For a long while, I have been a loyal Brave user, but I left for two reasons: the superior features of Vivaldi, and the Vivaldi Community. The Vivaldi Community provides a blogging platform, sync, a mastedon instance, and an email account. I think that brave can do better.
For video sharing, we can use Peertube. It is an alternative to YouTube built with activitypub and webtorrent for load balancing. For internet forums we can use lemmy, it is a compelling reddit alternative that uses activitypub for federation. For photo sharing we can use pixelfed. To create a compelling alternative for twitter we can use Mastedon. I would recommend adding a custom theme to better integrate these services with the brave brand.
Now what about email, for this we can use apache james for this. The apache james project also supports a distributed version using apache cassandra. To prevent spam we can limit the outgoing emails to 25 emails per day. However users should be able to increase that amount to 100 outgoing emails per day by solving a captcha. We should get our captchas from Cloudflare and Hcaptcha, which support a privacy ehancing technology called Privacy Pass, which uses a protocol which is documented at https://privacypass.github.io/protocol/ along with open source code for the server side. For the webmail, we can use squirrelmail, which is completely javascript free and supports a wide array of plugins. This is essential for viewing through the Tor browser, more on that later. We should also provide a PGP keyserver and Secure MIME certificate authentication for those who want to secure their email. There is free software to do this. This will make the new brave community, and by extension the brave browser a compelling alternative to protonmail, which only supports PGP.
As for the blogging platform, I recommend Jekyll by github. Jekyll is free software and only needs a graphical interface to be usable by a layperson. We should provide some themes to choose from by default. This includes a simple one page theme with page numbers after a certain point. A theme with a topbar and sidebar with tags, and a theme that looks like a newspaper. Fredrick Brennan has a very cool font that looks exactly like a typewriter called TT2020. He also provides a font that is an exact reporduction of the font used in the 1611 king james bible which could also be used for this purpose. We should use Jekyll because it is lightweight from the readers perspective and produces simple static sites.
This new brave community must also be available through Tor as an onion site to serve our community. Both through the Tor Browser and through private tabs with Tor for those who want to better protect their privacy. We must only ask for as little personal information as possible, since the less information we collect the less liable we are. We ideally should need up to two backup email addresses for two factor authentication and to reach our users when necessary. Backup emails should be optional. We should also ask for a phone number for two factor authentication and send text messages when necessary. This should be optional. We should also provide two factor authentication via TOPT app. This is strongly recommended. The only information we should otherwise collect is the users country/region, whether or not they are above the age of majority, and whether or not they are old enough to use the platform. In my jurisdiction, minors under the age of 13 are not old enough, but this can very by country. We should also ask them whether they want to see sensitive content on the activitypub instances.
Storage:
Each user should be restricted to 8 gigabytes across the entire service, this includes emails, posts, images and other user generated content.
What shouldn’t be allowed:
- Porn
- Spam
- Scams
- Direct incitement to violence or to violate the human rights of others as established in international law or the constitution of the U.S. This includes justifying genocide, slavery or war crimes, or incitement to violate the due process of the accused, or attempting to sway due process of the accused. I do not think that denying the above should be banned as it can be easily debunked on an intellectual level and might convince people stuck in these rabbit holes to change their mind if given the chance.
- Repeatedly attempting to message users after you have been blocked
- inciting others to gang up on users to harass them, also known as “canceling”, or inciting others to mass report otherwise allowed content in and attempt to get them banned.
- Abusing the reporting system
- repeatedly breaking the above rules after 3 warnings in a 45 day period
- creating a new account that engages in the same behavior
- content that is otherwise illegal in the jurisdiction that it is being hosted.
I think that this is a great list of what should not be allowed. Remember that the improvement of this community depends on all of our contributions. We must meet other eye to eye to gain a better understanding.
Spreading the word: I would like to think of such an online community as a means to get people who otherwise would not use the brave browser to make the switch. Brave could even spread the word by running exit nodes with names such as “brave.com” “community.brave.com” or “install brave”. It helps the Tor network and helps Brave. We could also run an I2P outproxy with a name such as “brave-com.i2p” or “outproxy.community.brave.i2p” If we made this new community available through an eepsite, we could help more people.
Paying for it: Since Brave Software is a very successful company with a very high revenue to empleoyee ratio. This new brave community would not need a business model on its own, since its primary purpose would be to convince people to install brave. We could even give an orange checkmark to brave users to convince people to download brave. Integrating all the services with the basic attention token tipping system would provide a reliable business model if the new brave community took 30% off the top for facilitating the transaction. This would also reward contributors to this community for making it great, which will in turn attract even more creators, and once we build it, they will come.