{"id":3057,"date":"2020-06-08T17:45:23","date_gmt":"2020-06-09T01:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=3057"},"modified":"2020-06-08T17:45:23","modified_gmt":"2020-06-09T01:45:23","slug":"nothing-venn-tured","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=3057","title":{"rendered":"nothing Venn-tured"},"content":{"rendered":"

The story on Venn, so-called, is a lot of what I DON\u2019T want. I don\u2019t want the entire world to be able to see all my posts; I want to control who does and have some granularity to it and define circles beyond just \u201cpublic\u201d & \u201cfriends.\u201d\u00a0I don\u2019t want to ever see anything<\/em> from people I don’t<\/em> follow – no reposting, no bots, no things other people liked from randoms I don\u2019t know.\u00a0I also ideally don\u2019t want the whole system to depend on one company and one app; I want interoperability like with email or web. But I also want security and encryption, which traditionally means you need one company holding the keys or else a complex public key sharing operation. It is honestly very difficult to square.<\/p>\n

I want to prevent random unsolicited interaction. No trolls, no bots, no intruders.\u00a0I want to let people follow without me having to follow them back or let them see everything I post, so that I don\u2019t have to maintain multiple accounts. LiveJournal had this in 2003 for godsakes.\u00a0I want a chronological list of every post from everyone I follow, rather than content surfaced out of order at the whims of an algorithm.\u00a0I want as much of the intelligence as possible at the endpoint rather than in the server in between.\u00a0I want a passive stream of posts that doesn\u2019t notify me for EVERY SINGLE NEW MESSAGE the way a group chat does. I do want the ability to message 1:1 and get notified of that, though.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of ways the current offerings fail. Let me think about it:<\/p>\n

FACEBOOK: Too evil to require further elaboration.<\/p>\n

INSTAGRAM: Evil, duh. No real granularity options beyond making the account private and using the \u201cclose friends\u201d group in Stories. Algorithmic timeline, so who knows what you see when.<\/p>\n

WHATSAPP: Evil, duh. Don\u2019t know if the group chat can work without pinging you for every message. Facebook is pivoting to WA as a focal product and trying to bring in advertising, so expect it to get worse.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

(smugly thinking\u00a0That\u2019s that sorted. The goal, after all, is to get away from Facebook. So what else is out there?<\/em>)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

TWITTER: Serious problem with evil. No granularity in posting aside from all-or-nothing private account. Algorithmic timeline, so some question whether you will even see everything, let alone in order. Constantly trying to snitch on your friends\u2019 favorites and follows, to the point that it defaults away from just giving you the latest tweets.<\/p>\n

TUMBLR: no real granularity or group model for visibility of posts. Just an option to password the whole thing and make it private.<\/p>\n

SNAPCHAT: (this is not a viable option as I am 48 years old)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

(Ugh. I don\u2019t like the way this is headed. What if we get away from the traditional social media options?)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

SIGNAL: Has some of the utility of WhatsApp, including the ability to create a group chat and mute alerts. Not suitable for adding large numbers of people esp. if loosely associated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

MICRO.BLOG: basically aggregates public blog posts. You won\u2019t see any reposts or anyone you didn\u2019t follow, but everything you post is of necessity public with no way to narrow it down to your circles.<\/p>\n

FLICKR: costs money after the first thousand pics or so. Almost everybody had it, but nobody\u2019s logged into it for at least six or seven years. Only has friends and family as granular levels of access, but that\u2019s more than Insta has.<\/p>\n

SLACK: based on a chatroom model rather than a post model. Granularity only consists of separating rooms and topics. App traditionally pummels your phone battery even when not on screen.<\/p>\n

CLUSTER: looks kind of like Instagram, consists of multiple private groups with posts locked inside a group, but seems more optimized for something like everyone in a tour group sharing pictures.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

(Huh. Maybe there used to be something that would kind of work?<\/em>)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

PATH: out of business. Dodgy. Not automatically public, but only real control was in limiting your number of friends to 50 at first, then 150.<\/p>\n

GOOGLE+: out of business. Evil. Late to the party. Bad security on APIs. Suffered from being shoehorned into every other Google product. Very good model for circles and granularity though!<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

(Okay, I think we\u2019re starting to get somewhere. \u00a0What about a new app altogether?)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

COCOON: very<\/em> close to what I\u2019m thinking of but limits a group to 20. Multiple groups even with overlapping membership don\u2019t scale across multiple users.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And here we come to the problem: the most secure and reliable options, like Slack or Cocoon or Signal (or other group chats) depend on a pre-defined group that is not easy to add to and is all or nothing. If I want to follow a new friend, then everybody is going to see their posts, not just me. You more or less need the social media model for this to function – a passive stream that doesn\u2019t notify you with every post, but also doesn\u2019t have to be open to the entire world.\u00a0If Instagram were owned by anyone else, it or even Twitter could each fill the role – so long as they ditched the algorithmic timeline. You can limit whether you see other people\u2019s retweets in Twitter (and I have done so with a lot of folks in a private Twitter, using Tweetbot as its only interface, and very nearly curated an acceptable environment). The model already exists, but in the hands of people who have optimized for growth and clicks over safety, security, and simple human decency – and thanks to a lack of antitrust enforcement, it will be almost impossible to generate the critical mass necessary to lure people onto another platform.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to keep looking for something that can be Venn, because I think it\u2019s an insurmountable ask to make it myself given that I can\u2019t get through the first lesson module on Swift Playgrounds. But we either need something else, or we need the hammer to fall on Mark Zuckerberg and force Insta to be spun off, and bring an end to the notion that you can avoid competition by buying up anyone who has a better idea.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The story on Venn, so-called, is a lot of what I DON\u2019T want. I don\u2019t want the entire world to be able to see all my posts; I want to control who does and have some granularity to it and define circles beyond just \u201cpublic\u201d & \u201cfriends.\u201d\u00a0I don\u2019t want to ever see anything from people … <\/p>\n

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