Presenters
Christine Lemmer-Webber, Spritely Institute
Christine Lemmer Webber works on decentralized/federated social network systems and on other technical issues surrounding expanding user freedom and agency. Christine co-authored and co-edited the W3C ActivityPub standard, which as of 2020 is the most popular and widely deployed web-based decentralized social network protocol to date. Their current work on Spritely is a research project on advancing decentralized social networks by introducing better privacy and security through integrating object capability theory, as well as exploring how to expand these systems towards full virtual worlds with richness of interactions parallel to our own.…
Randy Farmer, Playable Worlds
In 1984, Farmer began working at Lucasfilm Games, on an Apple II version of Koronis Rift. It was at Lucasfilm that he met Chip Morningstar, who was beginning design on the Habitat project, a groundbreaking graphical multiplayer adventure game. When the project received funding, Morningstar hired Farmer for the team, along with others such as Aric Wilmunder, Janet Hunter, Noah Falstein and Ron Gilbert. After Lucasfilm, Farmer worked at the American Information Exchange on smart.…
Summary
Christine and Randy describe how the current schema of social media has failed us. Networked communities have become centralized around a few large entities which are prone to failure. Poor incentives drive toxic behavior and more regulation will only reinforce the dominance of the current paradigm. The Spritely Institute outlines their plan for a new mechanism of interaction and community formation on the internet.
Presentation: Re-Decentralizing Networked Communities
Slides
- The current social media platforms have failed us.
- Social media has become centralized
- Advertising models drive toxic behavior
- The incentive structure for posting does not work
- Centralization has caused privacy loss, context collapse, and toxicity
- Google plus died due to privacy issues, Yahoo groups died due to moderation issues
- Centralized moderation won’t counter toxicity
- We need to re-decentralize networked communities
- Historical examples exist of decentralization. It’s possible to remove gatekeepers and allow consent, creating a future beyond simply “distributed twitter”.
- A mock demonstration of a new web. The demo shows management of profiles, communities, and interactions with friends. Payment systems and application management are described.
- Description of the top level architecture
- The organizational structure of the governing entity should be nonprofit
- Description of Spritely, the organization working toward building a re-decentralized internet.
