No Monoliths

The dust has mostly settled around Ello, the new social network that promises no information tracking or selling of user data to advertisers. Ello has been popular and refreshing because of these policies. Of course, there's concern and criticism around whether or not the folks behind Ello can be taken on their word and the long-term business viability of this strategy - their current plan (as of 10/08/2014) for revenue is selling premium features:

We occasionally offer special features to our users. If we create a special feature that you really like, you may choose to support Ello by paying a very small amount of money to add that feature to your Ello account.

And since, it seems, Ello blew up prematurely, their privacy policy has also drawn fire, though they have made promises to tighten things up.

Aside from these problems, which are understandable for any nascent social network, Ello has been a great opportunity to evaluate what we want and expect from social networks, and the inadequacies against the current dominating services: Ello has frequently been contrasted against Facebook (naturally), who's policies are always found problematic by at least some subset of its users. Facebook's selling of personal data and excessive tracking is the main thing Ello positions itself against, and a big part of what has drawn people to the platform.

I don't think Ello is a solution to these problems. Ello only challenges the symptoms of social networks like Facebook, that is, a centrally-controlled social network that, whether intentionally or not, is perceived to be the one platform everyone needs to be on. For social networking services structured in this way, I believe it is inevitable that user data eventually gets collected (and on Ello, it does, ostensibly to improve the site) and sold. It is a feature of this structure that you, as a user, must entrust your data to a third party which you do not know, to which you have no personal relationship with. What happens with that is then at the discretion of that third party.

To really resolve these problems, we must challenge the fundamental structure of these services. An ideal solution is one similar to that which the ill-fated Diaspora pursued, but perhaps taken a step further. I would love to see a service which allows users to self-host their own social network for their friends or community/communities (or for the less technically-oriented, spawn a cloud-hosted version at the click of a button).

Each community then has the opportunity to manage its own data, implement its own policies, make its own decisions about financial support for the network (e.g. have users pay membership fees, run on donations, or even sell data for ads if the users are ok with it).

Each network can run independently on its own social norms, but all the networks are technically interoperable. So if I wanted to I could join multiple networks, post across networks, and so on, all with the same identity.

But this kind of plurality of networks better acknowledges that people have multiple identities for different social contexts, something which monolithic social networks (i.e. one platform for all things social) are not well-suited for. With the latter, all activity is tied to one identity, and then there's a great deal of manual identity management to keep each social sphere properly contained. With this parallel network design, users can - if they want - share an identity across multiple networks, or they can have different identities for different networks, which for the user are all linked to a private master identity (thus making management a bit easier). To others, each identity appear as a distinct user.

It's something worth trying.