I just read Cory Doctorow’s article “Let the Platform Burn”. It reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for some time. Instead of joining yet another social network and recreating yourself, why not create your personal social network object and link it to others via a federation of the personal social network objects?
I call this object the Earthling object with all due respect to our extraterrestrial readers. The object would be maintained by its owner and contain whatever information the owner choses to add such as a bio, pictures, blogs, posts, or documents. The object could contain links to your friends, family, and coworker objects.
Once set up, you could serve it yourself or use an Earthling Service Provider (yet to be invented). It would be a lot like running your own Lemmy instance or joining an existing one. The essential feature of this approach is that all the data within the object and access to it is completely under your control. Should you decide to ‘go dark’, you can delete or disconnect the object and disappear from the social networking community. Right up there in importance is that you can move this object around to any location you like without having to rebuild it. Communication would be along the lines of ActivityPub.
There are most certainly many issues with the concept and some of the features already exist. As Cory mentioned in his article, Mastodon allows you to export all your data from one instance and move it to another. Kbin seems to already provide at lot of these features with it’s magazines, microblog, and people sections.
While the Earthling object would have extensive controls on who sees what in your object, people might prefer not to keep all their eggs in one basket, joining different networks for different purposes and only providing personal data for the specific purpose. Did I mention that the Earthling object would have an avatar feature so you could take on multiple personalities?
This post is part entertainment and part ‘wouldn’t it be nice’. Maybe there are others out there that have already thought through this and are a lot further along. I believe there are similar efforts in the Web 3.0 arena. Anyone else interested in having their own Earthling object?
I wish i could agree with you, but i’ve worked in tech support in the past. There’s A LOT of people that very much don’t want to exert the least effort on learning these things and are proud of this. Definitely there’s efforts that need to be made on making things easy for beginners and better ways to let them learn once they’re past that stage (documentation has always been a weakness of free software), but you cannot do that with people who actively refuse, and there’s a lot of them, many of them on positions of power.
Willful/proud ignorance, on a large scale, is one of the most harmful things to a society.
There is an entire political party in the US, that makes up around half of voting Americans, that prides itself in it’s ignorance. When you prime people to think that way, you can convince them of pretty much anything. Just look at Q Anon for example.
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