What principles you wish to see social networks (or the fediverse) adopt in their design?

Comments

• leraje@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  For the threadiverse in particular I’d add transferable user created Communities (between instances).

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  • muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If Activpub does portable actors (a user is just an actor) communities are just actors so therefore portable users means u get portable communities for free

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• RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  User sovereignty first design, where users individually control what instances they wish to block.

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  • matcha_addict@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I agree with this. I think instance owners retaining ability to block other instances is still unfortunately necessary, if at least for administrative and legal reasons. But putting the onus on granular blocking controls on the user is a big achievement, as I prefer the user to retain that control.

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    • ada@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s not a universal want. Trans people and other vulnerable, targeted minorities face a real cost in having to play whack a mole with bigots. Sure, you can block them as they appear, but by that point, you’ve already seen their hate. And it means every trans person has to see and block that content. After which, the bigot just comes back with a new account, and does another round.

      The blahaj instances offer aggressive, pre-emptive blocking of bigots and transphobes, at the instance level, with the goal of giving our users an experience of social media that isn’t shaped by hate.

      Of course, not all trans folk want that, and some absolutely do want the power to choose for themselves who gets blocked and are willing to face the hate in order to retain that ability. But that’s the other power of the fediverse, because there are instances that cater to that approach as well.

      tl;dr - Granular user control of blocking/federation is good, but it’s not “better” than instance level blocking and defederation.

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    • WamGams@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      you should look at the domain names of some of these blocked instances.

      going live without a block list implemented upon start up is going to put you in a very serious legal quagmire where you are now responsible for your ISP having transmitted CASM.

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• hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Uh, I’d love someone to have a try at full-blown direct democracy. Most aspects being controlled (and ideally owned) by the very same people who use the platform. Not sure if that’s good or feasible, though.

  And what I always love is to see design principles that foster a nice, amicable atmosphere. Some online communities, games etc have aspects of that. It’s somewhat more rare on modern social media. I sometimes wish hanging out on the internet was a bit less about politics, trolling and memes, getting agitated amonst random anonymous people. And a bit more like an evening at the Irish Pub with friends.

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  • matcha_addict@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    What exactly would be controlled differently under this direct democracy?

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    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I think the most obvious one is moderation. What gets deleted, who gets kicked out. Then for example community rules, what’s the topic and rules of discussion… Maybe we could do some more structural and organizationional decisions.

      It gets a bit tricky with technology. I mean ideally we want to do things like democratically decide to have a voice chat (if that’s what people want) and somehow 3 months later the platform has a voice chat…

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  • ademir@lemmy.eco.br ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Tbh It sounds awesome

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• lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  1.- and I’m going to emphasize this a lot.

  PAGING

  (or at least some concept in the vein of “show only a finite amount of information at a time”)

  Lemmy does it well, but Mastodon sorely requires it for example. Anything that induces the pattern of autorefreshing, auto-filling, constantly changing timelines only empahsizes the addictions that antisocial media is working with already.

  2.- More and better reactions than simply “upvote” and “downvote”.

  A upvote or a downvote can mean things in different categories, from “I don’t like this” to “this is uninformative” to “this is misinformative!” to “enough Musk spam!”. Condensing and factoring such results into how threads are found and sorted artificiates any or all of popularity, consensus and usefulness. So, being able to “react” (add a singular tag to a message without the need for a reply) to a message with more options than “upvote” and “downvote” would be useful. I’d count at least three axis (axeses? switchaxes?) that are useful to gauge: “agree - disagree”, “informational - misinformational” and “verified - debunked”.

  3.- Global, or at least shareable and moveable, user identity. Won’t comment on this more because others already cover it enough.

  4.- Fucking decouple instance identity from DNS. DNS is the layer that big corpo will rein in next, depending on it to validate who an instance is is playing an eventually loser game.

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  • matcha_addict@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’m so far paging, and it’s so annoying this isn’t the default design on the fediverse.

    On 4, I also agree, but what’s the best alternative?

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    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      On 4, I also agree, but what’s the best alternative?

      Fuck if I know, tbh. Whatever i2p and/or IPFS are doing, I guess? While removing a central authority is a good idea, I think the more pressing matter is to remove external authority. DNS registrars are not part of the fediverse in terms of being community or people, and thus are a notorious weak point.

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• JTode@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Radical interoperability. If I want to subscribe to this board via Gopher, or via Dialup modem, there should be an implemented way to do that.

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• Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Fun and weird ways of using the internet socially. Fediverse has the unique opportunity that you can build anything and automatically reach people. I’d like to see people really push the idea of what a social platform looks and acts like.

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  • nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Misskey?

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    • Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I havent found an English misskey instance so I havent been able to really try it out. At a glance it seems similar to mastodon

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  • matcha_addict@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Can you give examples ? That’s partly why I ask this question.

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    • Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Ive got ideas in my mind but its hard to put them into realistic ideas of a site.

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• wiki_me@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Allow people who fund the platform vote on features (that are pre approved ). who contribute more get more in return.

  “time well spent”. and maximizing the “average quality of content”. maybe by allowing custom feeds. or feeds that are based only on the votes of trusted users. with governance models supporting how those feeds are managed like how KDE and GNOME nonprofits are managed. maybe vote on best post/comment of the day/week/year/decade with leaderboards for that.

  Linus law of trail and error. allow people to easily extend the software .with plugins and ideally a store with reviews for addons like in firefox and chrome. making experimentation easier and safer (without risking adding a bad feature to all users of the software). vote on features implemented rating for example how satisfied you are on a scale of one to ten.

  information over speculations . use A/B testing to see what works in practice. maybe use “counted statement” for example “this is useful” or “this is important” beyond lemmy and reddit upvotes and downvotes.

  Right now a life changing post from world class expert and a funny cat picture with someone who spend too much time online are treated the same by the software. this should somehow change.

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• muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Unified identity really needs a modification at the core of activpub. The issue at the moment is that a user is just an actor and an actor is just a url. What it needs to be is something like a did(distributed identity) which is what atproto (bluesky uses) does. And the did points to a list of actors that can be across multiple servers. The did has a private, public key pair and signs all activities by per server actors as ur user. What this means is u don’t need to trust any server with login details or anything and u can do activities acting as any instance you want.

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  • matcha_addict@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I do like this, but it does require responsibility from the user to maintain their keys. I think having it as an option is great, alongside the identity providers I speak about.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      but it does require responsibility from the user to maintain their keys

      Not necessarily? We can have did methods that do not rely on key ownership.

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    • muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      So did has different providers so atproto uses did:plc and did:web but their are many different options and its a standard so u can get comparability with so many things ie did:pgp, did:eth, and like a million other options

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• Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I need the ability to send someone over and lightly slap other users if their comment reaches enough downvotes

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• General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Embrace content sorting and filtering algorithms, but on the client side, with optional control by the user.

  You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.

  Standardize tags on all content. So many of the different ways different platforms classify or organize content can be implemented as tags, which increases interoperability between them.

  I’m so with you. xkcd.com/927/

  Transferable user identity (between instances)

  User identity and authentication as separate service from social network instance

  That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.

    In the client, you wouldn’t need to be sorting and running extensive calculations on all data. You could, e.g, build the front-page by indexing/scoring posts and comments that have been created since your last visit with a hard cap on some time window (last 48h) or total data points (e.g, keep only the most recent 10k objects in a local hot database, freeze/archive everyhing else.)

    I’m so with you. xkcd.com/927/

    That’s what RDF/JSON-LD gives us for free. There is no need to have us arguing over what each tag means, all that developers need to do is to learn how to use the different vocabularies.

    That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.

    Doesn’t mean that we can adopt it.

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    • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      In the client, you wouldn’t need to be sorting and running extensive calculations on all data. You could, e.g, build the front-page by indexing/scoring posts and comments that have been created since your last visit with a hard cap on some time window (last 48h) or total data points (e.g, keep only the most recent 10k objects in a local hot database, freeze/archive everyhing else.)

      Absolutely. There’s a lot you can do. The “For You” Feed on Bluesky is quite instructive. bsky.app/profile/…/3mb2r5qei322a

      But when you’re talking about sending a lot more data to clients, you really need to consider what that means for the internet bill of instance owners.

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  • matcha_addict@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.

    There shouldn’t be resource constraint issues in downloading new content Metadata from all your subscriptions

    tags

    When I say “standardize tags on all content”, what I mean is make it a standard to have the option of having tags on every type of content, and treat tags as a first class attribute of the content. The XKCD you reference is not relevant.

    That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.

    Sure, they use it. But it is compatible with activityPub as well.

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• DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Some instances already implement this, but a hard anti-AI stance or at least requiring labeling of AI-generated content?

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• rako@tarte.nuage-libre.fr ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’ve been thinking about that a lot and plan to build something I’m more interested in:

  • powerless instances where all you can do is create accounts and store stuff to be served but every logic and integrity is done by clients
  • anonymous account creation so that everyone can participate -> freedom of speech …
  • follow-based interaction: if I don’t follow you, you cannot send me anything -> … not freedom of reach
  • because instances are powerless they do not define community anymore. Communities are good old accounts, created, managed and animated by users directly
  • because clients have all the power, they are the primary storage source
  • Communities are the primary dissemination vector. If I don’t follow you but we’re both part of the same community and you post something to that community, I’ll see it
  • when I block someone, that block can be propagated to others so they can automatically block that same account. This works for communities as well.

  Hopefully a design like this should empower users and communities by letting them focus on the social aspect of building the group, nurturing it, instead of the technical parts that constrain users into artificial uses

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  • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Sounds a lot like Nostr, no?

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    • rako@tarte.nuage-libre.fr ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Neither nostr nor simplex make “community building” a thing. The most important defining point is the ability to have communal intermediaries. All protocols can do a forwarding bot, starting with the good old mailing-list, but anything more complicated than that is rare. In nostr that would be running a full relay (which is just out of the question if you’re not technical). Simplex isn’t much better. Both are built for individualistic purposes, so it’s not really surprising.

      ActivityPub isn’t perfect but it has Groups, with some people working on making them controllable. XMPP has highly configurable pubsub. Those are proper foundations for billions of people building billions of communities

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• VitoRobles@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If we’re doing wishful thinking, I’d love an age and location mechanism.

  Theres currently no way to do this with privacy and security in mind. Because it’s just a clusterfuck of issues.

  But, again - wishful thinking. It would be cool hell to be able to actually have spaces for specific ages, or specific locations.

  All the eurocentric communities forcing the end user to be from europe. Imagine a community for only 40-60yos, or a real teenager community without the creepos.

  My city has a forum for each generation (millennials, gen X, etc) and the conversations and chats are lightyears better than anything else. We have RL meetups and BBQs. It’s a real community. Trolls quickly get booted and those who were assholes beg to come back after apologizing.

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  • matcha_addict@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think having instances or communities dedicated to that would be wonderful.

    I think having separate identity providers would work well with this. Those identity providers could optionally verify age and location, and your instance can just trust them on that to make it exclusive to certain ages or locations.

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• moonpiedumplings@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  design around ease of self-hosting. A non technical user must be able to self host easily and at a very low cost.

  This may be a controversial opinion, but I actually like the way that hosting a lemmy instance is somewhat difficult to spin up. I like the way that it is requires a time investment and spammers can’t simply spin up across different domain names. I like the way that problematic instances get defederated and spammers or other problematic individuals can’t simply move domain names due to the way activitypub is tied to those.

  In theory, you could set up something like digitalocean’s droplets, where a user does one click to deploy an app like nextcloud or whatever. But I’m not really eager to see something like that.

  Transferable user identity (between instances)

  I dislike this for a similar reason, tbh. If someone gets banned, they should have to start over. Not get to instantly recreate and refederate all their content from a different instance.

  Of course, ban evasion is always a thing. But what I like is that spammers or problematic individuals who had their content nuked are forced to start from scratch and spend time recreating it before they get banned again.

  As for what I would really like to see, I would really love features that make lemmy work as a more powerful help forum. Like, on discourse if you make a post, it automatically searches for similar posts and shows them to you in order to avoid duplicate posts. Lemmy does something similar, but it appears to only be the title. It would also be cool to automatically show relevant wiki pages, or FAQ content, since one of the problems on reddit was that people wouldn’t read the wiki or FAQ of help forums.

  I would also like the ability to mark a comment on a post as an “answer”, or something similar. I think stackoverflows model definitely had lots of issues with mods incorrectly marking things as duplicate, but I think it was a noble goal to try to ensure that questions were only asked once, and for them to accumulate into a repository of knowledge. For the all the complaints about it, stackoverflow is undeniably the one of the biggest and most useful repositories of knowledge.

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  • ada@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I dislike this for a similar reason, tbh. If someone gets banned, they should have to start over. Not get to instantly recreate and refederate all their content from a different instance.

    A ban on transferable ID would follow the ID.

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  • matcha_addict@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The first issue you bring up would be resolved with the idea of separating identity and authentication as separate providers from instance providers. In fact, it’s much better than just relying on a small difficulty, as that is more likely to discourage a well meaning non-technical person than a malicious actor.

    Wktn separate identity providers, your instance can trust the identity providers that have good reputation. And if I want to be seen by your instance, then I have to have one of those identity providers approve me.

    Different identity providers will have different standards and requirements.

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