| Federated Reddit and federated toots and all that shit are just too obtuse and like the old regime. It's too hard to set up and run your own node, and joining an existing one is just like joining Reddit or Facebook. The optimal way to distribute social news: bittorrent-style P2P swarms. People copy and paste news articles with photos (maybe this is piracy?) and share them as files with known hashes. The swarm pulls down all the articles for you to read locally without ads or scripts. No HTML and script garbage. Beautiful plaintext with minimal markdown-style markup. A core group of 5 or so people alone can probably scrape what's valuable of the old web on a daily basis, rendering the need for the web moot. The web is going away anyway with the social media giants. We should just own the method of distribution instead of having it locked away in Medium and AMP. User identities in the system are PGP signed, but can be effectively anonymous. You follow people that you upvote frequently, and articles they upvote are given higher priority in your feed. You share your voting with others to create rich filters. If the system detects noise, you know where in the graph it comes from and can nuke it. It'll take time to build a reputation, so people won't risk it. You can layer comments on top and distribute them the same way. Content is ephemeral as you want and decays naturally if nobody keeps or seeds it. Some archive team might want to keep stuff, but nobody else has to go to the trouble of maintaining infrastructure to do so. No spam. No ads. No VC-funded growth engines that require your phone or a mobile app. Just a solid protocol and beautiful reading and authoring client. The protocol should include a plaintext legal preamble / poison pill that prevents companies from ever trying to coopt it: BEGIN. BY EMITTING THIS PROTOCOL, WE OFFER SHARES EQUIVALENT OF 1% OF OUR COMPANY ON A DAILY BASIS TO ANYONE WHO CONNECTS TO THIS CLIENT. Or something to make "embrace and extend" impossible by forcing companies into an impossible legal contract. |