Open-Source Social Media
People have been trying to make more decentralized internet and social media experiences for a while, but it’s hard to compete with the network effects that the big centralized ones have established. A centralized server tends to be very efficient and self-reinforcing, and so centralized solutions get deployed, get the initial users, and thus entrench themselves for decades.
One of the ways to decentralize the internet is to normalize running a home server and make it easier to do so. As technology improves, basic server-grade computers have become more accessible, and a number of hardware and software solutions have come into existence that are geared towards a consumer server market. However, there are still long-term limitations on peoples’ interest or financial ability to run a server. The financial and bandwidth constraints are particularly problematic for potential users in developing countries.
On the other hand, some technologies enable more peer-to-peer information transfer. File-sharing, video calls, and things like that can allow people to connect to each other in high-bandwidth ways. Keet, for example, is far faster and higher resolution than Zoom for video chats involving modest amounts of people. A challenge with pure peer-to-peer models is that both users have to be online at the same time to coordinate.
A middle-ground method that seems to be beginning to work at scale is the idea of distributed servers or “relays”. In this model, not every user has to run a server, but individual servers are relatively easy to run, are financially incentivized to be run, and are therefore numerous enough that there is no way to control or censor the network. The result is a rather decentralized web of servers that connect to each other, and users that connect to them.
A good example of this is Nostr. It’s an open-source protocol that stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”. For the first two years of its existence it was relatively unused, but in 2022 it started to get more traction. By the end of the year and into early 2023, thanks to efforts by Jack Dorsey and others, it started to gain some serious adoption.
