Decentralised social media by and for the people

“We need to stop looking for heroes and instead look for communities,” explains Cohort 2 Fellow, Evan Henshaw-Plath, though most of the technological world has long identified him/them by the single-word moniker, Rabble.

“It’s not Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not Elon Musk. They’re myth-made heroes. No one invented Twitter. A group of people in a larger community of people thinking about these ideas together created Twitter.” Indeed, Rabble played a pivotal role in the inception of Twitter as the first employee and lead architect/developer at podcasting pioneer, Odeo, a seminal part of the community that ultimately created Twitter.

“I’m a software developer, hacker and political activist who grew up in northern California. I started programming at like 5 years old and dropped out of high school to start working in Silicon Valley at 16, briefly went to college and then dropped out again, founded a calendering company and sold it at 20 years old before spending 4 or 5 years travelling all around the world setting up computer labs for activist groups... I’m now based in Uruguay with my family until the borders reopen and I can get back to Aotearoa.”

Rabble has always been interested in the intersection between tech start-ups and activism, they say. “The start-up world has an idea that it and software engineers have ethics. But we need to do a much better job of thinking through the ethical implications of the technologies we’re building and what we choose to work on... Radio gave us fascism, for instance. Without the radio, no one would have ever heard Hitler and Mussolini speeches. The challenge now is to design the radios of the 21st century, who gets them and what they get to listen to.”

Technology is not going to solve our societal problems on its own, they say. “We need to build it so that people can collectively solve the problems of the world.” It is this ethics and activism space that has shaped Rabble’s work for decades, and they are now tackling the current and future challenges of social media with Planetary, a new social media app built on the idea of protocols, not platforms. Users own their own digital identities and social relationships and the content they see is curated based on those digital communities, not algorithms.

“I am firmly of the belief that what we’re constructing in social media is a digital equivalent of the constructed world in which we live. Buildings and cities and roads: these architectural structures shape the kinds of social interactions we are able to have in them. We need to construct digital tools and digital spaces that encourage the kinds of pro-social behaviour that we want to see in the digital world. We need a public sphere that is governed as a commons with collective governance of unknown spaces... I should note that we govern all sorts of things by commons; the misconception of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a neo-liberal myth created by a racist, neo-Nazi eugenicist with no basis in fact. It’s an ideological statement which enforces a belief in private ownership, despite considerable evidence that other ownership models can work just as well or better.”

Planetary, Rabble says, is a potentially revolutionary social media app that inverts the relationship to the provider. Users’ data and social relationships exist on their own devices which directly connect to their friends, allowing all of the same kinds of posting and sharing activities they’re likely used to, but with a digital world view that is subjective. “You see yourself, your friends and their friends. The content you post can be encrypted or publicly posted. There is no flat public sphere. Basically the idea is to invert the cloud so that everyone has a little part of it on their device in a peer-to-peer, decentralised network. The goal is to change the power dynamics around who can say what and who decides who’s in what community.”

The idea of Planetary came to fruition only after they joined the EHF community, Rabble says, due in large part to their discovery of a New Zealand-based decentralised protocol called Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB). “It was interesting,” they say, “but it reminded me of Bitcoin. A normal person doesn’t use Bitcoin. The same way a normal person doesn’t use Linux. So I went to the Scuttlebutt developers and suggested using this technology that they’d been building for something a bit more mainstream. Something that someone who was used to using Instagram or Twitter could find in their app store, install, find communities and post stuff without any need to understand how the underlying technology works.”

After 2 1/2 years of development, Planetary is now live as of early 2021 with some promising uptake already. Half of installers are using it every day with many interacting for more than an hour each day, a promising trend which has impressed even Rabble and his team. But, of course, the obstacles for a new social media alternative can seem nearly insurmountable.

“You make exponentially more money if you own the digital shopping mall, so it’s extremely difficult to convince potential funders to give you the resources you need to build technology for an ecosystem that you’re not trying to control... The industry has also already spent hundreds of billions of dollars on cloud infrastructure with technology that focuses on cheap and easy centralised systems that collect all your data and perform machine learning on it to then modify your experience. When you want to design a system that prioritises privacy and provides good tools to self-design your own interaction model – rather than handing over all of your personal information – there’s a lot of additional, difficult technological work you have to do around decentralised systems and protocols.

“And then you need to somehow convince people to actually use these systems, bearing in mind that no one uses Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or Twitter because of the way those technologies work. Nor are you using them because of who the company is, how the technology is governed or the level of privacy they offer you. You use them because of your social relationships with other people using them.”

The solution, Rabble says, is powerful storytelling. “Trying to sell people on the technology or convince them with evidence alone just doesn’t work. The hardest thing is wanting to make the argument that what you’re offering is better and tell them how it works, but knowing that people’s minds just don’t work like that. Everyone makes this mistake. Everyone who does fact checking or who is concerned about conspiracy theories or who’s engaged in activism makes this mistake.

“We construct our world through stories and we construct our stories and meaning through our relationships with other people. So, unless you can build stories that make sense to people through human relationship and connection, no one will make the switch.”

It all comes back to the design of the systems and software, Rabble says. “I want to design social software that is about connection and changing the world. The way to make that happen is to design it in a way that encourages stories, human connection and shared context and history. When I think now about Twitter, I liken it to the ultimate dive bar that 300 million people are in at the same time. It’s cool, there’s amazing people, the hip shit is totally going on there. But everyone is yelling at each other and no one can hear anything over the music. It’s a mess because of collapsing contexts. There’s no space by which you can define a community of people and create boundaries around that community through which others outside that community can’t just inject themselves into that dialogue. A good way to think of Planetary is like a group email to your friends. You can discuss topics and people outside of that email community without pulling your community into theirs.”

Planetary is gaining traction since its launch last month but Rabble’s challenges continue with pathways for additional funding and how to structure the business model moving forward. “I just always have to ask myself what is the most effective thing I could be doing to make change in the world. Sometimes that’s going off on your own, sometimes it’s being an activist and protesting with a collective, sometimes it’s working within an existing corporate structure.”

If Planetary can secure some much-needed investment for its next phase, Rabble hopes to build out the web and Android versions and to upgrade the peer-to-peer technology in the back-end. They want to develop the ability for creators to charge for content, enabling them to support themselves on an open platform and build an audience. Rabble also wants to continue supporting and championing the Scuttlebutt community in New Zealand by highlighting other SSB initiatives like Āhau, a digital platform for whānau-based communities.

They are eager to get back to New Zealand later this year to continue their work on big change through digital communities from Aotearoa and with the wider EHF community. “The idea that it’s individuals that make changes in the world is somewhat flawed. We make things, we come up with ideas, we make paradigm shifts and we change the world collectively.”

Learn more about Planetary here and download Planetary for Apple here.

To connect with Evan/Rabble, visit his/their website here.