Mastiff.Media00:00 · Welcome and interview roadmap
00:00:01–00:01:01
All right, William, welcome to the program. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Yergz. My pleasure. So first thing to ask about is the project itself and what you're doing, why you're doing, and all of that. And then I also want to ask you about the project itself, and that would be what we'll call the back end of it. And that's your existence on Kickstarter, your amazing success there. and just what's it take to develop something like this? Whether it's web-based like yours or if you're actually making a product or some other sort of service, what's it like raising the amount of money that you've hit at least as of this broadcast? And what's it like when you have speed bumps or when you don't make a particular goal, things like that. So first tell us about Haven.
01:01 · Haven’s privacy and facial-recognition goals
00:01:01–00:02:03
What is this thing and why should we use it eventually? Yeah, who would love to? So there is a huge, several huge issues with just the internet today. Every social media is being used as an arm of the surveillance state to track on you, track you and manipulate you, influence your beliefs, your opinions, all this other stuff. You have companies like Clearview AI going through and scraping billions of photos off of Facebook and other sites, and then taking every selfie they get into a big facial recognition surveillance system so that given any photograph of you, they can find every other photograph of you anywhere on the internet. It's terrifying. It's literally Big Brother 1984. And so Haven is how we're fighting against it, is we're making a social media very similar to Instagram or YouTube, where everything you post on it, we automatically run it through software that stops facial recognition from working.
00:02:03–00:03:14
It can't recognize a face in the image so that you can't be tracked. We're really, really excited about it. And then on top of that, we're just treating you right. We're just not surveilling you when every other option is. Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, all of these have gotten in hot water recently because there have been reports of the owners of these platforms using the platforms to like push certain politics or manipulate people into thinking a certain thing. You see, there was like several big news stories recently about how when there was like big political events going on, the Facebook page for that event just disappeared on its most important day. Oh man, isn't that just coincidental timing? So we are looking to protect people from that and give them a platform where they can, you know, share news, you know, post pictures, catch up with friends and family without Zuck or Musk getting into their brains or spying on their communications, actually.
00:03:15–00:04:07
Did you see a few months ago Instagram actually removed end-to-end encryption from their DMs? It used to be Instagram couldn't read your messages and now they can. I'm sure this is only for benign reasons. So totally messed up. To make sure everybody is tracking what you just said, Instagram is owned by a company called Meta, who is the owner of Facebook, and that's Zuckerberg. The one particular example you were mentioning too was this past weekend was the No Kings marches, and it was Instagram where the No Kings organizers couldn't access their Instagram page in the middle of Saturday, the day of the No Kings marches. So yeah, that's suspicious. I agree.
04:07 · Why William started: algospeak and surveillance
00:04:07–00:05:10
yeah so okay so was any of that personal like did you have some sort of life experience or anything like that that that caused you to say all right enough is enough I'm gonna stay up late one night and design this thing and and eventually fall asleep and be late for work the next day oh man it's been a lot of those late nights. But yes, for me, what it was is algo speak, like seeing it leak into real life, you know, words like unalive or pew pew, where if you say them on TikTok, your account mysteriously disappears, your video gets taken down, which, hey, by the way, that's literally a plot point from George Orwell's 1984. It's newspeak. I've seen people start to use that in real life, saying words like un-alive, drove me mad steadily over a period of a few months until I decided to do this.
00:05:10–00:06:20
Just think back five minutes when you and I were prepping for this interview and I was saying about how we're going to talk about this first and we're going to talk about… For those listening, what we're also going to talk about today with William is his journey through this whole process on kind of like the back end what it was like to do that and my pet peeve is when they use the word journey to describe something where they never even get out of a damn chair and you know you know that's exactly what you're talking about yeah oh yeah my brother works in the trades so he gives me no end of crap about sitting in a chair all day as my job yeah yeah so so go ahead talk about you know like the 1984 side and your personal side of this yes I've just been growing incredibly concerned with the state of the world it seems like the walls of the surveillance state are closing in everywhere yeah and I you know I I got to do something about this I gotta fight it somehow and Haven's how we're fighting it
06:20 · Who Haven is for; planned social features
00:06:20–00:07:22
Yeah, awesome. Okay, so who are you targeting then? When I say that, let's first talk about the platforms that, and I know the answer because I've seen it on your website, but who do you feel that Haven Social is going to replace in the rest of the real world, we'll call it, or on the virtual world, really? Yeah, so, our target user base is anyone who is fed up with the shitification of YouTube and Instagram, and then, you know, privacy freaks like myself, where, you know, you go to all these means to protect yourself, to prevent yourself from being spied on. You know, use Signal, use a VPN, all this stuff, but you have friends who aren't privacy freaks. And the only way to get in touch with them is through Instagram or some other insecure means of communication.
00:07:22–00:08:25
So we're building a way to get your friends who won't download a whole separate app for secure communication to be able to get them onto secure communication because it's built in to a really good social media. That makes sense. So when I first saw that, you had compared this to replacing both YouTube and Instagram. And at that time you and I talked about the video component of what Haven's going to be able to do. So YouTube made perfect sense, Instagram did not. Now did you talk about the texting and I mean I would presume you're even going to have sort of like audio or video communication in it. Now that all makes sense. So would you say that it's also then going to with the capabilities going to be some sort of like a Facebook or not quite that involved?
00:08:25–00:09:25
I'm not sure what you mean by a Facebook. So your website says that one of the two platforms is YouTube because of the uploading videos and not having to worry about them being scraped for proprietary content not safe for work content things like that. And then you used Instagram and that described to me the texting although Instagram also has the posting of video and still photos, if you combine both of those, you pretty much kind of sort of have Facebook. Yeah, I guess so. We're a little bit different from Facebook in that we're like not, it's not, you know, it's to be kind of silly, it's not a book of faces. We're not like asking you to tie it to your real life username and put on like, you know, things about William.
00:09:25–00:09:56
he went to this school and he went to, you know, he got married on this date and you know, have like, like, like personal information on it. Like Facebook has, we're not, we're not looking for that. Um, so, but, but otherwise, yeah, you're right. Um, everything you used to use Facebook for, you can use us for except for Facebook marketplace. That's, there's no replacing it. We're not interested in that. Right. And that's, you know, you don't have to be everything that everybody, just do what you are going to focus on. Yeah, absolutely.
09:56 · Adult-content policy and age-verification concerns
00:09:56–00:11:29
So the one thing that I did want to ask about in what your technology with Haven is going to help protect the users with is the not safe for work photos. Yes. Are you concerned about things like age verification? Ooh, okay. So these are both really good questions. they're slightly separate questions okay so as far as not-safe-for-work goes we are looking to support not-safe-for-work like drawings like art and animations we're not so interested in supporting like real-life photos of real-life people you know keep it two-dimensional look all dick pics and so on even like some sort of like an OnlyFans being another. We're not interested in being OnlyFans now. That is precisely one of the great reasons why we don't allow not safe work videos of like real-life people because we don't want to turn into that. But yes those there's a interesting aspect to that of those groups of people that like post art like that, have been kicked around, you know, shoved around, bullied for really just terribly long time. So we can provide a safe place for that. And also, you know, there's the
00:11:29–00:12:40
governmental overreach of what counts as not safe for work, right? So I think it was Rehnquist was the Supreme Court justice who said, with regards to pornography, I think his words were in the actual opinion of the Supreme Court was I don't know what pornography is, but I know when I see it. Right. Yes. That would be Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in the 1984 decision. OK. All right. We actually write a little bit about that on our Kickstarter. OK. But yes. So now, yeah, let's talk age verification. We think age verification is another big issue that really kind of scared us into action really put the spurs in us to get this out Because it is terrifying. It is the makings of a surveillance state and people need something to Some form of social media that does not Jump immediately gung-ho into this because here's the trick, right?
00:12:40–00:13:43
every social media like says like oh no we have to implement age verification we're being forced to by the government but that's an excuse they want to implement it so that they can collect more information on you and sell it you know there's proof of this in being that the lobbying effort in the United States to push age verification was funded mostly by meta by Facebook they were the one's lobbying for it you know go there's a few news articles on it go check that out so what we are doing is a social media that actively fights against that we have plans for how to for how to protect people from this you said you have a plan and I've heard that before John Edwards and John Kerry back in 2004, when they ran against George W. Bush, John Kerry said, John Edwards and I, we've got a plan, and we're going to change things.
00:13:43–00:14:37
You just heard their whole pitch. They never said what that plan was. And Donald Trump, well, I have a concept of a plan for healthcare. Healthcare, how far along is your plan, and you have to go through the whole thing now, but I do want to try to gauge how far you've thought some of this through because I also don't want to tread on things that are proprietary that you're keeping close to the vest for pretty obvious reasons. We are all about transparency man, don't ask anything. Okay, so then how far is that plan? And without making this a three-hour interview, what can you detail about it?
14:37 · Age-check plans, jurisdiction and alternatives
00:14:37–00:16:09
So let's get detailed. So there was a really interesting paper that came across our desk recently. If you want to go look it up for yourself, the title is Age Verification and Public Adaptation, a Preregistered Synthetic Control Multiverse. It's a mouthful, but it's a research paper where what it goes over is it studies the flow of traffic between two sites in a certain genre that I won't specify because I'm not sure what the age rating of this broadcast is, but the most popular site in this genre is based in the United States and therefore implemented age verification, whereas the second-largest site in this genre site in this genre is in France and so they did not implement age verification and this paper studies how many people switched from using one to the other how their audience just changed how you know age verification legislation affected these two sites what's really interesting here is actually the French site is currently being sued by the state of Florida for did not implementing age verification laws and continuing to serve United States clients so we are paying attention to this court case very intently because if it turns out if I I don't know what the future holds right but if the result of
00:16:09–00:17:17
this court case is that yeah the the French site technically broke Florida law but like what are you gonna do about it man there their their site is not based in Florida they're outside of your jurisdiction it's you can't really enforce it well that's like you mentioned Florida Florida just indicted Raul Castro mm-hmm yeah hello he's not here right yeah so what are you gonna do it's mostly just a gesture yeah right you can't effectively change people's lives so we again we don't know if this is how it's going to turn out but if that's how it turns out then we're gonna see that as an opportunity we're gonna go man so we can avoid pushing age verification on all our platforms on all our users and all it takes is that we move to France absolutely we'll do that no hesitation you know or maybe we'll move to Switzerland or somewhere you now. The point being, we'll move somewhere where it's not required, without hesitation.
00:17:17–00:18:22
Totally worth it for us. Now, I also want to be a bit more pessimistic and have a backup plan of what if the court case doesn't go our way? What if somehow this French site is still brought to heel to the state of Florida, or what if the country we moved to implements age verification, or what if they all do, right? Just in general, what if we are forced to implement this. We can still do age verification in a way that preserves your privacy far more than any other site, because the other sites are using it as an excuse to invade your privacy. Facebook, anything owned by Zuckerberg is creepy. So the way that we can do this, well, is that, oh, we don't want your ID, man. Oh my gosh, that's a liability. That is huge, never. There are far better ways we can do this. For example, we can bill 50 cents to your credit card and then refund it because if you have a credit card, well, they only give those out to adults.
00:18:22–00:18:28
So then if you have a credit card, you must be an adult. And there's other methods available.
18:28 · Importing content and preserving your audience
00:18:28–00:19:30
We have a automatic importation feature that I've talked about in other interviews where if you have a bunch of content on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, any of these sites, we can automatically move all your content over to our site for you, including your followers. So you don't lose your audience. You don't have to rebuild your audience. Well, that's key. Yeah, thank you. So if you link a YouTube account to us and say, and we see like, oh yeah, this YouTube account was created more than 18 years ago. Well, then you must be more than 18 years old. So we don't need to age verify you. I'll say, good luck getting that passed Florida. They're not that capable of doing that high of math. Yeah, yeah, it's there is I can sense the counter argument now of, oh, but what if someone just uses a YouTube account, links a YouTube account that's not theirs, you know, in order to get past the age verification?
00:19:31–00:20:09
And yeah, that's a threat. But then you've got other identity theft crimes that are a bigger issue than your liability at that point. Oh yes, absolutely. That same issue also exists even if we did the awful option of driver's licenses. If you're a teenager, it's trivial to slip your mom's driver's license out of her purse, use it to age verify for social media, put it back in. Not that I would know, if my mom's watching this. Not that I would know. Or so I've read. Um... Yeah, right. Where is it going with this? Right, so we can use...
20:09 · Private messaging and parental responsibility
00:20:09–00:21:23
The age of every game. I had them both together because of the not-safe-for-work, because what is the one that's known for swapping, we can say it on here, swapping dick pics, and then it disappears a day later? Oh, Snapchat was known for that a lot. in its early days. Is it still used for that now? I don't really know. That's how it was formed, was high schoolers would sheet lift their shirt up and get a snap and send it to the boy she was hot for or he'd open up the pants and whip it out. And then, okay, now we've seen each other so when we actually get together later and actually do it, no surprises. But then it's gone. and by the time we get home, the mom and dad. What is keeping that crowd away from you? And that's why I mixed it with the age verification is to not worry about those of us that are old enough, but to worry about your liability as a company for those who really aren't old enough.
00:21:23–00:22:29
How we're different is. There's a difference between taking a Snapchat picture and sending it to just one person versus you wouldn't put that on your Instagram. Right. Because that's public. We are we are primarily public facing the same reason this happens a lot on Snapchat, but not on Instagram. It's the same reason it won't happen as much on us, because with us, you're you're posting stuff for the public to see, just like Instagram. As for about what about the messaging side of it though? That is it's end end encrypted, so we have no access to that we have no. We have no ability to control or stop that, so it's not our concern. Is your own thing then? If you. And to be clear, if we wanted to stop that, no matter, no amount of intervention on our side can prevent this from happening a hundred percent.
00:22:29–00:23:29
At some point it comes down to parent your children. That's been my argument with Florida about how they keep putting all these restrictions on social media, on the internet, on books. There are more than 11,000 books in this state that are on the banned list that can't be in schools. I didn't know that there were 11,000 books. And that's just the list of the no-nos. And then in the same breath, these people will turn around and say, we're giving rights to the parents. Yeah. No, you're not, dude. Where? You're having the government be your parent instead. 100%. Yeah, absolutely. So, it's so good. I mean, it's... You're giving us responsibility, is what I see happening here. So, good on you.
00:23:29–00:23:30
Thank you.
23:30 · Desktop/mobile plans and the correct Haven website
00:23:30–00:25:05
What kind of timeline are you working on? When... I mean, I know the site is out, but when are we talking about an app? Is it going to be operational on a desktop version? Or is this a mobile device only kind of thing? what's your plan for that? We will be having both a desktop version and a mobile app for iPhone and for Android. Same as YouTube. You know, you can get YouTube either way. If you go check this out on desktop, I do want to warn you real quick. There's a website, joinhaven.social that is not us. We are havensocial.org. And I've got that. We'll show that in a second. Awesome. It is rather annoying. They registered their domain like nine months after we registered ours. So we've had some people get mixed up and go to the wrong place. So a word about that, and I'm going to quote somebody you don't want to hear from, but Zuckerberg once said, you buy domains to use them, and then you buy additional domains so others can't. So that's, I've got a list of like 30 domains that I'm not using but I am sort of right yeah yeah okay we do the same thing we have Haven social org and Haven social dot app where the dot app just redirects to the dot org but bang didn't grab that that that other one yeah well I mean you can't your marketing is already out there
00:25:05–00:25:28
because I'll tell you already you know you're not a huge fan of Facebook but that's where I've seen an ad for you and I don't I don't mean the fact that I follow your page on Facebook I mean I got an advertisement for Haven social while I was on Facebook so I'm like hey I know that guy so you're putting good
25:28 · Beta/public-release targets and Part 2 preview
00:25:28–00:26:34
used to that. What is your timeframe for the site and for the apps? What are you thinking with that? So we are looking to start beta testing around May of 2027. Actually, if you want to join our beta test, give your feedback on different iterations as we build, you know, kind of influence how the site turns out. You can grab that on our Kickstarter. It's a reward. And then And then we're looking for a public release around August of 2027. So, I mean, if it'd be earlier, that'd be great, but that's our objective. Right. Okay. And so how much of the coding and the development of the site and the apps have you already started on that ain't out there yet? Hey gang, as you may have figured out, this interview started to get a little long. The first part we concentrated on Haven Social. In part two, we concentrate on his Kickstarter campaign and what it takes to put a program like this together.
00:26:34–00:27:00
If that's something you're interested in, we will certainly see you in part two to learn about a Kickstarter campaign and everything you have to do to begin your own LLC. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for following us at Mastiff.Media, and thank you for supporting us through Buy Us a Coffee or through anything like Cameo or any other way that you can. We appreciate it. Thank you.