Let’s Reboot Social Networks!
Do you remember when the Internet was fun and useful? We had services such as Email, IRC, RSS, and Gopher to communicate, read, and search.
Facebook and LinkedIn replaced Email. Reddit replaced RSS (more details). Twitter and Slack replaced IRC. Google replaced Gopher. Now the Internet is controlled by FAANG/FAAMG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix/Microsoft, Google). Together, these companies now control every aspect of the Internet.
The “new Internet” is powered by “the Cloud” which means that everything has gone from being decentralized to centralized. As a result, we continue to hear about massive data breaches and AI algorithms analyzing our messages and deciding what to show us and even manipulate us through fake news and advertisements.
Perhaps it’s time to go back to the original decentralized and/or federated Internet protocols and take our Internet back!
In that spirit, we contemplated on how social networks could be delivered today by leveraging the original Internet protocols including Email, IRC, and RSS to name a few. In a matter of a weekend, we were able to build an Email-powered social network possibly capable of disrupting Facebook and/or LinkedIn! Perhaps IRC could replace Twitter and Slack next :)
Meet UHURO, the new decentralized social network built on email protocols! A fresh start that puts you in control of your data and can’t be government controlled or spied upon, the way social networks should be!
Your timeline is your email inbox.
How does it work?
Surprisingly, it works very similar to typical social networks but it’s accessed via your email client. Instead of claiming a user name, you join with your email address (personal and/or work emails) by sending an email to join@uhuro.com. That’s right — You can have a personal social network and a professional social network by using both of your email addresses.
You can follow and unfollow friends and colleagues by sending an email to follow@uhuro.com or unfollow@uhuro.com and CC’ing (carbon copying) email addresses. You post messages to post@uhuro.com and we relay your post to all of your email followers — just like Twitter. Here’s a complete list of the email address based APIs.
We manage your followers list and simply relay messages. Other than your followers list, we do not store any other data. In fact, we are looking into decentralized alternatives for managing follower lists including Blockchain, DAG, and IPFS…
We also support adhoc social groups similar to Google Groups and Yahoo Groups by adding any arbitrary group name as a subdomain to our email address i.e.
- follow@motorcycles.uhuro.com
- unfollow@motorcycles.uhuro.com
- post@motorcycles.uhuro.com
If the group doesn’t already exist, we’ll create it for you automatically.
We do not have access to your email account nor your emails nor your social correspondence — we don’t want it.
Joining UHURO is simple. No registration. No storage. After all, it’s just email — your email :)
Get started now by sending an email to join@uhuro.com.
