"With Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, I began to question if transferring ownership of a centralized platform to another is really the solution to true freedom of speech.
Mastodon was a platform that came to mind where each instance is run individually by a person or an organization and each instance gets to decide how they want to moderate it.
Although users get to choose which instance to join depending on their tastes, they have to sign up for a new account each time on each instance and potentially lose their followers if their account get’s banned in any of these instances.
So I’ve decided to build Soul, which is an external OAuth-based identity provider built specifically for social media in mind. It comes with several user management and user connections management features that can allow one’s “digital soul” to exist in various platforms as long as they integrate with Soul.
Soul is still in a really early stage of development but it is open source and constantly looking for new opportunities to improve. Please give it a shot and try building a social media platform on top of Soul to tap on it’s existing users (though not a lot at the moment, but I hope it’ll grow)."
That's a really good question, yes it can but we can remain impartial as we have no visibility to content or anything our users do. Platforms can still ban users on their side or through our API but that would not limit our users from joining other platforms or creating their own.
Lots of similar sites start up the same way, I know from experience. Let individual communities self-govern, and stay out of it.
Then you get spambots attacking your service, so you set up checks on your end to alleviate the burden your individual community moderators have to undertake.
Then people sending illegal/shocking content. More changes on your end.
Then your government sends you notice that copyrighted content is being shared on your platform. Oops, gotta moderate that, too.
Death threats, alternate accounts, you name it, these are the things that will either make your community moderators & users leave (thus no service), or things you have to crack down on yourself.
Before long, you have a full-time team dedicated to moderating content.
Not saying this to just discourage you or belittle you, but, if you tell communities that you will be "impartial" 100% of the time, then that might come back to bite you later when you have to take action.
It is a challenging position to be in for sure but I want to fight for freedom of speech and democratizing social media. If no one does anything nothing would change. Its takes 100 failures to make a pivotal change may soul could be that trigger for change
We'll need to have better validation in place for sure, that's a good suggestion though. It's tricky to moderate for bots while not limiting a user's freedom of expression. Maybe in the future, we can have some kind of voting system where if more than x number of verified platforms voted against a Soul account for bot activity, we will ban that user entirely from Soul.
Why should I trust some arbitrary third-party OAuth provider? Why?
Either I don't need this single point of failure and create an account on each and every service independently. Each and every service then stands for its own. If someone is able to infiltrate a service, it is impossible to infiltrate my whole personalty.
That is different with a single third-party OAuth provide. First it needs a lot of trust, especially in terms of (cyber) security. Second: Kus why?
Comments
"With Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, I began to question if transferring ownership of a centralized platform to another is really the solution to true freedom of speech. Mastodon was a platform that came to mind where each instance is run individually by a person or an organization and each instance gets to decide how they want to moderate it.
Although users get to choose which instance to join depending on their tastes, they have to sign up for a new account each time on each instance and potentially lose their followers if their account get’s banned in any of these instances.
So I’ve decided to build Soul, which is an external OAuth-based identity provider built specifically for social media in mind. It comes with several user management and user connections management features that can allow one’s “digital soul” to exist in various platforms as long as they integrate with Soul.
Soul is still in a really early stage of development but it is open source and constantly looking for new opportunities to improve. Please give it a shot and try building a social media platform on top of Soul to tap on it’s existing users (though not a lot at the moment, but I hope it’ll grow)."
Check out our site here: https://www.soul-network.com/ and main Github repo here: https://github.com/soul-project/soul
Doesn't that just change the point of failure? Can't soul still ban an account?
That's a really good question, yes it can but we can remain impartial as we have no visibility to content or anything our users do. Platforms can still ban users on their side or through our API but that would not limit our users from joining other platforms or creating their own.
Lots of similar sites start up the same way, I know from experience. Let individual communities self-govern, and stay out of it.
Then you get spambots attacking your service, so you set up checks on your end to alleviate the burden your individual community moderators have to undertake.
Then people sending illegal/shocking content. More changes on your end.
Then your government sends you notice that copyrighted content is being shared on your platform. Oops, gotta moderate that, too.
Death threats, alternate accounts, you name it, these are the things that will either make your community moderators & users leave (thus no service), or things you have to crack down on yourself.
Before long, you have a full-time team dedicated to moderating content.
Not saying this to just discourage you or belittle you, but, if you tell communities that you will be "impartial" 100% of the time, then that might come back to bite you later when you have to take action.
What this really means is that the mob will need to pressure Soul into cancelling undesirable account holders through 3rd party site communication.
Not to mention oauth is very hard to get right.. it’s a huge undertaking with pentesting, fraud detection etc.
I leave it to the big guys do auth.
And if Soul doesn't cave to the mob they will go for their ISP. Look no further than what happened to Kiwifarms if you piss off the mob.
It is a challenging position to be in for sure but I want to fight for freedom of speech and democratizing social media. If no one does anything nothing would change. Its takes 100 failures to make a pivotal change may soul could be that trigger for change
I applaud your efforts and wish you much success. A lot of people talk, few take action.
Either you could please users or you could please platforms. If 99% of your users are bots, do you think any platform will accept your users?
We'll need to have better validation in place for sure, that's a good suggestion though. It's tricky to moderate for bots while not limiting a user's freedom of expression. Maybe in the future, we can have some kind of voting system where if more than x number of verified platforms voted against a Soul account for bot activity, we will ban that user entirely from Soul.
Why should I trust some arbitrary third-party OAuth provider? Why?
Either I don't need this single point of failure and create an account on each and every service independently. Each and every service then stands for its own. If someone is able to infiltrate a service, it is impossible to infiltrate my whole personalty.
That is different with a single third-party OAuth provide. First it needs a lot of trust, especially in terms of (cyber) security. Second: Kus why?
Unless you already have a partnership with some platform using it, i think its a hard sell.