If you are over 40 you may remember when the internet was open to all discussions and every user owned his own content. If you are over 50 and were using the internet before the web was so interactive, then you may remember usenet and IRC, as well as other forums, some of which lasted longer than others.
Those was the days before Google and Facebook came along and entrenched their platforms making the user the products of multi-$Billion dollar operations.
Back then, there was no censorship, no tracking or everything.
Nobody owned email. Nobody owned usenet. Nobody owned IRC. And nobody owned the web.
Today, nobody owns the those still. But a few mega-corporations with their own financial and political agendas have managed to coral virtually every user of the web into their specific platforms where they own and control and censor the content for their own purposes, often nefarious.
If you want to communicate with friends and family online, you have to “hang out” at the same virtual places. And because those tiny few places are owned, each user has to surrender their liberty and their security and their privacy and their content as the price of entering. And that is not just a major problem due to the headaches and annoyances, it is a threat to the internet itself, and more importantly, it’s users.
If you have developed a large following using facebook and or Youtube and making your living from your work, you may be one of those who have seen your material cut off and or “demonitized”, either because the company wants you to start paying them for your success (after they invited you) or because they dislike your opinions or political positions. It can’t be ignored that they never did such things until they had virtually the entire internet using their platforms exclusively and so the users have no place else to go.
Now, at last there is a solution! The magic of it is that the users need not abandon those platforms and lost contact with their friends, they can join the open social network and start owning their own “walls” and their own content and sharing nothing with those corporations other than what they choose while waiting for their friends to do likewise. Little by little, Facebook and youtube will become increasingly less important until it reaches the point where they will have to respect their users privacy and content and opinions in order to retain their business.
They will no longer be able to squelch opinions they dislike and control content while hiding behind the immunity given such platforms under the claim that they are a public carrier and don’t control the content.
Before it is launched, I want to make sure mistakes of the past are not repeated. The internet’s first “killer app” was email. It was amazing and caught on very quickly. But in those days the internet was tiny and only used by government agencies and universities. Security was not even considered an issue. No one had ever heard of spammers which would eventually wreck havoc on email users around the globe, forcing measures to be invented to address the damage rather than have a system from the start that was immune to it. The same thing happened to the next “killer app, usenet, which most people today have never heard of, even though it still exists but is literally filled with little more than spam. The web was the next “killer app”, the one that made the internet a part of everyone’s life. And the same mistakes were made. It wasn’t much different with IRC (Internet Relay Chat) , the early real-time forum where people gathered to argue politics and talk about cats.
OpenSoNet is being created from the ground up with security in mind, but the model is simple enough and so non-centralized as to make spamming and most of the ID fraud, and even DOS attacks entirely ineffective anyway. There is no central point to enter it. There is no single company server that has everyone’s information other than the public name, similar in function to the DNS (Domain Name Servers) that have no more information the IP address associated with the domain name used on the web pages. Everyone owns their own username and their own content, and can even keep it all hosted only on their own PC if they like, although most would likely find it more practical to have it hosted by another company acting as a portal service, which Facebook and Youtube could even do to remain relevant.
More details are coming soon. We are in the early stages. But this can work and give the internet back to the users. I am posting this on August 12, 2019. In the coming months, I hope to have more people working on this and have it all in place and launched before the end of the year. If you haven’t figured out why that is important already, you will eventually see why. Let’s just say the importance of having uncensored discussions on social media will become rather obvious in 2020.
William R. James
