I remember when you could go on Facebook and look through your feed at what your friends are saying, catch up with them, and browse posts that they have made. Now, it's just completely random and chaotic, almost nonsensical. There's no logical sense to my Facebook feed at all. As you can see in the image, they are showing me stuff that I'm not even following. This is not even something that I am actively a part of! It's some random group. So what's the point of following a group or liking a page, if they're just going to show you random stuff anyway?
Like, wtf happened to this website?
The answer is obviously as everyone has pointed out already is enshittification.
Profit = enshittification. It's guaranteed as long as profit is a motive.
An interesting concept is the idea of a distributed social web. It was the concept me, and probably a LOT of other redditors, were looking at last year, but it seems no such thing really exists. The idea that everyone's home computer (or mobile device nowadays) could act as the client and the server. Perhaps using a firefox addon of some sort.
Do any software devs (ok that's like 90% of lemmy, lol) know if any existing projects are trying to do this? It does not seem like an unfeasible thing, and it wouldn't have to grow overnight, it could possibly just be a feature in an existing addon that allows communication directly between users. No centralized servers of any sort. Distributed communication without central control. Is this possible?
The existing social media companies own the world (literally), and they can maintain this control because they can buy out competitors. You can't buy out 5 billion people though, so if people had the tools available to host their own web; and it was as easy as installing a firefox browser addon, a true democracy could exist like the world has never seen.
sorry, but I think what you are looking for is platforms like Lemmy. it is not centralized, it is distributed. not peer to peer, sure, but
...ActivityPub?
I do know of a project that does what you are looking for, decentralized (100%), FOSS, easy to set up, encrypted...
I built a very basic chat program on top of it quite easily, a "FB clone" is not far away IMO.
So what's the project? It's my Tenfingers protocol & implementation (http://tenfingers.org) and it's just waiting for adoption!
I'm in the process of making the documentation and installation guide, but you can check it out right now.
I'd love showcasing it somewhere, getting feedback, help out with problems etc.
sounds interesting, is the source code on somewhere like codeberg or GitHub?
How does it work?
You can download the python code, or frozen executables for Linux and Windows on http://tenfingers.org
Or the whole project, which I admit is kind of messy, on codeberg: https://codeberg.org/Valmond/Tenfingers
I posted a more detailed description just below in this theead, please do say if you don't find it or if you have any kind of questions!
Very cool. 100% over my technical knowledge level but I'll take a look at the code and give it a whirl when I get a chance.
I think it would be awesome if it worked. Power to the people! ;)
Hey thank you!
I finally have some free time ahead, I'll put together a first 'real' documentation that covers installation and basic use cases so that people actually can have a chance of testing it for real. I'll swap the cringy 1990 web page for it on tenfingers.org
Do tell if you try it out 👍🏻
Valmond
I did do a test install (on a virtual machine), and everything seemed to install/configure fine using the python source code and instructions in your repo, but I wasn't able to see any connections being made in the listener log. Brain is too tired, but I tried all of the addresses/ports listed (Debian/bash/ip addr) and created port exceptions with ufw per the instructions file. Can this work with a virtual box?
Nice!
You do need a link to some data as a bootstrap to node adresses, there is a test link on tenfingers.org you can try using, it downloads a small text file but also adds my live nodes address to your known addresses when you use it.
Or you can just set up two local nodes on 127.0.0.1 with two different ports, run their listeners, add data to them, extract the links and, download from the 'other' node to see how things hook up and so on.
The links as tenfingers.db are sqlite databases, so they are easily inspected.