A Communications Suite - Reimagining Federated Social Media
The more and more I research the state of social media, identity, authentication, and communications, the more I realize that it might be time to re-imagine the concepts behind communication, authentication, and federated social media.
An idea that has been floating around my head involves creating a new communication suite based on a variety of technologies, including new ones. It would include the following features:
- Identity Provider (OpenWebAuth, FedCM, LDAP, etc.)
- Federated Social Media (Zot/Nomad, ActivityPub, etc.)
- Decentralized Social Media (Twitter BlueSky, Matrix, etc.)
- Proprietary Social Media (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Chat Client (XMPP, Bonjour, ICQ, etc.)
- Website & Forums Notifications Client (RSS, Zot/Nomad, ActivityPub, etc.)
- Newsletter & Blog Subscriptions (RSS, Zot/Nomad, ActivityPub, etc.)
- Email Client (IMAP, Gmail, etc.)
- SMS Client
- Contact Management
- To Do List / Planner (including connecting messages with tasks)
- Calendar and Appointments (including optional method of booking appointments)
- Time Management (be able to filter conversations & bookmarks based on time block)
- Bookmarks Manager / Read Later Lists (to store research and information)
- Cloud Storage
- Nomadic Identity (and Cloning)
- Multiple Ways to Log In (FedCM, WebAuthn, Blockchain, etc,)
- Integrations (Project Management Software, Financial Software, Blockchain, etc.)
Oh, my goodness, this seems like a lot, but a lot of these are already in Hubzilla, and much of the rest could be added as addons. And code for a lot of this stuff already exists and would just need to be integrated. Although some of this stuff falls in the "wish list" category.
The To Do List / Planner and Contacts Management would be vital since a person could easily become overwhelmed by all of the communications they may receive. You could organize all of the messages by contact, by organization, by project, by task, by type, by tag, etc. You could set it up so that it does most of the sorting for you. For example, if you associated someone's email address, Hubzilla, and Twitter account with them in your Contacts, all of those messages from them would appear when looking at their profile in contacts.
The calendar and time management system would also be vital too because they would allow you to focus on specific tasks at specific times. For example, if from 2 pm to 5 pm, you are supposed to be working on building your website, it could suppress notifications for non-work-related stuff. You could still get to non-work-related stuff if you needed to, and you could allow messages from certain contacts to get through immediately, but all other notifications would be suppressed and the interface would be simplified to allow you to focus.
This is something that I would like to have for myself. I personally need a better way of managing messages and contacts, and it really gets annoying having to switch between platforms, or forgetting which platform a message is on. It would help keep me organized.
Some of the goals of the project:
- People can choose to self-host their identity or they can use a custodian (a public hub).
- Give smaller websites, communities, forums, and social media better footing, since they appear as equals in the user's communications software.
- Help people, including myself, deal with communications overload.
- It needs to be available for free to all, although I reserve the right to make money by offering a hosted version or operating a public hub.
