Post BALhyU46qBFV93nTJg by hyphen@duwa.ng
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 (DIR) Post #BALhyU46qBFV93nTJg by hyphen@duwa.ng
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       thinking about the facebook model of communication media where you voluntarily and involuntarily give your host a full record of your person, life events big and small, and your relationships. voluntarily through your status updates and involuntarily through your connections status updates and your interactions with them. basically maximizing data retention and processing, with participation in the network being an implicit opt into all that.now there is real value in what facebook offered, considering its ubiquity among otherwise very offline and uninvolved with tech people, and if i am to guess, i'd say being able to keep up with what ur connections are up to with their lives, in a way that is rather hands-off and asynchronous to you both, plays a big role. another thing is being able to find someone you just met through your commonalities and connect, without explicitly exchanging contact. those two use-cases i've seen play out many many times among friends and relatives who are more present on the platform. of course these days it's a bit of a kitchen-sink, where people get entertained and keep up with the news and exchange goods and find niches among other things. but i'd say the core proposition is keeping a record of one's relationships and growing them through it.thinking about a potential anti-facebook model of a communication medium, maximizing information autonomy under the same level of convenience. how would it look like? for example it would still allow you to connect to people you physically met by looking up commonalities or by some other means, but if that connection is unwanted by one of the parties, there should be a way to ensure this party cannot be pursued further. same goes for keeping up with what they're doing, accessibility shouldn't be determined thru the object itself (is it friends only or public or whatever) but thru each individual relationship. maybe something like g+ circles got the right idea.for scraping, i'm thinking there has to be at least a "forgetfulness" mechanism, information you choose to announce to the public or share with a person, ad-hoc group of people, or a well-defined circle, won't stay accessible forever. it fades just like people normally forget things they don't take explicit note of. you yourself can access all your info through some kind of a protected archive it falls into, if you choose, but only you can without any time restrictions.another thing is, the connections must be designed in a way such that no single entity has a full view of the relationship graph and every person just knows its neighbors.much to think about... but one thing is clear: a much different and certainly much less antagonistic relationship with technology would've evolved under a different system. these are not hard problems to design for, they're just much less explored ideas. feels like we tend to default to hyper-individual control and obfuscation precisely because solutions are envisioned in a hostile environment. feels like we could've achieved this level of convenience without the draconian hoarding and control of everyone's information for profit or for surveillance.