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The third-worldification of the global internet: are private network enclaves the answer?

anon_voge said in #3574 3w ago: received

Following recent anon discourse on the general third-worldification of the internet, I've been pondering potential solutions.

Is there a valid case for the emergence of private, invite-only network enclaves? Projects like Yggdrasil [1] give a solid example for an overlay network made up of participant nodes operating on top of existing physical networks ("the internet"). It would be perfectly feasible to add some extra gating mechanisms on top--things such as requiring invites or financial contribution--to build a 'members only' internet.

[1] https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

referenced by: >>3605 >>3823

Following recent ano received

phaedrus said in #3577 3w ago: received

Generally, sorting out high signal contributions from all of the insane third-world trash is a really worthwhile endeavor. However, more private networks with higher barriers to entry suffer from the lack of network effects and a reduced openness to talented contributors that can be fatal. I think the structural barriers to posting on SofieChan are pretty good, and it seems to be spreading among the desired intellectual set. However, if it becomes more tightly locked down, that will have a negative influence on the incoming trickle of high-value posters. So something like cultural and structural barriers, like an imposing interface and longer-form writing, seem like a sweet spot that excludes the right people while remaining open to interesting new talent.

referenced by: >>3587

Generally, sorting o received

anon_betu said in #3581 3w ago: received

As the internet becomes overwhelmed with diversity, the masses, and AI slop, it does become necessary to construct more selective subnets of various kinds. At a most basic level, social networks which do this or provide for it will become more valuable. This is arguably what reddit and twitter are about. Now of course we don't totally like their particular curation or lack of curation, and maybe that points to a market opportunity. But to first approximation, this is a self-solving problem because of the value opportunity in solving it.

I think people reach too quickly to global solutions and overlay networks in particular when thinking about these things. I actually like the idea of an overlay network and I've thought about doing it myself, but I can't really convince myself that it's more practical than things like sofiechan. But maybe there's a decentralized overlay network in sofiechan's future.

The problem I find more interesting though is the problem of the eternal september. In particular, it's called september because the internet used to be dominated by college students, which were a fairly comprehensive selection of the top k% of first world society. That's a damn fine selection right there, and there's a reason it's still remembered as the ideal. So in all this self-solving self-selection into semi-exclusive social networks, is there ever going to emerge again a candidate for *the* social network for the broader elite-adjacent class of a particular society. Facebook started as this but quickly decided to connect everyone in the world instead of just college students. Could it be done again?

I think it could be done again. I think if you took a large public social network and applied a selective entry filter that more or less any real high quality person could pass (ie prove that you are a college student or grad, pass IQ test, get vouched in, or otherwise post proof of physis), you get something quite powerful. Who doesn't want to be a member of the network that includes only the best, if it is in fact good? Millions of people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for this! Such a network would become an institution of the elite, if it worked at all.

I think there's a lot of value in doing that, whether decentralized or not.

referenced by: >>3587 >>3856

As the internet beco received

anon_voge said in #3587 3w ago: received

>>3577
>>3581
While I agree that sofiechan seems to attract high quality members, there is nothing preventing a million Indians finding the site tomorrow, filling it with slop, and killing it.

I am thinking bigger than just a forum or social media platform. What if I want an email address that only my peers can physically reach? Maybe I want to sell a service or host some media that only a subset of the globally diverse internet can access? These are questions that a general-purpose network solve. I am imagining something more like Urbit, without the retarded architecture.

>Who doesn't want to be a member of the network that includes only the best, if it is in fact good? Millions of people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for this! Such a network would become an institution of the elite, if it worked at all.
Exactly. But I suppose attracting those initial best is the hardest part.

referenced by: >>3588

While I agree that s received

admin said in #3588 3w ago: received

>>3587
Ignoring the racism and speaking strictly to the technical point of sofiechan's defenses against a large influx of low quality noobs, the voting system here is entirely designed around that eventuality. Specifically it is designed to enable the incumbent community to effectively filter out low quality noobs, prevent them from gaining a foothold, and give the admin and core community even ability to fight a successful reconquest. Almost every parameter in the system right now is tuned to be absurdly egalitarian, but the instant that that becomes a problem this place can become extremely elitist and automatically identify and purge the low quality masses in about 15 minutes. This is not very tested, but I am confident we would be able to weather plausible virality scenarios with quality intact. And I will be continuing to think ahead and build the ultimate taste machine.

>But I suppose attracting those initial best is the hardest part.
So far so good.

Ignoring the racism received

anon_tira said in #3589 3w ago: received

What's the post-mortem on Urbit? The new owner recently crashed out on Twitter with a long essay I didn't bother to read. It seems like to me like the concept of Urbit had a lot of potential but there was something profoundly wrong with how it was being implemented. I used it between 2019-2021 and within that entire timeframe they couldn't get the messaging app to stop crashing constantly. They did attract high-quality people but it definitely didn't suffice to get the thing off the ground.

referenced by: >>3590 >>3591 >>3592

What's the post-mort received

anon_voge said in #3590 3w ago: received

>>3589
I’m in the same boat. Used it for a while, but got fed up with the buggy software. Not sure what they’re doing now.

The main issue I always saw with it was that the idea was to build _everything_ from the ground up, instead of using tried and tested protocols + software. I love the buy in private p2p network aspect, less so everything else.

referenced by: >>3591

I’m in the same boat received

anon_betu said in #3591 3w ago: received

>>3589
>>3590
Yeah I've got an urbit star and I really like aspects of the project, but building everything on a novel computing formalism, OS, ground-up overlay network, etc was ultimately the wrong choice. Even a novel protocol and software could have been warranted, but Curtis delved too deep.

The other big problem with Urbit was that the killer app thesis was never substantiated. Ideas like shrubbery and this anonymous discussion thing Curtis is talking about now are cool, but I don't see what it needs Nock and such for.

I think an urbit-like identity layer and overlay network protocol plus CRDT datastructure sharing possibly with not-quite-turing-complete scripting learning from the success and failure of javascript could be very cool, but you basically rip out the whole notion of trying to control the substrate. It's got to be about what language you speak, not what code you run.

referenced by: >>3602

Yeah I've got an urb received

anon_kaxy said in #3592 3w ago: received

>>3589

Urbit is a prime illustration of the limits of the theorycel.

Curtis Yarvin is one of the all-time great theorycels and we love him for that. A gadly, a provocateur, a lively conversationalist and a vivid writer. There are domains where this disposition works well, like posting. This is not snark--I say this with real respect--theorycels are good at expanding imaginations, which is a critical function in a society that wishes not to stagnate.

But there are many other domains where you need pragmatists. Politics, for example. See this political strategy debate between Yarvin and Rufo last year, an exchange that was great, informative, and also a brutal first-round knockout for our theorycel friend:

- 20 second version: https://x.com/RushDoshi/status/1882534504440660155
- 20 minute version: https://im1776.com/2024/04/11/rufo-vs-yarvin/

Anyway, working software comes specifically and only from pragmatists. It is a domain where managing complexity is a paramount concern and choosing boring-but-correct tradeoffs, a necessity. "No plan survives first contact with the enemy"--no software survives contact with real users. Success depends on a long ground campaign of such boring pedestrian things as "descoping", "refactoring", and "fixing bugs". Great software, like all great engineering, is ambitious in a single dimension towards a well-defined goal, choosing known-good standard foundations for everything else.

Yarvin, then known as Moldbug, started Urbit more than two decades ago with a grand vision to redefine software, networking, and more into a unified cathedral of computer engineering. A new programming language, "Hoon". A new assembly language, "Nock". A lot of other new things with what the man himself might call Star Wars names.

Urbit is just one in a long history of this genre of utopian maximalist software project built by a charismatic artist-type. There was Xanadu in the 1960s(!), a top-down pre-world-wide-web hypertext system which Ted Nelson is still technically working on 50 years later at 88 years of age. Then there was MojoNation in the 1990s: "what if we rebuilt the everything from Scratch as a Decentralized Peer-To-Peer Protocol." That story has a happier ending. Bram Cohen quit MojoNation and extracted one small part of it, the file-sharing part, calling it BitTorrent.

This is the best outcome Urbit can hope for: that a pragmatist might extract a good idea from its thicket and use it to advance the plot. I'll offer this: I understand at least Urbit's ID system (~faldyr-silrux, etc) in detail; it's open and extensible, built on Ethereum. If anyone has the will and the way to build something real in the "~" cinematic universe, I am happy to support and advise.

TLDR; Moldbug is a talented shitposter and a bad technologist. Urbit is a great parable covering art, engineering, our individual natures and the exhortation of Delphi to "Know Thyself".

referenced by: >>3601 >>3602

Urbit is a prime ill received

anon_wuro said in #3601 3w ago: received

>>3592

Bravo, anon.

Bravo, anon. received

anon_voge said in #3602 3w ago: received

>>3591
>an urbit-like identity layer and overlay network protocol
This is exactly what I envision. Just TCP behind some kind of access control. That way anyone on the network can start hosting and using the software they know and love, and building on top of it in ways they know how. In my opinion Urbit has failed to thrive (or was even DOA) due to them literally reinventing the wheel using the most obscure and convoluted tech possible.

>>3592
Well said. Urbit is a grand vision, whether it lives or dies. It's just too abstract I feel.

This is exactly what received

anon_mizi said in #3605 3w ago: received

>>3574
I could absolutely imagine this being something real, but as others have pointed out in the Urbit case, architecture astronautics like implementing a Yggdrasil style overlay network must absolutely be entirely abstracted away from the people actually using the platform. The problem is that it's practically impossible to engage in serious architecture astronautics these days without having a tangible, negative impact on your users. It's not 1969 anymore. Even worse, it gets harder every day to fly away, because the inexorable march of the incumbents continues while you sleep.

If you want your paid private internet to be more than an insanely glorified groupchat, the way in has to be gated through something that is as normally accessible and frictionless as a login page in the browser and a stripe checkout page. If you have to, for instance, touch the command line, history says you're pretty well fucked. And if your stuff crashes after 20 years of Kelvin versioning because it's still running Martian bytecode at the end of the day, you're also pretty well fucked.

I could absolutely i received

anon_gyvo said in #3610 3w ago: received

Until there's a particularly elegant technical solution one can always fall back on defense-in-depth. It's great that this forum has a nuclear option for handling an influx of noobs or raids or what have you, but the form keeps most of the wrong sort of poster out.

Anonymity means it's hard to chase clout. Minimal images means less virality. Posts being by default long and in complete sentences filters out anyone with a tiktok attention span. The content is heady and often obscure, etc.

(Of course it will always be tempting to reverse all of those things for reach.)

I think it's worth designing as much for uninterestingness and unintelligibility as for technical defensibility, both in technical form and cultural norms.

Until there's a part received

anon_voge said in #3823 2w ago: received

>>3574
For anyone interested, I have broken ground on a tech demo of this concept. Maybe we can chat more if you have ideas.

referenced by: >>3825

For anyone intereste received

anon_betu said in #3825 2w ago: received

>>3823
What project? Post and explain anon, we are very interested

referenced by: >>3831

What project? Post a received

anon_voge said in #3831 2w ago: received

>>3825
So far, I have a functional proof of concept overlay TCP network, gated by a peer in the network requiring a signed token from a central authority.

The client acts as a VPN, and each client is assigned an IPv6 address (derived from their public key) within an undesignated /64, meaning that applications function as normal—there are no weird protocols involved. For example, I’ve achieved one peer running a HTTP server and another requesting it via a standard web browser, all over this custom network, after both being granted access via the authority.

referenced by: >>3836

So far, I have a fun received

anon_betu said in #3836 2w ago: received

>>3831
Cool. What's the use case?

referenced by: >>3852

Cool. What's the use received

anon_voge said in #3852 2w ago: received

>>3836
What do you mean? The title of the thread is the use case

What do you mean? Th received

anon_xynu said in #3856 2w ago: received

>>3581
There are websites like blind that restrict posting to those with a company email, similar to how Facebook restricted accounts to university emails. Blind doesn't cultivate an environment that's great for discussion because it's focused on a narrow scope (although I think most users prefer it that way).

I think something similar could be done with a mix of university emails + company emails required for registration, and maybe anonymous browsing. A website like this would struggle to attract people entrenched in the old platforms, and if it did get popular, the creators would probably go down the same route as FB.

There are websites l received

anon_voge said in #4035 4d ago: received

https://x.com/bronzeagemantis/status/1949467326711206079

referenced by: >>4042 >>4043

https://x.com/bronze received

anon_mizi said in #4042 4d ago: received

>>4035
Very nice https://x.com/sofiechansbest/status/1949583255893893332

referenced by: >>4055

Very nice https://x. received

admin said in #4043 3d ago: received

>>4035
Should we do that?

referenced by: >>4048 >>4058

Should we do that? received

anon_kaxy said in #4048 3d ago: received

>>4043

Issue is, any such test can be oneshotted by gpt.

I dream of private forum... great quality, death to SLOP... entry only to those men who pass physical test in presence, meet at the bridge Saturday at Noon, you like this

referenced by: >>4058 >>4064

Issue is, any such t received

gs said in #4050 3d ago: received

If you want to keep undesirables out, all you have to do is not incentivize them to come in the first place. If there's no opportunity for monetary gain, access to women, or normie social clout (and this last one is mostly a derivative of one or both of the first two), 99.9% of undesirables aren't ever going to bother coming into an online space. The few isolated ones who do can be individually ID'd and moderated out without much trouble.

As weird as it might sound, online communities actually resemble irl communities pretty closely. People join irl communities for the same reasons as online ones: money/economic gain, access to the opposite sex, to increase their social status, or to enjoy some niche interest. As long as you keep a community or space all about that niche interest and not about those other things, you're mostly in the clear.

referenced by: >>4051 >>4064

If you want to keep received

anon_cego said in #4051 3d ago: received

>>4050

But an important question regarding the opposite as seen across campuses and corporations: will hordes of women not come banging down our doors in due time?

referenced by: >>4064

But an important que received

anon_vicy said in #4055 3d ago: received

>>4042
Any such forum ultimately has the same issue as any state. Entrants can really only be verified by processes and human decision. If there is value in joining, then people will try to game the system to gain access.

So the more robust the verification system, the more man-hours it requires, the more capital the system requires. So we are back to virtual private clubs with monthly dues. Great until you get banned by all payment processors for doing a racism, a white nationalism, an anti-semitism.

So getting around this with decentralized servers and crypto is what Curtis Yarvin spec'd out in his Moses chat app demo. No hosting company, no payment processor, no gay race communist authority to control your club.

referenced by: >>4064

Any such forum ultim received

anon_voge said in #4058 3d ago: received

>>4043
>>4048
I agree with this take from the X replies:
>>Has to be based on people personally vouching for you, staking their reputation on you. VPNs evade region blocks and orientals love nothing more than cheating on tests. Only way.

referenced by: >>4064

I agree with this ta received

admin said in #4064 3d ago: received

>>4048
>entry only to those men who pass physical test in presence,
I agree with this. You may be required to pass an in-person Merit test and phenotype inspection to continue posting here.

As for GPT spoofing the online Merit exam, maybe if it was just general trivia it wouldn't work. But there's a lot of ways to attest to true facts about yourself and be verified short of actually passing the physical.

>>4050
The thing is, we actually do want a highly valuable community that makes its members more powerful. If we succeed as a community in any way more than entertaining ourselves with ideas, it's going to become valuable and desirable to be here.

>>4051
Its not how many you have, it's what you do with them.

>>4055
I really doubt we will have payment processor or other legitimacy issues. We do after all have moderation here and we will ourselves will ban you for doing an "ism" if it's in such bad taste. I also don't agree that centralized server censorship is a serious threat. I just checked and the "most censored publication in history" is still up and has generally maintained a high level of effective uptime despite internet backbone attempts to ban them since 2017. If we have to, we will take your dues in Monero and build a bombproof decentralized overlay network, but I doubt it will come to that. The much more serious threat is that we don't post anything of value or consequence to make any of this a live question in the first place.

>>4058
Well that's precisely why we have the vouch system. Please do vouch for your intelligent friends, be highly discriminating, etc. It's not an issue now because the noobs are still pretty good, but as I've mentioned before all we have to do is tweak some backend algorithms and parameters and this place will become a lot more elitist and hard to get in to. Once we get there, we'll also innovate on the forms and expressivity of the vouch.

referenced by: >>4072

I agree with this. Y received

anon_wuro said in #4072 3d ago: received

>>4064

An in-person assessment is keyed. What are some ways this could be pulled off? Wait till there's a certain threshold of users, and then restrict viewing or posting rights to those already present, and thenceforth every new member must make contact with a member who will then perform the assessment?

referenced by: >>4074

An in-person assessm received

admin said in #4074 3d ago: received

>>4072
The architecture I'm envisioning is this: basically anybody can join the forum. If it gets bad there may be a slight barrier to entry where you have to pass a captcha, pay $5 or prove you're human or something, whatever, but broadly speaking open entry. Then you can post in at least some threads, where you can further prove yourself. But some aspects of the site which are most enticing or vulnerable to the spammers and idiots, or maybe just a lot of boosting in the curation etc, will be restricted to posters of taste. If your friends are well regarded by the algorithm and they vouch you in, you get more authority. If you're a great poster, you can get authority without as many vouches. Maybe there are other ways to prove yourself. So in that way, it's a multi-factor system without any hard barrier, just curation for quality robustly under the control of a core community. If it gets really bad, we may add ways to get a vouch before posting, and make it so you can't post at all until you've proven yourself somehow, but I don't anticipate having to do that.

Then we may have the members-only stuff. At some point, or maybe continuously with no clear "member" barrier, there will be things like threads you can't see unless you're a poster of a certain level of taste, parties and reading clubs you do or don't get invited to. You can organize and get invited to stuff on the basis of taste without anyone being able to link that to particular posts. More assessments will naturally happen at these sorts of events. There may be as you suggest more open events where a few prospects are judged by members and either vouched in or blackballed. But that would be one assessment vector among many.

Another assessment vector will be things you accomplished, which we can agree that you accomplished. So people who ran successful projects, did great intellectual work, or otherwise accomplished something worthwhile should also get a boost.

At some point this would probably need to split out with multiple sub-communities with their own focus and their own hierarchy. We're not there yet though. Probably that's done in association with the tag system, but its still a topic of ongoing research.

The general vision is to aggregate many different sources of information about people to get a maximally accurate picture of actual holistic poster quality, use machine learning methods to refine exactly what that is optimizing for and do all the detailed tuning, and then discriminate on that basis and provide tools for the community to discriminate on that basis. That way we get our highly curated discussion community of people we actually respect.

The architecture I'm received

anon_diry said in #4083 7m ago: received

I think the main problem with any online community is the same with any irl community: who is in charge, who is the elite, who decides if necessary.
That's why I think Sofiechan's model is particularly appropriate for this kind of situation: start small, form a first elite forged by upvotes around quality and let this Gerousia take the reins in case the site is flooded with undesirables.

What is important is that there is someone, or a small committee, who can decide over the rest and a small community of those close to them who support the vision and help to enforce the decisions. Egalitarianism is only between equals.

I believe that any project that wants to survive has to worry about this problem before anything else: how do I form a group of likeminded friends. If the power structure is clear, the technical problems are easier to deal with.

How to do this is another problem. Irl meetings? Irl friends? Best way I’ve seen is start building small communities in existing networks and slowly filter them through conversations, meetings, more networking, etc.

————

On institutional filters like early Facebook, I think a particular problem with that is the institutions themselves and the kind of human capital that goes into them. There is already Fizz, for example. It's true that it only puts you in contact with people from your university, so we could say that it's more restricted than FB, but even so, it should be more than enough, and the truth is that the app is pure rubbish.

I think the main pro received

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