propolis.social

a manifesto for change

Enshittification has impoverished the founding vision of the world wide web. It is now little more than 5 sites each consisting of screenshots of the other. Websites are just corporate silos, walled gardens mined ruthlessly for profit by their owners at the expense of both end users and customers. Social media is awash with misinformation, disinformation, hatred and anger often driven by shadowy actors both state and non-state. Increasingly it is just unusable.

Propolis is a radical reimagining of the way the internet works. Imagine that Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Charlie. This is known as a "directed graph" where a graph just means a web of interconnected entities. It's directed because, for example, Alice trusts Bob but Bob might not trust Alice in return. Relationships have a sense of direction. Alice, Bob and Charlie are "nodes" (or vertices) and the trust relationships are "edges". By examining the graph Alice can decide for herself whether Charlie is trustworthy even though she has no direct connection. Nodes and edges are not limited to People and trust relationships. Imagine now that Alice has a private mailbox and a public social media feed. Bob can follow the feed but Alice might decide that Donna, with whom Alice has no relationships, is blocked. The feed is another node while ownership, following and being blocked are edges. Anything can be represented on this graph, not just social relationships.

Now imagine that this graph is shared via a peer-to-peer network with realtime updates. Anybody can join the network and, subject to permissions, anybody can edit it. Nobody can own it and nobody take it down because it is highly decentralised. Creating a new post is just a question of storing the content somewhere public (i.e. IPFS) and issuing an update to the graph.

How people interact with the graph is completely open. Front ends could either be traditional web applications, mobile apps or something entirely different. Instead of relying on untrustworthy search engines, personalised intelligent agents can crawl the graph looking for the desired content.

The same intelligent agents can also deliver custom moderation rules. There is much content on the internet that is hateful but everybody has their own definition of hate. An intelligent agent allows the end user to pick and choose which content they see and which gets blocked for themselves. Moderation is not at the whim of a billionaire crank. Moreover, in a peer-to-peer network it is possible for each participating entity to simply not propogate a harmful update. Think about a Community Note which might supresses the propogation of misinformation. Some participants might decide to propogate anyway, others not. In this way content either dies or at least is restricted to islands of visibility.

It goes without saying that Propolis is an open source project and will always be free. It's very early days and very much a labour of love. You can support me by sponsoring the project on GitHub. Let's see where we can take this.