I just read Cory Doctorow’s article “Let the Platform Burn”. It reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for some time. Instead of joining yet another social network and recreating yourself, why not create your personal social network object and link it to others via a federation of the personal social network objects?
I call this object the Earthling object with all due respect to our extraterrestrial readers. The object would be maintained by its owner and contain whatever information the owner choses to add such as a bio, pictures, blogs, posts, or documents. The object could contain links to your friends, family, and coworker objects.
Once set up, you could serve it yourself or use an Earthling Service Provider (yet to be invented). It would be a lot like running your own Lemmy instance or joining an existing one. The essential feature of this approach is that all the data within the object and access to it is completely under your control. Should you decide to ‘go dark’, you can delete or disconnect the object and disappear from the social networking community. Right up there in importance is that you can move this object around to any location you like without having to rebuild it. Communication would be along the lines of ActivityPub.
There are most certainly many issues with the concept and some of the features already exist. As Cory mentioned in his article, Mastodon allows you to export all your data from one instance and move it to another. Kbin seems to already provide at lot of these features with it’s magazines, microblog, and people sections.
While the Earthling object would have extensive controls on who sees what in your object, people might prefer not to keep all their eggs in one basket, joining different networks for different purposes and only providing personal data for the specific purpose. Did I mention that the Earthling object would have an avatar feature so you could take on multiple personalities?
This post is part entertainment and part ‘wouldn’t it be nice’. Maybe there are others out there that have already thought through this and are a lot further along. I believe there are similar efforts in the Web 3.0 arena. Anyone else interested in having their own Earthling object?
I think you just reinvented personal websites? You can put on there whatever you want, and you can link it to anything else on the internet with the original open standard for communicating between networked computers.
We even had federations back then. Called them webrings. I’m not sure if I’m kidding.
I remember following a few rings. There were also website that would allow you to explore other websites.
You are not. It also worked, unlike … .
webrings still exist, i have a website that’s part of one. :)
Lol, and so GeoCities rises from its grave…
Then again, Neocities has been around for a little while now, so whatevs.
Yes, the web as it was before giant social media.
See also https://indieweb.org/
That occurred to me as I wrote it. The main difference is the controlled connectivity with other ‘web sites’. There’s also tumblr. I still have a site there, haven’t touched it in years.
I think that the thing that should set his idea apart from a website is that it has a highly structured data structure and restful API which allows the data to be accessed, aggregated, and presented in a myriad of ways.
So yes, you could have a standard “social profile” presentation front end which looks just like a geocities site, or Facebook page, or Friendster page or whatever.
But you could also add all your friends into a presentation layer that gives you a Facebook, Twitter, or instagram like feed, all federated from the single source of data they maintain as a federated social profile.
It’s actually a pretty damn genius idea IMO.
Yea I see what you mean. I think mostly that functionality could be covered by RSS though. But maybe there is room for some extension
RSS is too general purpose to structure the data properly for use in the ways I described. You’d need a myriad of standardized tags for things like profile pictures, bio, interests, video updates, photo updates, etc. as each platform would only be interested in some subset of that depending on what kind of presentation it was trying to make.
The problem is most people are computer illiterate. Hell, illiterate in general.
So there would have to be some host that has an easy to use personal social network object thingy and well, there you have it: new platform.
Until there’s some kind of open source standard that anyone can obtain, setup, host, use and maintain all on their own without learning more than the most minuscule amount of new knowledge, the platform will be where they flock. People just don’t want to learn anything.
i really don’t like this attitude, and i see this it pop up around here fairly frequently. its kind of elitist? classist? i’ll try to articulate myself here, though its not like… directly aimed at you, so try not to take it personally.
computer skills are just like being illiterate, but not in the way you’re presenting. if somebody grows up to adulthood and they are illiterate, that isn’t some sort of personal failing, its an indication that the people responsible for this person’s care neglected their obligation to properly educate their child, or did not have the resources to provide such an education, because nearly everybody can become literate if somebody teaches them. the reality is that every single person on earth comes into this world without the ability to read, write, use computers, or do fucking anything at all, and its the responsibility of the people who do know these things to be open and kind and helpful so that they can learn. did you have the option to take computer skills classes in school? maybe? in a lot of places, no. did you come into technology effortlessly good at everything? probably not. lots of people aren’t given the opportunity to hone these skills, or aren’t given motivation to pursue them for themselves.
it’s a problem in tech spaces. there is this subset of tech dudes who got in early and have made this weird, toxic culture of competition and exclusion that makes pursuing these skills actively difficult for newcomers. no. open source tech is for everybody. computer skills are for everybody. respond kindly and with understanding to those who do not already know these things, please. as much as it seems obvious or natural, it really really isn’t. people need to be taught this stuff most of the time. i don’t mean to be hostile, its just… the comparison to being illiterate is absurd to me, even if it was just a joke. when have you ever met a person who’s illiterate who hasn’t been systematically let down by their educators??? have you ever met somebody who’s illiterate? they aren’t that way because they’re stupid, or don’t want to learn, its usually something that happens to people who have been profoundly neglected by the systems supposed to protect them, who are poor, disabled, or otherwise marginalized. the stigmatization of illiteracy is cruel to people who have already been deeply wronged, denied full access to language and our vast inheritance of knowledge by systems and people which find it inconvenient to teach them.
i sorta agree with you, it’s a bummer that people don’t have these skills, that so many don’t have a strong grasp of how the machines that are so important to their lives even work. but that isn’t their fault, it isn’t their responsibility, and our response should be kind and accommodating. it should be a call to improve public education and provide resources to expand access to this knowledge, to build open source and demystify what has been mystified. that’s part of why there are so many free educational resources for coding online. because this is a field of study that is not being taught to students by default, as it rightly should be.
i don’t mean to go off on you specifically. lots of people don’t think very deeply about this, you haven’t committed a social justice crime or anything. but this is not a “people are dumb” problem. its an injustice. its a failure that we should do everything in our power to correct.
I wish i could agree with you, but i’ve worked in tech support in the past. There’s A LOT of people that very much don’t want to exert the least effort on learning these things and are proud of this. Definitely there’s efforts that need to be made on making things easy for beginners and better ways to let them learn once they’re past that stage (documentation has always been a weakness of free software), but you cannot do that with people who actively refuse, and there’s a lot of them, many of them on positions of power.
Willful/proud ignorance, on a large scale, is one of the most harmful things to a society.
There is an entire political party in the US, that makes up around half of voting Americans, that prides itself in it’s ignorance. When you prime people to think that way, you can convince them of pretty much anything. Just look at Q Anon for example.
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What bothers me about the tech illiterate (and I do consider it a kind of literacy) is that I wasn’t taught it by anyone. Unlike reading, which is skill which requires explicit education, tech literacy insofar as UI navigation to me indicates a fundamental lack of curiosity or inquisitiveness. Half the time when customers call, I don’t know where to find the thing in the UI - I just remote in and menu what sounds right until it’s there. We’re immersed in technology, it’s no longer possible to function adequately without it, yet somehow a very large portion of the population is so disinterested in the near literal magic in front of them that they can’t be assed to learn the first thing about how to use it.
I don’t make anyone feel bad for not knowing something. I try my hardest to be supportive and teach them how it works. But 99% of the time they don’t care and just want the thing to start working. So yes, I will judge people for lacking the bare minimum of curiosity which would ordinarily drive them to already know how this works in the first place.
And ironically, I seem to have avoided making my sisters be this. I was the “tech” guy in my family, and they’d ask me to do everything for them until eventually I told them I would give them tips and nothing else. They learned how to do everything themselves really quick lmao.
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This is so true. I’m often shocked by how intellectually incurious people can be when it comes to navigating technology. So many people can’t even do basic troubleshooting without being slowly walked through it step by step.
But did you have access to a computer to teach yourself on? A lot of people don’t.
I think some of it is, not even being “tech illiterate”, but people are just tired and want to do other things. The average person is coming home from work already exhausted, needs to spend time with their partner or kids, take care of the house, etc etc. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to tinker with setting up servers and learning to make websites and all the other stuff (I’m still learning it too). It’s a lot, especially if you don’t already have a solid foundation. Anything super complex that requires a lot of setup just isn’t accessible for most people. It’s not a lack of ability, but a lack of time and energy.
I do agree about the elitist attitude though. As much as tech people complain about non-tech people, we need them when we eat the food they grew, or they fix our car, or the plumbing in our house. Someone not caring enough to learn new skills because they’re good with the ones they already have is okay and it doesn’t make someone dumb. That’s why they just want to pay someone else to deal with it. I don’t understand how industrial agricultural machinary works but I still eat because there’s people who do. And that’s okay :)
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You could have services that host them for you that are easy to sign up for and use.
I agree it would have to be simple to be widely accepted. There would have to be an app to make set up easy. Clearly, self hosting would only be for the most technical of us. I’ve set up a dozen servers on bare metal VPS’s and still have to follow instructions to get it right. For others, the set up app would also support exporting it to a service provider. Even so, it would probably be too much for many people.
This is what a lot of people do when they create a Single user instance. You can learn more about that here: https://calebhearth.com/running-mastodon
There’s other projects that are trying to implement your ‘Earthling’ idea. There’s the Solid project for instance: https://solidproject.org/
Is there any extra info about the solid option? I went to their site and thinking to see about running a server on my home brew server to try it out. But, searching for “solid” doesn’t provide much relevant results. I’m wondering questions like, Do your files/information become basically a cloud storage drive? Is there a reason to use the solid server instead of just a NAS/home brew server with wan access?
There’s very extensive documentation on running your own server: https://solidproject.org//self-hosting/css
And this will answer some of your questions: https://solidproject.org/about
Solid is a specification made for other apps to run on. Here’s a list of apps that have been built on top of solid: https://solidproject.org/apps
Thanks, I’m not sure how I missed their about page. I appreciate the links.
That’s basically what Tim Berners-Lee is proposing with Solid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_project)
Thanks for the link. That’s almost exactly what I was envisioning. It’s great to see such a project so far along.
Sounds like https://activitypods.org/
The EU is trying to push the elements of something similar:
- Mandatory GDPR data exports
- Right to be forgotten
- Requirements for platforms to interoperate and allow easy migration
However, I don’t think we, as a society, are ready to have a unique “Earthling object”. People are complex beings, and whatever they say or do when they are high or depressed, doesn’t necessarily represent their professional or family opinions and behaviors (sometimes it does, others it doesn’t). Multiple personalities linked to a single object, would still allow tracing back from any of them to all the others. I don’t think society at large is ready to be accepting and tolerant of more than one personality per person, they even clump past with present behaviors, as if no person could ever change their point of view. What’s even worse, is that personality changes are often gradual, so a person with personality A who evolves into personality B over the course of 20 years, will still be linked to whatever they did or said as the personality A that no longer exists.
While a technology to simplify the self-custody of a multiple-personality object would be welcome, I don’t think anyone, definitely no server, should have access to the whole of it. I’d see it as a lesser evil to have people lose access to some of their avatar/personalities, than for any single entity to be able to cross-reference them and ban a person world-wide.
This is also why I’m really wary of Sam Altman’s Eyeball project. Under the guise of being able to distinguish AI from non-AI works, it’s creating such a unique “Earthling object” able to link everything a person ever does.
Similarly, while I don’t oppose a government issued ID as a means to ID oneself while dealing with the government, I do oppose the idea of “real identities” like what Facebook is enforcing.
The indieweb has you covered: POSSE
I like the idea and I know that’s how some people are using Lemmy at the moment. I think it would need to be very easy to implement though for it to be truly viable.
I love the name ‘earthlings’! Glad you’re keeping the alienfolk on side just in case
You would have loved Urbit.org
That’s kind of what Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, and Pixelfed among others are already doing.
