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Very good, I have been thinking of something quite similar. A “what if I could have everything I want” social media platform. Here are some of the most important aspects, maybe they are useful to you:
-Self-governing communities like Lemmy (not sure if instances make sense) with very fine-grained control over who can see and post what. You can either have a completely open community where everyone can see every post and everyone can post OR you can have an invite-only community where users can only see posts since they joined (and are allowed to see) and every post is anonymous OR anything in between.
-I like Lemmy for the ability of instances to block each other, but not sure how that makes sense in the context of a decentralized backend.
-Users should have the option to post anonymously or at least pseudonymously (on a community basis) in any community. They should have a choice if they want to share their post/comment history and with whom. Of course, communities have control over whether they allow that or not too. You might have one community that doesn’t allow anonymous posting at all, and another that only allows it if you have some form of reputation like karma. But I think optional pseudonymity on a community basis is a MUST. And if mods ban a pseudonymous account, the entire account is banned; they can’t just come back with more pseudonyms. I know people will get riled up over this, but I think it is important to let people speak their minds without fear of repercussions, also it’s important for privacy and to protect from doxxing.
-Also, optional automatic post pruning, where posts are deleted after X amount of time.
-Ideally, you should have the ability to have a community be like a Reddit sub, a 4chan-like board, or just you and your friends’ private server.
-Communities can be forked by anyone with the right permissions. They will become the new mods, and the fork with the most users gets to keep the name. For that reason, communities aren’t necessarily hosted on instances like Lemmy, but on some decentralized backend like IPFS. This is so you don’t have to copy all the content and user data, but just the references to it, to make forking as low-cost as possible. This is done to rein in the power of mods, making them work for the users. Also, it would allow communities to more easily naturally split without losing old content.
-I would have an “app market” for community-created feed algorithms, block lists, filtering algorithms, etc., where users can pick based on features, hosting cost, etc… AI filtering is well and good, but it’s still expensive, so you have to account for that. It would give users the ultimate power over their own user experience. I hate outsourcing social media algorithms to other people; it’s like outsourcing your own brain and letting others decide what you think.
-Reposts should be lumped together in yout feed. Ideally, you wouldn’t see the same post twice. This also applies to media; the same photo with a different title shouldn’t be shown twice. But perhaps you have some threshold where if the context is different enough, you show it twice.
-Like you said, AI post/comment filters. For example, I only want to be able to see left-wing comments or comments about cats or positive/negative comments. Comments could be clustered into categories like that, perhaps creatable by the users themselves. Also, I want the ability to see a broad mix of these categories. For example, for political subs, I want to know what each political orientation is thinking about this.
-Comment filters for the most unique comments. It should show me the one guy in a million samey comments who thinks there is a wizard conspiracy behind all world events, if I want to see that.
-Comment section summary, telling you what all the unique opinions in the comments section are. So if there are 10,000 comments about cats and one about a dog, I want to see 50% what the cat and 50% what the dog people think in the summary. Something like that.
-Built-in text post/link summary.
-A trending feature like Twitter, but more with smart keywords, not hashtags. So, for instance, 100 posts about the same soccer game with completely different content are shown in trending with the keyword “Frogfordshire Divided vs. Botingialera FC.” I believe that should be possible and financially viable with LLMs in the near future.
-Reverse image search should be built in, and possibly even image-to-text that will then show you similar text posts to what is in the image.
-Similarly, automatic AI captioning/summary of photo, video, audio content for better search and also for people with disabilities.
-A separate feed like TikTok that aggressively tailors to your revealed preferences, alongside the regular feed. Like how YouTube has a normal feed and one for shorts.
-You should have “recommendation algorithm save points.” I often click on one wrong YT video and my entire feed is off all of a sudden. So, I would like to be able to revert to the earlier point in the recommendation algorithm. Honestly, with modern ML embedding-based algorithms, that shouldn’t be that hard. You just allow users to save their personal vector/embedding. It’s literally just saving a history of vectors equivalent in size to tweets (Xweets? Xs? exes?).
-A built-in conversational AI would be nice, that you can ask about any comments on a post, what is in the post, what is in the image (like “Identify this mushroom for me”).
-Custom multicommunity feeds like multireddits, and also searches explicitly within this multicommunity. I often browse the Imaginary network for concept art, which just lumps together multiple subs.
I would say the forking, the visibiliy/posting permissions, pseudonymity, custom feed/filtering algorthism are the most important features. Everything else is just nice to haves.
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Well both have threads in different communities (reddit subs vs. boards like /b/).
4chan allows posting without an account, that is why it is popular for leakers, whistleblowers etc…
4chan “post comments” are chronologic, reddit post comments are nesting and have various sort orders. I think Reddit is objectively better here in my opinon, so I would just ignore this difference and do it like Reddit/lemmy. But if you really want you can give communities power over this.
4chan threads are automatically deleted after a short while, so they basically have pruning. This is a bit complex to explain, but I don’t think the exact mechanism is that important, as long as threads are deleted after a while. That is one important feature of 4chan vs Reddit where everything is saved.
The most important point is that everyone on 4chan is anonymous by default. I don’t use 4chan, but if I rememeber correctly depending on the board: 1) you get a unique ID for the thread so others can identify you in the thread 2) on some boards you don’t get an ID, it’s just that every post has an ID, but you can’t tell what two posts are by the same person 3) You can also give yourself a name on some boards I think. Another level of “anonymity granulatity” that 4chan doesn’t have I think, could be you automatically get a unique ID cookie that expires after you don’t post for a while.
Naturally there also is not post/comment history like there is on reddit.
So what I like about 4chan is 1) posting without an account 2) posting anonymously 3) posting anonymously with a unique thread ID 4) posting pseudonymously without an account 5) thread/comment pruning aka auto delete after some time.
But you could imagine all these various levels of anonymity on a spectrum from 4chan to Reddit. Phrased differently, from posting completely anonymously without an account and everything is deleted after some time like 4chan TO posting pseudonymously and posts stay forever and other users can see your post history like Reddit.
To explain further what I mean by the spectrum between 4chan and Reddit:
In my optimal social network a community would be able to perfectly mimic 4chan.
Or a community could require you to have an account but otherwise mimic 4chan perfectly.
Or a community could force everyone to post under a community pseudonym, so if you have a history on other instances/communities others can’t see it, only your history on this community.
Or a community could allow you to choose if you want others to see your cross instance history or if you want to be community pseudonymous or if you want to be completely anonymous.
Or a community could require you to be completely transparent about your cross-instance history like Lemmy.
And any of those communities could auto delete posts/comments after a while, regardless of anonymity etc…
But all of this with federation like Lemmy. So I can go to the community on a different instance (let’s say test.ml) that perfectly mimics a 4chan board (and requires an account) with my feddit.nl account and all my posts there will be anonymous. My post/comment history on this 4chan-like community won’t be visible in my account history and others on this 4chan-like community can’t tell it’s me.
Lemmy kind of allows you to be pseudonymous on every instance by just making a differnt account for each instance. But that is tedious, I would want to be able to be pseudonymous on an instance/community level with my existing account without having to make a new account. Bonus of this being that admins/mods could ban pseudonymous accounts from certain instances, but not from others.
Basically have various different anonymity/pseudonymity/pruning features that communities and users can mix and match depending on their needs.
Why? Maybe you have cancer and you don’t want everyone else to know you are posting on a cancer community, but you still want others in that community to see your post history.
And in general it’s just good OPSEC/privacy practice to have that kind of separation. It would be amazing to hinder Big Tech/Big Ad companies from mining and selling your data.
I know some people don’t care at all about that, but I value my privacy and my optimal social network would protect is as much as I want.
And anyone who doesn’t like those kinds of anonymity features, because of brigading or hate speech or whatever can just exclusively visit communities where those kinds of features are turned off.
I personally wouldn’t want to frequent 4chan-like communities either, as they are basically the sewage pipe of the internet. I would want something between Reddit and 4chan. But I don’t see why not to let others have their fun in the sewers, so I would let communities and instances decide.
And also would like to have a personal closed off community with my friends, like a Discord server or a group-chat, that I can access with my normal social media account without without worrying about data leaks. So there these features also come in handy.
So yeah I think the optimal social network would let communities decide on these features in a very fine grained manner. And of course combine that with fine grained permissions, who can do/see what and why.
Sorry for this post being so long and convoluted, but I hope you understand what I mean now. It’s just an unavoidably complex idea that I struggle to explain fully and succinctly. But every ounce of that complexity is nescessary if you ask me.
@CoderSupreme I’d love to know the difference too; never spent time on 4chan.
You could read my other very long reply to OP, but to answer your question in a nutshell:
I wouldn’t recommend 4chan, I explain why and what features I like about it in the reply to OP.
I read your posts. Interesting. I also find privacy to be an important desire on these platforms. That being said, being that anyone can open an instance and have access to the raw data, wouldn’t many of your features be logically impossible to implement under a distributed server philosophy.
Or maybe better said, individual servers could certainly implement certain features but they would no be able to share the raw anonymous data without breaking their security. Or they could anonymize their data but what server would allow this and not block them rapidly. Thus I would need an account on every platform to access all content.
Well there is a lot that you can do to maximize security, privacy and anonymity in this setting.
For expample, you can do optional client-side/end-to-end encryption, so the instance owner doesn’t even know what is going on on their server. E.g. like how Whatsapp, Signal etc do it. Delta Chat is even an example of an end-to-end encrypted federated messaging servive. Anyone can host a server, but server owners don’t know what anyone is talking about.
For example, there might be an instance for my local county that most people from the county chose as a home instance. I can do end-to-end encrypted personal messaging on it like Signal/Whatsapp or end-to-end encrypted group chata or my end-to-end encrypted discord like community or a personal end-to-end encrypted Lemmy community for my friends and me. Only people with access can see what happens in these communities, server owners can not, they can only see the encrypted storage.
Also you could do privacy protection cross instance by hiding the real account. Let’s say 1) you visit a new instance from your home instance, 2) you generate a new identity tied to your existing account, 3) you do some convoluted sheme to use zero-knowledge proofs to get your home instance to authenticate you as a trustworthy user, BUT without your home instance knowing your new identiy on the other instance, nor the new instance knowing your old identity. For all intents and purposes it’s like creating a completely new account for the new instance, except you get to keep your positive reputation from your home instance. Like a recommendation letter from your instance for an anonymous user.
This will also become much more relevant once AI bots are becoming a problem in the fediverse. You need some way to prove you are a human, that doesn’t rely on centralization, or reduces your privacy or anonymity. Basically every instance also becomes an identity service, that can vouch for you that you are a trustworth real human.
And again all these features would be optional for instances, communities and users. Some communities would use none of this and just work like regular old Lemmy. Even DMs could be visible for instance owners. As long as it’s clearly visible what your current level of privacy/anonymity is, I don’t see a problem with it. E.g. for corporate transparency you might have nothing end-to-end encrypted.
I just want one big federated platform that can be used for pretty much every form of communication with appropriate levels of privacy and security for every use case. That’s my perfect fediverse, like the concept of “the end of history”, it’s “the end of social media”, i.e. we won’t have to change it for as long as humanity lives…
But I’m gonna be honest, it’s possible that it would be a better solution to not have your identity tied to any single home instance, but have some sort of global identity management, that is like an umbrella layer over all instances. It functions in the same way that I described, with no instance knowing your real global identity. It just generates a new identity for every instance BUT somehow accumulates reputation accross instances. That reputation you can use to join new instances or to prove you are human, without actually ever revealing your “real” identity to them. Like, imagine you are a bouncer for a club, you can’t see anyone who wants enter the club, you just have an omnipotent guy that looks at them for you and that knows if they are trustworthy, and this guy just tells you who to let in and who not to. The bouncer is the instance and the omnipotent guy is the global identity service and the people that want to enter the club are users like you. The instance owner doesn’t know what users just entered, but they still know everyone is trustworthy.
Something like that.
Identity services/human verification like that are inevitable in my opinion, so I’d like them to be implemented in the best way possible, open-source, secure, completely decentralized, anonymous and private. No centralized government ID services, nor Big Tech ones, that is just ripe for abuse on a scale we’ve never seen before.
This global identity service that I’m envisioning wouldn’t nescessarily be centralization, as there might not be some central point that does all the global identity management. Sort of how there are password managers that don’t store your passwords on any single server, but passwords are generated from the name of the domain and your master password and maybe a pw reset counter. This global identity management could function algorithmicly without any data storage OR work on “truely” decentralized (not federated) solutions like blockchains or torrents etc… Basically where the trustworthiness is guaranteed by the algorithms, not the server owners.
And again all this obfuscation of identites might be optional. You might use the same identiy across different instances and everything you write in those instances might be public OR visible to the instance owner OR it might be completely encrypted, anonymous, private.
Having all identities under one umbrella will give you a lot of convenience. For example you might want to delete your entire social media presence, so you just delete your global identity and all your sub identites will be deleted as well, along with all the content you posted under them (where that is allowed).
It’s all about having the appropriate amount of privacy and anonymity for any use case, while keeping maximum convenience for users.
Of course you could do this all today, using different platforms like Whatsapp, Discord, Matrix, Lemmy, etc. while juggling 10000 different accounts, with every platform working differently. No one can tell me that that is better solution… I just want it all federated standardized so you always know exactly what you’re getting yourself into.
There might be 50 different variables that affect your privacy/anonymity on any instance/community and you get the same clearly structured overview of those varbiable on literally every instance/community on this “network”. No painfully extracting these variables from 1000 terms of service declations, no dealing with their shitty web design that is being forced on you to maximize clicks, no popups etc…
Instead you can pick your own clients to browse, just like the Fediverse, while always having a clear understanding of your level of privacy and anonymity.
Like I said, it should be the social media platform to end all social media to give the power back to the people, not some tech bro or the government. Just want people in virtual spaces to have the same agency they used to have in physical spaces. Privacy and anonymity by default used to be the norm in phyiscal spaces in a free society, but with the increasing virtualization that is no longer the case. I just want things to go back to normal.
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