Social Networks & Sociable Protocols

Sociable Networks - When I enter a room on Clubhouse, laugh at TikTok video, reply to someone on Twitter, or watch someone share some knowledge on YouTube, I find a different part of my brain is lighting up. It is a sociable interaction where I am connecting with someone outside my circles. I think of the products that are produced by these compani... See more

Earning is way more powerful than getting likes. If those two elements can be interwoven into the fabric of a network, it will mean people can make money from their time in new ways. Today, the bluntest tool in social is where you build an audience and then try to sell to it. We are going to see so many new experiments around paying people for cont... See more

Social Protocols - These were built at the beginning of the Internet. They allowed individuals who knew each others’ contact details to contact each other. Groups could form over email threads (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and IRC Channels (Internet Relay Chat). These protocols were really powerful for communication but they were unable to store ... See more

A Sociable Protocol must meet a few tests:

-Un-censorable developer access - Anyone with an idea should be able to interact with the data and connections with people’s permission.

Social Networks - MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and LinkedIn lead the charge to map out people’s relationships on the Internet. They used the best technology that they had access to at the time: a Delaware Corporation and racks of privately owned servers. This concentrated enormous amounts of power and capital in the hands of a few Silicon Valley C... See more

-Community-controlled censorship - I believe censorship should happen at the app layer, not the protocol layer. You can email child porn but Gmail will not show it to you. You might want Donald Trump removed, but I want to hear from the sitting President. People must be able to choose apps that tap into a common protocol with different censorship l... See more

I do not believe this will come from a team of wealthy engineers at Twitter through their Bluesky initiative. New technological revolutions come from young teams with nothing to lose and a totally new perspective.

-Permanent data storage - We cannot keep locating our social connections and memories inside servers controlled by for-profit companies.

-Open source feed algorithms - The systems that control what we see on our feeds have a profound impact on our mental health and understanding of the world. A sociable protocol would allow developers to offer new kinds of algorithms to communities who want to see the world in different ways.