Introduction

The abundance of social networks poses questions regarding their similarities and differences to identify redundancies, but potentially also missing services in the social network landscape.

Similarities

Social networks have the basic feature in common of connecting people via electronic channels.

Communication can be based on one or more of the following basic types of media:

• text (with varying character count per post)
• image
• audio (live, recorded)
• video (live, recorded)

At present, most social networks allow sending all types of media although there are differences in the preference and usability of these types of media, for example:

• text, e.g. E-mail, IRC
• image, e.g. Instagram
• audio, e.g. Spotify
• video, e.g. TikTok, YouTube, PeerTube

Differences

Social networks can be differentiated based on the following features.

Objective of Communication:

• Publicity, e.g. X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Privacy, e.g. Signal, Telegram, Wired

Object of Interest:

• Event, e.g. phone call, concert, hiking trip on Meetup, Mobilizon
  Note: I classified also classic phone calls here, because all participants must be on the call at the same time to communicate, although answering machine may also allow delayed communication.
• User-focused
  • recipient-focused (downstream), eg send (push) message to selected friends (Email, SMS)
  • sender-focused (upstream), eg retrieve (follow) messages from selected influencers (x.com)
• Channel (topic), e.g. discuss programming, knitting between peers (Slack, Mattermost or IRC)

Note: While user-based networks, e.g. X.com, allow reposting of messages, which can go “viral”, ie cascading through the social network, channel-based networks, e.g. WhatsApp, do not allow “re-posting”. Here, even “cross-posting” to other channels is often discouraged, eg to avoid engaging multiple advanced users to answer a technical question in parallel, thereby, using their time ineffectively. While in recipient-focused networks users select recipients they want to send information to (downstream), in sender-focused networks users select the senders (influencers) the want to receive information from (upstream).

Identifiability of the Agents:

• non-identifiable, i.e. anonymous, single-use (“burner”) user/nick name, e.g. abc123
• partially identifiable, i.e. user name which is identifiable for an in-group, e.g. first name or known characteristic, e.g. TommyMusicBerlin
• fully identifiable, i.e. First Name and Last Name, Personal Foto

Note: I assume, that any person can be identified with sufficient motivation and resources.

Directionality of Communication:

• asymmetric: Communication is asymmetric if the sender has more permissions (fewer constraints) than the receivers.
• symmetric: Communication is symmetric if senders and receivers have the same permissions (constraints) to post messages.

Potential Permissions/Constraints:

• Limits for sender, e.g. types of media, character limit, types of replies
• Limits for receiver, e.g. types of media, character limit, types of replies

Examples:

• If in a moderated channels receivers can only read posts, but cannot reply or only reply with a reaction (“like”).
• YouTube or PeerTube allows the sender to publish videos, but only textual comments or reactions as a response.

Level of Encryption:

• unencrypted, e.g. plain text messages
• encrypted, e.g. using various encryption technologies, such as TLS, PGP, Bluefish, OTR, OMEMO, …
  • client-to-server/server-to-client
  • client-to-client (end-to-end, E2E)

Level of Privacy:

• private
  • sender-selected receivers, e.g. invited by moderator
  • receiver-selected receivers, e.g. invited by group members
• public
  • accessible to accepted receivers (followers) only
  • accessible to all receivers (followers)
  • accessible to all users of social network, e.g. on X/Twitter
  • accessible to all users of the internet, e.g. search machines

Note: I have distinguished between Level of Encryption and Level of Privacy, because encrypted messages may not be private if the sender cannot select the receivers and verify their identities, e.g. if anyone can join a Telegram channel any encrypted messages may not be considered private.

Level of System Integrity:

• easy to compromise, e.g. unencrypted email via open WIFI
• difficult to compromise, e.g. end-to-end encrypted message via VPN tunnel

Type of Architecture:

• Centralized, e.g. most proprietary networks
• Closed-federated, i.e. federation on server-level, ie users can communicate with any other user hosted on servers of the same federation (e.g. IRC server networks such as libera.chat)
• Open-federated, i.e. federation on user-level, ie users can communicate with any other user hosted on any other server using the same protocol, e.g. E-mail (SMTP/IMAP), MASTODON (Activity Pub), Jabber (XMPP), …

Separation of social network and user data:

• User ownership of data (incl network of followers): e.g., Bluesky (Personal Data Server), Mastodon (Personal data can be move from one server to another server including privately hosted server)
• Corporate ownership of data (including using data to train algorithms and sharing/selling user data to third parties), e.g. Facebook, Twitter/X, most corporate networks