Project Midnight is interesting, but I do not see anything that tells me of the vision.
I have started building my own social networking system, but it is very different. It will be:
Anonymous
High trust
All user data will be held by the user, and is the basis of that trust.As such, although I will be using WordPress as a platform, the network will operate largely outside its user and content management system.
My system will be designed to operate outside of the internet, largely, as tracking, user data collection, and commercialism will not be allowed. Security will be entirely distributed, and based on levels of trust collected via a participating network entry point. Here, users will effectively judge themselves and others, controlling how trusted each other is, but helped to rise up those levels of trust, based on a gamified interaction zone.
There will never be a data breach, as my network will have no personal data, ever.
Encryption will also be at the heart of this new solution. I want to create a place where people can come to trust each other, and start working together again. They need to know that nobody is watching them, collecting their data, excluding them based on financial or other exclusionary tactics, other than, then staying as a part of the network and having sufficient positive interactions in the journey to have collected sufficient trust keys for a level of trust to be given to that user, whoever they are.
My psychology website, self-transcendence.org will be one of those entry points. I am currently moving it into a 25 trust level content management system. Within that architecture, I will have specific training courses for people who want to use (safely) moderate or manage social networks. Completing those courses will ultimately be part of that trust model.
Hi George,
Welcome back.Thank you for opening the discussion and thank you for sharing about your network.
What I understand from your reply is:- You are building a federated system like Mastodon where users may run their own server(or may be you are storing it in browser if they don’t need server) and uses heavy encryption.
Our Project Midnight Sun(codename), is not a federated social network system. It is more like how the popular social networks like Facebook/Twitter(X)/Linkedn etc. deal with user and data.
You can think of it as modern software for building community with WordPress. Our main focus has been developer productivity and site admin’s flexibility. We have architected the system in a way to scale. I have been personally working on it for more than a year now, have built custom ORM, form builder, background system and a lot more as the infrastructure layer. Anything that you can do with current available systems, you can do it in 1/10th time if you are a developer.
The project is in heavy development state(I have the infrastructure layer ready, routing, navigations, core API’s working.) I am working on modules and UI and my expectation is to go live in next 20 days. The current system is not something that we can show you as UI is a work in progress. For now, You may need to wait until 20th for the first demo/availability of the software.
PS:- I understand that different us cases have different requirement for data processing. We are more like traditional community in the sense. We are not anonomyzing data at user level but it can be made so at display level as anonymous/incognito is a built in feature for all kind of data.
Regards
BrajeshI’ve started to discuss the design philosophy – https://venutius.com/project-anonnet/
Hi George,
Congratulations! The ideation looks fantastic(we are on different path). In our case, we believe site admins(who run the network) should have the control over what they want to do with user data and how much freedom/features they want to give to the users. It is not our job to decide that, our job is to empower site admins/community managers with the tools and let them decide.I wish you all the best and I am looking forward to a better future for community building with WordPress!
Well, my user trust levels allow for 30 different levels of user access. New Admin, for example, start as trainees, at admin level 1, and they progress, based on the agreement of the super-admin/site owner, through five levels of trust, until they can manage everything, should the site admin wish. In addition, the site admin gets to choose which features become manageable, at each level of trust. They have complete control over every nuance of responsibility that they hand over.
In addition, users have 25 levels of trust, and the site admin gets to control everything, from the WordPress side of things, all data stored on their WordPress site, all links, cats, posts, and any other feature they choose to apply a trust setting to, will control exactly what level of knowledge, paid access, whatever, they just get a finer level of granularity to that access control.
AnonNet, however, is a social network, not a user network, not a commercially driven, biases and controlling network. And there, the owner of the data, is the person that owns it, the user. AnonNet is the back-end network to relax and spend time with friends. It also avoids me having to collect proof of age for every site that I run, simply because some content could be classified as too complex for a younger person to understand.
But also, AnonNet, by its architecture, moves like the wind – servers relocating themselves the minute they think they are under attack.
I was wondering what your architecture is going to look like? I mean, as far as I can see, there is no information on it at all. AnonNet may be able to use it. You see, as I said, AnonNet is a back-end, social, gaming and learning network. It is not public, as such, all users have to earn their trust, it can’t be paid for, and that is why it cannot be commercial, in any way. But, you can have your own AnonNet, and you can use it exactly how you like, anyone can. But if it becomes a commercial, then the linkage with the core anonNet would be reduced, directory listings, too, are based on trust. Anyone that walks in the room looking for sales, is not authentic, and is not going to play nice in our network.
The great thing about trust based systems, is that you get to trust your users, and can do things like automatically reduced levels of trust for a user who gets blocked by too many users with a set trust level.
I’ve completed the user trust level manager, It’s actually working on a live site, but only in the background. Part of its functionality is assigning trust levels to bots, and part of that, is that bots also get assigned trust levels, and the less we trust them, the less of our site they get to see.
You see, what I’m interested in, is the idea of having deep conversations online again. Facebook has killed that.
Imagine you had a WordPress site, with a shop or other commercial content. You might be selling training, or anything. You may well have buddypress as part of that, but that social network is a sales grift network, it is not about relaxing and letting your hair down. Where do you go if you want to chat to friends? Do you want all that personal chat recorded and tracked? Shipped off to a third party site for “processing”? Why do you want to know what your users are talking about? I don’t, personally, and I find their personal data to be an issue if I am the one holding it. These privacy laws are designed to kick all of the small sites out of the net, by forcing them to collect identity info.
I’m designing a system that avoids all of that. An open, free system that works side by side with WordPress and any public social network that they may have, and it’s systems and services, could benefit from the resilience and security features that I’m developing. A server with minimal data, can move like the wind, it may run in just a handful of megabytes, but yes, not your bloats WordPress installation, that is far too large to be agile, and that is the point – I’m decoupling the data from the access and control mechanism. The login server is the agile, no user data AnonNet polling server, whose location changes every day, and only you have the history, encoded in shared keys, to prove that you are that person, with that earned trust, on our, or your network.
Is your plan to use the existing user and security architecture of WordPress? I personally think that lack of granularity of access and trust levels meant BP was never scalable.
But also, WordPress is going to die soon. It’s moving commercial, this is why my ultimate goal is to have my mini servers hosted on peoples own PCs, and not need hosting, not from a hosting provider. They will be able to make backup agreements with admins that they trust. They would be friends that they met in the network, and had gained a very high level of personal trust with them. That is a trust that working with AnonNet, with its systems, policies and training, is always going to be far higher.
That is a bit of the vision. Better than Crypto network levels of security and resilience, that to a trust model that does not take cash as any sign of trustworthiness. Most of the action is outside of WP, it’s a solution that will ultimately integrate onto any platform, and sit there, side by side, ensuring a coherent application of a much more secure and resilience, yet highly flexible network data sharing architecture.
- This reply was modified 3 days, 4 hours ago by
Venutius.
- This reply was modified 3 days, 4 hours ago by
Hi George,
Tahnk you for the reply.I don’t think we have a competition here and we need to compare our goals with the project.
I understand your goal is to create a new experience and trust based network(what is trust? different people have different perspective on it and it is not the right forum to discuss it philosophically).We(BuddyDev) are not creating a social network, we are creating a software that allows site admins to create social network. What is that network and how it works is not our concern. We are not here to decide for site admins, our goal is to provide the tools and let the site admins decide what they want to do with it.
As of data ownership, unless your users are storing their data on their own systems, there is no real data ownership. The client server approach(where one or more servers store data) and not all users run their own server is not going to solve data ownership(Mastodon does allow users to run their own server, but users may be part of a server run by someone else too).
There are always going to be legal rules around world(Like EU/Australia’s current rules), and they are dynamic, they will change over time. Our goal is not to incorporate them into our software. Our goal is to enable site admins with tools to make the compliance simpler/easier. For that reason, our identity is not around these compliance, compliance is just one of the many things our system will provide easier tools/integrations.
As of your question:-
What is the architecture of this software
Client/server with partial inspiration from DDD.
Is your plan to use the existing user and security architecture of WordPress? I personally think that lack of granularity of access and trust levels meant BP was never scalable.
Yes, we are and we do not see any issue. WordPress provides granular role/capability based system which can be extended for all use cases. BuddyPress’s problem is not use of WordPress users, It is how they store/fetch data.
But also, WordPress is going to die soon. It’s moving commercial, this is why my ultimate goal is to have my mini servers hosted on peoples own PCs, and not need hosting, not from a hosting provider.
You are entitled to have your opinion. I have full faith in the future of WordPress and we are sticking with it. Also, you have all the rights to decide how you envision your software being used, for us, WordPress suits our requirement pretty well and we have full faith in the future potential of it.
To sum it up, we are creating a modern social network creation tool that will allow users(WordPress admins) to create social communities with various use case. Since our system is modular, It allows future extension without being limited by the current constraints. We are not re-inventing social networking(We believe the existing social networks like FB, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram etc.) is a good indicator of how a social network should work , we are rebuilding for a better experience and rapid development with WordPress.
Regards
Brajesh
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