I don't get the feeling that the old sweats around here are exactly social media enthusiasts, but I was wondering if I might pick your brains on the idea of peer-to-peer social media network.

All the major platforms, which offer more or less the same basic functions, have these nasty algorithms which apparently prioritize shareholders' interests over users' interests. Their executives also have an unfortunate habit of catering to the political villains who pressure and threaten them. They suppress external links of any kind which might lead users away from the app/platform. They seem to deprioritize political speech according to some mysterious rules. They try to extract ad money from you to reach your own followers. They jam your feed full of weird little pseudo-feeds they think you will like -- FB and IG, in particular, are full of these low-grade special interest feeds which are rife with misinformation/disinformation/AI-generated junk. They inject all manner of dodgy ads for temu this and bitcoin that and hateful outrage profiteers. They rake in gobs of cash for billionaire villains and disrupter tech bros. There are so many reasons to dislike these platforms.

I have often wondered how one might devise a protocol that would generate a social media type feed without the need for some centralized, parasitic corporate monstrosity. I tend to imagine something where each user's posts are aggregated into something like an RSS feed, with assets either delivered P2P or hosted on some kind of asset platform like Imgur, YouTube, etc. Clearly, there are some challenges:
1) where does the client find the feeds of the people you follow? Is there some way to broadcast one's feed from one's workstation or device? Or must some kind of dedicated web server scheme be devised?
2) Delivery of image, video, audio assets could be challenging. Delivering them directly to all your visitors could quickly introduce a giant bandwith problem. This is not efficient. Relying on some asset hosting platform like imgur or S3 would probably cost money.
3) How to enforce permissions? One great feature of social media platforms is the ability to block or mute stalkers and creeps, to limit the visibility of one's feed to just friends, etc.
4) Bad guys will inevitably want to exploit this system to disseminate agitprop, scams, griefer content, etc.

A cursory search for 'p2p social media' yields a smattering of information -- something called 'manyverse', some discussion of mastodon. Looks like the W3C has a working group: https://www.w3.org/Social/WG

I'd be interested in hearing anybody's thoughts. For all its many evils, social media does make keeping in touch with like minded people easier, and as someone who has had some success as a musician, I'd very much like a way to inform my followers of new developments without having to pay some greedy, evil corporation.

    Have you ever checked out www.Nextdoor.com ? It's been up now for about 14 years. As hard as they tried to NOT be like Facebook - they have in fact copied as much as they can.

    The original concept of communicating with your neighbors isn't a Bad idea per se.... You basically have to give them you water bill account information to join/prove you live where you say you live...

    Steve_R_Jones I have not checked Next Door. In my thinking, social media isn't about keeping touch with your neighbors--who are right next door, after all--it's about keeping in touch with far flung friends and family and finding a way to reach out to potential customers and sympatico communities of interest. I might add that NextDoor is yet another corporation that's trying to milk & squeeze their users for as much money as they can, the requirement of proof of residence seems like a privacy and security risk, and I've heard stories about rampant racism and xenophobia on that particular platform.

        hmmmm. If you have any sort of local business - being able to reach out to 10 to 20,000 of your neighbors for free isn't a bad idea.

        Ever had a pet sneak out and run away? Your "far flung friends and family" can't help you with that....but your neighbors can.

          That may be true but, to clarify the point of my original post, I'm curious about ways that users can interact on social media without the interference and strictures imposed by some potentially unscrupulous or adversarial corporation. And, in my case, I tend to peddle digital goods (music and code) and a few mail order goods, neither of which are constrained to my locale.

            9 days later

            I moved from twitter to Bluesky a few months ago and honestly, it's kinda delightful. The algorithm isn't at all as aggressive, the nazis are having a hard time fitting in, let alone taking over like they have on twitter, and not only is it hella easy to block people but blocking someone actually blocks them from your feed, again unlike twitter. Also, it's open-source so the likelihood of some fascist asshat like elon swooping in to buy it for nefarious purposes is low. Worth checking out imo.

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