Haven Blog

Haven promotes a different paradigm for social media, a model where everything is private. It is that paradigm that is important. Haven is just one option for implementing that paradigm but it is the paradigm I want to promote. One really cool consequence of private social media is that it cannot be censored.

Today, almost everything we do leaves a digital footprint. Watching a Netflix or Youtube video. Going for a walk or driving to the grocery store. Visiting a website. All of this activity gets tracked, associated with you, and sold to data brokers so it can be used to serve you better targeted advertisements. At least today that’s most of what it gets used for. Sometimes your location or other data is included in law-enforcement requests. Maybe that data will be used to target people insufficiently loyal to a government regime. It is a troubling footprint!

Digital tracking highlights one of the major personal and social costs that we (sometimes unknowingly) pay by using public social media platforms. But, how does it compare with private social media? Let’s first take a step back and understand exactly what I mean by “private”, because I mean something fairly specific.

Sending an email is private, right? Until 2017, Google would use the contents of your emails for ad targeting. The email protocol is unencrypted, so emails can be read by any of the companies that help pass your email data from server to server. What about a Facebook post that is only visible to Friends? Again–Facebook can read that post and use it to (surprise!) target better ads.

Both of these examples highlight the fact that when you use another company’s services for your online actions you have to trust that company to be a good steward of your data. When I say private, I mean that you control the data yourself, so you don’t have to trust another company. The only people who have any access to your posts are you and the people you’ve given access to.

Now this brings us to censorship. When a platform can read what you write, it can decide what to do with those posts. Twitter/X (and many other centralized social media platforms) will explicitly suppress posts that contain links. They do this primarily because they want you to stay on the platform instead of following a link to go elsewhere. This is censorship! The same tools that let them suppress posts with links also let them censor political posts, or posts critical of the platform itself.

In a world where everything you do is tracked and everything you post is analyzed, private posts which cannot be read by anyone you haven’t chosen are very censorship-resistant.¹ And the only way for that to happen is if you run your own platform. And when you do run that platform, something magical happens:

You stop self-censoring yourself.

To some degree, we’re all aware of the digital footprint or digital echo that we leave behind. That knowledge changes our behavior. Maybe it triggers a fear that someday these words left unspoken would’ve been used against us. Maybe a fear that we would be labeled by the algorithms in a way we find distasteful. Maybe we just don’t want certain Amazon recommendations to unexpectedly pop up while shopping with a friend. Whatever the reason, conscious or unconscious, that knowledge of our digital footprint changes our behavior and makes it harder to be our honest selves. With private social media, that burden gets lifted.

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