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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

Social Networks should be like email providers. You choose one that fits you best, or deploy your own, without having to worry not being able to communicate with others.

Maybe we are long overdue for an open standard protocol for social interactions on the web. If you come to think of it, when the personal data itself isn't the property of the company behind the social network, there should be no reason not to share that information, so we can access it from a provider of convenience.

This is what locks people into harmful platforms. I can't go to slow social without all my friends coming with me, so I'm stuck with Instagram/whatsapp.

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> I can't go to slow social without all my friends coming with me, so I'm stuck with Instagram/whatsapp.

This is partially correct. Slow Social would be a lot better if all your friends joined. However, my accommodation for this is that any post can be sent as en email as well. This lets you loop in people that aren't part of the network, and maybe never will be. It's not a perfect solution, but I hope it's better than nothing.

Well, the people that I know don't read their personal email unless they are looking for a password reset or a one time code.

once everyone started requiring an email as a user name, inboxes of normal people are just spam that's part of the deal for signing up for something.

It's basically useless these days, but it's not technically spam because they made you click the link when you signed up.

Sure you could unsubscribe, and I do, and my technical friends do, but the rest just ignore it unless they need it for a specific action. I'd have to call or text all my friends to let them know I'd sent them an email with a link to a post, and at that point, I could just text them the post and at that point, it's kinda . . . idk, not great.

I dunno, Substack is doing pretty well.

Maybe instead of a new "slow" network that enforces these rules, the consumer might want slow mode. Something that digests the fast-paced stuff. Maybe using heuristics to pare down the noisy, frivolous, or contentious stuff.

Or maybe this model and its intentional limitations is key.

> Maybe we are long overdue for an open standard protocol for social interactions on the web

We have those. They are called websites and emails.

Yeah but most websites don’t directly talk to each other. And email only covers some of what social media platforms have. It’s difficult to make and plan an event over email. But if I could make an event on a discord-like client, and my grandma can get updates on facebook, and so on, that would be an improvement from what we have now

> ActivityPub

Problem is that platforms don't see any incentive in letting their APIs loose like this.

> Maybe we are long overdue for an open standard protocol for social interactions on the web

This exists as a W3C recommendation (ActivityPub), and before that you had pioneers working on things like StatusNet and GNU Social, way back in 2008.

ActivityPub exists, it's just niche.

Maybe Elon will let mastodon instances interact with twitter or something. It'd be unlikely, but very cool

>I can't go to slow social without all my friends coming with me, so I'm stuck with Instagram/whatsapp.

That's the problem if these new social networks have nothing to add in terms of functionality. There are many examples for come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the-network strategies that work.

There is (was) Patchwork [1].

[1] https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

You should give ActivityPub[1] a look. There are plenty of platforms based on this already.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

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