What is OpenCola?
OpenCola is:
- A Company: OpenCola is a non-profit company that producess free
and open source software for public benefit.
- A Set of Values: We value transparency, accountability, personal control and security
and aim to maximize trust by maximizing these values. Futhermore,
we believe that these values are essential to individual freedom.
- A Toolkit: OpenCola is a toolkit that
enables people to create trust networks. It is
designed to be an alternative to big tech that puts you in control of your personal data and
allows you to shape the flow of information around you.
- An Application: The first application we have built is a collaborative media tool
that allows you to save and share links as well as create organic
posts. It looks a lot like exisitng social media, but addresses the long list of
trust issues that current applications have created.
Overall, OpenCola is a reaction to the current state of the Internet, where a
small number of companies has extracted,
captured and exploited the value of our personal data and relationships. It
represents a paradigm shift in how we think about the Internet, by inverting
the current power structure, putting you and your community in control. We believe that this is more
in line with the original vision of the Internet as an environment where everyone
can participate and benefit equally.
Where do I get the application?
Sounds great, but what does OpenCola actually do?
As mentioned above, the first application we built is a collaborative media tool
that can be thought of as an alternative to big tech social media. The feed looks like:
On top of providing you with similar features to existing social applications,
OpenCola offers the following benefits:
-
Local First Data: You decide where your data lives, which by default is
on your device. And you can collect data from existing sites and applications.
-
Personal Search: Everything you and your peers post is available through
search.
-
Personal Archive: The things you save get archived so that you can
access them later, even when offline.
-
Personas: People express themselves differently depending on the
audience. Existing social media generally ignores this distinction.
OpenCola provides personas that allow you to express yourself in a more
authentic fashion because you are in full control of the audience that
you’re interacting with. You can share with and talk to your friends
differently than you share with and talk to your family or your work
colleagues. This means you aren’t forced to communicate to “the lowest
common denominator” of people you’re connected to.
-
Trusted Connections: With OpenCola, you don’t need to reveal that you exist
to anyone, except the people you trust and want to interact with. You can
connect with someone just by exchanging a token using Email, SMS, Chat, etc.
This means that unless you allow it, there are no bots, scammers, trolls,
ads, algorithms, or 3rd party intermediary manipulation. For those that want
to be public, we will support a registration server at a later phase.
-
Information Centricity: Existing social media is designed to maximize personal
celebrity vs. engaging in shared conversation. If two people share the same
web link or story, they may never know each other has shared it, and all
activity accumulates separately. With OpenCola, activity around shared posts
/ links is aggregated, allowing for collaboration to grow around ideas.
-
Community Moderation: Information only flows when you make the decision to
save it, not because an algorithm thinks it will generate activity. You can
also mark information as untrusted which can be used by your peers as a
filter or as warning to help your peers navigate unknown information /
sources.
What do you mean by trust?
OpenCola is built to maximize trust in the following dimensions:
- Transparency: People need to see and understand the motives,
intentions, and actions of others in order to trust them. This type of
visibility is essential in empowering people to make informed decisions
about how to interact with other people, companies or applications. With OpenCola, everything is
transparent - the code, the people you interact with and where information comes from.
- Accountability: People need to take responsibility for their actions and
decisions in order to be trusted, which requires negative consequences for bad
behavior. With OpenCola, those that abuse trust lose influence in the network and
cannot regain influence without regaining trust.
- Personal Control: People need control over how they interact with each
other, how they use an application, and how information about them is used. With OpenCola, people have
maximal control over their experience.
- Security: People need assurances that a bad actor can’t pretend to be
someone they aren’t or access information in an unauthorized manner. With OpenCola, cryptographic
techniques are used to verify identity, ensure data integrity and keep information private.
Each of these principles is largely minimized by companies whose objective is to maximize profit. These
trust principles also serve to enable freedom in a number of ways that are essential to a healthy society:
- Freedom of Identity: People have complex identities and interact with different people in
different ways. OpenCola lets you create personas that are connected to different groups of people,
allowing you to be more authentic, avoiding the "lowest common denominator" behavior of other social
applications.
- Freedom of Association: With OpenCola, you can interact with whomever you like as well as exclude
anyone that has violated your trust. And because there is no incentive to maximize engagment, you will
never be suggested connections, which can lead to unintentionally connecting with malicious actors.
- Freedom from Manipulation: Scammers, trolls and bots do not have a viable way to get into your
network, so cannot influence you for their benefit. In addition, the algorithms that
companies use to optimize for engagement for advertising are blind to the harms they
cause through promoting unhealthy and untrustworthy content. OpenCola puts people, who can make
appropriate value judgements, in control of what information gets shared.
- Freedom from Surveillance: Only people you trust see what you share, minimizing the opportuntiy
for a 3rd party collect your information.
- Freedom to walk away: OpenCola was designed to have minimal switching costs. Since you are in
full control of you data, you can disconnect the network and still use the application or your data in
any way you want.
So why should I trust OpenCola?
Fair question. We’ve all been burned too many times. Companies have been
telling us what trust is and that we should just trust them for a long
time.
The above trust principles guide how we operate and what we build. That
is why we are a non-profit company, our code is open source that you are
free to modify to best fit your needs, and your data is not visible to
us. We can never extract the value of your networks or information and
exploit it for profit, nor can anybody else (unless that’s what you
want).
In order to make things easy to use, we provide some centralized
services, but we provide you the means to run everything on your own.
OpenCola is also free, in the freedom sense - you can take what you
like, modify it, sell it, and we can never take it away. It will run as
long as your device operates.
We believe that true competition requires competition of incentive
models. We reject the belief that obscene corporate profit equals
consumer good. We are guided by maximizing trust rather than
seeking metastasized growth to satisfy investors and shareholders.
How does OpenCola address issues created by social media?
-
Information Silos: Big tech
wants your data to be locked into their platforms so that
it’s hard for you to leave. This means that you can’t use your
data for any purpose other than what companies allow you to do
with it. With OpenCola, your data lives wherever you choose, on
your local device by default. You are essentially “always
migrated”, so there is no switching cost. You can use any
application on top of your data.
-
The Attention Economy: Most big tech companies make money off
advertising which means they make more money by keeping
you trapped in their products. OpenCola does not operate on an
ad model, nor does it have any incentive to keep you locked in.
-
Privacy abuse: Your personal data and activity is valuable, which is why
it is often sold, without your knowledge or permission
, infringing on your
basic freedoms. With OpenCola, your private data is encrypted and not
visible to the platform, so your privacy can’t be abused.
-
Corporate concentration of wealth / power: When corporations get big,
they use their power in ways to suppress competition as well as
change their policies in opaque ways that are hard for everyday
people to understand
.
OpenCola provides an alternative to these products that can counteract this
abuse of power.
-
Misinformation: Misinformation is fueled by algorithms
promoting content that generates activity for the benefit of
ad driven business models as well as
parties seeking to manipulate belief. Information in the OpenCola network is traceable
so those spreading bad information can be held to account by being
cut off, resulting in a loss of influence. In addition, information
only flows when someone trusts it enough to save it for themself.
Lastly, information can also be marked as untrusted which helps
peers avoid it.
-
Polarization: Emotion, especially negative emotion, drives engagement but
also drives people apart . Since OpenCola is not concerned about engagement, there are no
algorithms that promote sensational content.
-
Stifled Innovation: Big tech focuses on features that
generate revenue, and often leads to situations like
having to pay to remove features. With
OpenCola, anybody can modify the application to suit their needs, and
valuable features that don’t necessarily generate revenue can be offered.
-
Bots: Since big tech companies are centralized, they are
easy targets for those that wish to manipulate information flow,
for profit or for power,
which results in harm to the people using these systems. Because OpenCola connections are based
on trust, it is not
practical for bots to impact your network.
Who are you, and why are you building OpenCola?
We are people that are tired of the state of the Internet and would like
to help fix it, because it’s a problem worth solving, even if we don’t
make loads of money doing so. The founders of OpenCola all worked at the
original
OpenCola, founded in 1999, which was building something similar in
spirit, but was unfortunately too far ahead of its time. We’ve all
gained a lot of experience and seen what the Internet has become and
would like to do what we can to steer it in the right direction.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you stop bad people from using OpenCola?
We don’t. Anything we do to monitor or control activity requires
invading privacy and undermines our trust values. Every technology
has unintended consequences. The Internet enables bad things, but if
you’re reading this, then you’re using it, despite the fact that
people can do bad things with it, likely because you believe that it
brings more good than harm. Similarly, we believe that the world is
better with OpenCola than without it, even if people use it in ways
that we don’t support.
Does OpenCola address “Filter Bubbles”?
Yes and no. Since people, rather than algorithms, control the flow
of information, algorithmic filter bubbles are not an issue. But
people have their own biases and preferences, which can also lead to
filter bubbles as well as “echo chambers”. These are social, not
technical issues, that we believe cannot be fixed by forcing people
to consume information that they disagree with. Who or what would
even decide what people should see? Certainly not us. We believe
that the trust environment provided by OpenCola, which is less
polarized, is more likely to open minds than anything offered by ad
driven, for profit companies or any algorithmic / technological
solution.
How do you connect with people you don’t know?
Traditional social media has a loose trust model, which allows
people to connect with or follow other people with little or no
permission required. With OpenCola, because we’re focused on trusted
connections, currently both ends of a connection need to agree to
share information. As publishing is a useful activity, though, we
intend to support a publisher model, where you can create personas
that can be connected to by anyone.
While technically simple, the question then becomes should we
support searching for publishers? This opens the door to
verification problems, so we think publishers would need to
communicate their ids outside of OpenCola, like you do today when
sharing an email address or any other social media id. OpenCola
could then just host (cryptographically) verified details about
publishers, including where information posted by the publisher can
be retrieved.