The organization that hosts the follow-graph (call the organization "FG") needs to be an entity that is completely independent from organizations that host content that you post.

Motivation: we ought to be able to instantly migrate to any new social media platform without losing any of the friends we made along the way. This is necessary because we may occasionally find that the leadership of a given social media platform is unable and/or unwilling to meet users' needs (in which case those users must move on). It could also help in growing new platforms with interesting features that depend on a network effect.

FG could be a non-profit organization to which social media platforms subscribe, and subscription fees could potentially fund maintenance of FG. A platform might cache some of the data from FG, but for any query about who-follows-whom, FG would be the source of truth.

Furthermore, FG could guarantee that it is not & and never will be in the business of hosting posts. FG would know nothing of your hashtags, cat photos, location metadata, etc. FG would host only:

  • global user identities (possibly in the form of a UUID per identity, or something similar) as the vertices, and
  • relationships between identities.

(Incidentally, this should help to reduce FG's legal fees, moderation budget, etc.) But FG could potentially also store, for each identity, a list of sites where that identity has an account (so that your followers can easily follow you to new platforms).

FG could also store, for each identity, a list of blocked identities, as well as a list of block-lists to which the identity is subscribed. So, if an identity X is added to a blocklist foo, and you subscribe to foo, then, on all platforms that subscribe to FG, X would be blocked from viewing your posts, and also blocked from replying/DMing. (This may help to reduce moderation costs for platforms that subscribe to FG.)

There may be reasons why this arrangement wouldn't work, or how it could introduce security problems that may be difficult to solve; if so, please explain in a reply!

Discuss!


You must log in to comment.