aCosmicWave

I’ve been day dreaming about a social media platform built entirely on a peer-to-peer (P2P) model, leveraging the existing BitTorrent protocol. The idea is to decentralize content creation, distribution, and moderation, eliminating the need for centralized servers and control.

Here’s the high-level vision:

• Posts as Torrents: Every original post creates and seeds a torrent file on behalf of the OP.
• Upvotes as Seeds: Upvoting a post downloads and seeds the post, reinforcing its availability.
• Comments as Torrents: Each comment generates and seeds a torrent file somehow linked to the original post.
• Comment Upvotes as Seeds: Upvoting a comment downloads and seeds the comment, amplifying engagement.
• Text Only: to avoid exposing users to potentially graphic content (due to lack of centralized moderation) this platform would initially be limited to text content only. This would also drastically reduce the compute and bandwidth requirements of the seeder.
• Custom BitTorrent Clients: Open-source Social Media BitTorrent clients would display the most popular social media content by day, week, month, or year. These clients would allow users to seed only the content they find valuable thus organically moderating the network of ideas. Relevant content continues to be seeded and shared, while outdated or unpopular content fades due to a lack of seeds.

This setup seems like it could address key issues in traditional social media—privacy, censorship, and centralized control—while naturally prioritizing high-value content.

Why hasn’t a system like this been widely adopted? Is it a matter of technical limitations, lack of a viable economic model, or something else?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Something about those awkward hand gestures really gets me going.

People love to hate AI, but I think it's one of the most human inventions ever. The majority of my internal human experience already runs on autopilot.

The life-critical tasks have been outsourced to various biological systems.

My heart beats 24/7 without conscious effort, thanks to the cardiovascular system. Digestion? Handled seamlessly by another system. Breathing? Autopilot. I don’t have to remind myself to inhale and exhale. It just happens.

Even many of my own thoughts seem to appear out of nowhere—emerging from my subconscious or triggered by something around me.

Is it any wonder that, in one way or another, all human technologies strive to replicate this internal 'automation' in the external world?

To me, it’s a beautiful—if ultimately futile—attempt to harmonize our inner and outer realities.

As a kid, I learned to “pause” my true self. School was the pause, and my hobbies, dreams, and passions were the unpause—something I’d rush back to during lunch or after class.

Over time, the pauses got longer. Tiredness and responsibilities crept in, leaving little energy to unpause at the end of some days.

At work, sometimes the pressure and the demands were so relentless that I couldn’t unpause for weeks or months at a time.

Then came marriage, fatherhood, and the joy—and work—of raising a child.

I want my son to get to know the real me but I worry that by the time he is grown I won’t have any “self” to unpause to.

The kind of game you daydream about while at school or work because you can’t wait to come home and play some more.

When thinking about the most important moment(s) of your life, do you still feel the full range of emotion associated with that memory? What if you keep recalling the same memory many times, does the intensity of emotion fade?

I see the human organism as a layering of different levels of consciousness. Each layer supports mostly automated processes that sustain the layers beneath it.

For example, we have cells that only know what it’s like to be a cell and to perform their cellular processes without any awareness of the more complex layers above them. Organs are much more complex than cells and they perform their duties without any awareness of anything above them either. And the complexity keeps increasing with various systems like endocrine, cardiovascular, etc. Then we have our subconscious and finally our conscious.

At our level, we do not consciously control any of the layers beneath us. Our primary task is to keep our bodies alive.

This got me thinking… isn’t it a little too self aggrandizing to think that we have a near infinite layering of consciousness beneath us and then it just stops at our level of awareness? What if there is some other conscious process that exists above us within our own bodies?

When people take psychedelic drugs they often describe achieving a higher level of awareness akin to ecstasy. Well what if this layer is always there actively ”living” within us but we are just the chumps that go to work, do our taxes, and exercise, while it doles out just enough feel good chemicals to keep us going (sometimes not even that)?

Socrates bemoaned those young'ns who had the audacity to read their Homer, instead of memorizing it.

About 8 months ago I got pretty tired of seeing billionaire spam online. I could not bear to read about yet another rich guy who launched themselves (or their $200,000 car) into outer space 🚀 . I did not care about their expert opinion on the latest meme coin back then. I do not care about their expert opinion on the dangers of AI today.

So... I developed a tiny, free, and open source Firefox browser add-on called "Block the Rich". It is completely local and private. No data is tracked. No data is phoned home.

The concept is pretty simple: whenever I load a web page, the extension quickly analyzes the content and intelligently blurs out any references to the Forbes Top 10 Billionaires. Some former and wannabe billionaires are blurred out of courtesy as well (I'm looking at you Trump and Kanye 🙄).

This project is a very early prototype that I built in the span of a few days. I have so many awesome ideas for enhancements but the truth is that the wind got completely knocked out of my sails when I put myself out there on Reddit many moons ago. There was absolutely zero public interest. To this day my wife and I are the only ones using the original prototype.

People of Lemmy, do you think there is a place on the internet for such a project, or is it time that I let it go?

Edit: I am blown away by the support from you all. Thank you! I am so excited to start polishing this baby up!