from Hacker News

Let's build a decentralized social network together with Logseq

by bribri on 6/13/22, 6:27 AM with 53 comments

  • by jerojero on 6/14/22, 2:48 PM

    I think we need to see more implementations of the already existing federated protocols. We need that one app that will truly explode and bring the fediverse to the masses. Mastodon is okay but it's just a microblogging platform; it's not really too innovative.
  • by velcrovan on 6/14/22, 3:48 PM

    There are so many ways to build decentralized social networks. It’s a 1000% solved problem at this point. They never get traction because they always require more learning and work than 99% of people are willing or able to fit into their lives. You jump through more hoops to reach fewer people.
  • by bribri on 6/14/22, 4:17 PM

    Hey Everyone! Really appreciate this discussion. Here's some extra context.

    Logseq is an open source notetaking app (similar to Roam) that has a feature where you can publish your notes as a static site.

    It has some advanced features where you can attach data to pages and bullet points (like some basic bio info, like name, site, twitter, tags) that you can query.

    There are some public graphs out there, but they're hard to find and figure out who made them. The main goal is just to create a "link ring" where we can find each other.

    This spec suggests a standard page on each graph called [[logseq-social/profile]]

    That way, when you find a public graph, you can go there to find out about its author and who they follow. You can download that page to your notes, and a simple logseq query makes the bio information of each user you save show up on your follower list.

    The idea is really simple, just agreeing on a convention for a "profile" page on logseq that has some standard tags.

    Logseq has a really powerful plugin system that can have a whole react app in it, so down the line you could make a UI for friending, browsing, etc when more people have public graphs.

    Plus, there's now tooling to host your logseq notes as a programmatic api. So having some metadata standards opens up some interesting possibilities.

    https://github.com/logseq/nbb-logseq/tree/main/examples/fly-...

    There's lots of other stuff out there like this, but since this is just public static data there's hopefully a way to make it interoperable with existing solutions. If anyone knows of a good existing "bio" or link ring schema, I would be interested in taking a look.

    I have other fun ideas like hosting graphs on IPFS, or even some day having every logseq bullet point block be an immutable record on ipfs for use by everyone.

    Another example out there is agora, which seems to be somewhat compatible with markdown flat files that logseq uses https://anagora.org/agora-editor

  • by cm42 on 6/14/22, 4:11 PM

    I've been playing with Logseq for something similar - using the Zotero integration to share research notes (and sometimes blog). The attributes and queries are super clever, too.

    I'm not sure it'll ever replace Facebook/Twitter/et al, but it is nice to have a semi-private network of people who can have grown-up discussions, or express thoughts deeper, or with more nuance, than 100-some characters.

    There were only a few Facebook groups that I ever got any value out of, which were mostly small professional groups that banned political bickering. My mental health has definitely improved by going back to old-school forums, and I've noticed a lot of others doing the same over the past year or so - especially with Lemmy, which is maybe even a bit easier to set up.

  • by onebot on 6/14/22, 1:58 PM

    I very much think this is a pragmatic approach. I also truly wish for a LinkedIn and Facebook without a single corporate entity profiting in the middle (decentralized/web3). However, for this to ever truly work, the UX just has to be heads and shoulders above this approach, imo.
  • by ocdtrekkie on 6/14/22, 2:23 PM

    Why not use twtxt? It looks like you're inventing a similar protocol here.
  • by bribri on 6/14/22, 6:43 PM

    I'm also tweeting my logseq graph pages here https://twitter.com/Bsunter and curating those tweets in a newsletter here, if anyone is interested in following my "feed" of my public logseq learning experiments https://www.getrevue.co/profile/bsunter/issues/weekly-newsle...

    If anyone sets this up definitely contact me on twitter so I can add you to my following list.

  • by mro_name on 6/15/22, 6:44 AM

    if it's not for Jane Doe it's not 'social'. Is it?

    And I believe the self-hosting option inevitable. Including your own name (domain).

  • by dafty4 on 6/14/22, 6:13 PM

    Cool! Can I easily post self-hosted photos? :)
  • by malfist on 6/14/22, 2:35 PM

    Why would you want a social network platform with even LESS moderation?

    More spam, more misinformation, more hate speech, more everything bad.

    Sure, you get, maybe, some more privacy. But you can get that by just staying off social media.