There are a lot of problems with how we currently receive information and ideas. In the modern Internet where most information and ideas are exchanged on platforms optimized for entertainment and retention, we have a system that is not especially effective at delivering news that is trustworthy, authentic, relevant, and actionable. We need one that can, because a system would enhance our ability to bond with each other and protect each other. Such a system must optimize for trust, proximity, and accountability instead of attention, engagement, and advertiser penetration.

What I propose to meet this need is a mesh network paired with network-based reputation systems. I’ll call it “mesh media” for short. Allow me to break down what this would actually look like.

Caveat emptor

Mesh media is not intended to compete with or supplant “social media”. It is meant for delivering news that spurs people to take action in the real world: to meet with others, to avoid danger, to claim resources, to make plans. It can be used for fun, but it’s not designed for entertainment.

How would “mesh media” work?

Let’s start with an idealized version.

In mesh media, there is no centralized server. When someone publishes something, it is broadcast to their peers using long-range (1-10km, sub-GHz) radio. When your device receives the post, it decides how to handle it based on its score. There’s a few things that go into the score.

• Reputation of the author: If you’ve indicated that this account generally publishes info that is trustworthy, authentic, relevant, and actionable (so you’ve given the author a positive score), then the post will have a positive base score. The base score can also be negative if you dislike the author.
• Reputations of the forwarders: If the post is reaching you by being forwarded via someone else, the reputation you’ve assigned to the forwarder will bias the score.
• Endorsement from your peers: If your friends have scored either the author or the post itself, this will bias the score.

Once a post is in your inbox, you can reply to it with your own post and/or give it a reaction. Your reaction will bias the final score of the post, as well as the perceived score for your friends.

Examples of what this could look like

• Your pastor has put out a post announcing a charity basketball game. Your fellow church-goers responded positively, and your pastor never spams the inbox. You get a push notification, and the post quickly spreads to everyone in your church and a few friends of the church.

• An acquaintance you met in school has reposted a post about the dangers of a certain pharmaceutical. You’ve never heard of the original poster, and you don’t know whether the acquaintance who reposted it is smart or not. One of your friends thinks this acquaintance is a moron, so the post appears hidden towards the bottom of your inbox. You downvote it because it’s not even relevant to you.

• There’s a pop-up in your neighborhood where they’re selling apple cider donuts for $1. You don’t know any of the people running the pop-up, but the post was endorsed by an account that you do know that aggregates events in your area.

• A car crash happened on I-405. You live in NYC and do not own a car, so posts from the California Department of Transportation are not relevant to you (even though there’s nothing wrong with them). This post never makes it out of California because it’s not relevant anywhere else.

• Men in masks have appeared at the residence of a friend of a friend. You don’t know this person personally, but they’re really important to your friend, and if enough people show up, the men in the masks will back down. Nearly half of your mutual friends have endorsed the post and begun coordinating with each other. You get a push notification and the post quickly spreads through the community.

Side benefits

In addition to distributing news that is trustworthy, authentic, relevant, and actionable, mesh media would be very difficult to censor or surveil because it does not require any infrastructure and can be thoroughly encrypted. There is no choke point for the state to take hold of, and the trust-based nature of the medium means that it would be very expensive for external actors to insert themselves en masse.

Prior art and pushback

Aren’t you just designing echo chambers?

I tried to articulate this idea to a buddy, and the first thing he said in response was that echo chambers would be a huge problem with this idea. My response is that mesh media is a system for distributing news that is expected to be actionable, not a system for distributing ideas or entertainment. Echo chambers are harder to form as a result of going out and dealing with real people in the real world.

I can’t force people to use this tool the way I intend, but by designing a user interface that encourages actionability (ex.: are you posting an event, a notice, an SOS?), I can definitely nudge them in the right direction.

Aren’t you just designing an event aggregator?

Even though I’m a big proponent of going out and gathering with people, not every actionable piece of local news requires that you do this. Other examples of relevant and actionable local news:

• Information about where not to go (ex.: danger, too crowded)
• Announcements of achievements made by your community members (ex.: getting married, receiving an award, completing a project)
• Requests for general assistance (ex.: moving, building furniture, commissions)
• Requests for urgent assistance (ex.: injury, men in masks)
• Information about changes to rules or laws
• Information related to long-running games (ex.: assassin, intramural sports tournaments)

These types of notices are things that are not super well served by existing platforms (ex.: Instagram) unless you play the engagement-farming game. You shouldn’t need to be a “content creator” if you have information to share that is relevant to the people around you.

Aren’t you just designing Facebook groups?

I must admit that I’ve never used a Facebook group. I think most people my age don’t use them unless they’re the only way to achieve their goal. This is for a few reasons:

• Facebook isn’t cool. Facebook is for old people, Facebook steals your data, Facebook is clunky.
• Facebook groups don’t have a mechanism for filtering based on relevance, except for subdividing the group into smaller and smaller ones.
• Facebook groups exist on Facebook, which is designed for entertainment and engagement, not connection and utility.

What about Bluesky?

Bluesky’s focus on control over the feed makes it easy to remove antisocial/irrelevant people from your feed. However, it doesn’t make it especially easy to discover people that are relevant, and it has no emphasis on actionability. It is designed as a competitor to Twitter, which makes its use-case different from the use-case of mesh media.

What about Bitchat?

Bitchat does have an emphasis on geographic proximity in its chat system, and it even integrates mesh networking in its messaging transports. However, it is designed for anonymity and ephemerality, which contrasts with mesh media which is designed for trust and accountability. You would prefer Bitchat in situations where you don’t need to know who you’re dealing with, such as certain types of business transactions.

How are you going to beat the cold-start problem?

Mesh networking enables real-time IRL experiences that are fun and useful. For example, getting a notification when a friend happens to be nearby and you would’ve missed each other, or being able to track each other down in a huge crowd or a dense forest. Currently, my plan is to wrap this up like dog medicine wrapped in cheese. I pitch it based on the real-time experiences, which are engaging and which social media currently cannot compete with, and hope that people stay for the genuine utility and tranquility.

How is this going to make money?

Mesh media costs a lot less to operate than “social media” due to all of the computation and data transfer happening on end users’ devices and not on my servers. This makes the pressure to make money a lot less.

That being said, it still needs to make some money to remain solvent in the long term. I’m thinking about simply charging small transaction fees (after a generous free trial) to exchange information on the network using my software/hardware. If you don’t like it, you can switch to some other software/hardware that implements the protocol. But you probably won’t.