NetNews - LeFreq/Singularity GitHub Wiki

Singularity has a news service to complement its object and knowledge environment ("Messages" and "Events"). Whereas objects form the body (or cells or "droplets") of the meta-mind, the news service forms its nervous system. Further, just as new objects can be created out of the void, new messages can be sent to the the Soup, a collective, "non-destination", that makes spontaneous, new connections, preventing the problem of memetic inbreeding by adding a randomish, gravitational model of attraction between nodes that are not already linked.

As, according to OS philosophy, a communications system should be createable with simple hardware, under $50, using airwaves. That means that baud rates may be 120cps, with a simple command line text screen.

Given this, the operating system should be allow a non-technical person the ability to receive text messages and news items, and easily select the next level of engagement (download whole story, reply to a personal message). First level reply is + or -, meaning support or decline. For selecting news levels, they could have an interface of > and >> to get next and next-next level of stories. A 4x60 screen might be sufficient for reading news. But ultimately, one can take the fractal idea further and have multiple levels of engagement for using (saving) battery life and complexity of interfacing.

Nodes/Users otherwise subscribe to topics that are organized in a hierarchy much like the original Usenet. The MSG command is used to send news, making an event. All together this creates a decentralized, perfect(?), news-casting service for civics to happen.

Hierarchies are organized (as per color ontology) along 4 axiis.

When users want to subscribe to a nodes news service, they are asked how much money they'd like to give per month to stay subscribed. Nodes can mark themselves as "free" if they want to avoid asking other users.

Visualization:

Glass Bead Game. This is the whole. This forks into two:

• ACTIVE-INACTIVE. Topics with INACTIVE tag are dead, no longer considered true knowledge, or no longer in production. Since this is a binary category, if the INACTIVE tag is not present, the node is considered ACTIVE.

These categories then fork into the four primary axiis (creating namespaces):

• Global-Local axis: tags organized by geography (Global.UnitedStates.Nebraska giving all state headlines for Nebraska)
• Person axis: topics organized by biography (INACTIVE.Person.Washington.George)
• Knowledge axis: tags organized by subject (Knowledge.Computers.PC-Compatible.Programming.C, INACTIVE:Knowledge.Science.Alchemy)
• Product axis: (Product.OnoSendaiCorporation.Ninja9000.rev3, Product.Book.HarperPublishers.TalesOfPower, INACTIVE:Product.IBM.PC-XT, )

Respectively: where, who, how, and what. What of Why? (topics not knowledge, but inquiry, like zen. A: use a higher white, florescent, iridescent/simulated reflection), When? (categorize biography on a time axiis? for example. A: fade to deeper black all historical nodes or polka-dot black with greater dark coverage with deeper history? OR maybe BROWN is really it's own axis representing death)

The more trusted the node is in the meritocracy, the "shinier" the message packet is in the Soup. (The extra white color can be used or extra dark...)

Four news levels:

1. CHATTER (everything on the channel) (any message you send goes here first, unless you are owner of the node)
2. INFO (messages approved BUMPED UP by someone other than the sender) (generally gossip that someone else finds interesting),
3. ALERT (BUMPED UP by approved moderators) (E.G. annual conference proceedings), and
4. PANIC/META (approved by the node's creator) (cannot be unlisted to, and will be proceeded by a PANIC or META tag).

SO, Users can set the level of engagement they want from each subscribed channel.

One might think that one could just set the merit level of the sender in order to decide what to listen to; however, this isn't robust, socially. A new user without rank might get ignored perpetually. Better for the community to decide rather than the individual. Hence the tiered system of engagement. 0 users required vs. 1 other user required vs. a moderator (based on merit, like 50% of maximum) vs. owner (setting the tone for the whole node). Each time a messages gets bumped upwards, they earn some (quantity?) amount of merit, from each individual that bumps it up. This amount probably related to average user merit and moderator merit. Perhaps only one level at a time can be bumped, until it gets to owner... This mimics the body's immune system of panic, I believe.

Once a headline is received. Each node/user can ask for the desired data level (or perhaps just the next level of engagement?):

1. Headline (limited to 160 characters(?)) to
2. Abstract (limited to 10 sentences (?)) to
3. Body to (complete story, up to 1000 paragraphs (?))
4. Complete (all messages).

This selects how much information you receive about the topic/headline. It may be better to have a 2-word title, before needing a headline, so it can fit on one line of the display. Or something like 1-word, 2, 4, 8, 16 words. Or 10 characters, 10 words, 10 sentences, 10 paragraphs, 10 chapters = 1 field, 10 fields, 100 fields=glassbeadgame. Something to challenge the writing public to conform to that isn't arbitrary but well-thought.

A key point, is that a user cannot sop up the bandwidth by posting or requesting huge video (for example) news items. They will have to navigate to the node in the Cloud and allow the interconnection points handle it. In other words, one can only post text to the Cloud -- snippets of knowledge, not full-motion videos.

Users can cross-post one news group to another. The cross-posted item gets tagged with the level (CHATTER, INFO, ALERT, PANIC) that it received in the former group, but placed in a lower-level of the new group (unless it is a super-group where it should probably stay the same).

Just like Usenet, groups can have sub-groups. If a user subscribed to comp, for example, they get everything in every subgroup (comp.programming, comp.hardware, etc.) at the level of engagement that they select (CHATTER, INFO, ALERT).

This would probalby be too much power and disrupt more healthy social functions, but the system could collate all news into 1-day, 1-week, 1-month, etc. old news where people could get news from all sources that they haven't negated. The system would auto-aggregate and generate the news into something like a newspaper. Top stories could be collated into 1-wk editions, to keep content amount manageable. It would be delated by the amount of the news source, so this could possible counter-act the imbalance of easy-fed news -- the people in the know would have first knowledge.

NOTA BENE: To prevent the distortion of the (physical) economic marketplace, one must restrict data about market prices from being communicated between nodes to messages between single users.

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• MSGs without a destination node name are message from your nodename itself and push to all nodes/users subscribed to your node-name.
• MSGS sent inward << are put in the Soup without your nodename. These messages wait some calculated time, dependent on the color-proximity of your peers.
• Node names could be considered the leaves of a invisible hierarchy or ontology of Person axis. Person.IndoEuropean.MarkRosenblitt or Person.Aryan.Female.Sjilka or Person.Unspecified.SingularityUsers.Marxos)
• INACTIVE nodes when re-activated create a news headline from Singularity from near peers. Similarly with objects, if it is re-used/instantiated by some node.(?)