For example, for me, here are some things I wish to see (or would implement in my design) :
- design around ease of self-hosting. A non technical user must be able to self host easily and at a very low cost.
- Embrace content sorting and filtering algorithms, but on the client side, with optional control by the user.
- Standardize tags on all content. So many of the different ways different platforms classify or organize content can be implemented as tags, which increases interoperability between them.
- Abandon obsession with real-time-first implementations for use cases that don’t explicitly need it.
- Transferable user identity (between instances)
- User identity and authentication as separate service from social network instance
Would love to hear yours!
Sounds a lot like Nostr, no?
Edit: or maybe SimpleX? I keep confusing various implementation details between the two.
Neither nostr nor simplex make “community building” a thing. The most important defining point is the ability to have communal intermediaries. All protocols can do a forwarding bot, starting with the good old mailing-list, but anything more complicated than that is rare. In nostr that would be running a full relay (which is just out of the question if you’re not technical). Simplex isn’t much better. Both are built for individualistic purposes, so it’s not really surprising.
ActivityPub isn’t perfect but it has Groups, with some people working on making them controllable. XMPP has highly configurable pubsub. Those are proper foundations for billions of people building billions of communities