The Path to Freedom
We are on the Oregon Trail of a new social experience
The challenge in starting something new is that most people have a bias against change unless (a) peer pressured, (b) required to use, or (c) it becomes a path to freedom. The golden ticket is a combination, at least two out of the three.
We started to engineer a solution to freedom from legacy social back in May of 2021, before Zuck went Full Meta Jacket, Jack flipped The Bird for Bluesky, and Elon became Chief Twit.
We are not special, many thought experiments have come before us: Lens Protocol (compostable identity), Mastodon (privacy), Blurt (creator economics), Aether (privacy + administration), and Diaspora (privacy) to name a handful, but step inside any of them and you will find mechanics held over from the incumbent ideologies.
How is Shill different?
We have redesigned the social architecture based on a complete philosophy
We are not trying to build our own social, instead we are enabling anybody to license the architecture for their own feeds, i.e. social software as a service.
Existing Social Architecture
We consider the five fingers of the existing social economy:
Ownership: accounts owned by the platform and access rented to the user, with data sold, surveilled, and exploited with zero permission from the account renter.
Authority: ToS only read by 1% and updated on a political whim, black-box algorithms, shadow bans, and similar subtle or overt censorship from the top-down that dictates the nature of the user experience.
Voice: forced loyalty and the explicit non-ability to meaningfully improve or safely exit the system through proposals or emigration with one’s social assets/collateral.
Reciprocity: the violation of relationship norms due to absence of obligatory reciprocity (I like/follow you, but you don’t have to like/follow me); leading to engagement farming and exasperated social inequality.
Action: atomization of action through normalization of individual-only modes of behavior that invariably produce echo chambers and exasperate social divisions.
Each of these points can be imagined to exist on an axis with all of the current networks designed to an extreme negative.
Social Software as a Service
Our mission is to free your feed from exploitative relationships in order to enable new and tailored forms of social participation. With Shill, users license the below architecture to spin-up their own feeds.
Independent Ownership: absolute privacy and complete ownership of all of the data, users, and social activities on your decentralized network.
Full Control: self-governance of ToS, algorithms, and moderation behaviors.
Active Voice: regular capability for users to update values, algorithms, and reciprocity mechanics according to achievement of consensus (“social DAO”).
High Reciprocity: automatic reciprocity and recognition of the value of user generated content through distribution of social currency to all members.
Collective Action: establishment of voluntary interoperability with other independent networks to coalesce around common goals and language.
In our opinion, what wins the next iteration of the web are custom social experiences that facilitate the development of human potential through participation in self-owned applications that provide access to bottom-up modes of authority, highly reciprocal relationships, active voice, and collective action.