The End of Conglomerated Social Networks: The Public Hypercloud

Peter McClard
DataDrivenInvestor
Published in
9 min readJan 1, 2022

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In the real world, our social networks are closed and private. We don’t get people knocking on our doors asking if they can be our friends. We don’t get companies putting banners up at our parties and stopping the action to tell us about some random product. We put up with a lot of crap in the online world that would not fly outside—all in exchange for free utility-like services that take care of our posts and photos, our data, and maintains the network database— The Graph.

Up until now, the technology stack required to maintain such networks have been enormously expensive and onerous to maintain to the extent we hardly see any competitors worth mentioning that can go up against the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat or Tik Tok. These are nearly on a level of nation-states in their scale and budgets and revenues and they have permeated nearly every nook and cranny of planet Earth. But like any inbred, unwieldy beast with a large appetite, these behemoths are destined for extinction by a much smaller, less greedy, more nimble creature—The Private Graph. The term “network” in this case is really a database about all the other inter-connected networks related to a given single network from its owner’s perspective.

Everything besides the physical servers and wires would be software and databases. For carbon neutrality, these physical parts would need to use renewable energy sources and should be strictly limited to such which is easier to do when you don’t have lots of different businesses managing lots of different server farms (they would still exist).

The Vision

Imagine if you could own your own private Facebook-like network that YOU controlled fully, where all your data remained with you and you could connect it to other similar networks maintained by friends or interest groups and advertisers would pay you to run ads on your network, if you even allowed them. Indeed, you could set up your own a la carte of any of the different modalities of each of the social network archetypes:

  • Friend news feeds (eg. Facebook)
  • Friend chat feeds (eg. Twitter)
  • Chatrooms (eg. Pinterest, Rumble)
  • Photo/video feeds (eg. Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok)
  • Calls and Video Conferences (eg. Zoom)
  • Virtual 3-D Simulations (Metaverse)
  • Telepresence (Medical and other such as space platforms or sea robots)
  • Remote learning and training (Accredited)
  • Blogs and Vlogs (Medium)
  • eBooks and podcasts
  • NFT galleries and exchanges
  • National archive source

Sure, you are not a programmer and you don’t own a massive server farm so how is this possible? The answer is Green Public Blockchain Hypercloud Service sponsored by the International Community and funded by minimal taxes or even modest subscriptions or possibly public funds like PBS. Basically, think of it as we now think of roads and sidewalks as a part of our Social Infrastructure. It comes with global citizenship. Instead of the government spending money monitoring and regulating these large conglomerates, they would put the power in our hands directly and Mark Zuckerberg would become a peer human overnight (albeit a very rich one).

Once a user has been certified and verified, they would simply login with a biometric or other authentication to this highly secure Hyperservice owned by The People (WE made the first Internet after all). Then they would choose a model from many different AI Managed Templates which could be customized to their liking. We could all have our own networks. Our friends could do the same and then we could determine how and who we wanted to connect too. Our personal data, all our posts and comments, even if it appeared in someone else’s network (actually an overlapping intersection with our network) would always remain ours and we could withdraw completely in part of in full at any time. All the hard programming stuff for your network is performed by Hypercloud Services which are pretty much AI bots that are themselves managed by people.

Hybrid Networks could combine different modalities mixing a Twitter-like chat feed in with a Friend news feed. In this way content becomes more interesting and less stodgy and siloed into different apps, saving time jumping around to different apps and getting all those different notifications.

Likewise, interest groups or business networks could be formed and connecting to those would give access to the that group’s activities, another intersecting Venn diagram with one’s network, sort of like Google Circles used to be but not a snoopy corporation behind it in this case.

If you think about it, maintaining public virtual servers is way cheaper than maintaining millions of miles of roads and bridges and far easier to upgrade so it needn’t be expensive, just smart. The governments of the world would greatly benefit to the point where online voting would be an easy next step since identity is assured and blockchain is used to guarantee privacy and anonymity where required. This would reduce the possibility for voter fraud to nil and results would be calculated instantly and polling places would no longer need to even exist, saving money. More voter participation, safer voting, fraud free, faster, easier, cheaper—no brainer. This could evolve democracy to the next level.

Advertising would be by invitation only so even they would need to change their behavior to be more simpatico or risk being tossed out of your network. For example I would allow Gibson Guitars to advertise their latest and greatest guitars to me. However, instead of polluting my news feed, I would have all my advertisers in one place like a sort of custom built market, perfectly tailored to my needs and interests and paid for by them to me. I’m both the client and the customer. A new model. Pay me to advertise to me and I might buy one of your products. I create my own advertising profile, not some algorithm watching my every like and click (that then get sold to others).

In exchange, governments could use the system for emergency coordination on a local, state or national level (similar to EBS) and they could maintain their own government networks we could connect to such as Election 2028 where candidates could duke it out in public, make their best case for why we should vote for them, not with negative ads and endless spam but with real policies and statements. It would usher in a new era of transparency and online equality. Campaigns would have to pay us to advertise on our network.

It would be much easier to keep bad actors out of our affairs as we more easily identify points of origin and the legitimacy of the participants. Of course, people could still silo themselves in a fringe network but they couldn’t so easily spread out to other networks and because we control what we see we could turn up filters for certain types of offensive or harmful speech.

Since it wouldn’t be a private company owning it, intelligent safety regulations could be more easily enforced and enacted by a multi-partisan independent panel that answers to Congress, not a for-profit Board of Directors or CEO. But not for the purposes of censorship! If nudists wanted to have their own group no one would stop them just as in real life, so long as they limit it to their own private network. Any network that grew past a critical limit to be determined, say 1,000 subscribers, would automatically have a safety monitor assigned. Indeed, since the people own the system, we could set it up to be self-policing with volunteers who keep tabs on troubling activity.

There could also be solid private companies whose business model is privacy first such as Apple, DuckDuckGo or Cloudflare that could either fully implement such systems or work in collaboration with government. However, these business models notoriously change in the blink of an eye or projects are shelved leaving users stranded or abandoned. I prefer the public model of infrastructure as a service for a more permanent solution.

The Benefits

There are many benefits to having a publicly funded Hypercloud including but not limited to:

  • Greater privacy and security via blockchain
  • No out of control advertising
  • No 3rd party monetizing of private data
  • Self-monitized advertising
  • Full, life-long control over your content including the ability to maintain a local backup copy
  • Certified networks not set up by shady operators
  • Highly customizable: Many more choices of presentation and styling
  • Standardized commerce
  • Less criminal activity
  • Far fewer fake accounts
  • Far fewer hacked accounts and if they were hacked, less damage
  • More social harmony and social equity
  • Maintenance of legacy social records
  • Time saving

Web 3.0 Digital Currency

In order to facilitate commerce we would ideally have a stable form of digital currency (eDollar) with a cryptocurrency wallet attached to accounts. This way payments from advertisers are automated and can be made in fractional amounts every time you clicked on one of their ads a bit more and impressions a bit less. Other goods and services could be securely purchased and sold with no complicated banking or credit cards involved.

The Certified Registry

In order to make these millions of different private networks “connectable” like tinker toys requires standards starting with The Registry. This is basically the global database of each network in the system. In order to become registered, a network must have a certified owner. A certified owner is one who’s identity and date and place of birth and citizenship has been verified similar to identity points required to get a passport or driver’s license. Certification of a network would depend on its purpose. For example, a news outlet would have to be accredited for journalism a medical one would need medical accreditation, etc. This would allow users to see a Badge of Trust so they know information is top notch and vetted. Such certification would need to be renewed periodically.

Other metadata about the network would be required such as discoverability (who can find the network), age rating, parental controls, main topic, category, maximum users, etc.

Once in the Registry, a network can never be deleted, only archived. The content posted in the network remains the sole property of the owner of the content, not the network. The network is merely the glue that binds things together intelligently.

The Registry would be searchable based on discoverability settings. For undiscoverable networks one would need to be invited to join.

Migration

By law, each current social network is required to provide a means of downloading one’s content and this should always be the law. The Hypercloud could easily have an Import function that would allow you to transfer your old data to your private network, probably creating many orphans of fragments from the thousands of comments you made. These might not be easy to reconstruct but nonetheless, moving forward this would no longer be an issue.

Conclusion

This would not solve all the inherent problems of social media but would eliminate some of the pitfalls such as permanently putting our private data in the hands of a few unscrupulous profiteers and endless targeted spam. No matter what, the status quo is not acceptable so the best thing we can do is decentralize the power to the people. We would no longer have to wait two years for a new feature or design but could choose from an ever-growing library of public templates and algorithms. If you want your “Facebook” to be dark blue and show family posts first, no problem. If you want to add a “dislike” button, add it. You could even make the icon a middle finger since it’s your network.

Each nation would need to have their own languages and rules based on their laws and cultural norms just as they do today. This would be governed by the verified citizenship of the owner of a given network. A person from China or Russia couldn’t easily set up an account as an American like they can today because they would lack the registry credentials.

One non-trivial benefit of such a system is it could tie into the National Archives for folks who wanted to preserve their records for perpetuity and future generations like an Ellis Island on steroids. After a certain number of years after passing (25) any records that the family or individual bequeathed to the archives could become public so future generations could truly learn about life in the past both on a social and individual level.

The purpose is to fulfill the promise of the Internet by making it more enjoyable, safer and more useful to more people around the world for decades to come. The fact that this might cause collateral business damage to companies that have already made a fortune should not daunt nor hinder us from taking control of what is rightfully ours—our memories, thoughts, pictures, videos and lives!

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As a creative type, entrepreneur and philosopher, I write on many topics and try to offer solutions to, or useful insights into common problems.