Do you need social networks?

Before you start talking about social networks, you must define the social network, and therefore describe something without which the social network will not be such.

A social network is people (objective information about a person, his profile) and connections between them (type of relationship and subjective opinion / knowledge of individuals about each other).

Everything else can be discarded - it is possible to imagine a social network without sharing music and video, even without a blog platform, without games and applications, without messaging and other things (there are rumors about some stickers, I'm sure - they are not necessary either).
')
Next, you need to remember the history of social networks, back to basics. It is necessary to begin with the times when representatives of the species homo sapiens lived in small groups (up to 150-200 individuals) at a considerable distance from each other.

Due to the extreme shortage of computer equipment, for storing the social network, one had to use a biological computer - one’s own brain.

Everyone had their own social network and just consisted of information about their relatives, opinions about them (relations with them) and their relations with each other. What were the features of social networks at that time?

First, their sizes were small and mostly limited to the size of the group. Secondly, their composition changed slowly and smoothly, group change was rare and most likely occurred only once in the life of an individual.

Under these conditions, the biological computer coped well with the task of storing the social network ( the Dunbar number hints, as it were). What tasks solved social networks of those ancient times?

1. Network of personal relationships - it is useful to know with whom you can play, talk, chat, have sex, and with whom it is better not to communicate.
2. Network of working relationships - no less useful to know who has what knowledge and what can do.
3. Network of trust - you need to know the reputation of a person, honesty, reliability, etc.

What has changed since then? The following has changed:

1. humanity began to live in huge groups;
2. the composition of both the groups themselves and the subgroups within them has ceased to be stable - mobility has become very high;
3. which means the number of social contacts has increased significantly;
4. biological computer not only did not develop, it even dried out ;
5. but computer technologies were rapidly developing.

All this brings us to the logical idea of ​​preserving our social network in an external repository. However, instead of social networks in the online storage, we got something strange and not always convenient.

Mass social platforms are trying to perform only the first function (a network of personal relationships), I will not say how good, this is a topic for another conversation, but it seems to me not perfect.

For the second function (network of working relations) there are separate platforms - you have to be sprayed.

But the third function (trust network) seems to have not yet been implemented by anyone, although the storage of reputation is a very important function of the social network (there is a germ on freelance exchanges and resources with karma). True for such a function, it is desirable to check the reality of the user, but for this, and so actively move, for example, demanding a phone number for the purchase of which you usually need to present an identity document.

At the same time, the existing social platforms perform many other functions without performing the main ones. And it’s not hard to understand why this is the case - the task of the existing social platforms is not the expansion of our memory, not help in solving some problems, but the emptying of our wallet. These are commercial companies that earn on our personal data, for more targeted advertising they need to replace all existing tools and services, the ideal world for them is the world in which the “Internet” for the user is their social platform.

The current situation has the following problems:

1. As noted above - the incompleteness of the implementation of key functions;
2. Too great social platforms to spy on users - in the case of a hack, attackers get a lot of information about users;
3. A single point of failure, both technical and organizational - no matter how they reserve their infrastructure, failures are still inevitable , which means that at the most necessary moment everything can break and you will be left without your social network, something even more serious in the presence of the owners of the social platform, which can close the platform, sell it itself or customer data, the new owners can radically change something, in general, centralization is a solid risk.

Is there any other solution to this problem? The desired social network should have the following properties:

1. Decentralized - does not depend on the central infrastructure, better p2p.
2. Free - based on free software.
3. Protected from fake accounts - encryption / signature keys, blockchain data storage?
4. Non-anonymous - the very essence of a social network does not imply anonymity, if you need anonymity, then you do not need social networks (do not think that a distorted name and photo make you anonymous). In order to make the most effective use of the social network's capabilities in support of a person’s reputation, it is necessary to have a correspondence between the network profile and the real person. To do this, the key of the person must be signed with the keys of several people who know him and, ideally, by a certain notary on behalf of the state.

There are many attempts to make a decentralized social network (one of the most famous ones is Friendica and Diaspora , but they don’t seem to be p2p), there is an interesting p2p project from Pandora, a robux habrauser , but I don’t know how he’s doing.

What is the problem of decentralized projects? It is hard to say for sure, but the inability to earn the creators, the need to install software, disregard for users about privacy and other problems apparently lead to the fact that very interesting p2p projects get stuck.

Unfortunately, I do not have a ready-made recipe for making cool and useful decentralized projects popular; if I once create my own state, the right social network in it will be an important part of the relationship between state and society, the mechanism of direct democracy.