I'd like to see a social network that tries to minimize the impact of "whale" nodes. I can go to twitter if I want to see what's on the mind of the world's top influencers. I can go to facebook if I want to see people mass-sharing news articles with 10,000 toxic comments about the latest political events. Where's the social network built around connecting you to your network and only your network?
This would likely alleviate the moderation issue too. You aren't going to see filth and extremism unless it's posted by your social network, which decreases the incentive for bad actors to post it in the first place.
This is how Scuttlebutt works. The problem is that when you download the client software, you have no content to read until you build up your network. This confuses most people that are looking to find new friends and augment their current social network with something global. The solution that I found was to go to hacker spaces and meetups and turn on the client and see who else was on the local network. Not everyone has that option.
Default content is difficult to manage, especially if the goal is to avoid cults of personality, or recreating Slashdot/Digg/Reddit on your platform.
I think this is why everyone who started a MySpace account has the founder as a friend. You have one example of how the thing works, and he's too busy doing other stuff to turn it into a soap box.
I think the right solution is exhibited in the way people use Slack servers for niche communities. You don't install Slack because you heard Slack is neat. You install Slack because someone sends you an invite link.
I was having a similar problem with SSB but resolved it by subscribing to an SSB Room I ran across online that was for folks generically into tech, and that bootstrapped my experience really well, as I now have lots of channels and pubs that I can access. I agree it's quite hurdle to get over compared to what most everyone is used to, though.
Your name 'grishka' looks familiar. I'm also an ActivityPub developer (https://quanta.wiki). What languages do you develop in, in case we can share code?
Group chats work well for a fixed set of users looking for all-to-all broadcast, but that's hardly a social network.
Something like Discord gets even closer. I'd say Discord actually makes a pretty good social network, although most people don't treat it as such. In my experience, the biggest issue with discord-as-a-social-network is the binary nature of discord server membership. I've had my one "friends group" server split into 3 or 4 servers (each with 80% membership overlap) over some people who had drama, and this makes it much less manageable as a social network because you tend to spend most of your time on one or maybe two servers.
Sure, in theory. But I feel like on both platform you end up just seeing tons of shares/retweets of whales/influencers. (particularly the way they reorder content on your timeline so it's presented by what they think you want to see)
This would likely alleviate the moderation issue too. You aren't going to see filth and extremism unless it's posted by your social network, which decreases the incentive for bad actors to post it in the first place.