[indigochill]

No, I mean just mapping social media closer to actual social networks. As examples of how existing platforms have strayed from that:

Something like 80% of my Facebook feed these days are content from groups I didn't join posted by people I don't know. It's no longer social, it's just content.

Twitter has a "Verified" checkmark, but you don't need a third party to verify your friends' identity. Of course, this is for public entities like celebrities or news organizations, but in my book celebrities don't have a place on social media besides connecting socially with their celebrity friends. But what if you want to follow the BBC? Not what social media is for. Shut off mass media and socialize with the people around you.

My current experiment is running an ActivityPub server where I only federate with a small selection of peers who I already know I trust. I think ActivityPub is likely to be a dead-end for widespread adoption (at least in this model), however, since not everyone knows someone who runs a host. Most of the uptake is on mastodon.social and people there are effectively strangers so this breaks the social trust model.

Anyway, from there I'm looking to get more into gossip protocols like Secure Scuttlebutt since on some level that's the platonic ideal of this idea: there are no servers or admins, just people connecting directly with each other (and even without a need for internet access!). However, there are usability challenges with the protocol, especially that your identity is tied to a specific device (you can't even share an identity across your mobile and desktop devices). The Manyverse crew is working on a protocol inspired by SSB to try to address these issues which I'm looking forward to.