I just read Cory Doctorow’s article “Let the Platform Burn”. It reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for some time. Instead of joining yet another social network and recreating yourself, why not create your personal social network object and link it to others via a federation of the personal social network objects?
I call this object the Earthling object with all due respect to our extraterrestrial readers. The object would be maintained by its owner and contain whatever information the owner choses to add such as a bio, pictures, blogs, posts, or documents. The object could contain links to your friends, family, and coworker objects.
Once set up, you could serve it yourself or use an Earthling Service Provider (yet to be invented). It would be a lot like running your own Lemmy instance or joining an existing one. The essential feature of this approach is that all the data within the object and access to it is completely under your control. Should you decide to ‘go dark’, you can delete or disconnect the object and disappear from the social networking community. Right up there in importance is that you can move this object around to any location you like without having to rebuild it. Communication would be along the lines of ActivityPub.
There are most certainly many issues with the concept and some of the features already exist. As Cory mentioned in his article, Mastodon allows you to export all your data from one instance and move it to another. Kbin seems to already provide at lot of these features with it’s magazines, microblog, and people sections.
While the Earthling object would have extensive controls on who sees what in your object, people might prefer not to keep all their eggs in one basket, joining different networks for different purposes and only providing personal data for the specific purpose. Did I mention that the Earthling object would have an avatar feature so you could take on multiple personalities?
This post is part entertainment and part ‘wouldn’t it be nice’. Maybe there are others out there that have already thought through this and are a lot further along. I believe there are similar efforts in the Web 3.0 arena. Anyone else interested in having their own Earthling object?
I think some of it is, not even being "tech illiterate", but people are just tired and want to do other things. The average person is coming home from work already exhausted, needs to spend time with their partner or kids, take care of the house, etc etc. I don't blame anyone for not wanting to tinker with setting up servers and learning to make websites and all the other stuff (I'm still learning it too). It's a lot, especially if you don't already have a solid foundation. Anything super complex that requires a lot of setup just isn't accessible for most people. It's not a lack of ability, but a lack of time and energy.
I do agree about the elitist attitude though. As much as tech people complain about non-tech people, we need them when we eat the food they grew, or they fix our car, or the plumbing in our house. Someone not caring enough to learn new skills because they're good with the ones they already have is okay and it doesn't make someone dumb. That's why they just want to pay someone else to deal with it. I don't understand how industrial agricultural machinary works but I still eat because there's people who do. And that's okay :)