Having just finished reading Michael Nielsen's amazing book "Reinventing Discovery: A New Era of Networked Science" , it occurred to me in one of the many Mark Zuckerberg moments that happen over lunch at work that it would be most desirable indeed to have an open source social network to replace the Encarta like organizations such as Facebook, who don't even allow me access to the posts of most of my friends, my news feed grows increasingly specialized into a thick bubble which will I fear soon engulf me in self-referential quasi-agreement. And it does this in such an opaque way. I don't know how it works, why it connects me with this person rather than another on the news feed, and I don't know to who my news feed is going, who sees my articles, maybe it's none of my friends. Why have my friends stopped writing to me? Is it facebook or is it that they don't like me anymore?





Wouldn't it be nice I thought if we could write our own algorithms for social networks and post them up and allow others to use them if they wished. For example, I could write a social network called "Straw", which every week would connect me to 5 random people chosen because they have maximally diverse political opinions to me. Their feeds would then appear on my feed and mine on theirs. This would be transparent. If people liked my social network algorithm they could click and sign up to it. Another person could write an open source algorithm within the same framework called "GoodSamariton" which would connect with people who their algorithm thought might be depressed, or someone could write an algorithm called "KillingCats" and connect with people interested in cat torture (I'm just thinking of abuse cases), or someone could write an algorithm called "Influencer" and connect to people who might be on the fence about Brexit and maybe post them important influential messages like "Take Back Control over America" proposing that the British had lost control of this colony to its detriment and now the colony had gone too far and had acted ignobly in several respects relating to e.g. drone based attacks, and that perhaps we should re-colonize those bad boys. Anyway, you get the idea. A whole diversity of connection algorithms could be made available to the users themselves, instead of having a few dodgy central institutions such as Facebook dealing with the real nuts and bolts of how connections are made. Controlling who talks to whom is more important than we think. An old boys network, dinners, clubs, etc... these are all ways in which power percolates. Transparency in how people connect may help in several domains, and democratize, enfranchise users beyond the level they are currently used to and take for granted (like sheep that grass will generally be induced).





Problem: Open-source social networks have been tried, and appear to have failed.













Thanks to the reddit commenter who suggested I look at This one attracted less than half a million people and only has 80,000 members. The question is, why has it failed? Has it failed even? I want to find out more about these networks. The problem I envisage is obviously invasion. How can such a network invade Facebook's market? Facebook had it easier at the beginning. Do people even have a problem with the opaque algorithms used in Social Networks? More work remains to be done in this, comments welcome.Thanks to the reddit commenter who suggested I look at Fediverse , as a non-failure case. Whilst my post was removed from reddit Science, an online journal which still requires the validation of 'real' journals for posts to be legitimate, I got some useful feedback while it was still online. Will look into Fediverse when I get a chance.







