(2019-07-25) Kazemi How To Run A Small Social Network Site For Your Friends

Darius Kazemi: How to run a small social network site for your friends. Since August 2018 I have run a social network site called Friend Camp for about 50 of my friends. I think Friend Camp is a really nice place, and my friends seem to agree that it has enriched our lives. I'd like to see more places like Friend Camp on the internet, and this document is my attempt to provide some practical guidance as to how you might run a social network site like this.

These principles are related to community building more than they are related to specific technologies.

For those of you familiar with the term, I'm discussing federated social media. (fediverse)

What makes a small social network site different from a big one?

Friend Camp is a modification of a program called Mastodon.

So far, this seems like an underpowered Twitter, but there are some key differences from Twitter

You control the computer that runs the site

a small social network site doesn't need a huge complex network of computers. One computer can be enough. Often it's the kind of thing you can rent for $10 a month

Friend Camp costs about $30 a month to run, it experiences about 10 minutes of down time each week, and it takes about 2 hours a week of my own time to maintain. I maintain the computer that Friend Camp's software runs on.

You get to make the social rules and policies

On a small site serving a small community, if the content comes from inside your community, then you can navigate it the way you navigate problems in small communities in the real world. You bring up with the rest of your community that someone is behaving in a way that is counter to the values of the community. It's unpleasant, but at least you have some control over that process

You can modify the software

A silly example of this kind of rule in action is Dolphin Town... the only letter you are allowed to use is "E"

I made Dolphin Town to draw attention to something that I think a lot of people miss: if you run a social network based on open source software, you can fundamentally alter how it works to your liking, at least for the version that runs on the computer you own

Wait, who is "you"?

Some communities may have a single person who is kind of the "benevolent dictator". Other communities may run based on consensus or even more formal processes.

Some servers are formal cooperatives that use cooperative decision making tools like Loomio to organize their node, which has its own advantages and drawbacks that I won't go into the details of here.

Why run a small social network site?

campers have a special communication channel that lets us post messages that only other campers can see.

We are also able to have moderation rules that are hyper-specific to our own values as a community. It lets us maintain an environment that's far more pleasant than you find on most social media sites.

Mastodon has four levels of privacy available for your posts

According to some discussions I've seen, one reason that Mastodon has been reluctant to add a "local-only" posting option to its service is that it multiplies that to a combination of eight total privacy settings.

in a case like Friend Camp, I can personally walk the user through what these complex features mean

You can have hyper-specific norms

You also don't need to implement some kind of draconian filtering system to have norms: you simply model the behavior you want to see, and remind people to act a certain way when they post outside of those norms. This kind of thing does not work well in a forum of even 200 people, but in the 50-ish range it is entirely doable.

Why to NOT run a small social network site

people will now depend on you for something that's important to them.

it's really hard work

This is exactly the cost of starting a community theater group, activist group, social group, sports club, book club, and so on.

What you can do today

People like to bring up Dunbar's number when I talk about this stuff, and I have no idea if that concept is a crock of bullshit or what.

Keep it small

With 50 active users I field, on average, one moderation request a month.

You are the party host

Among other things, my duty is to read the local timeline and catch up on everyone's posts. I need to take the temperature of the network and also provide social lubrication where necessary.

Provide a custom introduction to your network for every user

When a new user joins Friend Camp, I now schedule a video chat with them (or an in-person chat if they are local). For one to three hours, I introduce them to Friend Camp and walk them through our basic features.

Group activities

Keep it interconnected

Alice says something that Bob didn't like, Bob points it out, Alice agrees and apologizes, and everyone moves on."

Funding

We have a Patreon for Friend Camp simply because it's the easiest way for me to collect monthly donations.

The bus problem

In this first year, if I got hit by a bus, the server would probably run until its first crash and then never come back again.

Code of Conduct

I think a good CoC should be specific enough that it is actively repulsive to some people

As an example, Friend Camp is anti-free-speech, at least in the sense that freedom of speech is commonly understood as a value

For those wondering, the RationalWiki definition of freedom of speech is exactly the kind of freedom of speech we take issue with on our server

Enforcement

Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner have published a free book called How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports that I think is required reading for anyone with a code of conduct on their site. The book explains what a CoC is and what it is not and how to make yours actually effective.

Technical recommendations

we maintain Friend Camp as a fork of Mastodon and pull in Renato Lond's great work that allows for posts that only the 50 people with logins to Friend Camp can see

Provide multiple services for your community members! Probably not email because that is a nightmare

Examples of services you can provide

Bugle is a bot that any Friend Camper can use that sends a direct message to every other person on the server (unless they have blocked it or have DMs otherwise disabled).

What we need to do in the future

Fluidity of identity and the ability to migrate

Places where we need better tech

People need to be able to jump ship and migrate their accounts, seamlessly and wholly, to other servers.

Let people keep things in the community

There is currently a pull request open on Mastodon by Renato Lond that implements exactly this feature. It's derived from glitch-soc, a Mastodon fork.

Server forking should be easy

support for messages that don't federate and can only be viewed by people with access to the server on which the message was posted.

Lean software that doesn't have to scale

What if we built software to run on very low spec, low power machines

Pleroma is a Twitter style server that extremely light on its use of resources. And Write Freely, a federated Medium-style blogging server, is incredibly lean as well

More on scale

I'd like to advance the notion that software does not have to scale, and in fact software can be better if it is not built to scale

Beyond local and public: the neighborhood

I would like to see groups of servers that band together through a kind of mutual approval system

until I tried it in practice.

I also think there shouldn't be concepts of overlapping Venn diagrams of multiple neighborhoods. I loved the concept from Google Plus of circles.

I think many of us can hold three of these groups in our head though, especially if it's not the job of the individual user to constantly maintain it.

Conclusion

Hard questions

How do people join one of these networks if they don't have friends who are already on such a network?

What happens to people who suck?

What about equity? For example, how do we get these servers run and operated by people in poor communities?

Do the technical administrators have to be the same people doing the social organizing? I think the answer as of June 2019 is, sadly, yes

So what do you, the reader, do next?

If you are comfortable with servers and hosting

If learning the tech stuff is realistically not going to happen

You can also pay a company like Masto.host to run all the technical stuff for you.

Running a small social network site is completely possible to do on the side.