A Holistic Design Process for Developing a Prosocial Media Ecosystem

Hi All,

I previously introduced myself to the group but it has been a few months. I
have been thinking about the set of problems presented by the predominant
social media paradigm for at least 12 years, which is what led me to work
with Digital Bazaar on Decentralized Identity for six years prior to
officially launching the Mosaic Foundation <https://www.mosaic.social/>
last Spring.

Everything I am writing from here on out is not meant to be conclusive, and
certainly not comprehensive–it is meant as a conversation starter that I
hope will inspire feedback that will be integrated into future proposals. I
am working on a presentation that will provide more details but I wanted to
get your feedback on the basic concepts before producing the video.

I suggest that to enable the vision for the future of social media that we
all share (to a great extent) that we need to address the many challenges
holistically, in a multidisciplinary manner. There are numerous technical
challenges but there are also governance issues and the question of
business models that can attract investment to this new ecosystem without
undermining what should ultimately be a public good for a free and open
global society. I don’t know of an existing forum, or Working Group,
focussed on addressing these issues holistically.

I propose that we, the SWICG and other relevant stakeholders, embark on a
multidisciplinary design process that aims to address the various
challenges and chart a path forward. Most efforts address a subset of the
problem set rather than attempting an integrated ecosystem solution. Many
efforts focus on technical solutions alone, or try to create a new and
better walled garden. We need to consider technological, organizational,
governance, business models, and other factors. We have the collective
capacity to develop a framework for such an ecosystem but we need to be
intentional about design and development. Read more about the proposed
design process here
<https://www.mosaic.social/humane-social-media-design-process>, and the
preliminary wiki here
<https://wiki.mosaic.social/xwiki/bin/view/Design%20Categories%20Directory%20/>.
There are some prospective design categories listed here
<https://wiki.mosaic.social/xwiki/bin/view/Design%20Categories%20Directory%20/>.
If
there is interest from the requisite subject matter experts in the space I
am willing to do some fundraising for this design project.

Generally speaking, I think we need an open ecosystem, a social media
commons, that many organizations can provide services to. My assumption,
which I am happy to have challenged, is that Web standards alone aren’t
sufficient to ensure true interoperability or Fediverse performance. A
nonprofit could provide core software and test suites to ensure
interoperability between solutions providers and network-wide performance
(a Fediverse alternative to YouTube won’t succeed if the videos don’t load
quickly). This non-profit could also aim to protect civil liberties and
data sovereignty by helping prevent the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
strategy of some for-profit entities. The objective of the non-profit
should be to serve users, creators, and the public good, not shareholders.
For-profit entities could provide services to the network and attract
necessary human and financial capital required to build out, operate, and
maintain a lean competitive ecosystem capable of being a viable alternative
to “big tech” social media. To achieve this we’d need to build on Activity
Pub and unbundle services such as hosting, digital identity, groups, and
moderation, etc. This is just my two cents–all of this would be up for
discussion during the proposed design process.


Some Assumptions:

   1.

   Web Standards, or protocols, alone do not ensure interoperability or
   network-wide performance.
   2.

   A totally free, and advertising-free, service isn’t likely to scale to
   be a viable alternative to Facebook and Twitter. A performant global scale
   social network requires significant resources to build and operate.
   3.

   The for-profit shareholder model is not capable of good ecosystem
   governance because its incentives aren’t aligned with the public good. But
   for profits organizations can provide services to the ecosystem assuming
   the non-profit commons ensures true interoperability, with ease.
   4.

   The Fediverse, via Mastodon, has decent traction and has delivered a
   solution that is part of the way there but we need to address several deep
   issues, with some examples being:
   1.

      No guaranteed profile/data portability (relying on the decency of
      server hosts).
      2.

      Sign-up confusion–which server should I choose and why?
      3.

      Moderation can happen on your behalf, by server/instance admins,
      without your consent.
      4.

      Moderation, identity, hosting, etc…are bundled into a single service
      5.

      No Payments, so content creators can easily monetize on the
      Fediverse.
      6.

      No good group functionality, a critical social structure to support,
      and the implementation of which could be a good scaling strategy.
      7.

      etc..



I could be wrong about a lot of this and I am curious to hear what you
think. I think there is a huge opportunity to solve the big problem of
centralized corporate advertising-based social media while unlocking
massive potential to further democratize our economy. I am not a specialist
of any kind but I am happy to help convene the requisite subject matter
experts for the proposed design process. This shouldn’t be just an academic
exercise--if the outputs from the process are good we’d ideally start
executing on them.

Some of my questions are:


   1.

   Are Web Standards alone sufficient to enable a viable alternative to the
   status quo of centralized social media, for decades to come?  Or, do we
   need additional methods to ensure true interoperability and ecosystem
   performance?



   1.

   Do you think there is value in a multidisciplinary prosocial media
   design process that investigates how technology, appropriate business
   models, and good ecosystem governance could be combined to enable an open,
   competitive, and healthy social media paradigm?



   1.

   Would you be interested in helping define, or participate in, such a
   design process?

   2.

   What are your concerns and/or disagreements with what you’ve read so
   far?



   1.

   Assuming we do need a new institution (potentially in the form of a
   nonprofit) who do you think are existing entities (perhaps a consortium
   onclusing orgs like EFF) that would be trusted, and trustworthy, to
   maintain such a prosocial media ecosystem commons?


Thanks for reading this far!

-- 
*Adam Lake*

*Founder | Mosaic Foundation540-285-0083*
*www.mosaic.social*