Thread by @andrestaltz

It surprises me when people think #Scuttlebutt is for privacy, freedom of speech, and anonymity. That's very far from what characterizes the technology and the community.

Scuttlebutt is about putting "social" back into social networking.

(Thread:)

We're not motivated by privacy, individual freedom, and anonymity. Don't get me wrong, though, these things are good to have, in contrast to a system like Facebook with privacy invasion and real world identities. Privacy is like water, I need it daily, but it's not my motivator.

Scuttlebutt has decent privacy, most content is public, some is encrypted (very private). We have individual freedom due to your data living 100% on your device. And you can be somewhat anonymous if you wish. But that's not the point of it.

Scuttlebutt is about restoring natural human interactions in the internet era.

To accomplish that, it needs to be non-commercial / non-profit, or at least "free of influence" from businesses.

You see, a lot of the weirdness going on in social networks today is a product of intentional engineering, growth hacking, and profit seeking. I can describe a few profit-driven contraptions that have deformed human interactions on the internet:

1) Ease of account (re)creation.

Or: conversion optimization. This is fundamental in any for-profit social network, for user growth.

As a technical feature, it's innocent. But socially, it means you can misbehave as much as you want, because creating a new account is easy.

Only recently have social networks began to add requirement for phone numbers or other signals, and they only started doing that to crackdown on fake accounts, bots, and ban-circumvention.

Notice how account re-creation and behavior are intrinsically related.

2) Engagement growth.

In other words, engineering of addiction. To think that billions of social interactions are now dopamine-driven with face-paced social confirmation, means are on a path of degrading normal discourse on a global scale.

3) Advertisements.

Never before have humans had commercial ads interrupting even small gatherings of friends and family.

Entertainment and sports have been used to catch attention for ads, but using frienships to catch that attention was genius, but wicked beyond comprehension.

4) Communities of interest.

This property is less well known, but important to acknowledge. The internet allows you to find a (large!) community for any hobby or topic you can imagine. This has been great. But it has a downside too...

It means you can find people who think like you for ANY idea you have. You can potentially find thousands who think alike. It is tempting to withdraw into those communities and feel empowered together. Essentially the internet enables efficient formation of cults.

So:
1) Account creation is fueled by capitalistic growth.
2) Engagement & addiction is fueled by capitalistic growth.
3) Advertisements are fueled by capitalistic growth.
4) Communities of interest are productized, for capitalistic growth.

This is why restoring humanity on the internet must be done free from influence from capital and/or growth hunger.

#Scuttlebutt is doing that by nurturing communities that are more like villages. Here's how:

Communities are small enough so you can know everyone (the size restriction is actually defined by your storage limits, so you cannot connect with unlimited amounts of people).

E.g. I have 9k people on my computer, and don't want it to reach much more. That's the size of a town.

We do growth nurturing, not growth hacking. Nurturing is the removal of obstacles for growth. Hacking is tricking or luring people, to bloat community size.

We encourage new comers to introduce themselves to the community, tell their story, and we cheer and welcome them.

If you behave badly and get blocked by others, it's not enough to create a new account, you'll have to regain their trust and get invited again. No invites, no interaction.

Instead of trade, transaction, and businesses, we gift, share, and make careful use of our resources. Scuttlebutt just got an 85k€ grant from @HNS but Dominic (who created Scuttlebutt) has so far no role in managing that. The community is democratically managing that.

We need this. A huge percentage of human interactions is on the internet today, and it's not just about fun and cool social apps anymore, it's about society.

Links: manyver.se / scuttlebutt.nz