Planetary, the decentralized social media app based on the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol is in the App Store. And we have a favor to ask:
Would you please go and give us an upvote on Product Hunt? It will really help us get the attention of new users, press, and investors.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/planetary-bcedec54-a0eb-4d1b-b1ec-d423300a2b15
Our dream for years (and years!) had been to build an easy to use, protocol-based, decentralized social media app, and it is thrilling that it is a reality. We still have work to do, but this is an incredible milestone.
Planetary is built on the idea that communities should manage public space as a commons instead of asking corporations or the state to regulate our social norms. When we started building Planetary the idea that users should own their relationships and accounts seemed like a radical notion.
“technical solutions to social problems.“
There’s a joke that what we’re doing as technologists is looking for technical solutions to social problems. That’s so often what we expect of startups and the Silicon Valley ethos. But that’s not how social software works, it’s about people.
When I wanted to learn about what went wrong with social media I had the immense privilege of being invited to spend time with the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab. At the lab Dr Nathan Matias was researching subreddit governance. He found that the strongest communities depended on a combination of tools and social norms.
We need solutions which combine technology and people. We need digital spaces which reflect the social norms which work in the offline world. We know what’s acceptable behavior based on mimicry of others and social context and the collapsing social context is one of many problems with our existing system.
Everything old is new again
Back when we were creating Twitter, I remember thinking that humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years as social creatures, but it’s only in the last few millennia that technology has shaped us. Our tools evolve quickly but we evolve slowly. When we develop new tools, we use them to do the same kinds of things we've always done, but now with different affordances. Instead of flirting with somebody from the next tribe over, we flirt with somebody who’s in the same cultural tribe halfway around the world.
With twitter the idea was, make something so easy, simple, fluid, that you can keep in touch with the happenings of your friends lives without running into them walking down the street. It gives users a sense of intimacy with celebrities in a way that was never possible before, but the human behavior is the same. That casual social space has connected people around the world and become the central public sphere of news and politics.
We manage social norms based on where we are, the built environment and customs shape how we act. That’s how we know to act differently in a library or a bar or a busy market. Often we have guides who help people learn the cultural norms of the space, like librarians both explaining how to use the library and shushing people who don’t follow the rules.
When twitter created a flat space, made it so you could casually follow the lives of millions, it didn’t reproduce that sense of space. With planetary we’re building tools which help you get context and connect. We believe these tools we’ve built, and will continue to evolve with empower community self governance.
Building a digital commons
We’re using a model of a commons, it’s a shared resource not owned by anyone but managed by the participants for the benefit of all participants. A commons isn’t doomed to fall apart, in despite being peer reviewed, Tragedy of the Commons, was a fable without basis in evidence created by a racist nazi eugenicist.
In reality the commons is a viable social-political-economic model. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, studied the commons and what makes them successful. She outlined the characteristics of a well run commons. We’ve strived to incorporate her eighth qualities of a successful commons into Planetary:
Clearly defined (clear definition of the contents of the common pool resource and effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties);
The appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions;
Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;
Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access;
Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities; and
In the case of larger common-pool resources, organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local commons at the base level.
Both Planetary and the underlying protocols are designed based on Ostrom’s research. We believe, and evidence shows, that these principles provide for creating a healthy online public space where people can be empowered to address hate speech and harassment with community organizing, mutual aid, self governance, and tools.
Planetary won't end hate speech, but it will give us a new model distinct from asking for state intervention or companies to do a better job of regulating us. One of our community members and Mozilla fellow, Emmi Bevensee’s report on combating hate groups in a decentralized erais an excellent read if you’re excited about questions like this.
Acknowledgements:
I want to thank everybody who works on this and has worked on it. Amanda Hickman, Tom Coates, Christoph Moskalonek, Christian Bundy, Henry Bubert, Sebastian Heit, Martin Dutra, Kris Kowalik have all poured immense energy into this project. The protocol Planetary is based in, Secure Scuttlebutt was started by Dominic Tarr and has had hundreds of contributors around the world. Without them we wouldn’t be here today. Beyond just SSB, our work exists within a much larger ecosystem of work on the decentralized web and we want to thank the Internet Archive, Mozilla, and Aspiration Tech for their indispensable work in support of this space. The Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab was kind enough to include me as a researcher and that work has shaped the design and vision of planetary, I’m boundlessly grateful to Sasha Costanza-Chock and Ethan Zuckerman for their work and support. Without the support and encouragement of our investors, James, Roy, and Minn at Bloomberg Beta, Chris at Fuel Capital, Kent at Upside, Consensus Coven, Erik and Niraj at Kilowatt, Balaji, Blaine Cook, Biz Stone, and many others, we wouldn’t have been able to get this far.
