Something I don’t quite get about these new social networks that are clearly aimed at technical people: my model of a truly decentralized social network is more like a network of privately hosted personal websites, à la the original web. Not yet another platform I need to make an account to interact on separately.

Have there been any attempts to make more of a “network” that incentivizes operating personal websites but adds a mechanism for typical social media features like chat, a feed, etc. in a centralized way? The only thing I can think of is RSS, and that is only a way to follow content publication.

"Accounts" in this case are just a public/private key pair. You can host your own relay (and nobody will hear what you have to say unless they subscribe to it), but you can use the same public key ("account") on any nostr relay. You can broadcast your posts to all relays, or just some, or just your own, depending on how you feel.

You can, in theory, generate a new key for every post if you want to. The relays don't care.

This is something Mastodon etc. lacks (accounts are tied to servers, so you can't move your self-hosted Mastodon to your self-hosted Akkomo without keeping Mastodon running, and you can't move from one instance to another if your instance admin doesn't let you).

On the other hand, the complete lack of account recovery, even for sysadmins, is something many people will have an issue with.

That's more or less how nostr works, except instead of websites there are notes (a generic type which can be anything - including website content), and instead of servers there are 'relays'.

You might want to check out Really Simple Decentralized Syndication (RSDS) https://writer.did-1.com/

> more like a network of privately hosted personal websites

Can't monetize that.

Why do you say they're "clearly aimed at technical people"? Do you know the minds of people who created them?

This an interesting question. Forgive my meandering take on this.

We already have a mix of technologies to achieve that effect. Sort of. Simplified, you can host a personal website on shared hosting, a VPS, or wherever, at the same time chat via IRC or XMPP, and use RSS to create feeds to share tidbits about yourself. Nothing stops you from combining different programs and services to get that.

So, what are the problems you're actually trying to solve here?

Do you want to improve accessibility, that is: lower the bar for non-technical people to join feeds, publish their own thoughts, join group chats,...?

Do you want to improve discoverability across what we already have? Make it easier for everyone to serendipitous finding information? Like, search, recommendations, linking, pub/sub, and so on?

Do you want to solve sustainability? Developing models that also cover the expenses involved i.e. either covering the costs in maintaining tech, or redistributing the costs?

Do you want to solve governance, the issue of providing enough affordances to communities to moderate/govern themselves?

These are big questions, and once you try to solve them together, you'll have to make trade-offs, inevitably. Decentralizing everything sounds great, but that has an impact on discoverability, as well as accessibility. Not having another account sounds great, but that hides complex debates about online and offline, distributed identities.

Even more so, if you dig deeper, our approach these affordances is based on our values. And those can be very different depending on who you talk to. That's where things enter the murky, ambiguous teritory of sociology, culture, and so on where few absolute truths are offered.

That doesn't mean we should just accept throw up hands and accept the status quo, though. Talking in terms of a single "network" or a single "protocol" is too crude to approach these questions. The intrinsic value the Internet offers us, can be found in a handful foundational design principles like standardization, composition, openness,... which allow us to create many networks that host many diverse communities. Each to their own isn't a bad thing as it's too naive to think that there's a catch-all solution that caters to everyone's needs. Balkanization, such as it is, becomes really problematic if it erodes common beliefs we hold about a free, open and accessible digital global network.

Many "technical" people who are active in these niches like Mastodon, Nostr, the Fediverse, or even the Smolweb, do so because they are steeped in a particular (counter)culture that espouses the same values that also led to the birth of the early Internet. Cyberspace really is a marketplace of ideas first. Technologies are an expression of that.

IndieWeb?