Once upon a time, I built a proof of concept distributed social network that ran entirely on cell phones.

I eventually ran into enough complications that I abandoned the project. But the tech did work. I could create posts, add friends, etc. (It just wasn’t reliable in its sync mechanism and I gave up trying to fix it.)

So… Imagine Lemmy, but a community’s data is stored collaboratively on mobile devices, the load shared by all its subscribers.

We all walk around with goddamn supercomputers in our pockets. We should put them to work.

Ah! A fellow holder of the belief that time travel stories are better when they are internally consistent! I hate e.g. Looper for having time travel that makes no goddamn sense. It takes me out of the story when the characters are literally watching the timeline change before them as it magically radiates out from one point. And then our protagonists somehow remember the original timeline… Bah.

…So I must ask - have you seen Primer? If not, maybe you’d like it!

It’s hard to compare apples and mangos, but if we’re gonna consider favorite tropical fruits, I friggin love fresh mangosteen. It’s like a little fruity Bob-bom. Smooth and silky texture, creamy sweet flesh and just fantastic. They don’t seem to travel well, unfortunately.

Or fresh pineapple.

I had fresh pineapple off a farmer’s cart in the tropics two decades back. Afterward, I couldn’t eat pineapple in the US for almost three years. It was so much better than the canned or grocery-store stuff there was just no comparison.

A few years back I started working on a P2P-based social media app.

The things I did:

• Pull-based: you don’t see anything from people you aren’t subbed to.
• Natural vs algorithm-driven growth: Introduce friends instead of shoving randos into every conversation.
• No ads: Servers are expensive. P2P architecture removes (most of) them, so we can afford to run on donations of time and money.
• Community-based publishing: When you share, it’s to a community of users you’ve curated. “Family”, “Co-workers”, “Cool co-workers”, etc
• Community-based moderation: local + shared tags and filters to control what your communities can show you. (E.g. Block all #politics posts from Uncle Fergulous and all #soblessed posts everywhere. Sub to other users’ tags to make them part of your personal moderation team)
• Data Ownership: I don’t want your data. You host it. You own it.
• Right to be Forgotten: Automatically delete older posts (This is impossible to achieve completely, but having it as the default makes casual abuse harder)
• Pseudonymous: I don’t care who you are. If the FBI cares, they may be able to track you though.