Symgnosticon | Main / SocialismP2P

Livejournal had a very strong sense of ethics that coincided with what could be called the hacker frame of mind. Libertarian, free and open speech. Access to code.

Six Apart had a very closed model of organization and development. Taking arbitrary actions without consulting the community, regulating the community to make it "safe" for outsiders. Implementing advertising. Censoring content, even legal content. Yes, I know the "companies can't censor" argument. We don't have to deal with that to discuss the practical market-based issue at hand:

LJ felt a bit like a community and it was being betrayed by the people who were now running the joint. People sought alternative solutions, either moving to a different LJ-based network, and even starting a new one up (dreamwidth.

During the hubbub I pondered what a truly "community owned" site would look like. How can you guarantee that no-one will fuck with your journal?

Solution

P2P networking. Socialism.net as an idea was formed.

There would be a central service for backup and for the ability to access your account on other systems if you were away from your home base and didn't have your computer on, as well as "comrade" discovery (the socialism.net term for "friend")

But it wouldn't be necessary if you didn't want that feature.

The service itself would be a truly P2P system whereby you friends feed would come in from each of their computers. There would be a Socialism Server you would run that was easy to setup. Posting would be as simple as LJ (or, these days, even simpler).

Since then (~2006/2007) technology has advanced. Opera has set up a system to make it easy to host your own media servers/web servers, through their UNITE system. This is an approach that could work. Bit-torrent as a service might not work.

There are many options, but I believe it's one way to really connect with your friends, network, and grow from the bottom up.

It's certainly not a corporate environment, comrade.