This seems to be a new kind of social network, that combines mastodon (very obvious if you look at the UI), blockchain and artificial intelligence to give an assessment if a posts content is trustworthy.
I went to their website, but couldn’t find if they are part of the fediverse (ActivityPub) or not.
To me it seems kinda silly and not like a real improvement over standard mastodon. I do like that they tried to tackle the problems of modern social media, like fake news etc.
Also the mixture of the mastodon icons with the “I trust this” and “I don’t trust this” icons is so horrible, they don’t fit together at all.
2/10, I’ll stay with mastodon.
I haven’t looked at the EUNOMIA project in detail, but Eugen Rochko is directly involved. The entire project is funded by the EU with about 3 million Euro, along the stated objective of:
EUNOMIA is a fully decentralised, intermediary-free and open-source solution for addressing three key challenges: which social media user is the original source of a piece of information; how this information has spread and been modified in an information cascade; and how likely it is to be trustworthy. Although its innovations are applicable across any social network, its design philosophy makes it ideal for evaluation on similarly open, decentralised and federated new social media networks, thus contributing against accumulation of power in the large social media intermediaries located outside Europe. EUNOMIA actively encourages democratic citizen participation in content verification by allowing voting on content trustworthiness and influencing the reputation of content generators and sharers. It combines information cascade verification with information trustworthiness scoring, benefitting from blockchain technology to ensure transparency of the scoring process and that information has not been modified in a cascade. It also places emphasis on ensuring that trustworthiness information is communicated transparently and accessibly.
What the actual fuck? Is there some way to get such fundings to only apply when there is no blockscam and artificial bullshit involved?
There’s so much research that desperately needs funding but of course the money goes to such utter crap. How can they spend over 2,5M€ on this? This is a job that needs 3 persons 1/4 of their worktime and some cheap server.
Blcokchain is useful, if you need an independent trust anchor. In most cases, it is absolutely useless, but here it might finally be a real usecase for blockchain, besides crypto currency scam.
- Be CS reasearcher
- Be in EU
- Make project proposal
- Cram as many buzzwords as possible.
- EU funds you millions
- Profit
- Declare it was worth trying but did not work
This is not new.
This has been around from 2018 or 2019 but seems that is becoming something real already.
The project itself isn’t an idea that I am a fan of. The only somewhat good thing about it, is that people’d probably hear and contribute more to Mastodon the free software.
Which luckily is going to be maintained entirely separately, as always.
