Haven Blog

Retro-Tech Parenting

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am a technologist. I enjoy the things that computers and digital devices can do–they often seem magical and amazing! As a technologist, I have a particular vantage point to see and be very uncomfortable with what companies are doing with that technology. There are catchphrases for these patterns: AdTech, Surveillance Capitalism, Rage Bait, Engagement-Optimized Feeds, Harvesting Eyeballs.

I am also a parent. As a parent, I am scared about the prospect of letting my kids loose in a digital world so aggressively dominated by these companies and patterns. But at the same time, technology was an enriching part of my childhood and continues to be an enriching part of my life and I want to share that with them. In this post, I don’t want to spend much time discussing the ways that bad tech patterns are bad, instead I want to share some of the ways I have held on to the enriching parts of technology to share them with my kids. For many of these choices, it turns out that (surprise!) my favorite solutions involve looking back in time a couple decades.

Physical media

I’m starting to fall in love with CDs again. When I was young, music came on CDs. This was a time before MP3s and before Spotify. This was a time when going to summer camp, I would pick which half-dozen CDs I wanted to bring with on the trip. This was a time of wired ear-bud headphones, sitting in school sharing a song with someone by giving them one of the two ear buds and listening side-by-side. This was a time of [Parental Advisory] labels on CDs that had objectionable language. This was a time of tiny LCD screens on portable CD players that only displayed the track number, so I sometimes knew my favorite song on a CD by number instead of by name.

I bought a mini CD boom box for the house. My oldest loves bringing it around to different rooms, plugging it in, and putting in a CD. I bought her the K-Pop Demon Hunters CD for her birthday. The local public library has CDs! CDs are awesome.

Speaking of the public library, they also have DVDs and BluRays. I remember the whole ritual of going to Blockbuster Video with my Dad to pick out a movie for family movie night. Usually he would let my sister and me pick out a few extras that we wanted to watch. That’s how I got familiar with the Three Stooges, even though it was before my time. The magic of having something to hold onto that you can bring home and put in the player next to the TV, and there is your movie!

As a parent one of the big wins with physical media is I know exactly what my kids have available to experience. If they aren’t ready for something, it doesn’t come home with us. The kids can be much more independent about watching and listening because there is no adversary inside the device they are using. Kids love that independence.

Landline Telephones

I hooked up a wired, physical telephone next to the kitchen in our house. I’m using a cheap VoIP provider with an analogue telephone adapter, but there’s a company called Tin Can that makes this really easy (no affiliation). The telephone network has retained backward compatibility as everyone moved to smartphones, so grandparents, neighbors, aunts and uncles, are all now accessible to the kids. Even better, these digitally-managed phones have excellent configuration options. I’ve whitelisted all the friends and family who get to call us, and the phone automatically blocks calls from dinner time to morning. My kids will spontaneously call up their grandparents to ask if they can go over to play, and have memorized my phone number because they like to prank call me when I’m also in the kitchen.

When I was a kid, the telephone was my bridge to friends and setting up my own playdates. It was “do you want to come over to my house?” instead of “Dad! Can you set up a playdate with so-and-so?” There is still a bit of a network effect until other families get hooked up with their own house phones, but I’m really excited about it. Kids really love that independence.

The Family Computer

I remember having friends over and going to friends’ houses and one of our favorite things to do was play computer games. This was the era of Commander Keen, and Prince of Persia. We would sit at the family computer, side-by-side, taking turns, discussing strategy. I definitely have games I want to share with my kids, but the internet is also not something I trust. I bought a used tower PC from Ebay and set it up next to the kitchen. Each kid has their own login and their own games or activities they like to explore. I also set up a pi-hole for our home network and configured the family computer to use the pi-hole for DNS. Just like the phone, I’ve whitelisted every domain that they can visit. For example: they get access to Wikipedia, but not Google. They get access to Minecraft, but we don’t play on public servers. No Youtube or Spotify, but I’ve curated some sites about how to solve a Rubik’s cube, or different ways to tie your shoes.

I showed my older kid that she could rip a CD onto the computer, and listen to it there. For now she’s just excited that she has yet another place she can listen to her favorite K-Pop Demon Hunters song, but maybe this is the start of building up her own music collection as I’ve done over the decades. Kids love being able to use a computer on their own!

I opened by calling myself a technologist. I recognize that a lot of the tools I’ve described above aren’t as accessible to less-technical parents, but the core philosophy is definitely still accessible. The dystopian parts of modern technology came to dominate because they are very convenient–but that convenience comes at a cost. Especially when kids are involved, it can be really rewarding to refuse paying that cost and sometimes even look to the past for inspiration.

Age Assurance and Bluesky

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week, the popular Twitter/X alternative Bluesky shared that they’re working with Epic Games and the UK Government to do Age Assurance“—verifying the age of a user before showing them adult-appropriate content.

At face value, this seems like it would be a good thing, we’re protecting children, right?. Unfortunately, there are some very important details that get glossed over.

In the United States, if you want to buy movie tickets for an R-rated movie, or buy alcohol, you have to show your ID to the vendor. The vendor looks at your ID, confirms your age, and allows you to make the purchase. But the ID is only seen by the checkout person’s eyes, the vendor doesn’t take a picture of your ID, and store it forever with a record that you saw that movie or bought alcohol on that date. (More recently, ID barcodes are being scanned which is troubling). By contrast, Epig Games’ Kids Web Services which Bluesky leverages for online age-verification uses “payment card verification, ID scans, and face scans.” Online age-verification technologies require you to share exactly who you are—not just prove that you are of age. (Note that there is really cool cryptographic technolgy that can do this, called Zero Knowledge Proofs, but I don’t know of any platform using that technology).

This is the first major downside, age verification is actually identity verification which prevents free and anonymous access to information. When your identity is verified, you can’t get information about anything without that interest being associated with your identity.

The second major downside is what gets classified as adult-appropriate content? In this case it is the UK Government’s decision. That means anything the current administration doesn’t like, they get to effectively restrict everyone under 18 from seeing. There is no global consensus around the precise boundaries of adult-appropriate content.

There’s one additional disappointment here, and that is the difference between the promise of Bluesky and what has actually happened. Bluesky was supposed to be an open protocol so that anyone can participate on the network without being restricted to a single gate-keeper like Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, etc. But the Bluesky protocol requires an app service, which is incredibly difficult to operate and results in almost everyone using the Bluesky-provided app service. Despite the protocol being open in principle, Bluesky is still able to control everyone’s use of the platform. I don’t really want to put too much blame on Bluesky, they had a great vision. Unfortunately one of the downsides of a centralized service (no matter how noble the mission or virtuous the founders!) is the fragility. A company can be pressured by government laws that may run counter to its mission. For another example: the secure messaging app Signal intends to leave the UK market and be unavailable to UK citizens instead of complying with government demands to weaken the encryption it uses for secure messages.

What’s the alternative? Decentralized platforms. If it is easy for you to run your own social media node, then you have full control over what you access, and how you access it. You have full control over who sees the posts and pictures that you share.

No company or government can get in the way when you take control.

Private Social Media Doesn’t Need to Worry About Censorship

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

We can’t say 100% censorship-proof. A person, company or government that targets you directly for other reasons might have the resources to hack a private platform and decide if it should be blocked by other methods such as a denial-of-service attack or DNS hijacking. ↩

What comes after Web 2.0?

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There is a history to the web. When it started, this computer-to-computer network let people share web pages by running a program on their computer (a webserver) and someone else could run a program on their computer (a web browser) to see what the first person shared. If you wanted to publish something on the first generation of the web, you needed the following:

A computer to run the webserver, connected to the internet
Knowledge about how to setup the webserver
Knowledge about how to write a web page and publish it on the webserver

Not very many people published web pages in this first version of the web. It was hard to do, which excluded a lot of people from participating.

Then came “Web 2.0”¹. The big difference between the first generation of the web and Web 2.0 was the ability for anyone with a web browser to post updates to someone else’s webserver. You didn’t need your own webserver or any special technical knowledge anymore: you could visit someone else’s website, and post your thoughts on their site!

This really seemed like a revolution–we were democratizing the web, right?

Web 2.0 was a paradigm shift in more than one way. Publishing on the web became as easy as typing words in a text box–you could go to Facebook or Twitter and post your updates on those platforms. You didn’t need your own webserver and you didn’t need to know how to use a webserver. With so many people publishing on Facebook or Twitter, everyone got in the habit of visiting their social media platform(s) of choice instead of visiting all the diverse websites that made up the first generation of the Web.

But this presented a new problem. By making it so easy to publish, more and more people started publishing; pretty soon these social media platforms were hosting unfathomable volumes of things people published. How could they make sure the right information went to the right people? Or maybe more importantly–why should they make sure the right information went to the right people? There was (and still is) a very important distinction between publishing your own website on your own server and publishing something on Facebook. (I’ll keep referring to Facebook, but the same is true for Instagram, or Twitter, or TikTok, etc). When you publish to Facebook, then Facebook gets to decide what to do with what you published. Facebook gets to decide who sees it.

In 2012², Facebook had a really inspiring way of thinking about this problem:

… massive opportunity lies in figuring out how to deliver this huge amount of new information to the right people in the right ways–giving people things they are interested in, in ways they can understand and consume quickly.

And historically, that’s what friends are for. There’s always been way more information in the world than time to consume it. Human networks evolved naturally as a way to help sort through it. That’s why we are drawn to friends with similar interests. Our friends are our news sources, as well as our filters. They bring us stories that interest us because our interests are similar.

As anyone who frequents Facebook knows, this isn’t what happened.

There is another dimension we haven’t touched on yet–these Web 2.0 platforms’ popularity also grew because they were free for everyone to use. Someone has to pay the bills, and the advertising business model that worked so well for search made its way into Web 2.0.

When you scroll on Facebook, how much of what you see is interesting or valuable to you? The Facebook feed is stuffed with click-bait titles, sponsored updates, and news from more distant connections that just isn’t important to you. Buried among these updates are the things you do care about–the friend’s promotion or the picture of your niece–but you have to scroll through all the cruft to find what you care about.

Why would Facebook do this?

Facebook decides how to use what you published to satisfy Facebook’s goals–not yours. Facebook sells ads to businesses and shows those ads to people scrolling on Facebook. The longer you scroll the more ads it can show you. Even worse than that, Facebook uses all of your messages and posts along with the very personal knowledge of who you follow and which groups you’re a part and everything else you do on Facebook (or any website with a Facebook ‘like’ button) to build a very detailed and very creepy model of who you are and which ads you’ll be more likely to click on. It is an invasion of privacy designed to steal your time and attention for profit.

Web 2.0 made it easy for anyone to publish online, but it did so at the cost of letting corporations control who sees what. All of the corporate incentives are to keep you scrolling for as long as possible–not to give you what you need quickly and let you go on with your day. That is why your feed is filled with cruft.

What can we do about it?

Imagine if you logged into your Facebook feed and it was organized to give you the most important things first: the post a friend of yours shared about their big promotion, and the cute picture of your niece taking her first steps, and the news article your Mom was excited to share about the possibility of auroras tonight. All of these, right at the top of your feed. This is the vision Facebook was talking about in 2012, and it is still an inspiring vision to me today.

We can do this! Imagine a world where you can publish online as easily as on Facebook but you keep control of the things you create. You get to decide who to share it with instead of handing it over to Facebook to decide. And you get to create your own personal feed that focuses on updates from your own friends, family, and public personalities/companies. A feed that doesn’t serve you ads, because you own it.

This is the vision of Haven. Your Haven lives on your own little webserver. Running and managing your own webserver in your house is easier than it has ever been, but it is still harder than it should be. Fortunately there are cloud hosting companies (like PikaPods) that will rent you a little webserver and manage it for you. Now you have full control over your data–but unlike the first generation of the web, publishing updates is still as simple as typing words in a text box. And it is private–you choose who to share with. No company can sell you (or your friends) ads because no company has access to your data! Your Haven even lets you build your own feed where you can follow your friends’ Havens and follow any of the public blogs on the internet. Imagine: a private feed without ads, sponsored updates, or viral clickbait. That’s Haven.

Remember the quote from Facebook in 2012?

Our friends are our news sources, as well as our filters. They bring us stories that interest us because our interests are similar.

Technology has improved. We can use it as a tool to better share and connect with our friends and families, where we get to decide what is important. Let’s change the world!

Special thanks to Tracy Durnell for reviewing an earlier version of this post and offering some input!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 ↩
Facebook Little Red Book (2012), pg 29: https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook ↩

Podcast

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s blog post is something a little bit different. Google released a tool called NotebookLM¹ that can summarize articles in the form of a podcast. I tried it out with things I’ve written about Haven, and it generated a really good overview of Haven; exploring what Haven is and the role it plays in the ecosystem of online communication. Take a listen below!

Your browser does not support the audio element.

https://notebooklm.google.com ↩

Bluesky, Mastodon, SSB, and the Social Networks of New Protocols

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The first time I heard about Secure Scuttlebut, or SSB, I thought it was the coolest idea. Let people moving around from place to place be the transmission mechanism for a network. Facebook over sneakernet! I love protocols and this one triggered some sort of itch with the crossover of novel ideas along with a lack of dependance on (or vulnerability to) the internet. It felt very cyberpunk. So I installed patchwork and poked around to discover that they had implemented this idea of pubs to allow this person-to-person network to support the near instant online patterns of interaction that we’ve come to expect from Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc. Most of the people I could find on the network were other protocol (or anti-censorship) people who were rallying behind this new protocol.

When I learned about Mastodon and ActivityPub later, I wasn’t quite as taken. At that point I had developed a strong bias against publicly posting on the internet as a means for social interaction. But the network was (initially) very similar. People who were excited about it because they wanted Twitter, but they didn’t want it to be centrally controlled. This was the community focused on decentralization in their networks, similar to SSB.

For one more example, the first several years of Facebook were focused on local campus communities. In that world, it was about keeping up to date with friends who you also saw regularly. As Facebook strove for larger reach and opened up the platform beyond campus communities, it changed. The feed became more algorithmic and went through various iterations of showing more and more content that wasn’t produced by your friends. Today Facebook has gone almost full tiktok, all but abandoning the original mission of keeping you up-to-date with your friends.

One day, I came across https://runyourown.social/ , which made the point that running a small social network is as much or more about community-building as it is about the protocols and servers. So what happens to small communities when they get big?

The short answer is they die. Or at least the small community and the culture that existed there dies. The canonical example is the Eternal September of 1993 when Usenet become much more widely available. Before then, the internet was still small, and it had its own unique culture because it was limited to technical professionals and hobbyists. Every September, as new first-year university students came online, there was an adjustment period as the influx of new people adapted to the existing culture. In 1993 the flood was so big that the existing culture and community got overwhelmed.

Going back to SSB, you have two different things happening at once. One is a new technical protocol for communication and sharing. The other is a community that cares about this technology. The community happens to be using that technology but the community and the protocol are distinct. In this way, the protocol plays a bigger role as a rallying point for the community than the role it plays providing technical advantages for people in general to communicate. SSB was designed by an engineer who lived on a sailboat and only rarely came to port to connect to the internet. For people who have consistent access to the internet, SSB is a worse protocol. But lots of those people are still using it because it is the rallying point for their community.

Mastodon is similar, but a bit bigger. As Twitter has gone through the chaos of the past 12 months, Mastodon has shifted from just the community of decentralization-is-awesome, to the growing community of I want Twitter-but-not-Twitter, a place to do what I did on Twitter but with a less toxic atmosphere. The previous Mastodon community I’m sure mostly sees growth as a marker of success, but I’m not sure they’re ready for the breakdown which might be coming to their community. As Meta/Instagram Threads prepares to federate with ActivityPub, some people are really concerned. With Twitter’s size and social role, you get trolls, marketers, and state-actors who spend an inordinate amount of time and energy figuring out how to make their messages go viral–inserting themselves into your feed. All on top of Meta’s corporate interests, wherever they may lie. As Mastodon grows–and especially if Threads follows through federating with Mastodon–we’re going to see much more of the same things happening there.

Bluesky is in a similar position. They clearly have a goal of seeing their protocol (link) be adopted for a global, federated Twitter replacement. Bluesky is slightly different in that they are explicitly thinking about layers in the protocol to avoid the toxicity that everyone bemoans on Twitter. But they are also still small. By limiting growth (and delaying federation), Bluesky is able to build it’s own community culture which may not survive if it grows according to their ambitions.

So what do you do? How can you build a community that doesn’t die by getting bigger? I think there are two approaches that serve different needs. The first is to formalize the rallying point of the community. This is what made Reddit so successful. Each sub is explicitly focused on one topic, many of which are very niche. Those communities find Reddit easy to use, and care more about their community than the platform they use to connect. The other approach is to make these communities and discussions private. I think this is the best approach for the people you are already connected to off-platform–whatever the platform may be.

The value of public discourse is discovery and building new connections. Discovery also means sifting through the noise to find the nuggets you are interested in. The bigger the platform, the more noise. Private discourse is a much better tool for keeping up with the people you already care about. That’s why all of our day-to-day tools like phone calls, email, text messages, etc are all nominally private. Social media should work the same way.

Private Comments, or Why I’m Down On Webmentions

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I love the IndieAuth community, I love what they stand for, and I love a lot of the technology they’ve built and defined. But I have a hard time getting behind Webmentions, even though they clearly solve a problem that exists and the people who use them love them. What’s going on here?

First, some background. The IndieWeb community wants an internet that isn’t dominated by a few giant silos. They want the internet to be free and open with a rich diversity of ways to interact with it. When all of your posts and status updates live inside of Facebook or Twitter, then you don’t really own them. The only way people can see them is to go to Facebook or Twitter and accept whatever comes with that relationship. The IndieWeb is big on hosting your own content–maybe syndicating it to places like Facebook and Twitter–but making sure you have it available on your own website.

It is relatively easy to build a blog with Wordpress or Hugo or something else that publishes an RSS feed. But we are social creatures and one thing that “Web 2.0” taught us was people like to talk and discuss. The people want comments! Technically, things get harder when the web gets social–especially when you want to keep owning your content. The IndieWeb community suggests that owning your content means posting a comment on your own site, and telling the original poster that you’ve got a comment at your site.

Webmentions are a computer protocol to make this much easier. Webmentions define how your comment should exist on your site, and how you can tall the original poster (or rather their web site software) about your comment so that it will understand your comment to display it and link back to the source on your site.

There’s even good precedent for this. Twitter and Mastodon both work with a very similar semantic. When you tweet (or toot) a reply, that’s still a tweet you posted which shows up on your own timeline.

Twitter is a great example too of the issue I take with not just Webmentions, but the model itself. When anyone with lots of followers tweets something, they get inundated with reply tweets. Reply tweets have to go through the same algorithmic filtering and ranking to try and separate the signal from the noise. These are the same algorithms that we bemoan for amplifying misinformation. But however poorly implemented they are, we need something that plays that role when we want to have anything approaching a useful view of public content where truly anyone can post. When anyone can post the first problem you run into is spam–before we even get to what legitimate content should be promoted.

And spam is the core of the problem I have with Webmentions. They are a tool for letting anyone make unauthenticated posts on your own site. Today, they are only used by a small group of people within the IndieWeb community–and with such limited usage, there isn’t much value to spammers–but with broader adoption spam would become a huge problem.

To be fair to the IndieWeb community, I’m not the only person who is worried about spam’s impact on Webmentions. Wouter Groeneveld has a great article on his website about combating Webmention spam. He talks a lot about technical details, but ultimately builds for his own site, a content-moderation dashboard to manually approve or reject Webmentions from unknown source.

Before I built Haven, I tried to build a private blog on Wordpress. I locked down self-signups with various plugins and I still had to wade through automated spam signup attempts (which were presumably hitting an exposed API directly) every day. Based on that experience, I don’t even think that requiring manual approval of Webmention replies would be a great solution. It improves the reading experience for people who visit your site, but forces you as the site owner to do a lot more work curating responses.

So what is the solution? The people want comments! How do we give them comments?

The answer is two-fold, and it depends on what kind of posting you do. For very popular publishers, or news organizations that really want to engage with the public in their writing, something like Webmentions would be fine, but the publisher needs to devote the effort to curating the responses. A great example of this is Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten. He allows open comments on his posts which he moderates heavily. A little while after a post, he will often make a separate post with highlights from the comments. Engaging with an unauthenticated public community is a lot of work and we shouldn’t be satisfied with publishers who add a comment box without actually engaging with their audience.

For the rest of us who publish socially, I don’t really believe in public comments. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise, I built Haven because I don’t really believe in public posting in a social context to begin with. But, we can have something much more interesting. When you post on your Haven or any other private blog, that post only goes to people who have access to your Haven–your friends and family. The most interesting conversations that I have about what’s going on in the world are conversations with (surprise!) my friends and family. What if Haven and other social feed readers let you make comments on public posts, but only shared those comments with people on your Haven. Now we have private conversations about public content. That is the vision I have for comments on Haven.

Just to be clear, this doesn’t exist yet in Haven–it is still a vision, but one I’m really excited about! Today you can let your visitors comment on your own Haven posts, and you can make a post with a link to some public post to talk about it; but these features aren’t built into the reader to make them a pleasure to use.

So that’s it! I’m down on Webmentions because their success and popularity will destroy their usability thanks to spam, but a similar model that enables private discussion on public content–right in your feed–could be a real game changer in how we interact socially on the internet.

The Lie That Facebook Sold You

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What is Facebook?

For a tool that so many people use every day, the answer is surprisingly difficult to pin-down. It’s a social network, which means it’s about connecting you to other people. You have friends on Facebook, and it helps you keep in touch with those people. You get to see what they are up to and they get to see what you are up to. Right?

Wrong.

Facebook should be those things. It used to and it even pretends to still be those things–but it isn’t. That’s the lie that gets you in the door, and then Facebook uses every nasty trick it can to do one thing: keep you scrolling. As long as you’re scrolling you’re looking at Facebook ads. As long as you’re scrolling, your likes and even the pauses while you read something are signaling to Facebook what is engaging to you and might be engaging to someone else–so that they will keep scrolling, and looking at ads. Over the last quarter of 2021, Facebook made over $60 per user In the US and Canada¹.

Keeping up-to-date with your friends just doesn’t keep you scrolling long enough to show you that many ads. Once you are on Facebook, it becomes a game of attention. That means the competitors to Facebook aren’t other (potential) social networks. They are the competitors for your online time: Youtube, TikTok, Netflix, Twitter, etc. TikTok is a hit because it has an algorithm that is so well-tuned to feed people things that will keep them scrolling–and the future of Facebook looks a lot like TikTok.

This leaves an open question: how do you keep in touch with your friends online? Can we build a safe space which serves that need without falling down the rabbit hole of fighting for engagement? For example, your email doesn’t fight for your engagement. You read your emails and get caught up–and then move on with your day.

In the early web, there was a problem. Lots of people and companies ran websites and you as a user wanted to see the updates from all of these sites. You could keep a list of bookmarks, and each day check every site for new updates, or you could use RSS. RSS was a tool for aggregating updates from many different websites. RSS was built right into all of the major browsers, as central a feature as the bookmark. Unfortunately, RSS wasn’t very good at tracking users or delivering ads so it was slowly removed from all the major browsers. However, most web sites and blogs still serve RSS, and you can even use it for private things!

All of this means that RSS is an amazing tool for curating your own feed of information, and that’s why Haven uses RSS as the core means to connect between Havens. The Haven Reader gives you the power to build your own feed from all the public websites and blogs you want to follow, and also follow your friends and family who write on their own Havens. All without anyone tracking you around the web or serving your ads. With Haven, you are in control because you run your own site.

Google used to have a guiding principle, “Don’t be evil.” As the company has grown and it has become more ambitious, it dropped that principle. The incentives for any company are to make money. For a company that runs a social network, that means exploiting users for their information and attention. That’s why Haven isn’t a company and you can’t just sign up in one place. Haven is software which is free, and which you can run anywhere you want. This keeps the incentives as pure as possible. Haven uses RSS–an open protocol–which means anyone else can write their own Haven-alternative and still share with all the people using Haven. The network is as big as the internet, it isn’t siloed off behind one company.

So take the next step. Explore one of the many ways you can run your own Haven and give it a try!

https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q4/Q4-2021_Earnings-Presentation-Final.pdf ↩

My Initial Thoughts on Bluesky's AT Protocol

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Bluesky is a project/company that came from somewhere inside of Twitter or Jack Dorsey. They’re moving forward with the idea that Twitter (or its replacement) should operate with an open protocol so that users can move between different hosting providers. Under this vision, Twitter would just be one provider but the protocol would be compatible with people who want to run their own servers and still tweet at each other.

I’m a big fan of open protocols, that’s a commitment I’ve made in building Haven on top of RSS. Bluesky decided to design their own protocol called AT, and shared an initial preview yesterday. I decided to write down some of my initial thoughts.

This is going to be a little bit of a technical post, so if that isn’t as interesting to you I’ll lead off with my general conclusion. Open protocols are great! If Twitter was built on something like this, then Haven could let you follow people on Twitter. That said, building a new protocol from scratch instead of working with an existing protocol community (like ActivityPub) means we fracture the ways that systems can talk to each other.

Account mobility is hard. In this case it means having an identifier that your friends can use to find you no matter where you live. Imagine having an email address that you could move from Gmail to Yahoo Mail to Outlook, and all the emails would keep reaching you. That’s the goal here. And it’s a good goal! Account migration is one of the big missing pieces in Haven, but even when it’s ready, you’ll have problems if you can’t bring your domain with you. Bluesky defines a Distributed Identifier (DID) as an abstraction layer that lets you point to wherever you live right now. Neat idea, but we’ll see if it works out.

If your account is mobile, then you need a way to prove that you actually wrote things that seem to come from you. This is where cryptography comes in. Instead of just trusting whichever server your DID points to, each message is cryptographically signed with a secret key. As soon as we have cryptographic keys involved, any software gets much more complicated. In general I lead towards signing as few things as possible. In AT, I think they expect users to provide their signing keys to the hosting provider directly, which misses a lot of the value you get from having a user sign their own messages. But key management is hard and I don’t expect most users to do it right (I haven’t even figured out how I would do it right!) Haven uses domain as ID, and SSL as the only cryptography. SSL certificates can be reissued as needed, so there is no need for long-term key management. If we get to a place where everyone has and controls their own domain, then we don’t need an abstraction layer or extra cryptography–your domain is the authoritative source for what you did or did not say.

AT defines a new remote-procedure-call format, which they call XRPC. It seems like this is mostly HTTPS/REST with built-in schema migrations. Schema migrations are important for a versioned API that can evolve, but this is already a solved problem with things like gRPC or Avro before it. Maybe they thought that an HTTPS and JSON API would be easier to build against but it seems like an unnecessary extra layer to reinvent.

On the whole there is a lot of good stuff, but I worry about the ability for it to stay an open standard. Today Google has dominant browser market share with Chrome, so they get to dictate new web standards just by building them into Chrome. If Bluesky is the behemoth using the AT Protocol and there are a few smaller groups also offering hosting, they might always be struggling to keep up with protocol changes that get forced into the ecosystem. But even that would be better than locked down APIs that prevent you today from reading Twitter unless you’re on the Twitter website or App.

Haven is now available on PikaPods

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You might have noticed a new “Run on PikaPods” button in the Haven Readme file.

PikaPods is a company that offers very economical paid hosting for open source projects like Haven. As of today, if you sign up with PikaPods you get a free $5 credit without needing to add a credit card. PikaPods only charges $1.64 per month to run your Haven, so you get 3 months free to try out Haven before you have to start paying! In this post, we’ll talk about how to setup your own Haven on PikaPods.

Before we get started, I want to talk about what it means to run a Haven. Your Haven is yours, it is your own site. You have an account on your Haven and you create accounts for your friends and family on your Haven. All of those accounts are only for your Haven. PikaPods is a hosting provider. You can pay them to host (or run) a Haven for you. To do that you need an account with PikaPods. The PikaPods account is different than your Haven account. You have to sign up with PikaPods to use PikaPods and you use your PikaPods account to create a new Haven, or to pay them, or to shut down your Haven. You use your Haven account to sign into and use your Haven.

Now, go ahead and click on that green “Run on PikaPods” button. It will bring you to the PikaPods website where you need to register for a PikaPods account.

Click the “register” button to create your PikaPods account, or simply log in if you’ve already created an account. Once you’re logged in, you can create a new Pod to run your Haven. The new pod page looks like this:

Your app is “Haven”, and you can name your Pod. With PikaPods you might run multiple different pods, for example you might run another Haven for a friend. The Pod name helps you to keep track of which Pod is which. Before clicking that “ADD POD” button, we need to do one more thing, add the account information for your Haven account. We do that on the “ENV VARS” tab on the left.

Here you enter the login information you want to use for your account on your Haven. Enter your email (Haven never sends any emails) and pick a password. Once your Haven is running, you will use this email and password to log in to it. Now you can click the “ADD POD” button and wait a couple minutes for your pod to start up. Once it is ready you’ll see information about your pod, along with a “OPEN POD” link to visit your new Haven for the first time!

Click that “OPEN POD” link and you’ll be on your new Haven’s login screen. Login with the email and password you setup for your Haven and you’re all set! Congratulations on your new Haven!