Social Networks for Humans

aka, my own reference links for making the fandom spaces of the future

For a while I've been thinking about and working on decentralized social networks as a better way for the internet to be. Here's some of the stuff I've been reading/writing during that process.

Philosophy

• "Why Does Decentralization Matter" by the creator of Mastodon -- a 'short and sweet' intro
• Why I'm excited about decentralized social networks (by Darius Kazemi) -- a very quick intro to the cool stuff about ActivityPub (the backbone of Hubzilla) and its particular flavour of decentralization
• Run your own social (by Darius Kazemi) -- a longer intro to some social network philosophies, focusing on small networks with community norms and agency.
• Basic HTML Is the New Punk Folk Explosion, by Zach Mandeville
• The Future Will Be Technical, a solarpunk manifesto by Zach Mandeville
• State of the Migration: On fannish archival catastrophes, and what happens next - the DW post that, for me, started it all
• Federation and Fandom, another key 'inauguration' post, this one by impertinence

Methods

• Fandom Platform of the Future✨: Requirements Gathering and Features Discussion - a collaborative google doc of specs for what we might want Next
• Banner Ads Considered Harmful: "9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects in reader engagement and resharing."
• Fanzilla Setup and Tips - a better guide than mine
• Figuring out how to host my own Fanzilla instance (by me) -- a liveblog that might someday be a guide
• Figuring out how to administrate my Fanzilla instance (aka "So You Have A Fanzilla Instance Now: You Are Like Unto A God") (by me) -- a liveblog that might someday be a guide
• How to Do Basic Stuff in Hubzilla Instances, a crowdsourced guide to using Hubzilla as a user
• How To Do The Thing, Vamp's wiki guide to using Hubzilla as a user

Homegrown fannish networks

Let me know if you want to write about yours here!

Open for users

• fandom.ink, a Mastodon server hosted by alis
• fandom.stopthatimp.net, a Hubzilla server hosted by impertinence
• oulfis.space, a Hubzilla server hosted by me, your friendly neighbourhood oulfis

All set as-is

• Vamp has her own single-user Hubzilla hub (a great way to federate!!)

In development

• Keppari, a homegrown social network still in development.

What Next?

If you're interested in getting involved, consider:

• joining, and posting on, one of the existing instances
• starting your own Hubzilla instance
• (if you have dev powers) improving Hubzilla or other ActivityPub-enabled code -- see Fandom Platform of the Future✨ !
• maybe you can make PeerTube work with ActivityPub / Hubzilla??
• maybe you can make 'sharing' work better?

Reference

Web Histories

• How the Blog Broke the Web

Other interesting social networks

• The now-defunct "This." which let people post exactly one link a day and nothign else.

Fannish conversations about centralization

• Fan fiction archives, and the opposing natures of the Internet (2009) by cschick
• Federation: social media potlucks! by beautifullights1
• Reposting a Post about Decentralized Computing, by request - some scattered thoughts from cesperanza, the source of this key quote:
  • "I have a foot in both worlds b/c of RL (meshnet stuff) and it’s honestly whiplash to go from distributed computing and decentralised web stuff where they are wading through tools and software and approaches and ideas but don’t have the networks (the largest p2p search engine has like, 600 peer operators, approximately the size of an abandoned tumblr about the sock choices of Bucky Barnes) and fandom where the #1 concern is how to cope with the avalanche of content and people and sheer BYTES and ACTIVITY we produce. It’s like, fandom is constantly making these posts going ‘but what are we going to do with all this GOLD? We just can’t DEAL with this amount of GOLD. THIS GOLD IS A GODDAMN ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARD.’"

Maybe to-read later

• A highly opinionated guide to learning about ActivityPub (by Darius Kazemi) -- in case I want to read and understand the technical documentation for the ActivityPub protocol
• Enspiral handbook -- the org doc of a decentralized collaborative organization; in particular I want to use the wayback machine to find former versions, because I remember a more manifesto-y version with some useful concepts
• Laurel Schwulst
• Retribute, a donation system for fediverse creators
• Questions About Federation, an old DW thread that I want to revisit and see what's useful in it
• ActivityPub as it has been understood - a link roundup page like this one!