Computing On The Edge - 202329
Building an Antisocial Network
I think the whole idea with Social Networks was not too bad in principle.
Everyone has a need to share, and give or take, a place where you can do this exchange should be a good place.
It's just that most of the implementations are plain and simple doing something else.
Of course creators should be proud of what they share, but I do not understand why so-called followers should be interested in the potatoes they eat for dinner.
While I do not understand it, who does of course builds profits out of advertising some given potato brand, and this should be a testament to the entire human modern history.
But this is not where I am going now: Surveillance Capitalism - the book, has been already written.
What the so-called Social Networks are actually doing is not what we discussed above, a platform to share content.
They are rather grabbing, owning the content.
Most people takes photo shots and archive them on $evilsite thinking that that is their own backup, but they are wrong.
They have no warranty they'll get their data back in a decade when they look for it. And while it could no longer be available, it's not even their own, it's not private, and they'll run machine learning jobs on top of it to classify, infer, classify...
So, even given the established Social Media weren't to be the evil they actually are as collateral damage, the problem they have is that it'll never work as long as they are as of now.
The problem is not even machine learning: ML is great to make predictions, with it you can gain a lot of knowledge out of plain data, as long as it's your data and not extorted and used in some nasty means.
You cannot expect Social Networks to work for you unless you own them.
It sounds like a joke now that $richnerd bought one all for himself, that's not what I mean, even if the guy himself understood it that way: "let us just buy a social network to have my tweets on top"!
I hope you heard at this point about Mastodon and the so-called fediverse.
They are on the right path.
But the fact that a lot of people opens an account on Mastodon instead of $birdsite won't be enough. What needs to change is understanding that not everyone needs to flock to some server, someone could also take pride in administering new sites.
As a matter of fact, the base protocol on top of which Mastodon is running is quite simple to implement, and I expect a lot more sites to grow their own interoperable implementation.
These are the ActivityPub W3C specs
Myself after discarding the idea of running a Mastodon instance, I decided that I'd rather integrate ActivityPub into my own tooling, and at some time an own ActivityPub server will see the light.
I prefer the idea of a tool that helps to spread valuable content to the paradygm of the big basket where you put your belongings that, after spoiling you of the ownership, can disappear at any time.
The Way To Go
Ten Years of 'Go: The Good, the Bad, and the Meh'
Humans and Computing
[api] [machine learning]