OpenSoNet.org

OpenSoNet – How it works

William James — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 22:42:21 +0000

From the user’s prospective, it’s much like a typical interactive web page, but you have downloaded and installed a program on your computer. Once you do that, and open your browser, you enter the OpenSoNet setup which leads you through the steps of choosing your username. Because the name, unlike a domain name, is not necessarily unique, there are several other fields for you to associate with your name. Location would be suggested for the 2nd, but it could be anything in that and the other fields. For example, your name might be “John Doe”, and there may be a number of other people in the world with the same name. But you could also include middle name or initial. “John Smith Doe”or even “The John Smith Doe”. It should have your name but however you want to display it for others to find.

In the 2nd field you might add “New York, NY” or “Brooklyn, NY” to be more specific. Or you could use something else if you don’t want your location known, but keep in mind it might make it harder for friends to find you. The 3rd field is similar, you put whatever you lie to identify yourself among others that might have the same name, perhaps an age.

For the web, the DNS inquiry happens when you type in a domain. Your computer sends a query to your DNS server asking for the IP address of whatever name you typed. If you enter “xyz.com” then the query asks the DNS server for the IP address of xyz.com. It’s a bit more complicated than this, but basically the DNS responds back with the IP address and then the computer goes to that IP address to retrieve the web page for xyz.com. So the DNS server really has little more information than a long list of domain names and their associated IP addresses.

For OpenSoNet it’s just as simple a query, but the answer has another question. It returns the list of all matching names (even if a partial match for at least two words) but including the other two fields, the list is then displayed by the browser. You can then click on one of them and since it is a perfect match only for that one, the 2nd query return the IP address to the browser, which then calls up the user’s “wall” data.

This three field name system is designed to work well for social media, and solves a problem that domain names still have to this day when there are multiple people or businesses with similar names but only one domain name can be used. But frankly, it would be cumbersome for domain names anyway, but social media names, it’s far more functional because it takes into account the non-unique nature of personal names.

Once you have selected your username, You select your hosting option. At first, you can choose your own computer. You can move your “wall” anytime you wish. Now you add your profile, whatever information you wish to share with others. Enter what you want and add whatever photos or videos (or audios) you like and you are done with the setup.

Now anyone using OpenSoNet can find you and see your “wall”, and leave comments on your cat photo of tell you they like or hate your pineapple pizza. If they know you and search for “John Doe”, yours will be listed among the list of people with that name followed by whatever you put in the other fields. Unless you chose only to be visible to friends, they can see your “wall”, but either way they can send add you as their friend and or send you a friend request so you can add them as your friend, or decline.

Posts that tag you will be sent to your page, as well posts of those on your friends list.

If you only have a few friends who only occasionally post, then that wont be a problem. But if you, like some people in current social media, have hundreds on your list, some whom post in large volumes, then you have to manage it rather that be flooded with thousands of posts every day. So you have a priority list for friends and topics. You can set some people as a higher priority, putting their posts first. And the same with a list of topics that if mentioned raise the priority of display on your wall. Any topics or people you don’t want to see posted can simply be given a zero priority. You can also set the maximum number of posts from any specific person to be displayed, and chose them in time order or randomly, or choose only the shortest of their posts.

On your “wall”, you will also find a chat function, and able to select someone else or add many to a conference chat. And you can message anyone on your friend list or anyone who who allows strangers to message them. If you ever used IRC it should look familiar to you.

Also on the page are links to interface your facebook and or youtube or other media accounts. If you sign in to your facebook account and interface it, then your facebook content will also be displayed on your OpenSoNet “Wall”. You can add your youtube and other accounts as well. Your friends who access your OpenSoNet “wall” will see your content from the other media as well, whatever you choose to share on your “wall”.

Eventually Facebook might take the option to allow OpenSoNet users to share their content on their facebook page, but if they don’t it wont be a problem. People can still access both and eventually there will be no need to use both Facebook and OpenSoNet since only one contains all the content and isn’t censored or otherwise controlled by anyone other than the users.
Another great thing about this is that it is open sourced and public. Anybody who thinks they can write a better browser, or copy and modify code to improve this one, can do so as they see fit. Businesses can even write their own commercially and if people choose to use it rather than the public free ones, go for it! No problem.

William R. James

Open Social Network Platform

William James — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 22:30:51 +0000

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