Social networks | Everything I Know

How to run a small social network site for your friends is a neat guide. I like AT Protocol & Nostr and hope they succeed.

It's hard to appreciate just how bad it is to centralize the common people's town square where anyone can voice their opinion is. Right now, the most popular options for such a place are all governed by a set of rules that can be changed on a whim by few people only, sometimes only one. More often, what's written in the rules is not being followed too and there is no way to argument against your account being deleted or shadow banned by the network.

One other thing such centralization of authority brings, is that social networks can start collaborating with oppressive governments in the name of 'free speech'.

The only way you can have a social network that works for everyone is for it to be decentralized. Something akin to Mastodon where each instance has its own rules and pays for its own compute. You can federate with any server you like and can't be blocked out of a service with all the history deleted just on a whim.

Decentralization has big challenges to solve before it can compete with likes of Twitter. Compute has to be paid off by users using the network. UX should abstract the notion of servers and federation so the experience is like on Twitter, create account, start creating posts. On Mastodon, you have to first choose a server and most just choose the official server for obvious reasons.

I am personally trying to make Mastodon work whilst still staying on Twitter as that's where the conversation is still happening.

Farcaster & Bluesky seem promising too.

Whatever the new social network is, it has to be open source and be a protocol with a viable plan for moderating and customizing your experience on the network.

All valuable data posted on any of the networks is ultimately transferred and linked in my knowledge base.

Starting social networks is hard. I liked steps Gas app took too reach virality.

Notes

Facebook has recruited one of the world’s top AI teams, led by Yann LeCun. Their work and Google's are the equivalent of tobacco companies engineering cigarettes to ensure that nicotine hits a smoker's brain more quickly. Facebook and other social networks are the cigarette companies of the mind. Cigarettes blackened our lungs with tar, and social media blacken our brains with distraction, alienation, envy, and loneliness.
- Social media networks will become ever more addictive, and by using AI to increase the click-through rate on the ads, they will squeeze ever more money out of their addicts. AI will be essential to the "capture and sale of attention," as Tim Wu puts it, walking users from curiosity to the cash register more and more efficiently.
- Capitalism is an accelerant for addictive behavior, and we are only just realizing how unhappy people become as a result of the marketplace’s newest and most insidious products. What's worse, the necessary functions performed by our phones and the Internet are fatefully tangled with the apps that addict us. They put the heroin next to the tap water.
FB simply prolonged relationships that should’ve died out a long time ago naturally
- Generally you'd lose contact with all these people over time as you mature and just naturally drift apart. No shame in that, the ones you do want to keep in touch with you'd make a real effort for. Now it's so easy to just send a "like" , "congratulations!" or "Happy birthday!" that you find yourself very loosely connected to a bunch of people you don't want to be but feel like everyone else is still in "contact" so you don't want to miss out.
When you realize that Instagram is someones curated life, you realize how manufactured their profile actually is. What you see is what they want you to see.
The sad truth is that friendly face isn’t Facebook’s true face; it’s a sham, just like it’s a sham to sit on a tractor so people will think you’re tall. Mark Zuckerberg uses your most intimate connections, the literal faces of the people you love, to fool you into thinking that he’s not picking your pocket and taking a wrecking ball to our media, to the integrity of our society, and to democracy itself.
I gained a following in part because developers with larger followings would share my work. If you have a large following I highly encourage you to share the work of other creators! It costs nothing to share a blog or video but can make a huge difference to that creator!
Moderating a community is not censorship.
Facebook knew its algorithm incentivized outrage. Instagram knew it hurt teen girls. Facebook has been shielding VIPs from moderation.
The thing people don't see is that the problem isn't centralization, it's social media. Your decentralized social media will still be social media.
I wonder how much any Facebook story now changes anyone's minds. There’s a group of people now quite convinced that Facebook is evil, who see any new story as proof, and the rest of us, who think it's all just a noisy mess. But what would change look like?
FB (and social media generally) is amplifying the flaws in the human condition.
The main benefit of taking a break from social media is that you stop living in a fictional world and finally start dealing with your own reality.
Instead of asking “how will you make money?” Or with NFTs “how much money are you making right now buying and selling into the hype?”, please ask “how does this lead to deep habitual usage?”
Social networks usage destroy attention span for many
The greatest business you can build is one that helps people feel loved and doing so in a financially sustainable way.
WhatsApp communication being blocked in Iran as protests against oppressive regime take place.
The key to the internet is to fully own what you love, regardless of what it is, and share it without shame.

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