How to decentralize social media—a brief sketch

The problem about social media is that it is centralized. Centralization empowers massive corporations and governments to steal our privacy and restrict our speech and autonomy.

What should exist are neutral, technical standards and protocols, like the standards and protocols for blogs, email, and the Web. Indeed, many proposed standards already do exist, but none has emerged as a common, dominant standard. Blockchain technology—the technology of decentralization—is perfect for this, but not strictly necessary. Common protocols would enable us to follow public feeds no matter where they are published. We would eventually have our pick of many different apps to view these feeds. We would choose our own terms, not Facebook’s or Twitter’s, for both publishing and reading.

As things are, if you want to make short public posts to the greatest number of people, you have to go to Twitter, enriching them and letting them monetize your content (and your privacy). Similarly, if you want to make it easy for friends and family to follow your more personal text and other media, you have to go to Facebook. Similarly for various other kinds of content. It just doesn’t have to be that way. We could decentralize.

This is a nice dream. But how do we make it happen?

After all, the problem about replacing the giant, abusive social media companies is that you can’t replace existing technology without making something so much more awesome that everyone will rush to try it. And the social media giants have zillions of the best programmers in the world. How can we, the little guys, possibly compete?

Well, I’ve thought of a way the open source software and blockchain communities might actually kick the legs out from under the social media giants. My proposal (briefly sketched) has five parts. The killer feature, which will bring down the giants, is (4):

  1. The open data standards. Create open data standards and protocols, or probably just adopt the best of already-existing ones, for the feeds of posts (and threads, and other data structures) that Twitter, Facebook, etc., uses. I’m not the first to have thought of this; the W3C has worked on the problem. It’d be like RSS, but for various kinds of social media post types.
  2. The publishing/storage platforms. Create reliable ways for people to publish, store, and encrypt (and keep totally secret, if they want) their posts. Such platforms would allow users to control exactly who has access to what content they want to broadcast to the world, and in what form, and they would not have to ask permission from anyone and would not be censorable. (Blockchain companies using IPFS, and in particular Everipedia, could help here and show the way; but any website could publish feeds.)
  3. The feed readers. Just as the RSS standard spawned lots of “reader” and “aggregator” software, so there should be similar feed readers for the various data standards described in (1) and the publishers described in (2). While publishers might have built-in readers (as the social media giants all do), the publishing and reading feature sets need to be kept independent, if you want a completely decentralized system.
  4. The social media browser plugins. Here’s the killer feature. Create at least one (could be many competing) browser plugins that enable you to (a) select feeds and then (b) display them alongside a user’s Twitter, Facebook, etc., feeds. (This could be an adaptation of Greasemonkey.) In other words, once this feature were available, you could tell your friends: “I’m not on Twitter. But if you want to see my Tweet-like posts appear in your Twitter feed, then simply install this plugin and input my feed address. You’ll see my posts pop up just as if they were on Twitter. But they’re not! And we can do this because you can control how any website appears to you from your own browser. It’s totally legal and it’s actually a really good idea.” In this way, while you might never look at Twitter or Facebook, you can stay in contact with your friends who are still there—but on your own terms.
  5. The social media feed exporters/APIs. Create easy-to-use software that enables people to publish their Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Diaspora, Gab, Minds, etc., feeds via the open data standards. The big social media companies already have APIs, and some of the smaller companies and open projects have standards, but there is no single, common open data standard that everyone uses. That needs to change. If you could publish your Twitter data in terms of such a standard, that would be awesome. Then you could tell your friends: “I’m on Twitter, but I know you’re not. You don’t have to miss out on my tweets. Just use a tweet reader of your choice (you know—like an old blog/RSS feed reader, but for tweets) and subscribe to my username!

The one-two punch here is the combination of points (1) and (4): First, we get behind decentralized, common social media standards and protocols, and then we use those standards when building plugins that let our friends, who are still using Facebook and Twitter (etc.), see posts that we put on websites like Steemit, Minds, Gab, and Bitchute (not to mention coming Everipedia Network dapps).

The exciting thing about this plan is that no critical mass seems to be needed in order to get people to install the envisioned plugin. All you need is one friend whose short posts you want to see in your Twitter feed, and you might install a plugin that lets you do that. As more and more people do this, there should be a snowball effect. Thus, even a relatively small amount of adoption should create a movement toward decentralization. And then the days of centralized social media will be numbered. We’ll look back on the early days of Facebook and Twitter (and YouTube!) as we now do the Robber Barons.

We can look at a later iteration of Everipedia itself as an example. Right now, there is one centralized encyclopedia: Wikipedia. With the Everipedia Network, there will be a protocol that will enable people from all over the web to participate in a much broader project.

I would love to see the various competitors of the social media giants settle on a common standard and otherwise join forces on these sorts of projects. If they do, it will happen, and the days of privacy-stealing, centralized, controlling, Big Brother social media will soon be behind us. We’ll return to the superior and individually empowering spirit of the original Internet.

We have to do this, people. This is the future of the Internet. Even if you’ve given up social media, we should build this for our friends and family who are still toiling in the digital plantations.


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Please do dive in (politely). I want your reactions!

31 responses to “How to decentralize social media—a brief sketch”

  1. Andrea

    Hi Larry, This is great. Move the human story forward!

  2. Aaron Parecki, responding (indirectly) to the above essay, bragged (and why not?), “Pretty pleased I managed to have this entire conversation with @lsanger on Twitter using only my own website and tools! Never had to visit Twitter or use any Twitter apps! Our #indieweb tools have come a long way! #ownyourdata”

    I was happy to retweet that. Definite win. But I also responded: “But you’re still using Twitter, which (a) helps them and (b) gives your tweeps no extra incentive to leave.

    “If you made your stuff available only using a browser plugin that added your microposts to people’s feeds, it would help make your open protocols go viral.”

    Greg McVerry replied to that, also on Twitter and (this is very cool!) via his decentralized, syndicated feed, which also posts to Twitter. Since I had a longish reply I decided to put it here.

    He said: “Yes form of decentralized syndication. Since users own data they choose where to syndicate. No one is forced on Twitter. Many use webmentions and never touch a social media silo. Some stick around for advocacy, others because that is where there…”

    No one is forced on Twitter, naturally, but if you aren’t on Twitter, then your audience is (probably) smaller, while if you are on Twitter, they can steal your privacy, which I deeply resent. This is a big dilemma to me. Beyond that, I simply don’t think anybody should have as much power as the social media giants have over us today. I think it’s increasingly politically important to decentralize social media.

    But the problem is that there is just no sufficient incentive to leave, to get acquainted with alternative social media, and (most importantly) to start actually caring about the fact that you don’t have to let Big Tech rule such a large part of your life.

    The only way (that I’ve been able to think of) that we are going to be able get a lot of people to start using decentralized social media (like IndieWeb, or whatever it ought to be—I haven’t studied it enough) is to constantly advertise its availability by coming where they are and actually showing them (with a browser plugin using something like Greasemonkey, inserting posts like this one) that there’s social media originating elsewhere.

    Otherwise, look—the vast majority of people who made social media popular in the first place have no incentive to leave. You can’t build stuff for programmers if you want mass adoption. You have to build it for grandma, or at least (as in a browser plugin, which grandma probably will never install) for the power users who care about this stuff but just throw up their hands when it comes to stuff like Mastodon or Diaspora.

    There by the way is another reason we need to replace traditional social media. It’s much too controlled. I can’t add a long response like this on Twitter without making an annoying thread. Because they won’t let me write longer posts.

    On the notion that FOSS programmers should make stuff for grandma and not just other programmers, see this Reddit thread that I started.

  3. […] Larry I am goign to reply here and on your comments (in case you do not accept webmentions). […]

  4. Larry I am going to reply here and on your comments (in case you do not accept webmentions).

    The conversation you and https://aaronparecki.com had on Twitter has been great. Glad we incentivized you to move it off of Twitter and on to our blogs…

    It’s like the opposite of Field of Dreams, if you ask them to leave they will (well we built a way cooler ball park so I guess its still exactly like Field of Dreams)..

    But the problem is that there is just no sufficient incentive to leave, to get acquainted with alternative social media, and (most importantly) to start actually caring about the fact that you don’t have to let Big Tech rule such a large part of your life.

    Be a Model

    I am that incentive. I teach.You are that incentive. Wikipedia is a model. The next person you find on Twiiter they will be the next incentive.

    Let us not expect blitzscaling level of adoption when we seek to retake the web based on human values rather than inflated valuations.

    I take 90 or so kids a year and get them online for the first time. Sometimes this requires a scaffold like Medium or WordPress.com (who didn’t have Livejournal or MySpace)…What you are asking is equivalent to asking someone to skip those baby steps we all got.
    Build Tools by Using Tools

    Tired and engendered stereotypes aside (let’s leave grandmas alone…gender or age doesn;t reflect interest in turn key platforms) you are correct this needs to be easier in two issues you mention discovery and the tools.

    The tools are there. People can get a https://micro.blog subscription and be ready to go. Known (which I use) is a step up, WordPress themes exist, and then you get into the heavy code options.

    The other issue of discovery we are working all the time. Been playing with web rings, and no joke they will also be great tools to find content.

    I also think so many sites exist in the wild that connect to the IndieWeb we will soon be able to build really neat open data queries..Want to know most popular song listened to last week on Indieweb? That possibility is coming.
    Incentivize Others

    We also are trying to expand our tools to other platforms. In fact during this Winter WikiMedia Foundation meeting we submitted three proposals, one for webmention badges for contributors, one for an h-feed and one to add IndieAuth support so I could log in with my domain. It isn’t just Twitter we want to play with, but wikipedia as well.

    More and more publishing platforms and journalisms sites turning to IndieWeb tools to ensure maximum inter operability and resilence.

    In fact any network that relies on open apis can connect.

    See that’s the beauty of IndieWeb, it doesn’t take any new killer social media platform.

    Just a bit of HTML.

  5. The social media browser plugins. Here’s the killer feature. Create at least one (could be many competing) browser plugins that enable you to (a) select feeds and then (b) display them alongside a user’s Twitter, Facebook, etc., feeds. (This could be an adaptation of Greasemonkey.) In other words, once this feature were available, you could tell your friends: “I’m not on Twitter. But if you want to see my Tweet-like posts appear in your Twitter feed, then simply install this plugin and input my feed address. You’ll see my posts pop up just as if they were on Twitter. But they’re not! And we can do this because you can control how any website appears to you from your own browser. It’s totally legal and it’s actually a really good idea.” In this way, while you might never look at Twitter or Facebook, you can stay in contact with your friends who are still there—but on your own terms.

    This is an intriguing idea. In particular, it would be cool if I could input my OPML file of people I’m following and have a plugin like this work with other social readers.

    We can look at a later iteration of Everipedia itself as an example. Right now, there is one centralized encyclopedia: Wikipedia. With the Everipedia Network, there will be a protocol that will enable people from all over the web to participate in a much broader project.

    As I look at this, I can’t help think about my desire to want to be able to link to a wiki in a post and have a Webmention added to that post’s “See Also” or reference section. With the link automatically added to the wiki’s page like this, future readers and editors could have access to my original and could potentially synopsize and include details from my post into the wiki’s article.

    But how do we make it happen?

    Larry, I caught your Twitter conversation with Aaron Parecki earlier about IndieWeb. I’ve added a lot of the open specs he referenced to my own WordPress website with a handful of plugins and would be happy to help you do the same if you like. I think that with some of the IndieWeb tools, it’s always even more impressive if you can see them in action using something you’re already regularly using.

    If nothing else, it’ll give you some direct experience with how the decentralized nature of how these things work. I’m posting my reply to you own my own site and manually syndicating the reply (since you don’t yet support webmention, one of the protocols) which will give at least some idea of how it all works.

    If you’re curious about how you could apply it to your own WordPress site, I’ve collected some research, articles and experiments specific to my experience here: boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/

    The feed readers. Just as the RSS standard spawned lots of “reader” and “aggregator” software, so there should be similar feed readers for the various data standards described in (1) and the publishers described in (2). While publishers might have built-in readers (as the social media giants all do), the publishing and reading feature sets need to be kept independent, if you want a completely decentralized system.

    I’ve outlined a bit about how feed readers could be slighly modified to do some of this in the past: https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/

  6. Larry, I installed NextCloud on my home server to enjoy the benefits of a cloud without turning over my files to a company that wants to market things I don’t need to me, but in using it I noticed that there are decentralized social media plugins available, like Circles, XMPP Chat, and Social, which is touted as, “Nextcloud becomes part of the federated social networks!” Overall, I found NextCloud to be very good, and think it’s something that may be worth getting involved with.

  7. Giarc

    What you are describing sounds a lot like Secure Scuttlebutt. https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
    It’s open, it’s built on verifiable signature chains (DCGs) that make up append-only feeds, and it doesn’t have a centralized singleton like blockchains do. Each cryptographic feed identifier (public key) can be assigned personalised petnames to make them human friendly. You publish messages of any type to your own feed(s). Has encrypted private messages, with private groups being worked on. Nodes replicate other feeds of friends and any number of hops (friends of a friend) from that friend. Blocking feeds helps push feeds outside of your friend.hops network so they aren’t replicated. Nodes can invite new peers, peer with each other or discover each other over local networks. Nodes called pubs (supernodes) are used to publicly invite people into the network and to relay messages. You can reply to friends offline and then sync when you connect to a node in the network (it’s a delay-tolerant network). Is network protocol agnostic (UDP/TCP, Tor, WebSockets, Bluetooth). Has a number of different clients currently available. Someone has already written twitter-ssb-import. A browser extension for Firefox is being worked on that could implement your idea, and will handle ssb: protocol links in the browser. The URI format is currently being worked on, expect to start seeing more ssb: links soon. It’s still rough around the edges but is actively being worked on by a passionate group.

  8. Is the IndieWeb a real alternative to the “corporate web”?

    Is this a more “decentralized” alternative to Google and social media outlets that gather and monetize your data?

    Can the IndieWeb really avoid the access walls, terms of service and ownership of content rules of centralized web sites (like FB, Twitter)?

    I’m a little skeptical. There’s an old Italian aphorism: “Change the miller, change the thief.” The Marxist in me distrusts any proposed radical changes in design and implementation of corporate entitles (like the “corporate web”) that actually use those structures to launch what’s claimed to be a different platform for protecting content and ensuring search privacy. It doesn’t seem to the nonspecialist like me to be anything but the same old same old but with a different mission statement.

    I’m also always a little wary of claims by well-meaning people with specialized knowledge and data management skills of their own who claim to democratize the means of cultural production without being able to articulate it clearly and make it look like a clear alternative.

    It hardly strikes me as a paradigm shift. David Deutsch has coined a term “constructor” to indicate a dvice that causes other things to undergo transformations change without undergoing any net change itself (from “The Beginning of Infinity”). Is IndieWeb a “constructor”?

    The IndieWeb looks to me like ripe picking for devious IT capitalist ventures of the future.

  9. […] This article was originally published on Larry Sanger’s blog […]

  10. I’d like to add the following corollary to what I’ve already posted.

    You said, “After all, the problem about replacing the giant, abusive social media companies is that you can’t replace existing technology without making something so much more awesome that everyone will rush to try it. And the social media giants have zillions of the best programmers in the world. How can we, the little guys, possibly compete?”

    Larry, I don’t think we need to compete. As I said in my previous post, to do so would run the risk of employing a fake “constructor” in Deutsch’s use of that term: a device that causes other things to undergo transformation without undergoing any net change itself. Device here can mean the new Blockchain Economy (that George Gilder argues in Life after Google will replace “big data” and Google algorithms). The shackles that proposed “blockchain” or radically decentralized (“horizontal”) models loosen would only give way to others given the nature of capitalist democracy with its long neoliberal hooks into the private market.

    Deutsch optimistically envisages a future of space travel and colonization using only the matter and energy deep space provides in abundance. In the case of FB, Twitter, Google, however, is it possible to transform current social media models without radically changing the capitalist superstructure on which they arose in the first place and that continue to sustain them? It’s (in my view) ideologically impossible. It’s hard to envisage, even with Deutsch’s optimism, something to replace them.

    I agree with Geert Lovink, media activist and organizer, that we should rather adopt a post-colonial response to the hegemony of FB-type social media, understanding that, in the face of diminishing “physical spaces”, they are at present the only available sites for growing numbers of people in the world who strive daily to engage in meaningful “commons based initiatives” and grassroots movements. It’s a refuge for people who may feel disenfranchised and cut off from the more elitist global networks being run by rich white guys in the West.

    I think the problem is that the need for a more decentralized social media is in response to one prevailing view of the “online- self” as being isolated and/or targeted for cultural and identity theft. It’s a fashionable view that’s a far cry from the original view of online activity as a place for liberatory and self-defining activity.

    1. Conrad, you are right to be skeptical but we aren’t talking about any new tech. Just the web.

      The corporate alternative we speak of is the individual.

      I know the idea of personal ownership may not gel with your economic values but solidarity begins with a commitment to self.

      Doesn’t just take data management specialists, it takes, leaders, teachers, and organizers. Fighting exploitation always been this way in history. Why would the web be different?

      Does developing the literacy skills and having the income to support this vision reflect inequity. Yes. Again literacy has always reflected our power structures, and yet at the same literary is the the only thing that can topple power.

      That’s the alternative, let us fight to bring basic web literacy to all and empower people to own their data and control how it is used.

      1. Thank you for your reply, Greg

        the skeptic in me always is looking for the underlying assumptions of any proposed claims to rectifying the wrongs of hegemonic power (in any area).

        But you’re right: it does begin with the individual. As a retired teacher I appreciate the importance accorded here to education and broader community-based efforts.

        At the moment my views on web and social media have been heavily influenced by Geert Lovink

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