Project Vision

[balzack]

I am one of the lucky ones; somehow I never felt the draw to social media. I would use it to see what friends were up to but would quickly get bored. I see it now as a net negative; the anxieties and social dis-function associated with it seem to outweigh any benefit. I feel especially lucky because I am aware of my vulnerability to manipulation. When I hear negative things about someone or something, it shapes my view and behavior. Manipulation isn't something we can avoid, but when it happens within our local community, it comes with opposing view points and by people who don't necessarily want to exploit us.

The manipulation from big tech seems to be a different beast. A company only truly cares about profit regardless of its affect on people. Any of these 'free' tech services are selling the attention of their users for advertisement of products or causes to support. They go further and observe our behavior and interests so they can be much more effective. They can target their advertisements with something we are less likely to dismiss, or they provoke our fears, insecurities and angers so we stay engaged and they can sell more of our attention. Censorship is another way to manipulate a user base. While some censorship may be necessary, it can also be used to shut down conversation against the interest of the social media company.

Unless we can acknowledge how easy we are to manipulate, I don't think we are prepared to handle the social shift brought on by big tech. I do believe tech can be a positive aspect of society, but not in its current form. In a decentralized model, the services would no longer be 'free', but they could be free from the exploitation of its users. In a decentralized system, users would either have to host their own data, or pay for a hosting service. It is hard to see the average person making this leap to decentralized systems, but perhaps societal dis-function will make the leap the only reasonable choice.

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is a concept that has been around for awhile and describes a system in which we are in full control of our digital identities (the principles are well described here: http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity.html). Although many projects exist taking significant steps towards SSI (solidproject.org and matrix.org for example), there is still a long ways to go and the path is far from certain. This project is intended simply to give another approach to SSI with design decisions not taken by the other projects.

The starting point is a full vertical slice of a messaging application. As that functionality matures this project can grow to include other aspects of SSI by adding more vertical slices, use case by use case. In theory all aspects of our digital identity from reviews to our family photos should reside within a system we have full control over. The current requirements for self-hosting will always be too much for the average person, but perhaps someday this project can be embedded into CE devices. A router or a VPN gateway device hosting a decentralized node seems to have great potential for achieving wide adoption.