Yhoti – Your Home on the Internet

This website is (for now) a pitch for a saner social media platform. I know… you hear “social media” and you run screaming in the opposite direction! Me too! But hear me out…

Elevator Pitch (short version)

Yhoti believes that…

  1. The internet can be a vibrant place where small communities thrive without being dependent on Big Social.

  2. It should be trivial for a community (a family, a town, a club, …) to create and maintain a web site that provides:

    1. Static web pages

    2. Blogging - both long form and micro-blogging, with comment capability

    3. Chat rooms - not gamified like Discord, just communication.

    4. Photo sharing

    5. Email

    6. …more…

  3. Your 9-year-old should be able to setup and maintain the site. No scripting, no complex installation tasks, just run the app and answer a few questions.

    This is important! You might be saying to yourself “I can do all that stuff right now with x, y, and z software”, but I challenge you to tell me that everyone over 9 in your family could do it reliably without tearing their hair out.

  4. The software should be free and open source. The only costs should be for hosting in the cloud if you don’t want to do your own backups.

  5. You control the data:

    1. You choose who participates (just family, family and friends, friends and not family, open to the world…)

    2. All data stored locally.

    3. All data stored encrypted (optionally).

  6. No ads (unless you really want them).

  7. No algorithm pushing content to you.

  8. No “feed”. Cows are awesome, but we are not cows.

Elevator Pitch (more words)

Yhoti isn’t like Big Social. Yhoti is a place where you can chat with your friends and post updates about your cats, but you are in the driver seat rather than Facebook’s algorithm or your friends.

  • Yhoti is active – you decide which friends’ Yhotis to check out rather than passively consuming a stream of your friends’ and acquaintences’ responses to arbitrary content that was pushed to them by an algorithm.

  • Yhoti is thoughtful – Yhoti moves at a slower pace because you’re not constantly consuming a stream of posts curated by an algorithm. Posting content is like writing a blog or a microblog. People can comment on your entries and you can curate those comments. Real-time chat happens on a different page, separating real-time interactions from more thoughtful content.

  • Yhoti is flexible – Completely control your own Yhoti, share one with your family, or run a public Yhoti for thousands of people. Turn major features on/off with ease. It’s up to you!

  • Yhoti is you in control – You control where your data is stored and how it is backed up. You decide who can or can’t contribute, from fully public to only allow-listed individuals. You can remove unwanted contributions without having to beg a social media giant to do it for you. It’s your house.

  • Yhoti has no algorithm – Have I mentioned there’s no algorithm pushing unwanted content into your “feed”? There is no feed, just a place for you to have a presence on the web and perhaps a place from which to start your daily internet journey. ooooooooohhhhhmmm

  • Yhoti is not a competition – It’s not about trying to get the most friends or the most “likes” for your content, it’s about having a place to express yourself. Yes, people can still “like” your content (free dopamine!), but because there is no algorithm pushing this information to all your friends it’s not a competition.

  • Yhoti is easy to run – It is absolutely trivial to get up and running. Choose from a menu of features to enable. By default anyone can view content but must have an account to contribute, and you must approve all accounts. Friends can login with their Facebook or Google account or create a local account.

  • Yhoti is interconnected (but not monolithic) – Each Yhoti instance automatically provides links to other referenced or explicitly recommended Yhotis. These references can be organized by topic and show recent activity on the other Yhotis.

  • Yhoti is open source and free – All the code can be improved or audited by anyone. The design isn’t determined yet but I picture a plug-in architecture that enables anyone to create a new major feature. For example, a geneology plug-in that allows your whole family to contribute and view the family tree. The data for the new app is automatically stored and backed up with the rest of your Yhoti data.

Yhoti returns us to the early promise of the Internet, where your eyeballs are not the product, making billionaires ever richer through ads but instead where you can express yourself freely and creatively! The whole point of the Web is that you don’t need to put your content into one centralized system like Facebook or Twitter because anyone can make their own site.

Centralized social media isn’t working; it’s toxic because “the algorithm” pushes the content that generates the most heat which also makes the most moderate people flee. At the same time, we need a way to connect with people on the internet. Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, et al are convenient, but if it’s easy enough to run a Yhoti for yourself, your town, your business, or your gaming buddies, maybe we can escape the toxic aspects of centralized social media.

It would be great if Big Social disappeared completely, but that isn’t a realistic goal. The idea is to develop an alternative social media ecosystem over time that is rich enough that people won’t feel like Big Social is the only way to keep in touch.

What about Mastodon? Mastodon was a step in the right direction: Distributed Twitter without the algorithm or ads. But Mastodon depends on the “feed” metaphor, which is fundamentally not the way I, at least, want to interact with people on the Internet. It discourages self-directed reading, encourages trivial interactions, and makes it hard to find content later. You can still do all of those things on Yhoti if you want, it will just be presented in a way that means you decide when to do it.

What about the blogosphere? The blogosphere is great! Yhoti is an attempt to expand the blogosphere (let’s call it the Yhotiverse :) and make it a more attractive alternative to Big Social by making it trivial to run a more fully-featured site (blog, photo albums, chat, etc.) with one simple tool under your full control.

Hasn’t this all been done before? Maybe! If you know of other free, open source software that does similar things please let me know. So far I’ve only found services that require paid subscription and only do part of what Yhoti will do.

Sweet spots for Yhoti would be

  • Individuals.

  • Large, geographically distributed families, as is common in the US.

  • Small clubs and organizations.

  • Small towns, as an addition to, or (eventually) as areplacement for their $commercially$ $sourced$ website.

Let me know what you think. Email me at concatenate("carl", "gay", "@gmail.com").

-Carl