DIY social networks and groupware

1 Theory

• (Mannell and Smith 2022)

2 As digital nostalgia

See the internet back in my day.

3 Using turnkey infrastructure

There are turnkey technical solutions designed to do this for various use cases.

• discord is like a “fun” themed Slack, (i.e. chat thing hosted on a 3rd party server) which means a slightly lower barrier to entry but less professional cred. It is still presumably prone to unaccountable American politics tantrums. Cool addition: Discohook, Webhook notification from Netlify to Discord. This lacks cipherpunk security jazz but it is the one I end up using most often because it has a critical mass of community, good UX, and is free.
• discourse is an open-source community chat platform which you can install on your own server. It seems to be the dominant force in community-run servers at the moment. Do not be confused by the similarity of name to the commercial discord, below.
• keybase teams are reputedly end-to-end encrypted chats run by a fancy hipster dotcom.
• Zulip is an open-source slack-alike with first-class mathematics support.
• Rocket.chat is another one. A quick perusal seems to indicate it is attempting to be the good bits of Slack, which seems to be the aspiration for nearly everything else here.
• Element is the flagship modestly-secure chat system for Matrix. Looks a little like Slack; Matrix is positioning itself to fill the paranoid Slack niche too. See Matrix Offers Red Pill to Slack Users
• Stackoverflow teams is goal-oriented Q&A for teams. I do not know anything about their security history, but they are hosted in the USA FWIW.
• Gitter is a hosted and (open-source) system. It too is sort of like its more famous cousin Slack, apparently?
• Slack is a communication platform somewhat more oriented towards workplace organising than other chat programs. Can be forced to support mathematics. Its UX is unsatisfactory for ad hoc groups (signing on is hard, and it requires people to learn how to turn on notifications, and you end up with a million Slack channels of low activity) and it is hosted by a third party with dubiously competent enforcement of their jurisdiction’s wacky geopolitical tantrums.
• Groups is a freemium mail group services with, for each group, “a calendar, chat, polls, a database section, a photos section, a files section, and a wiki.” Also integrates “Feeds, Facebook Pages, Slack, Google Drive, Github, Trello, Email.” NB Facebook pages need to be public to integrate.
• Forj has particular emphasis on community management for non-profits.
• wire pro is the groupware version of the wire chat client.
• Wickr Pro is similar, a group chat that could be shoehorned into being social.

Or, dunno if it fits here, but look at this attempt to provide the some of the features of the social network in terms of telling you not to forget birthdays, Monica the open-source personal CRM.

If you just want something efficient for your purposes but don’t care about the NSA reading it any of those will work, and they offer varying degrees of guarantees about not data mining you.

Keybase, Wire, Wickr and (partially) Riot claim to be host-proof, so in principle it should be hard for adversaries to spy upon.

Mike Hoye divulges Mozilla’s evaluation of some options.

4 Host your own social network

Run your own social system! On (possibly) your computer or (probably) someone else’s cloud, or even your own private cloud.

Various of the turnkey options above also allow you to self-host, plus there are extra ones.

• Zulip
• discourse is an open-source community chat platform which you can install on your own server. It seems to be the dominant force in community-run servers at the moment.
• Element/Matrix (🏗 check this really is self-hostable.)
• Gitter is open-source although it has onerous dependencies and it not plausible for civilians to run. This might change now that it is being merged into element
• rocket chat is an open-source, optionally-self-hosted team chat server. A quick perusal seems to indicate it, too, is attempting to be the good bits of Slack.
• Matrix is self-hostable.

Of the above ones, only Riot is AFAICT host-proof encrypted; unless you control access to your server because it is in your house and you get to manually input the encryption keys, this host-proof thing is nice to have.

The following that AFAIK don’t have a primary corporate backer providing turnkey hosting.

• Federated social media projects like Mastodon and Peertube, are at a half-way point between central systems and fully distributed systems. You and a community barnraise a server together for your local social network, and it talks to other servers for you to create a global mesh of local social networks.
• mattermost. 🏗

These fun DIY systems are good simple starting points. They are presumably sharing less information with the Facebook marketing and profiling machine. YMMV.

5 Decentralised social networks

Paranoid, robust, slow, server-free options.

For AFAIK all of the above options, apart from possibly the host-proof ones, the servers can still be subpoenaed and spied upon and presumably blocked by malevolent interests either through legal mechanisms (by the state) or by hacking you (criminals and/or the state). Or to put it another way, in every centralised social network system there is one extra machine apart from all the participants’: the server, which might be held in suspect circumstances by unknown third parties, because who wants to keep a server farm under their bed? To reduce the risks of that machine being interfered with, you could one-up the noobs and use decentralised encrypted networks which try to eliminate the need for a server at all, and possibly work hard to preserve the anonymity of the people using them. Then, of course, you still have to secure the users’s machines, but at least they have autonomy. Long story short, with this option there are no servers because everything is run on the computers of the network participants. Here are some social media examples.

The theory of decentralised internet services in general is discussed elsewhere.¹

Typically the decentralised net people see themselves as leapfrogging over the federated social networks and their solving of some of the problems of social media, and solving all the problems at once.

6 Financing and governing your DIY social network

I don’t have much to say here, but I’m interested in knowing more. Perhaps the overview Matias (2017) is useful?

7 Working together online

See DIY online collaboration.

8 Events

🏗 rant here about how no one but Facebook facilitates IRL gigs, events, and meet-ups and since that is a major priority for me and many of my communities I am unlikely to actually use any of these options until I (or more realistically, someone else) can produce a decent collective events system.

9 Indyweb

A slightly different niche: hosting your own web content with sociable overtones.

10 References