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?
The EU is trying to push the elements of something similar:
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.