The future of social media is human

Social media has been ripe for exploitation since its invention, but GenAI has significantly lowered the price of entry.

We are rapidly careening to a world where we are going to be talking with bots online and we won’t be able to avoid it. Whether it’s sharing our dreams online, getting health advice or arguing about politics¹. Everything we say or read online, we increasingly have no ability to avoid a soup of words spewed out by an LLM, when we would rather focus our attentions on words typed by a uniquely human person.

I don’t want to live in that world. I don’t think anyone does.

What has made the internet wonderful: meeting real people, without the anxiety of the real world. This is being taken away from us.

Social Media has been broken for a while

Powerful and rich people have been using social media to divide us for a long time. It has been extremely easy to create an abundance of social media accounts, not just to spam advertising, but to genuinely push political opinions on the masses.

We are all susceptible to the illusory truth effect- the tendency to believe false information to be correct after it has been repeated to us multiple times.

State governments know this and they have the money to fund such propaganda campaigns. How much damage to the social psyche do you think 100 full-time humans controlling thousands accounts can do? What about thousands such employees?

These tactics are well documented, sometimes referred to as the Firehose of Falsehood or “flooding the zone”. They impact us every day, even if we avoid the internet in all its forms.

GenAI has lowered costs significantly

What would have been a full-time job of reading and posting online for a hundred humans can now be automated away completely by an LLM. Whatever form of bot detection the social media companies have can be resolved by the few humans that remain employed for this enterprise.

The Firehose of Falsehood can now reach superhuman proportions. After all, even humans working full-time have to eat and sleep. But LLMs can write enough plausible sounding bullshit at an unlimited pace.

We cannot continue participating in social media platforms which do nothing to stop us being tricked by GenAI and the powerful people/governments that control them.

This doesn’t just apply to ordinary citizens, but our lawmakers are duped by this plague too. If you’re a politician then surely you can see the value in engaging with real and authentic people online.

It’s time for a truly human social network

So how do we solve this challenge? I believe that it’s time we build a social network which only allows human accounts.

This does not mean sacrificing anonymity. What it does mean is enforcing one account per human.

No more alt accounts, no more ban evasion, and no more sock puppet accounts.

So how can this possibly work? How can I verify you’re human? or for that matter that you’re a unique human?

This is where things get tricky and where I will lose most of you. But before you go. Please consider what I have written above. Your very psyche is in danger if you continue frequenting platforms filled with bots, paid actors and bored humans trying to trick you. I believe that human social networks are going to be the only ways for us to form human communities online with confidence.

So please stay.

Okay.

Ready?

Deep breath…

… we can solve this using the existing government documents that we are already using to prove who we are. Passports, IDs, and other documents. Yes, they contain sensitive information, but currently there is no other way, really.

I’m losing you because your immediate feeling is disgust about the thought of sharing your ID documents with a random website. Yes, I’ve seen how this ended up for some apps. Know that my number one priority is to store as little data from your ID as possible and to reduce the risk of any of your ID data being leaked as a result of using this service.

Is the risk zero? Of course not. Nothing in this life is risk-free. But I hope, with your support, that I can get it as close to zero as possible.

In the meantime, the risk is already very close to zero and I will be completely transparent about how the system works. In the future, some governments may provide anonymous systems to prove humanity, and I sincerely hope this will happen soon. But for now, passports in particular, offer the most universal way to prove your humanity.

Just to be clear. At time of writing I don’t make any money from this. I know that for some this may be strange. But I genuinely want to create an online community of humans. The scale at which this website is at right now, the costs for running it are small enough that I can cover them. In the future, with enough users there are options for funding, from donations from members to advertising. I hope that we can come to a decision together when it comes to it.

But as far as my intentions, I have no ulterior motive for collecting this data. I only do it to provide a safe space for humans to communicate anonymously. Yes, you remain completely anonymous on the website. You just know that every account you speak with and interact with is human. How amazing is that in this day and age?

What are we storing?

Alright. So what is actually stored from your passport? Why does anything need to be stored? The reason is to ensure each ID can only be used to create one account. What is stored is your full name, date of birth, the last 4 digits of your ID’s number (e.g. passport number) and the country that issued your ID.

But the great thing is that your name and ID number are stored in such a way that even someone with access to the database (and our encryption keys) wouldn’t be able to read them!

Don’t believe me? Here is that data from my passport in the database:

b75fab6ac766917fe7cffe02bbe4decc45b5cc5cf57302b4dd9e5896a8b74bad933137ff4ccbe2f861c5add5a5a1a56f8a562b518af82f07db38604016f1292c

I challenge anyone to decipher it. Though I expect it is impossible, hence why I am comfortable in displaying it in public here.

It’s worth noting that the amount of data we store is the absolute minimum. The 4 digits of your ID number are only there to ensure two John Smiths (or Zhang Weis²) born on the same day don’t clash.

All this to say, you remain completely anonymous. I even cannot decipher what your full name is from the data stored in the Only Human Hub database. Furthermore, there is no requirement to display your full name on Only Human Hub, you may choose to use a nickname or pseudonym that has no link to your real identity.

Join Us

If you’ve made it this far and you want to join us, then head over to https://onlyhumanhub.com

Our ambition is to create a social network filled with human users, with no access given to AI bots nor crawlers used for AI training. So you can write to other humans and be confident that not only are you speaking with other humans, but that your words will not be used to train AI models.

Right now, we have a prototype social media app that isn’t ready for release yet, but our registration and verification process is. You can verify that you are a human, link this status with a Bluesky account and get a link to prove to others that you are human. As an example, here is my proof: https://onlyhumanhub.com/profile/dom96.picheta.me. You can place this in your preferred social network’s bio, or share it with people when they ask for it.

In addition to linking your Verified Human status with a Bluesky account, you will also become verified by @OnlyHumanHub.com on Bluesky and gain the Verified Human label in our labeller available at @label.onlyhumanhub.com. We also have a feed which contains all verified humans, so you can see what they are posting and engage with them.

You do not need to provide your passport to register. Just getting registered is a good way to stay up to date on developments, you can also follow @OnlyHumanHub.com on Bluesky for the same. Eventually the hope is to enable early access to the social media app and if you’re registered you will be one of the first to gain access.

Addendum: Technical Deep Dive

If you enjoy tech deep dives then this is for you. I didn’t want to go into too much technical details above, as the target audience I am targeting would have required more extensive explanation than I have room for here. My assumption if you’re reading this section is that you are aware of what hashes are and how websites usually use them to protect your login passwords.

So how does the verification process work? You take a photo of your passport using passportreader.app which then enables it to read the NFC chip of your passport. The data from the NFC chip is temporarily stored on passportreader.app’s servers together with a flag signifying whether the passport is valid. The Only Human Hub verifier reads this data, if it finds that the passport is valid it captures the following data from the passport:

• Full Name

• Date of Birth

• Issuing Country

• Last 4 digits of the passport number

The date of birth and issuing country are stored in separate SQLite/D1 database columns. They are encrypted with a private key.

A concatenation of the full name, date of birth, issuing country and last 4 digits of the passport number are encrypted and hashed. This means that each unique passport ends up hashing to the same bytes. It enables the verification process to reject a passport that has already been used for verification previously. This hash is stored alongside the encrypted DoB and Issuing Country. This data entry is linked to your account.

The original raw data read from the NFC chip is stored on passportreader.app’s servers for at most 24 hours. I have set up a cron job to verify this and will be alerted if this does not happen. So far, from what I’ve seen, the data is usually removed within an hour.

Addendum: State Actor Risk

If you are someone who is at risk of prosecution by a rogue state government, then there is a risk that the data stored about your passport may be successfuly linked with your real-life identity. While the hashing described above will effectively prevent any non-state actor from identifying you, even if our database and encryption keys are leaked, this cannot be said of a state government.

This is because the ID document you have used may have been issued by that state government. In that case, that government may be able to go through all the ID documents they have ever issued and hash them in the same manner that we have. In that case they may be able to identify a particular hash as belonging to a particular ID document and thus identify you and the account that this ID document is linked to. Due to this, using Only Human Hub for acts such as whistleblowing or other acts that may warrant prosecution is not recommended.

Of course, at any point you can choose to delete your Only Human Hub account and the associated passport data.

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¹ Yes, I am using the Rule of Three here. No, this was not written by GenAI.

² Zhang Wei is possibly the most common full name in the World