solving social with forced interoperability

The social networks we use are spaces where our interactions and their reach are very prone to manipulation. It's easy enough to rig a public feed to dampen certain messages and amplify others for profit or politics - and we would not be able to tell. 

The damping of a message wouldn't have to be applied for those in the 'bubble' that already agree with it .. but is very effective when applied to those outside that bubble.

So the people that share a certain idea would be mostly talking to themselves. Useful for organising around an idea, but with little to no spreading of the idea.

...

This potential subversion of our new public space(s) cannot easily be avoided or even detected while we use platforms whose source code isn't open for inspection.

An idea being called forced interoperability might offer a path to a possible solution. 

https://spectrum.ieee.org/doctorow-interoperability

Right now there are multiple social networking platforms available that adopt open standards that allow for a federated approach -like Mastodon and the Fediverse- so that different platforms running different software can access the same public space. Most are publicly owned (copyleft) and therefore have public feed algorithms that are open to inspection . 

All of these function quite well but suffer a seemingly insurmountable downside - public spaces work best when they are ubiquitous, and so there's a very very big disincentive to leave the platforms with the largest populations

Forced interoperability is the idea that we solve this knot of a problem by legislating to force the existing monopolies to adopt those open standards so that open platforms we chose can work seamlessly with the Facebooks, Twitters and Instagrams.

The EU is already doing this for messaging - https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/24/22995431/european-union-digital-markets-act-imessage-whatsapp-interoperable

China seems to have implemented some of it in their networks.

We need to push for legislation that forces interoperability for our social networks too.

Different communities choosing the platforms with the rules and ethics they want. And those separate platforms talking to everybody else.

This won't immediately solve that public feed manipulation problem. If everyone stayed on with the existing closed platforms - they still get manipulated. 

But if the idea of freedom from that manipulation grows... without any downsides..

We could see populations voting with their feet on the type of public space they want

hypothes.is

A sidebar annotating the web, like SideWiki should have been.

Social bookmarking, tagging, annotating and note sharing of the web in public or private groups, or just for yourself.

"Our efforts are based on the annotation standards for digital documents developed by the W3C Web Annotation Working Group. We are partnering broadly with developers, publishers, academic institutions, researchers, and individuals to develop a platform for the next generation of read-write web applications. You can follow our development progress on our roadmap. Many have contributed tools, plug-ins and integrations."

https://web.hypothes.is/
https://web.hypothes.is/about/

sourcecode and other projects at https://github.com/hypothesis

A Chrome extension. Firefox and other users will have to use the bookmarklet for now - which works very well
see web.hypothes.is/installing-the-bookmarklet/

run by a public foundation apparently. source code is open but not copyleft, alas.

our tools are broken

Regular Reminder - Our tools Are Broken: social networking tools and other information infrastructure that are not publicly owned (and by that I mean licensed under the General Public License or Copylefted -see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) are fundamentally broken. Because anything less than public ownership severely limits the extent to which we can use, fix, experiment, and grow these into useful universal assets .. This is especially true in the long term.
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The list of our broken tools include Facebook, Google search, Twitter, and the operating systems Windows, Mac-OSX, IOS, and bits of Android. Linux is completely ours. Most of Android and the software that serves up and browses the world wide web is also properly public property.

Distributed/Federated social software that could easily replace Facebook and Twitter already exists (see Diaspora and Identica). Publicly owned search engines won't have to start from scratch either.

Its just going to take us some time to realise that all the complaints that we have about our social software - about the abuses of power that extend from privacy violations to the manipulation of search results and manipulation of our social signalling - all of these cannot be fixed until we switch to Free (as in speech) Software.

fork governance

Time to begin hacking on top of -and away from - these current primitive democracies. The governance systems in use globally carry way too many design features common to the royal courts they emerged/evolved from (strong hierarchical design, centralised opaque authority, personality based leadership, etc.).

[Distributed governance models. Decentralised technologies that might be used to underpin new forms of collective cooperation and decision-making.]

"I use the term “governance by design” to describe the process of online communities increasingly relying on technology in order to organize themselves through novel governance models (designed by the community and for the community), whose rules are embedded directly into the underlying technology of the platforms they use to operate"

http://commonstransition.org/commons-centric-law-and-governance-with-primavera-de-filippi/ (As part of a series on the 100 Women Who Are Co-Creating the P2P Society, Rachel O’Dwyer interviews Primavera De Filippi)

the non-physical and the copy function

The thing thats most unfortunate about treating ideas (and the digital) in the same way as we do things made out of atoms, is that you have to work against the best attribute of the non-physical: That they spread so effortlessly - as readily as anything can copy, mutate and spread them. Multiplying, growing and evolving, only as fast as the rate of copying ...

zero cost copying is potentially the predominant design feature.. 

freedom in the cloud

"Everyone wants a piece of you these days: Google, Facebook, Flickr, Apple, AT&T, Bing. They’ll give you free e-mail, free photo storage, free web hosting, even a free date. They just want to listen in. And you can’t wait to let them. They’ll store your stuff, they’ll organize your photos, they’ll keep track of your appointments, as long as they can watch. It all goes into the “Cloud.”

How we got here is quite a scary story. But nowhere near as scary as getting out again. Eben Moglen, a Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University and the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, warned you about privacy and the cloud before. At a public meeting of the Internet Society of New York on February 5, Moglen asked you to consider how much worse things have become since then and explain what you can do to reclaim your freedom in the era of Web 2.0."


got sent this way by the folks at diaspora. they cite it as one of their motivators.

eyeopening talk. nice bits about the choices that were (not) made about internet architectures - why client-server limits the internet peerage possibility - and some of the political aspects of those choices.