New censorship-resistant social media solution now available!

[rawTOP]

The thread about newTumbl kicking people off their platform reminded me that I should mention that there's a censorship-resistant social media solution that's in the works thanks to the bitcoin community. Right now it's a bit rough around the edges - to put it politely - but also far slicker than you might imagine - and getting better by the day/week.

It's almost impossible to get completely kicked off of it. So if you're tired of people (including me) telling you what you can and can't do on social media sites - you'll like it a lot.

So watch this thread. I'll explain how to get started on it probably next week or early the following week. Before I explain it to everyone I need to accomplish a few things:

• My host is migrating me from a server in Miami (red state - boo!) to a much faster server in Michigan (blue state - yeah!) I need  a particular new application set up and running on that before I announce anything.
• I need to finish my documentation on how to get started (it's a bit more confusing than it should be right now).
• I need to finish the ability to set up accounts on my new sites.
• Ideally I'd also have image uploads ready - but that's probably a month or 6 weeks off.

So stay tuned…

[evilqueerpig]

Some much needed good news.

[pozpopperpig]

That is wonderful!

[Oralguya1]

This sounds awesome. I am looking forward to hearing all about it.

[ProudPOZbttmboi]

Sounds very interesting 

[pervinmt]

I took am very excited about this prospect!!

[TaKinGDeePanal]

Bitcoin is inherently unstable - will that be the form of payment demanded (because it won't be a free service)?

 

[ErosWired]

If it’s a solution that will just take the shackles off responsible sexual expression, all to the good. If the infrastructure can also be used to build safe havens that would support white-supremacist, neo-Nazi, Q-Anon, anti-vaxxer, antisemitic, flat-earther, homophobic, and generally misinformation, disinformation, hatespeech and troll- friendly platforms, that does not sound like forward progress to me. It sounds alarming.

 

[laguyinhou]

Thank you! 

[Guest]

This would be great.

[rawTOP]

14 hours ago, TaKinGDeePanal said:

Bitcoin is inherently unstable - will that be the form of payment demanded (because it won't be a free service)?

It actually IS a free service, but there will be paid upgrades, so to speak. Most of the development has been open source. I'll explain more about possible costs later.

It has built-in support for Bitcoin Lightning payments - which is a simplified/faster way to do Bitcoin transactions (it's "off-chain"). I agree that Bitcoin is unstable - which just means you shouldn't keep any significant amount of money in it - periodically all but a little bit out by converting it to fiat.

 

14 hours ago, ErosWired said:

If it’s a solution that will just take the shackles off responsible sexual expression, all to the good. If the infrastructure can also be used to build safe havens that would support white-supremacist, neo-Nazi, Q-Anon, anti-vaxxer, antisemitic, flat-earther, homophobic, and generally misinformation, disinformation, hatespeech and troll- friendly platforms, that does not sound like forward progress to me. It sounds alarming.

Yes, that is my worry too. We'll have to see how it turns out in practice. I honestly don't know how that will go.

Right now the guys on it sometimes make it clear that they're pretty conservative, but I've seen almost zero political discussions. And oddly they avoid sex and porn as well. But they're literally religious/cult-like about Bitcoin - to the point of it being disconcerting.

But at the same time some of the people working on it have come up with great ways to reduce the spread of things that are controversial/disturbing. One has coded things so you won't see it unless someone you follow or someone they follow posted it. Gone are the corporate algorithms that intentionally try to get people arguing to up engagement and sell more ads. So chances are the crazies will only be followed by crazies - and we know crazies hate an echo chamber.

[horndoggy]

On 3/18/2023 at 9:57 AM, rawTOP said:

But at the same time some of the people working on it have come up with great ways to reduce the spread of things that are controversial/disturbing. One has coded things so you won't see it unless someone you follow or someone they follow posted it. Gone are the corporate algorithms that intentionally try to get people arguing to up engagement and sell more ads. So chances are the crazies will only be followed by crazies - and we know crazies hate an echo chamber.

Sounds interesting. I’m a programmer and I’ve been trying to come up with a usable algorithm to turn “anti-social” media into a more civil experience without becoming a bland, homogeneous bubble - a way to engage ideas in good faith and not deal with trolling for kicks. 

Needless to say, I haven’t got very far pushing my boulder uphill. 🙄

So I’m really looking forward to seeing more about this new solution.

[tallslenderguy]

On 3/18/2023 at 9:57 AM, rawTOP said:

Gone are the corporate algorithms that intentionally try to get people arguing to up engagement and sell more ads. So chances are the crazies will only be followed by crazies - and we know crazies hate an echo chamber.

This alone would be huge progress, removing the (evil!!) manipulative algorithms that are ultimately divisive and antisocial would be a major step in the evolution of social media.

[Theo8]

On 3/17/2023 at 10:33 PM, ErosWired said:

If it’s a solution that will just take the shackles off responsible sexual expression, all to the good. If the infrastructure can also be used to build safe havens that would support white-supremacist, neo-Nazi, Q-Anon, anti-vaxxer, antisemitic, flat-earther, homophobic, and generally misinformation, disinformation, hatespeech and troll- friendly platforms, that does not sound like forward progress to me. It sounds alarming.

 

let me second that!

[rawTOP]

Announcement time…

🎉🥳🎈🍾

The social media solution I was telling you about is called Nostr. Not to be too technical, but it's not a site, it's a protocol that defines how to do messages that are cryptographically signed using a decentralized network (for comparison HTTP, FTP, and email are protocols).

I won't go into crazy detail here. I've written A LOT of explainers on my site s3x.social - check out the site to learn all the little details about Nostr.

Why I think it'll be great for you guys…

• It's an open source project and most of the people working on it are releasing their code on GitHub. So far no major companies are involved.
• Two of the founders of Twitter (Jack Dorsey & another co-founder of Twitter who's non-binary) say Nostr is what Twitter was supposed to be. Jack Dorsey says he prefers it over Bluesky (the social media solution he's now associated with in the press). I'm not mentioning the non-binary's person's name since I don't want this page coming up in Google searches for them, but they've largely dumped a project their company was working on that was based on Scuttlebutt (a Nostr competitor) and is going all in on Nostr.
• It's impossible to truly censor people on Nostr - that's both a good thing and a bad thing (more on that in a moment).
• A number of the core Nostr developers are openly sex worker friendly - which hints at a respect/tolerance for sexual minorities.
• There are currently about a half million active users on Nostr. Most of the users are from the Bitcoin community, but there are also quite a few from China & Japan.

It's important to know that Nostr is pretty rough around the edges right now - but it's improving rapidly. Part of the "rough around the edges" is the fact that it's rather complicated to get started. Which is where s3x_SOCIAL comes in…

s3x_SOCIAL

You won't actually browse Nostr using s3x_SOCIAL. I may add that later, but for now s3x_SOCIAL will focus on doing the following:

• Help you get started. It'll set up a profile for you, host your xxx rated profile photos, and help you find people to follow. [NONE of that is ready yet. The closest I've come are the previously mentioned instructional "explainers".]
• It will offer you guys "NIP-05 verification". That will let you be YourName@breeding.zone - or you can choose from a long list of other possible sites, if you prefer one of those instead of breeding.zone.
• You'll get free use of the s3x_SOCIAL Nostr relay if you use s3x_SOCIAL for NIP-05 validation and agree to be listed in a directory of users. (A relay is one of the data servers that the app you'll use will pull information from. There are some public relays, but most relays require payment - mostly as a way of combatting spam. Anyone can read from the s3x_SOCIAL relay, but only paid or comp'd members can write to it).
• In time you'll get file storage at s3x_DRIVE. Nostr relays (for the most part) only handle text - not images, video, audio files, etc. For that you'll need to link to the file on a media server. Most media servers don't want x-rated images. If they see one, they'll delete it. I'll be building a porn-friendly media server you can use.
• (And a bunch more)

If you go to s3x_SOCIAL - DON'T REGISTER! Instead you can login with your Breeding Zone user name and password. BUT there's no point in logging in since I'm still working on you being able to set up your profile. Oh, and registering for / logging into s3x_SOCIAL is not the same registering for / logging into Nostr… You do that with a client app.

Basically, right now, s3x_SOCIAL has a lot of information, but you can't actually do anything on it yet. But it has all the information you need to get started with Nostr. It's just won't be with the easy interface I'll eventually make.

 

If you do sign up…

Please post your 'npub' in this thread and I'll set things up so you can use the s3x_SOCIAL relay. You can find the Nostr accounts for my sites by following the links on the NIP-05 page.

I'm not posting much (as rawTOP), but if you want to follow me, my npub is: npub1x30jemy23qme0rkc8jkhk72tvzch35emeh6pw968449w4hywys8qg6t4kx

And please follow s3x_SOCIAL:
npub1k27tyhsg9hqqy2zm7lgxk9n3kafsy8e7x6du6hnes8q65mr2aslqn3vmmj

 

Content Moderation & Safety Issues

The other question is "is this a safe place for people like us?" To that I'd say it's about as safe as any other type of social media - except maybe ones that are locked down and members-only (like the Backroom here). That said, I did get my first death threat on Nostr the other day in response to announcing the launch of the s3x_SOCIAL relay. But the person is an exception - most of the folks there are pretty tolerant and easy going.

Honestly though, more needs to be done to have proper content moderation. Since it's an open source project it's a perfect chance to practice "be the change you want to see in the world" - so I dived in, signed up for GitHub  and started a discussion about how handling of "sensitive content" needed to improve. Since I was discussing sex and porn I managed to use so many explicit terms I got banned by Git's moderation bot. It took me three weeks to get back into my account. Then there was the first Nostr conference which I watched remotely. Only two of the presenters mentioned content moderation. The developer of the only Apple-approved app for iOS mentioned it briefly. But the non-binary co-founder of Twitter I mentioned above dedicated most of their talk to it - to the point people labeled them "the censorship guy". The two of us teamed up and have been pushing the idea of content moderation. We're determined to get something better in place and will keep at it until it happens.

Read this if you want to understand our vision for content moderation on Nostr.

One thing I like about Nostr is the potential fluidity of communities, and "moderation". Mastodon (and a few other platforms) have been trying for years to do what Nostr is finally figuring out and doing right. All Mastodon manages to do is replace a corporate censor with lots of little censors who control their part of Mastodon. When I read it described that way I chuckled - it described my relationship with Breeding Zone pretty much perfectly. Trust me, I'll be a hard ass, and there are times when I have to be, but it's a role I do a little reluctantly.

So with Nostr let's say I ban someone from s3x_SOCIAL - big deal… All that happens when I ban someone is their content gets deleted off my relay.   They're no longer my problem, but you can still interact with them if you want to because they're still on Nostr. Nostr is bigger than my little piece of it.

 

If you're a developer who uses GitHub, I could use your help

Here are things we could use help with:

• To get our pull request approved to move forward with content moderation, we need to come up a simple client app that can demonstrate what we're talking about. I'm struggling with that. So any help would be appreciated.
• We could also use people to support our vision as we introduce pull requests to improve content moderation. So even moral support would be greatly appreciated.
• There are changes that are needed to other open source Nostr-related projects as well. For example one of the really popular relay servers can't accept reports on content from anyone but paid members if it's in "paid relay" mode. Given than anyone can read the problem content from the relay - that's a legal problem for relay owners like me.

DM me if you can help with any of that.