Resilient social networks

time to read 4 min | 636 words

Yesterday I posted about Parler banning and the likely impact of that, both legally and in terms of the technical details. My expectations is that new actors will step in to fill the existing demand created by the current social network account suspensions. I had spent some time thinking about the likely effects of this, and I think that it will lead to some interesting results.

A new social network will very likely rise as a result of those actions. That network would have to be resilient for de-platforming issues. That means that it cannot assume that it can run on any of the cloud services, at least not as normally understood by today’s standards. That means that we are likely to see one of two options:

  • Fully distributed systems – independent nodes collaborating with one another to create a network. Each node may be host and operated independently. Similar to how torrents work and other fully distributed P2P systems.
  • Distributed infrastructure – a set of servers that are running on behalf of a single entity, but are spread over multiple vendors and locations. The idea is that the shutdown of a single or multiple vendors will have little impact, because of distribution of effort.

The first option is probably something like Mastodon, but I would really like to see a return to blogs & RSS as the preferred social network. That has the advantage of a true distributed model without a single controlling actor. It is also much lower cost in terms of technology and complexity. Discovery of new blogs can be handled via recommendations, search, etc.

The reason I prefer this option is that I like to blog Smile. More seriously, owning your own content and distribution platform has just become quite important. A blog is about as simple a piece of software as you can imagine. Consuming blogs is an act that require no publication of personal information, no single actor that can observe everything you do, etc.

I don’t know if this will be the direction, although it is my favorite one. It is possible that we’ll end up with Mastodon empire, with many actors creating networks of servers which may or may not be interconnected. I can see a future where you’ll have a network of dog owners vs. cat owners, but the two aren’t federated and there are isolated discussions between them.

Given that you could create links from one to the other, I don’t think we have to deal with total echo chambers. Consider a post in the cats social network: The dog owners are talking about the chore of having to go for walks at “dogs://social.media/walks-are-great”, that is so high maintenance, the silly buggers. 

That would create separate communities, with their own rules and moderation. Consider this something like subreddits, but without the single organization that can enforce global rules.

The other alternative is that a social network would rise with a truly distributed backend that is resilient to de-platforming issues. From an outside perspective, this will present as something to the existing social networks. That has the advantage of requiring the least from users, but it is a non trivial technical challenge.

I prefer the first option, but I believe it is more likely we’ll end up with the second. The reason for that is monetization strategies. If you have a many different actors cooperating to create a network, there is a question on how you pay for that. The typical revenue model for social network is advertising. That doesn’t work so well where there isn’t a single actor that can sell ads (and track users).

That said, it would be much faster and easier to get started with the first option and it may be that we’ll end up there with the force of inertia.