Re-invent the social ẃeb

#1

I played around with facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like - but I really didn’t like the experience too much.These all are cheap solutions, and the possibilities of community making are not explored yet. A social web should be as colorful as life itself, and don’t limit the individual or groups in the way they can express themselves and their ideas in a real freeform communicating context.
I start to make an app with such an approach myself. I plan to use Node.js Socket.IO messaging to make the experience quick and responsive.
If somebody is interested in working with me together in that matter - I would be glad to share my thoughts and ideas with you!

#2

Socket.io is a solution but you could also consider websocket on solid, it’s quit same thing notifying you when a file has changed but last time I’ve tried it only acts on files. Websocket on folder would be a must so users could be notified when something has changed in a folder he subscribed

#3

What will be different about your social network? Have you looked at diaspora and friendica? (two other decentralised social networks)

#4

Hi @alexstacey - thanx for the hint. I will inspect both of them, and then I will report back to you.

#5

I am not sure we need to re-invent the social web, by way of another Facebook clone or anything like that, moreover, I believe we need to focus more on interacting with the social webs that exisit today, we should encourage that users do the same. I am not sure that I want to disavow Facebook and/or Twitter because, they are moving to a more de-centralized position, among other things, they support the contract for the web, and the data portability project.

Records indicate that Facebook and Twitter would stand to benefit from a decentralized system of interactions, where Solid becomes the interconnectivity between social web, and the users data. People who choose to decentralize their data via solid will be at an advantage, they can have their data, and their Facebook too. Difference is, the user will have to pay to store their data with their pod provider, which should create a savings to Facebook, and a revenue for the pod provider.

Facebook will not have to worry about data breaches on the level they do now because, the user will have to take full responsibility for their data, and the securitization of it, and at their (the user’s) own expense. So yes, I believe pod providers want Facebook to stick around because, among other things, they create allot of user data that will need to be stored in a solid pod, which will in turn generate profits for pod providers.

As for developers, they stand to gain revenue if they know the solid ecosystem well enough.

I read an article by @RubenVerborgh and Vander Sande, M., that was quite revealing about the past missed opportunities of the semantic web and the current web. You can read the article here: https://ruben.verborgh.org/articles/the-semantic-web-identity-crisis/

Solid: File server vs database?
#6

Hi @Joytag2 I definitely agree with what your saying, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on a social app solution and how you plan to fix / improve on what there is already.

#7

@Joytag2 I am also interested in hearing your proposal, I am sure there is allot of thought you have put into it.

IMHO, I believe that Solid will make the social web as colorful as life itself, truly, the day of reckoning is at hand for the social web, soon, users data will no longer be held in captivity, and against the users own interest.

Solid is a great start to colorizing the social web. Soon, users will be able to do all sorts of inventive things with their data, but most of all, solid as a read, write space offers users a whole new range of connectivity and interactions with the social web.

#8

I agree, I think making social generic and independent of service or app is a killer app, and I’m sure TimBL and Inrupt appreciate this.

#9

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I was sitting outside with my Macbook checking out solid and I asked myself, what is TimBL up to? What is Solid all about? I turned a little into the sun and this beam of light shot across the solid logo, and I said to myself, Solid is going to colorize the world wide web! So I took a photo of the sun shinning through my blank screen and threw the solid logo on top of it.

#10

First I want to get away with all restrictions on the users. For example it
should be possible to design content with free layout and elements comparable
to a good wysiwyg html/css designer. Naturally that means that it will be
hard to do this on mobile. But I don’t want to get the mobile users -
I want to get the artists and the creative people - the nice people. A user of my web
should spend some time in creating and exploring. This is not meant to be
a quick consumable product you can consume in a hurry. It is like with friendship:
you need to invest some care and time. But what do people really seek?
A lot of connections and followers, or something that enables you to experience love?
Second there are no tweets or posts the whole layout of the site will
be build comparable to the nautilus file explorer (if you know gnome linux) every
folder ( I call this r o o m) can contain content or other rooms.
So the user can structure his data in a easy way. The content must
not be a message to other users but can be everything you can show
in 2-d space. You can assemble your own structures, f.e. create a form that
plays the role of a time-management task to you (with title, description,
status, assignees, finish date). This structures you create will be saved as
templates, so you can use them later easily.
Third and essential: there will be a console and a text parser for this console.
There you can define your actions, relations and thoughts (there will be a thought-map that
capture a model of all relations of a user - first, every user has this way a good overview of
himself - second, every user can explore the thoughts of other users - this will require
the permission of a user - so data can be private or public).
The text parser is not limited to a set of sentences but it will be expandable.
Every user can add semantices he thinks to be useful - and use it later on - and other
users can use it too. For example: A user wants (from whatever reason) to declare
war on other users, then he can define the sentence structure: myself declares war on other.
The text parser will know about what ‘myself’ (current user from context) and ‘other’
(other user not myself) means.
From this moment on: it is possible in the system to say for example: “I declare war on @MicrosoftWindows”
This will make my web much more expressive than all other systems I do know about.

These are my first thoughts I want to share with you on this project. Additions will follow.
The working title of the whole is “we-are-alive!”.

Thanx for reading.

Please feel free to comment, criticize and add your thoughts.
I need your support on this.