Self-Hosted Social Media?

I've been thinking about how a self-hosted social media platform would work. Think of something like Twitter, Facebook or Path on your own server.

The thing is, those sites aren't just publishing tools. They're communication networks. Users flock to them because their family & friends are there, and there's zero resistance or lag in sharing and communicating with others.

The trade-off for painless publishing and sharing is having commercially-driven enterprises responsible for your data and the transmission tools. Once you pull those tools onto your own server, you fragment the network and the timeline. You add resistance to others' ability to consume or respond to your content.

So you'd need an app, presumably mobile, that would let you follow friends' social URLs just as you do their accounts on a given social network. You'd want one party issuing the hosted web app, which you'd install on your own web server, and the mobile consumption/publishing app, so that things would still be seamless. That party would, however, not have access to your data or the ability to shut down the network, whether deliberately or through negligence.

Think of it as a Twitter, Facebook or Path app on your iPhone that publishes updates directly to an API on your own web server, while also consuming feeds from friends' servers, merging everything into one timeline. It would have to be easy to install & configure, support pushing updates to existing networks, and be able to pull conversations--replies, mentions--into threads on your server.

Why the effort? You could integrate your content into your own publishing platform. You could stop worrying about privacy controls and having your life mined for marketing and advertising revenue. You could also avoid watching it all go up in flames if the platform du jour shuts its doors. Zeldman:

But there is another piece of this which no one is discussing and which I now address specifically to my colleagues who create great digital content and communities:

Stop selling your stuff to corporate jerks. It never works. They always wreck what you’ve spent years making.

In light of the threat of SOPA, power-user displeasure with "new new Twitter", Gowalla going under, Facebook's constant tinkering with privacy and unquenchable thirst for ad revenue and profit, it's something to consider.