for the Internet. We have email; we had newsgroups; we have the World Wide Web. We now need a P2P social network that is not dependent upon a centralized authority. Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, to name the three most obvious examples, can no longer be trusted.
Is there something available along Bitcoin lines, or from the chthonian depths of the Dark Web?
What do you regard as the advantages here of P2P?
Except for the
Interestsservers themselves, everything that I described could be provided by a WordPress plugin or the equivalent, added to an existing 'blog.The technical challenge itself is minor. The only issue is getting protocols widely agreed and adopted, though that issue is very far from trivial. Services such as Facebook would either just refuse, or embrace, extend, and extinguish. And most 'bloggers would see individual leasing of server-space as too expensive, and formation of syndicates (to lease space jointly) and installation of software as too complicated.
When I wrote this entry, I was imagining a decentralized equivalent to LiveJournal. Not included were features absent in LiveJournal, such as reäction buttons. (As to this last, I would perhaps creäte two dBs, on each 'blog.)