Bring On the Decentralized Social Networking

Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes: "The distributed-social-networking Diaspora Project recently announced that their software will be released as open source. I don't know if Diaspora specifically will be the Next Big Thing in social networking, but I hope that social networking moves to a decentralized model within the next few years, where anyone can set up and run a hub to administer profiles for themselves and their friends or clients, and where profiles can interact with each other in a distributed fashion instead of on a centralized system like Facebook." Read on for Bennett's thoughts on how that model could work. A decentralized social network infrastructure would bring a number of benefits, such as:

• the end of horror stories about accounts and company pages being shut down arbitrarily by Facebook
• privacy settings that give you fine-grained control, and that are not forcibly changed for you
• an ad-free viewing experience (depending on the policies of the node hosting your profile), and
• the easy implemention of desirable features in the interface, without waiting for a single company like Facebook to adopt them.

(Not to mention an interface that stays relatively stable until you decide you want to change it -- no more waking up to find out you've been "timelined".)

Consider the main things that we use Facebook for today:

• Finding old friends and re-establishing contact with them.
• Receiving a stream of updates from your friends, viewing photos, posting comments, etc.
• Creating events and inviting friends.
• Creating branded pages for your company or product that other people can "like," and receiving updates from pages created around other people's companies or products.

There's no particular reason why any one of those functions could only be carried out on a centralized system. I can envision a distributed protocol with many different servers, or 'nodes,' run by different hosting companies, and each 'node' can be used to store many accounts; users pick a hosting company and a node to create their new account, and their account on that node could be used to store their friends list, their photos and status updates, and any events and groups that they had created. I'll get to the protocol design in a second, but let me emphasize something more important first: to make the protocol censorship resistant, it would have to be possible to move your entire account from one node to another node at a completely different company, without breaking any of the existing links with friends, your events, etc. That way, the node hosting your profile wouldn't be able to lean on you by saying, "Delete that one photo you posted, or I'll delete your entire profile and you'll lose all the friend links and events that you created."

To make a profile "seamlessly portable" in this manner, my suggestion would be to have the profile associated with a domain name owned by the user, with a URL like http://yourdomainname.com/profileprotocol/yourusername/. The domain name could be hosted with any hosting provider, as long as you paid their hosting fee (or as long as you were willing to display their advertisements to people who viewed your profile). But if your hosting company ever kicked you to the curb, you could simply change the domain name to point to a different hosting provider, and be back up and running after just a few hours of downtime (assuming you had backups of all of your data!).

No one would be able to shut down your profile permanently, unless they wrested control of your domain name away from you, or convinced every hosting provider in the world not to host you. (A user who didn't want to bother with their own domain name, could still host a profile under someone else's domain. This would probably be the default option for most casual high-school users, and thus companies like Facebook could still exist to serve them by helping them create new profile accounts in two minutes. But then those users would have to accept the risk that the domain name owner could shut their profile down.)

Thus I'm distinguishing here between two levels of censorship-resistance that could be provided by a distributed model. In the weaker type of censorship-resistance, profile-hosting companies would compete for your business by providing more permissive hosting policies, which would enable people to post edgier content than Facebook currently allows -- but once you're hosted with a given company, you couldn't easily switch without breaking all of the inbound "links" from your friends' accounts, so your hosting company could force you to self-censor, by threatening you with the loss of your account. In the stronger type of censorship-resistance that I'm advocating, you could switch seamlessly from one hosting provider to another, as long as you kept control of your domain name.

Of course this is exactly the type of "censorship resistance" enjoyed by people who run their own websites under their own domain names. The challenge would be to bring the same freedom to an open social networking protocol, but I see no technical reason why it couldn't be done.

Consider a protocol where "Bob" creates a new account on a social networking hosting node (together with a public/private key used to authenticate his actions to other nodes — if you're not a crypto geek, don't worry about that, it just means that users wouldn't be able to forge friend requests, "likes," event invites, etc. from other people). "Bob" could then find the profiles of his friends, and add them to his own "friends list" (which would be stored on his node). If Bob adds Alice as a friend, then Bob's node can also download Alice's current friend list (unless Alice has disabled this feature, or unless Alice has customized her friend list so that only portions of her friends list are viewable to other users — something not currently possible with Facebook). That way, when Bob searches for new names of users to add as friends in the future, the search will first default to searching the friends-of-friends lists that he's downloaded from his own friends.

When Bob signs in to his account on his node (either through a web interface, or a dedicated application, or a mobile app), his "news feed" consists of the comments, photos, and other items that have been published from his friends' accounts. He can post comments on any of his friends' items, which are then transmitted to his friends' accounts and stored on their node along with their content, unless they choose to delete the comments. And of course he can publish his own photos and status updates just like we all do on Facebook today, which would be downloaded to his friends' news feeds. (I'm hand-waving over whether the notifications would be "pulled" by users' nodes periodically polling the nodes of their friends to check for new content, or by their friends' nodes "pushing" the content to all known subscribers.)

Alice could meanwhile create an "group" of users would would be stored as an object on her node, and invite other users to join the group. Then any messages or content posted to the group would show up in the news feeds of all users who had joined. And Alice could create "events" which are also stored as an object on her node, and send out invites to her friends or other members of her groups. Pretty much any Facebook feature could be duplicated in this distributed system, with the benefit that users wouldn't run up against aggravating limitations imposed by Facebook — like the fact that Facebook used to block you from messaging the guests of your own event after it reached 5,000 attendees, and then removed the ability to message guests of an event entirely.

There's only one Facebook feature that I think could not be implemented on a distributed social networking protocol, and that's the practice of accruing hundreds of thousands of fans for your company fan page, basically as a form of "social proof" to show potential new customers that you're serious. Under Facebook's model, if you see a fan page with hundreds of thousands of fans, your first instinct is to assume that the company must be doing something right in order to be that popular, since Facebook makes it difficult for a company to create hundreds of thousands of fake users just to be fans of their product. On the other hand, in a distributed model, suppose I run across a company's fan page which claims to have 1 million fans. It's not just a case of the company lying about having 1 million fans — you could use digital signatures to verify that 1 million "users" really are "fans" of the product — but since anybody can set up a profile hosting node, you have no way of knowing how many of those 1 million "users" are real. "Acme Soda Company" could have just set up a dozen profile hosting nodes and created 100,000 fake users on each one, and have each of them sign up as "fans" of their product. (I just made up that company name, but this is incidentally something the real Acme Soda Company is apparently not doing.)

But how useful is it for regular users, after all, to see that a company has hundreds of thousands of fans? I've never assumed that a company makes a quality product just based on the number of Facebook fans that they have. I'd be more interested in checking out a company if a high proportion of my own social networking friends are fans of the product — and that is something that could still be implemented in a distributed model, since if a company claims that 3 of my 100 friends are fans of their page, I could use their digitally signed "fan" relationships to verify that this is true.

So I hope that the future of distributed social networking arrives soon. It may or may not be in the form of the Diaspora Project (in true Dr. Evil fashion, their most recent press release announced that they've already attracted "thousands" of users), but there's no particular reason that a distributed protocol would have to be a grass-roots effort. My guess is that if it took off, it would have to be started as a side project by an established company that gave it name recognition, and which could possibly provide free hosting for the first wave of users. Google+ never gave most people a compelling reason to switch, but imagine if it had been released not as a website but as an open protocol, complete with an open-source implementation that could be installed anywhere. Thus, complete freedom to create pages with whatever content you want, to amass as many fans and subscribers as you could legitimately earn, without having to worry about it all being controlled by a single entity who could mine your data or delete your content. I definitely would have given it a closer look.

Comments

One question

[should_be_linear]

Joe Sixpack has one question: WTF you are talking about, who is centralized, and why should I care? Seriously, geeks are 1% of Facebook audience, 99% couldn't care less about "decentralization".

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

But the 1%ers are evil and must pay for their crimes. Oh wait, wrong /. article.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

When you put all the humans in one place, it makes it easy for the Cylons to find and destroy them. Better to split them up into say 12 or so groups and send them out in different directions.

Re:One question

[sixtyeight]

Thirty years ago, the idea that non-geeks would ever start using computers themselves seemed absurd.

Forty years ago, the idea that people - rather than corporations and governments - would use computers themselves seemed absurd.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a big difference between using something and caring about how it works, see: Magnets.

Re:One question

[Cid Highwind]

Everyone (technical or non) has one question: "Are my friends on Diaspora?"

followed by "...then what's the point?"

Re:One question

[Desler]

How was it considered absurd in the 80s to think non-geeks would be using computers? The 80s was all about making home compurs for the masses. It was in fact NOT considered an absurd idea.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

geeks are 1% of Facebook audience

If your definition of "geeks" means "people with significant technical knowledge about computers", then I doubt it's anywhere near 1%. Geeks are generally smart enough to stay away from it.

Re:One question

[kwerle]

Thirty years ago, the idea that non-geeks would ever start using computers themselves seemed absurd.

Forty years ago, the idea that people - rather than corporations and governments - would use computers themselves seemed absurd.

You need to update those numbers. 30 years ago Apple was most certainly selling computers to home users.

What we have learned i the past 40 years is that people will use computers. What we have learned in the past 15 years is that people will not admin servers.

Give people a choice (I'm looking at you, too, linux), and people will ignore you. Give people a single (or very few) "winning" options - like Facebook - and they will flock.

Remember when every ISP offered email? I guess they still do - but nobody cares. There are 3ish winners in the west: Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail.

And people suppose - with a couple of gorillas already on the scene - that people will adapt a multitude of social network sites that magically* interoperate? I'm not betting on it.

* I don't buy that any significant number of sites in this space will successfully maintain consistent standards and communicate. Unless there's a whole lot of fairy dust involved

<disillusioned home email/web/etc admin of 15ish years>

Re:One question

[sixtyeight]

Sure, the geeky masses. WordStar. Spreadsheets. In other words, business needs at home and in the small offices.

For personal use, the geek stigma was only overcome once people found they could play decent computer games.

Re:One question

[sixtyeight]

So the geeks would be the early adopters, and everyone else would probably wait until Facebook inevitably turned the thumbscrews on the users enough for them to become dissatisfied.

Re:One question

[nine-times]

I do see a lot of common non-geeks complaining about Facebook-- about the privacy issues, the ads, seemingly arbitrary changes to the UI/UX. It's not as though non-geeks are all completely stupid and unconcerned about anything.

Plus, insofar as people don't care, that doesn't mean that an alternative couldn't be successful. People who don't care go wherever everyone else goes, because they *don't care*. If all the geeks and concerned non-geeks decide there needs to be a change, there will be a change. Right now, the problem seems to be that, for all of its problems, Facebook is providing the best value for the investment of time required. A lot of that is because Facebook has so many people on it, but realistically it's also because Facebook has done certain things well.

Re:One question

[Desler]

No, the home computer was being created for the masses not for geeks. You are rewriting history

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

It has ramifications for privacy concerns, political speech and advertising, data security, etc... Every big social network right now has one company in charge of their network, loyal to stockholders or private owners. Facebook, Google+, Myspace, Twitter, etc. all rely on the infrastructure and decision-making process of their respective corporate leadership structure.

Having an open-source, decentralized social network means any "geek" could affordably set up his (or her) own page and network. People who don't trust the big networks to do right in terms of privacy policy/data sharing/advertising/free speech can go to a different network, or make their own, and still have it interact with other networks using Diaspora because there is an open-source standard.

Short enough for you or still TLDR?

Re:One question

[Desler]

No, most users will just go to the next user-friendly social network that works like Facebook. They aren't going to go to anything like Diaspora. This is nothing but nerd fantasy.

Re:One question

[0racle]

Twenty years ago if you wanted to put your pictures online you had to run your own server.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

You are rewriting history

DuckTales! Whoo ooo!

Speaking of 80s.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

I care very deeply about how magnets work. I'm just not going to talk to a scientist about it.

Re:One question

[Seumas]

And the rest of us are saying "the last thing I want to do is be the guy responsible for maintaining and administering the social network platform for all of my family and friends".

Re:One question

[DragonWriter]

So the geeks would be the early adopters, and everyone else would probably wait until Facebook inevitably turned the thumbscrews on the users enough for them to become dissatisfied.

And which point, "everybody else" would probably move to the #2 centralized social networking system, and the geeks would still be the only ones using the decentralized system.

Unless, of course, what looked to casual users like the #2 centralized system also used (as its core infrastructure, not just incidentally and with limited or one-directional functionality) the protocols of the decentralized system. In which case, yeah, the decentralized system might win. But the problem is convincing anyone that has the interest and skill to build a service that is attractive to Joe User to use the open infrastructure, and to get the people maintaining the specifications of the open infrastructure -- and the various implementations -- to build the features into the specification (and support them in the various implementations) that make the open infrastructure useful for consumer-attractive finished implementations. Otherwise, making the open protocol central is just a drag on attempts to make a service that will attract non-geek/ideologue users.

Re:One question

[Seumas]

If, by "online", you mean "the web", then twenty years ago, you literally had to be the guy who invented the web, to put a picture online, since it was just about exactly twenty years ago that Berners-Lee uploaded the first photo to what there was of the "web" at the time.

Re:One question

[Seumas]

The geeks would be the early adopters and everyone else wouldn't care, because a bunch of us geeks is hardly the social network they're looking to associate with.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the home computer was being created for the masses not for geeks. You are rewriting history

This. Personal computers were pimped heavily for managing household finances, for example.

Granted, the mid 90s are when things really took off - but that was due to the Internet and the sudden existence of unlimited marketability, rather than, "Buy our overpriced calculator! It'll manage your budget and, uh, do things!"

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought my first computer in 1981.

Everybody, except for a couple of hard-core nerds, asked me: what the hell could you possibly want/use/need a computer for?

Re:One question

[HornWumpus]

WTF? How old are you? You're completely wrong. If you had a computer in the 80s you were a geek.

Yes, even the Mac and Amiga. A few C64 people were simply gamers, geeky gamers.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

And you are also happy to pay MS taxes?
Ever heard of competition?

Like MS in pc-softaware, FB will not give up it's monopoly in social networks. It will not open interfaces.

Re:One question

[Dan667]

because facebook has been around for 100 years and nothing like myspace existed before them?

Re:One question

[Radres]

Why does everything have to be about the bottom line with you people? Diaspora is a cool idea for a project. The service itself may or may not take the world by storm, but a P2P web hosting service is a novelty that I'm sure someone, somewhere, sometime is going to turn into a profitable idea and make you look like the fool that you are.

Re:One question

[somersault]

Geeks are generally smart enough to stay away from it.

It's nothing to do with being smart or not, it's about whether you care about your so called "privacy". A lot of geeks seem to be paranoid, and it's those ones that stay away from FB, not the "smart" ones. I don't give a shit about targetted ads. Especially since I have them blocked anyway.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

And even 30 years from now, the thought of non-geeks ever learning anything falls flat on its face.

Face it, they'll never care. Ever. And I don't use never lightly. You'll never change these people without changing what makes them them. And doing that considering the current way society works would create such an entitlement generation on levels you could NEVER imagine.
Trust me, it ain't happening.

Unless it is 100% seamless that a person with 50 kinds of mental degeneration can use it, it won't be used.

Re:One question

[rasmusbr]

It's not Joe Sixpack who decides which social networks succeed and which fail. It's more like Jane Freshman OMG-where-do-the-cool-people-hang-out? who decides, and she's an unpredictable and fickle character, at least seen from the perspective of your average developer or entrepreneur. One thing we can be sure of is that she views the Facebook blue design with the same mix of familiarity and contempt that she views a McDonald's plastic tray. Creating an attractive, fresh, daring yet easy to use user interface design is going to be an important factor.

Re:One question

[Gilmoure]

It would have to be implemented as a 'feature' by one of the gorillas (MS, Apple, Amazon, Google) but in such a case, it'd still be happening on a central cloud/server/thing. Would be cool to see someone ship a decent turn-key home A/V Web Server that would have a distributed social client but currently, the gorillas are all pushing centralized cloud servers. *sigh* I live in the country and we don't have the greatest network connectivity. Sure, for myself, I run my own home server but yeah, the rest of my family won't.

Re:One question

[rich_hudds]

You could imagine a rival company such as Google, creating such as system to ruin Facebook.

Almost everyone would use Google's 'node' but as long as anyone who wished could host their own 'node' or whatever then I'd be pretty happy.

Re:One question

[Samalie]

We couldn't even move the masses from FB to Google+.

What in the fuck makes these guys think people will move to Diasporia?

Re:One question

[Samalie]

You mean like Google+?

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. You can't sell a social network to any significant proportion of the population by advertising it as decentralized or censorship-resistant. On the hand, if Facebook dies and gets replaced by something else (which will probably happen eventually), it would definitely be nice if there were a replacement ready that satisfied those requirements. Personally, I would rather my social network be peer-to-peer (friend-to-friend?) instead of simply decentralized, but that requires people to install programs (and p2p apps drain smart phone batteries, so you can't run a p2p network purely off smartphone apps). Then the install step would be a lower barrier: semi-technical users can install a p2p app and let it sit there much easier than setting up a server and domain names.

Re:One question

[mfnickster]

When you put all the humans in one place, it makes it easy for the Cylons to find and destroy them.

Sandpeople always write a single file, to hide their numbers.

Re:One question

[rich_hudds]

No, I mean I social network like the article describes, where anyone could host a server.

Google could possibly change Google+ into something like that though.

Re:One question

[Talderas]

Are you sure about that? Or is it that you put yourself in places and converse with people who, while non-geeks, are above average in intelligence thus skewing your world view?

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people bought them as an educational tool for their kids, because "computers are the future".

There's millions of people who had an 8-bit computer and didn't do anything with it except play a few games, maybe type in a program. They just aren't hanging around on slashdot still talking about it.

Re:One question

[gl4ss]

none of my friends were ever on myspace.

well, maybe with some fake aliases.. but not with their real names anyhow.

Re:One question

[Mr. Slippery]

If, by "online", you mean "the web"...

"Online" sharing of information, including pictures, existed before the web / HTTP. People put stuff up on anonymous FTP sites.

Re:One question

[Curunir_wolf]

Joe Sixpack has one question: WTF you are talking about, who is centralized, and why should I care? Seriously, geeks are 1% of Facebook audience, 99% couldn't care less about "decentralization".

Hey, Joe - hot chicks want to meet you now! Click here to join.

Re:One question

[Curunir_wolf]

If, by "online", you mean "the web"...

"Online" sharing of information, including pictures, existed before the web / HTTP. People put stuff up on anonymous FTP sites.

Only academics did that, everybody else shared their pictures on BBSs.

Re:One question

[nine-times]

Well I do try to avoid associating with complete morons, for whatever that means. Still, my point is that there are non-geeks who care.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

And which point, "everybody else" would probably move to the #2 centralized social networking system, and the geeks would still be the only ones using the decentralized system. ..... blah blah blah I'm a fucking moron with no vision

You know, if it were up to idiots like you, nothing would ever be accomplished. Thankfully, it isn't. Now sit back and watch while history passes you by, chump.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost everyone I know is completely bored of Facebook and just treats it as another email inbox they need to check. They might not care about "privacy" in the nerdy sense, but they have so many shirt-tail friends/relatives/work-people on there, they can't post anything except the most sanitized shit.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm geeky enough to read slashdot, and even I don't understand the real use-case of "decentralized social networking".

Maybe it's something useful for creeps who want to post dick pics and fake 14 year old girl profiles.

Re:One question

[EdIII]

Thanks for making me feel as old as fuck this morning :)

Back in my day, online meant you accessed it through a modem on a BBS. If you were really advanced you were using a protocol that allowed you to start to display the picture while it was downloading.

With a slow modem, or a BBS in another country, this meant you could literally fap fap fap to a picture and try to hold it till you got to the pussy. Or if you were Japanese and into some sort of weird fetish, the feet.

No thumbnails. Every picture was a guess. Which... made trolling a BBS with pictures of chicks with dicks hilarious because the guy could have literally going to town for 10 minutes.

Now a days you can look at 1000 pictures in hi resolution in 10 minutes........

Re:One question

[brusewitz]

Click, click-click, click-click, click...

Re:One question

[Steauengeglase]

Was there a Facebook App I could click on that would automatically create a Google+ account for me? I can't recall such a thing, but it seems like it would be easy to implement.

Google was reaching too far with G+. They wanted to become the lord proprietors of your online identity and that is a quixotic task that wastes user's time and effort.

Re:One question

[next_ghost]

I'm geeky enough to read slashdot, and even I don't understand the real use-case of "decentralized social networking".

May I suggest you watch episode 2 of Your Face is a Saxophone? Mark Zuckerberg makes an appearance and shows a very real use case for decentralized social networking.

Re:One question

[EdIII]

This is nothing but nerd fantasy.

Not entirely. A decentralized network where I am in absolute control over my information is the minimum requirement for me to start to participate in social networking.

It can be very attractive, if you package up the features right, and to both hosting providers and users.

What was not mentioned is how we could use DNS SRV records. A hosting provider can set up those SRV records to distribute all sorts of services attached to the social networking profile.

Right now the hosting provider is the one absorbing the cost for the bandwidth, storage, and operation when that could be just as easily shifted to the user.

Consider the hosting provider as really just providing a configuration and maintenance service and cheap nodes (Raspberry PI's with external storage) hooked up in homes like appliances.

The hosting provider can:

1) Profit from the sales of the nodes.
2) Reduced infrastructure cost by leveraging the nodes bandwidth and storage.
3) Reduced fail over costs by allowing nodes to cache/store linked profile data, with user consent.
4) Profit from the sales/maintenance of the domains.
5) Profit from maintenance and service of the nodes.
6) Reduced costs of compliance with totalitarian governments since they have access to no data whatsoever. They only configure services and don't read data.
7) Upsell additional services like VOIP and email gateways. While the nodes could certainly negotiate VOIP directly (more so with IPv6), for quite some time you will need origination and termination services for traditional phone networks. Email is the same, but could face problems with PBL's, etc. and could certainly benefit from an SMTP relay (secured) that would have higher levels of trust.
8) Gateway for additional upsells like offsite encrypted backup of files, and other services we are not considering yet.

The consumer can:

1) Own their very own "name" on the Internet with a plethora of uses. www.desler.com/profile - www.desler.com/message - www.desler.com/location. They will own this for as long as they pay for the domain. If we get to a more censorship resistance form of DNS, this is even more attractive as it makes it very difficult for corporations and governments to control it.

2) Rest easy knowing that their profile data, communications, files, whatever is right at their fingertips and not held hostage by anyone. They could transfer the name, configuration, and upsells to whoever they wanted. Additionally, they could have more than one provider. Why be limited to one provider, when there is technically no reason why they could not be getting VOIP from one, and backup services from another?

3) Rest easy knowing that all of their data is encrypted and secured. No company is reading the data to target advertising, or disclosing anything potentially embarrassing by accident.

4) Rest easy knowing that their friends and family can be keeping parts of their data backed up, and with the purchase of another node, they can get it all back (without interruption) in a matter of hours.

5) Feel empowered to customize their own node to their personal tastes. They would not be limited to what Facebook feels it should look like. Profile Themes?

6) They don't have to wait for a companies to get off their butts and create a service. With open source and a vibrant community, new plugins could be created all the time that allow new forms of social interaction.

7) Screw XBOX live and their advertising, etc. They can have online gaming because their own nodes can be configured to transfer gaming data from attached devices. Could work just as easily for Android, iWhatever. Imagine a gaming protocol standard that worked off www.desler.com/gaming?

8) Feel in control over their profile and their data being shared. With an open source platform they can have far more granular control over what data is shared between who, and feel confident it is actually being enforced.

That's just what I can think about in 10 minutes on a break. The benefits are endless for the consumer, and it's not like it is impossible for hosting companies to make money at this.

Re:One question

[formfeed]

+1 Like

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

Tim Berners-Lee's program, WWW.app, didn't have an image tag. That was added by NCSA Mosaic.

Re:One question

[skids]

At some point facebook will fall out of favor due to a superior service. Then that will also fail. The failures will start coming in increasing intervals, and eventually the concept of a "portable" profile will become popular because people are sick of rebuilding their services. At that point providers running Diaspora guest services will be able to make a grab for market share because they can promise portability and interoperability with self-hosted instances where those geek friends that some customers do have have long since moved, so maybe then they will again start to get answers when they ask a computer question.

It is tempting to say that Facebook has a captive market, but remember that was once said of AOL.

Re:One question

[Urza9814]

First of all, plenty of people still use their ISP email. Mostly older people though in my experience -- those who just got email when they got internet and don't want to bother to change their address.

But social networking seems to be in pretty much the place email was many, many years ago. The only difference (which, I'll admit, is not at all minor) is that there's less providers with more inertia. But email wasn't always decentralized, so there's no reason why social networking couldn't end up decentralized as well, if people demand it.

I think the real, "killer app" win here would be if they could make it easily to fully segregate your data. The privacy settings and 'circles' of current networks just aren't quite cutting it. There's a reason people tend to have a separate Linked In profile and Facebook profile -- and I even know people with multiple Facebook profiles as well. One for friends, one for family, and then Linked In for employers and coworkers. Rather than just privacy settings, how about a network that allows you to create multiple linked profiles? When someone searches for you, they see one result. They send a friend request to that result, and you can choose to add them to your 'friends' profile, or your 'work' profile, or your 'family' profile...then when you post you can choose both profile(s) and privacy setting(s). Or maybe even have something like what Facebook uses with pages, where you need to click a link to swap from one profile to the other (but still get all notifications together.) I know, it's perfectly possible to have this sort of separation currently with existing privacy settings, but nobody does because it's such a pain to deal with. Google+ does it FAR better than Facebook, but that's still lacking in my opinion. Users need to feel like there is an actual, solid separation between these areas before they'll start using a single unified profile.

On an unrelated note -- basing your profile address on a domain name? Really? Why not a more decentralized approach? You should definitely be able to have some kind of unique hash for each user -- it's been done in P2P networks forever. Or even a centralized lookup service of some sort, kind of like a parallel DNS, though I guess you'd still need to find a way to pay for that...I just think the key benefit is that you can easily transfer, but if it costs you $15/year to be able to do that, most people aren't going to pay and therefore won't see any benefit.

Re:One question

[Urza9814]

5) Feel empowered to customize their own node to their personal tastes. They would not be limited to what Facebook feels it should look like. Profile Themes?

...which is part of the reason everyone left Myspace for Facebook...

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm geeky enough to read slashdot, and even I don't understand the real use-case of "decentralized social networking".

Here's one: Facebook takes your data and sells it to corporations. As someone put it here a while ago, you are the product; Facebook's real customers are the companies targeting you with ads, selling you apps, or mining your data for other purposes. They control the landscape here. If you, or someone you can actually trust, is running your node, that's not happening. When it's your node, you are in control.

Here's another Facebook's use of terms of service to create disenfranchised classes.

These are people who have completed their legally imposed punishments; who have extremely low rates of recidivism; who can't talk to their families, can't monitor who is talking to their kids, can't make comments on various sites that incorporate Facebook's commenting system, etc.

Personally, I shoot a lot of photos, and I don't want anyone to have control over deleting them but me; If I'm going to take the time to write a blog, or a history, or post on a wall, I don't want it going away because some faceless executive decides I used a bad word or am saying things that they find otherwise objectionable.

We're becoming a cruel society of lists. The no-fly, no-buy, no-live-here, you-might-be-a-terrist, felon, offender (not the same as felon), etc. Suppose you're pissing behind a bush one night, dumping your beer in a happy haze of snow-name-writing, and some cop objects, and you end up with society's version of the Jewish star. Guess whose terms of service say you can't have an account already? That's right: Facebook. You probably just lost touch with your family's preferred means of keeping each other up to date. Just as Pastor Martin Niemöller warned, first, they locked out one class of people, but I wasn't one of those, so I didn't care...

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

This
"Remember when every ISP offered email? I guess they still do - but nobody cares. There are 3ish winners in the west: Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail."
is a piss poor argument. It's like comparing two computer mice, identical in every way except packaging to the consumer. One is in a nice plastic wrapped cardboard box, the other is in hermetically sealed blister pack that takes the jaws of life to get open. Which freaking one would you choose? Seriously.

I'm sorry but ISP hosted email has ALWAYS been a pain in the ass of everyday consumers, and it never changed. ISPs tried(horribly) to ease this with software that could configure everything, but this wasn't perfect, and in many cases caused more problems than it solved.

This argument is moot anyway, the bubble that is Facebook is about to burst from underneath the 99% you quote, and all of them are going to be left in the dark sooner or later.

This isn't an argument FOR Diaspora(worst fucking name ever), but for competition for FB, it needs it badly, and you know what? As long as NewsCorp doesn't have a chance to muck it all up...it might work too.

And no, Diaspora doesn't have a chance with the 99% of FB users until it drops the absolutely terrible name...every single time I hear it, or read it, my mind immediately thinks of the 5 or so random Diarrhea ads on TV. I know what the word means, and I'm sorry, but even that association can't help this inanely chosen monicker.

Re:One question

[incongruency]

If you add ten years to each of his original statements it makes a bit more sense...

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

So we cannot use any words that start with the prefix dia- because you are a willful retard?

Re:One question

[Americano]

wait until Facebook inevitably turned the thumbscrews on the users enough for them to become dissatisfied.

At which point they'll move to G+. Or Orkut. Or back to Myspace. Or to some new centralized service.

The BEST you can hope for is that the "next great social network" will be a pay service, where "you own what you post, we don't mine data, and we don't sell your data to other companies." (See: app.net's recent attempt to take on Twitter using this very model. They managed to get ~10k supporters to pledge during their funding drive, so perhaps there's a burgeoning interest in this model.)

If Facebook turns the screws hard enough as you're suggesting, people aren't going to magically want to become home server admins as a result. They'll say, "Well I want a service that respects my privacy and stops selling all my information to other companies." And if they want that, someone will come along and say, "For $10 a month, SocialFaceSpace will give you all the features of Facebook, but you'll retain full rights to ANYTHING you post (provided you own the copyrights to it in the first place, etc. etc.), and we will NEVER sell your data to third parties!"

Most people would rather spend $10 a month for a service than learn how to administer their own servers. The idea that people will suddenly develop a lust for Linux as a result of Facebook implementing further privacy intrusions is way too far-fetched. They'll simply move to a new central service which will promise (for a fee) to not behave like Facebook.

Re:One question

[yt8znu35]

Joe Sixpack has one question: WTF you are talking about, who is centralized, and why should I care? Seriously, geeks are 1% of Facebook audience, 99% couldn't care less about "decentralization".

This^, despite the fact that I do understand the article and appreciate the concepts. Diaspora would never fly because ten nerds (and zero women) would not constitute a user base. Even Google+ has a user base of mostly nerds that keep it active. There (apparently) has to be a SN for utter dipshits, and that's the role that FB fulfills.

Re:One question

[DragonWriter]

You know, if it were up to idiots like you, nothing would ever be accomplished.

I think you are very confused. What I said was is an open social network isn't likely to without attention to features that support mass, consumer adoption.

Now sit back and watch while history passes you by, chump.

If social networking was my thing -- which it really isn't right now -- I'd be working with the open distributed systems now, not withstanding a lack of expectation of any likelihood of them displacing the dominant closed system in the near term, even if the dominant closed system managed to make people angry enough to look for an alternative.

A lack of irrational exuberance about the near term mass market prospects isn't the same thing as a lack of vision.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, geeks are 1% of Facebook audience, 99% couldn't care less about "decentralization".
 
I think you got this wrong, in a matter of speaking. 99% of all facebookers are non-geeks who don't care about decentralization, true. But 99% of that 1% who are geeks don't care about decentralization either.
 
Too many Slashdotters think that the geeks here would actually get off their ass to do anything in this case. Most don't have the talent it would take and those that have the talent are already dedicated to other things. You're not going to get many who will take you up on this.
 
For proof of concept, check out the number of people who who have a page that bother to put it out there for you to look at. Not many, huh? Go to some of those pages. Many haven't been updated in years and a good number of them don't even exist anymore but their owners can't be bothered to take the link out of their profile. Imagine this kind of "geekdom" running a decentralized social networking site. These types of efforts require people who'll actually play an active role in the process. Having a few thousand who are willing to dedicate some old hardware and spare bandwidth to the effort isn't going to mean much if even 10% of them don't follow through on the process for the next year. I can see many of these systems losing power in a blackout and not being powered up again for months. Or as hardware fails some people won't want to invest to keep it alive.
 
I've hosted goofy little servers myself from time to time. I like putting them together and sharing them with people but when they fail or need maintenance I rarely keep up on them.

Re:One question

[kwerle]

First of all, plenty of people still use their ISP email...

I wish I could find numbers.

..But email wasn't always decentralized, so there's no reason why social networking couldn't end up decentralized as well, if people demand it...

Wait. What? When was email not decentralized? Which is to say: when was email centralized?

I think the real, "killer app" win here would be if they could make it easily to fully segregate your data.

Circles work fine for me. Most people seem to care very little.

On an unrelated note -- basing your profile address on a domain name? Really? Why not a more decentralized approach?

Right. Because what I really want is 1000 commercial sites all responding to queries for Kurt Werle with data about me they have scrapped off the web.

This is one of the biggest invisible features of the walled gardens of Facebook & gPlus: the walls. Because if you think that email spam is bad, wait until you start to get Diaspora spam from Russia, China, and a million zombie boxes all running bogus diaspora nodes.

Re:One question

[AmberBlackCat]

They shouldn't market it as the decentralized network. They should market it as the network with no advertisements, no changing your settings at any given moment, and without that stupid timeline Facebook added in it's panic over Twitter. If you take the time, you can come up with a long list of things people hate about Facebook that aren't really necessary for a social network to exist.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

It would actually be more fun to use decentralized and open systems for social networking. why wait on Facebook to implement a new feature? You want a "Time Line" for your profile? Google it...someone has probably made a plug-in. This is the nature of the internet and open source. Unfettered innovation and inter-connectivity. The cocksuckers of the world want to take this beautiful thing we call the web and turn it into a more profitable television set or use it to spy on people or whatever stupid agenda the cocksuckers of the world have going at any given time. As always, the 1% innovate and the 99% consume. The 1% merely have to show the 99% that open systems are more fun.

On a side note it should be noted that it is impossible for Google to "not be evil." Google is a corporation now. It is by definition, amoral.

Re:One question

[Phreakiture]

For those of us without the time to watch the whole episode, here's the relevant clip.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

While Diaspora* is known for having very nice privacy settings for keeping things more private, what is less publicized is how useful it is for hosting content you want open to the public in a straightforward manner (good luck using your facebook stream as an open-to-the-public page, particularly if you want people to use it with RSS readers...it's doable, just a bit on the painful side). So, in that case, the point is that as people move away from facebook (for one reason or another...for now it's a bit of a trickle, but it's already fairly visibly turning into more of a stream), regardless of where they end up going to, you can still at the very least link people along to your update stream. Top that off with integration with facebook (it's very easy to make your Diaspora* updates automatically also post to facebook), and it actually becomes easier to keep in touch with all of your friends, even if most are only on facebook, using Diaspora, rather than using facebook directly.

This example isn't something that will necessarily fit for everyone, but it does point to the flexibility of Diaspora being a clear benefit over the rigidity of sites like Facebook. I'm not saying Diaspora itself will necessarily be the big winner, but I do think that a structure LIKE Diaspora will be what we have to look forward to.

Re:One question

[styrotech]

WTF? How old are you? You're completely wrong. If you had a computer in the 80s you were a geek.

Yes, even the Mac and Amiga. A few C64 people were simply gamers, geeky gamers.

Really? I knew plenty of kids back then with Amigas, C64s and ZX Spectrums etc for games that were nowhere near being geeks. The only thing they knew how to do (or even wanted to do) with the computer was boot it into a game.

Many of my friends and school/family acquaintances had a computer in their home, and yet I was the only one I knew of that ever tried to program one. Nobody else cared in the slightest - computers were just a game console where the more awkward game loading was offset by the ability to pirate the games.

Re:One question

[jibjibjib]

> Facebook takes your data and sells it to corporations.

No, Facebook sells targeted advertising. e.g a corporation could say "Show this ad to all the gay people" or something. The corporations generally don't actually receive any of your data.

Re:One question

[Urza9814]

..But email wasn't always decentralized, so there's no reason why social networking couldn't end up decentralized as well, if people demand it...

Wait. What? When was email not decentralized? Which is to say: when was email centralized?

I mean, I will say I have no personal experience with this having not been alive at the time, but it is my understanding that in the early days of personal computers there were many email providers with proprietary systems that were not capable of sending messages between networks.

From http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2002/cmsc434-0101/MUIseum/applications/emailhistory.html :
"In the late-1970's and 1980's the phenomenal growth of personal computers (Apple II 1978 - 1985; IBM PC 1983 and Apple Macintosh 1984) created a whole new genre of email technologies. Some of these systems were proprietary 'dial-up' systems such as MCI Mail, EasyLink, Telecom Gold, One-to-One, CompuServe, AppleLink etc. For two people to exchange messages remotely on these systems they had to both be subscribers. The proprietary systems did not interoperate or transmit messages from one system to another, or for the few systems that did these were notoriously unreliable...."

You could certainly state that by not being interoperable this wasn't technically email, but that's not really the point -- if social networks became decentralized in the same way I bet people in thirty years would be claiming Facebook wasn't technically a social network either.

I think the real, "killer app" win here would be if they could make it easily to fully segregate your data.

Circles work fine for me. Most people seem to care very little.

Well, we're both going on purely anecdotal evidence, but FWIW: Most people I know care a lot. Some care enough to make multiple separate accounts on the same network. Most do as I do and simply refuse to add large numbers of people. For example, I will never add a coworker on Facebook unless we're hanging out outside of work and I get to know them fairly well. I refuse to add ANY family members. My Facebook account is for friends only, because there's no way to ensure that what I post to one group won't end up visible to everything. Shit, just the other day my privacy settings somehow got altered so that all of my posts were set to 'public' rather than 'friends'. I sure as hell didn't change that (at least not intentionally); and I wouldn't have even known if someone else hadn't noticed and pointed it out to me. I think most people would have a larger 'friends' list if they could ensure this separation -- which to me implies that they'd like to be able to do so.

Google+ is better by far, and would probably be sufficient, but my point was more that if you phrased it and built it as 'profile isolation!' or something it would be easier to understand for most users and provide a more compelling use case than saying 'more user friendly privacy controls!' -- even if it's the exact same thing.

On an unrelated note -- basing your profile address on a domain name? Really? Why not a more decentralized approach?

Right. Because what I really want is 1000 commercial sites all responding to queries for Kurt Werle with data about me they have scrapped off the web.

This is one of the biggest invisible features of the walled gardens of Facebook & gPlus: the walls. Because if you think that email spam is bad, wait until you start to get Diaspora spam from Russia, China, and a million zombie boxes all running bogus diaspora nodes.

I fail to see how this is a problem. That's kind of the point of social networks -- you only see posts from people you have agreed to see posts from. Unless you're talking about the common 'message' feature on most networks -- in which case there's really no difference between that and email, and the same technology that manages to keep my Gmail completely devoid of spam should work just as well in something like diaspora.

Re:One question

[Urza9814]

Ah, my other reply neglected to reply to this bit:

Right. Because what I really want is 1000 commercial sites all responding to queries for Kurt Werle with data about me they have scrapped off the web.

THAT I see as a big issue. I suspect it could be handled by reputable node operators simply blacking nodes that are reported to be doing this. Make it a web-of-trust model. But I admit that this may become impractical if the network and/or the number of spam nodes are large enough...

Re:One question

[brantondaveperson]

Now I don't necessarily know about that.

OK, it's got a stupid name. But they seem to refer to themselves as D* in blog posts etc, which I suppose might work.

In any case I don't think there's any doubt now that Facebook will implode at some point. Maybe Anonymous will break into their datacenters somehow and obliterate all their data - imagine that! So given that at some point people will be looking for something new, is there any reason why a few Diaspora nodes might pop up and start to be used. I've not used it myself, since I personally have to give social networks a miss for the same reasons that reformed alcoholics should never drink again, but if it's online somewhere why wouldn't they?

I mean this site looks perfectly fine. Does it matter that it's decentralised, as long as the experience of it is fairly seamless? Especially given that I don't remember facebook being all that reliable anyway. As someone else has pointed out, email started out as closely guarded proprietary systems, and evolved into the distributed system we have today. It has its problems, spam being chief amongst them, but these I'm sure could have been engineered out when true email was designed. Of course, it's far too late for that now, but that doesn't mean that a distributed social network is nothing more than a nerd fantasy.

From a more idealistic point of view - and as a wise man once said to me, 'what's wrong with having ideals?' - isn't a free distributed social network that no-one actually owns just generally a better thing?

Re:One question

[Anrego]

Which is something the vast majority of users don't care about.

Privacy and data ownership are big issues to the slashdot crowd.. not to the masses (lest we forget, facebook is all about blasting your personal info out to the world..). It's not even that people don't understand the issue, in a lot of cases they do, but have a different set of priorities.

Re:One question

[DuckDodgers]

I think the reality is somewhere between your point and the writer's point. I think it's easy to convince Joe Sixpack that a decentralized social network is good:

1. No company can read or sell your personal information.
2. The government can't issue a subpoena to snoop your personal information. (They can issue a warrant to you, but you have some Fifth Amendment protections in the US and similar protections in some other countries, and you may be able to delete your data before they can get to it.)
3. They can't change the social network user interface or features without your consent.
4. No ads in the content.
5. You can share whatever you want, whether it's legal or not.

On the other hand, in order for it to get widespread non-geek adoption a distributed social network would need to be ridiculously easy to set up, run very well on low end hardware ( maybe even on tablets and smart phones ), and have some kind of distributed encrypted backup system similar to Wuala. The fact that Diaspora works at all is amazing, but this level of requirements takes things to a whole different level and I'll be pleasantly shocked if any free software community can make it work.

Re:One question

[dwye]

Nonsense. This shows the use case for taking guns into the toilet, just as Tuco The Rat from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly showed the use case for keeping one's pistols in the tub while bathing.

Seriously, if Zuckerberg (or whoever else) took someone's picture while using the toilet, you could not stop him from publishing them on his domain without threats (at least, to unfriend him, if not lawyers or physical force (actually, lawyers without force backing them are fairly useless)).

Re:One question

[lennier]

Remember when every ISP offered email? I guess they still do - but nobody cares. There are 3ish winners in the west: Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail.

None of which I use, and the majority of people in my email to-list are not on one of those.

Re:One question

[lennier]

Twenty years ago if you wanted to put your pictures online you had to run your own server.

Fifteen years ago, though, you had GeoCities.

Which, if you weren't there (and I'm guessing most of you weren't - kids today, harumph) was basically a Facebook wall without messaging. We had "guest books" for that. But we did have image memes. The dancing baby. The Java "water droplets under the cursor" thing. The tiled background JPGs And the animated "under construction" GIFs, aieee. My eyes are still burning.

Re:One question

[kwerle]

None of which I use, and the majority of people in my email to-list are not on one of those.

Why?

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

If only. Learn about data aggregators. This is a good place to start, as the NYT uses Facebook as an example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/facebook-is-using-you.html

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand the real use-case of "decentralized social networking".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

On a side note it should be noted that it is impossible for Google to "not be evil." Google is a corporation now. It is by definition, amoral.

If something is amoral it cannot, by definition, be evil.
Amoral != immoral.

Besides which, people are moral beings, and corporations are people too, my friend.

Re:One question

[Thugthrasher]

The failures will start coming in increasing intervals,

Why do you think this? If anything, the trend is that each '#1' social networking site is lasting longer. Friendster was only there (in the US) for around 2 years. MySpace lasted what, 3 years at the top? Facebook is on its 8th year and has been top for around 4. It will likely last a few more years as the #1 site, just from inertia alone. As these sites learn more and more what users want/don't want, they will continue to last a while.

Social networking sites are not like 'normal' tech. If you come out with a better social networking site, you will attract an initial group of people. Those people then have to convince their friends to move to your site from another site. People are on Facebook because people are on Facebook. Facebook would likely have to do something truly unpopular at about the same time another social networking site started getting its initial base at users in order to go away. Once that happens, people will move to the new site. Then, once that site has enough of a base, the pattern will repeat. If anything, I'd guess social networks will become MORE stable as years go on.

Re:One question

[Thugthrasher]

I do see a lot of common non-geeks complaining about Facebook-- about the privacy issues, the ads, seemingly arbitrary changes to the UI/UX. It's not as though non-geeks are all completely stupid and unconcerned about anything.

But they have short memories. They complain about privacy issues when Facebook makes a mistake, like changing everyone's privacy settings, that gets publicized. Then most of them forget about the issue and stop complaining. They complain about the ads occasionally, then continue on with their day. They complain about the changes to the UI/UX for a little while and then one of two things TENDS to happen: Facebook changes the UI again, as they realize their original change was a bad one OR most users realize they actually like the new way better, once they are used to it.

How many complaints have you seen recently? I'm betting less than you did a few months ago and the ones you are seeing are likely about A)Timeline, because they have recently been switched over or B)a select few who still complain about FB changing their displayed email. Non-geeks complain for a little while and then stop.

Re:One question

[next_ghost]

But then you'll miss the first appearance of Mark Zuckerberg in the episode and a whole lot of fun on top.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

go away, shill

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand the real use-case of "decentralized social networking".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure

Quick! Everyone! Get off the Earth!

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep.

Hope you are poised, ready to capitalize.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

5) Feel empowered to customize their own node to their personal tastes. They would not be limited to what Facebook feels it should look like. Profile Themes?

...which is part of the reason everyone left Myspace for Facebook...

It is possible to give users choice without inflicting their choices on others. Trying to impose a specific graphic design on the Web goes against how it was supposed to work, and on a basic level fails to understand your hardware is not my hardware, your view is not my view.

It would be entirely possible for a site like Facebook to have a default stylesheet, and give users the option of stylesheets that give a radically different presentation of the same material.

I strongly suspect the big reason sites do not do make more effort in regards to stylesheets is because a stylsheet can also be used (crudely) to hide advertising.

Freetard fail

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't want to run hubs or have to do complex setup just to talk to people. Freetards once again fail.

Re:Freetard fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong use of freetard. Wanting freedom is not the same thing as being a cheapskate.

Re:Freetard fail

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't want to vote or have to read and check facts just to live. Democracy once again fail.

Re:Freetard fail

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't want to run hubs or have to do complex setup just to talk to people. Freetards once again fail.

Oh sorry, I didn't remember that people have to build their own antenna to use the telephone network.
And damn, my grandmother always have problem when setting up her email server.

Re:Freetard fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh, now I see, thanks. I don't want to be called freetard so I'm now dropping all my aspirations to freedom and independence. See you at FB buddy! Thanks again!

Re:Freetard fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Only need enough 'people' to make the system work. Think of every p2p based applications and or protocols. Gnutella, BitTorrent, Skype (granted bad example on many fronts except that people were used as hubs without doing anything but leaving the app online on a quality connection) and of course Tor come to mind first. The point being if the application does all the work and the protocol is implemented properly people need only opt (or perhaps not) in to be a hub. I've been waiting for one to try paying or playing to ego (special icon by your profile that says you rock for leaving your app running) to further give incentive to check that box or leave the app running.

Re:Freetard fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Freetard = someone who promotes a ridiculous solution for something which most consider a non-problem

Re:Freetard fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear all: the politically correct term for "freetard" is "person with intellectual-freedom-biased cognitive diversity".

Thanks.

cool story bro

[Anonymous Coward]

cool story bro

IT'S CALLED USENET MOTHERFUCKERS !!

[Anonymous Coward]

But binaries ruined it !!

Re:IT'S CALLED USENET MOTHERFUCKERS !!

[Anonymous Coward]

If by ruined you mean made awesome, then yes.

First they need to

[Anonymous Coward]

Release a product.

BOOM roasted

Another question

[opus_magnum]

just how many users are there on Diaspora?

Re:Another question

[Desler]

They claim to have a couple hundred thousand users.

Re:Another question

[Cro Magnon]

I've heard there are more Diaspora users than Ron Paul voters.

Re:Another question

[Seumas]

What is their definition of "user"?

I chipped in on their Kickstarter from the very beginning and was one of the first to create an account and login. After that first login, I never touched Diaspora again. Do I still count as a "user"?

Re:Another question

[fibonacci8]

I've heard there are more Diaspora users than Ron Paul voters.

The last time I heard this joke, it was relating the number of SARS victims to the number of people unhappy with "The Party". And it was in Mandarin.

Bennett is a tard

[Desler]

Hey Bennet your link is about it Diaspora becoming a community project not about opening the source code. Since, you know, it's was already open source and on Github.

Re:Bennett is a tard

[Anonymous Coward]

when i hear the name "bennet" i cant help but think of that guy wearing chainmail in that schwarzenegger movie (Commando was it?)

"Let off some steam, Bennett"

Re:Bennett is a tard

[Anonymous Coward]

When I hear bennet I can't but think about the poor girl in Sweden Hannah Bennet that was brutally murdered recently because the neighbour though she made to much noise.

Re:Bennett is a tard

[gpmanrpi]

Poor Sully, Matrix told him he would kill him last, but he lied. Literally the most homo-erotic, comedic, and quintessential action movie ever made. It is the 80s action movie genre in one movie. All action movies are measured against this movie. Too bad this thread is off topic, but we need posts on /. regarding Commando instead of Diaspora.

All very fluffy

[Anonymous Coward]

But this approach also has disadvantages which are not explored. The exposition above seems to assume that Facebook act randomly in removing photos and in removing features, but that's clearly not the case. There is a reason they remove certain photos and a reason they remove features (e.g. if they are abused). This system would bring all the abuse back, unless designed with those abuses in mind - but all I see here are advantages, no disadvantages or even cautionary notes. Maybe people don't want a Facebook alternative where they are spammed left right and center, and on which people host porn, for instance.

Re:All very fluffy

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the internet; all the things you suggest already exist on it. Yet, somehow, we survive.

Re:All very fluffy

[Altanar]

Not as a social network they don't, at least not a social network that has any kind of popularity. The only people willing so sort through porn and spam to talk to grandma are masochists.

Re:All very fluffy

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh

Re:All very fluffy

[Hatta]

Maybe people don't want a Facebook alternative where they are spammed left right and center

If you're going to be spammed left right and center, you might as well use the real Facebook.

Re:All very fluffy

[Apu de Beaumarchais]

The idea is certainly interesting and I was even looking into the source and debated contributing to it when it first came out. I was not impressed with what I saw and when I thought about the concept I saw a few major issues with the idea of creating a decentralized network which weren't easy to overcome and the Diaspora developers weren't ready to tackle.

1. Cost: Anything costs money to run and it would be inevitable that one pod would grow to be substantially larger than the others and would have to be able to scale up to meet the demand so money would have to come from somewhere. It would be difficult to put ads up when your software is open source so others can set up their own pod easily and criticize your use of ads. I also believe most people wouldn't donate.
2. Trust: This is probably the biggest issue with decentralization. Most people won't just trust some random person who would be very difficult to find and sue if they screw up. The main node is currently the most popular to my knowledge and it would be difficult to convince companies people trust like Microsoft, Google, etc. when it's difficult to differentiate themselves, there's risk of being undercut easily and they can make a lot on advertising on proprietary alternatives that aren't as easy to compete with.
3. Development effort: The decentralized nature means it's a lot more work to develop new features since they have to behave nicely with other nodes. One of the big difficulties is adding new features or overhauling existing ones because they either have to not be decentralized, be designed to be backwards compatible with other less up to date nodes, or can not use these features with nodes that don't yet support them. It also means much greater potential for bugs when nodes with various versions of the software communicate and then it's a lot more work debugging than if you controlled the whole software / hardware stack.

In the end my fiancee and I created our own social network. We plan to open source it if it ever gets any popularity, but we want to keep it centralized with potential communication via versioned APIs and OAuth. We have way more features, including a mobile app, than Diaspora despite receiving no money and doing it all in our spare time and we're quite happy with where it's going.

Re:All very fluffy

[Requiem18th]

That's not even the main disadvantage actually.

The main disadvantage is the old "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link". Let's say Diaspora becomes at least as popular as OpenID. As you know, OpenID's problem is a lack of identity consumers, not identity providers, in fact many large business including Google offer OpenID services. Therefore it's only natural that Facebook will offer Diaspora servies, in fact it's incredibly easy for them to simply provide a Diasspora API their existing profiles, meaning Facebook can become, overnight, the largest Diaspora pod.

Of course your facebook profile will be tightly integrated with your Diaspora profile, it's actually a very convenient feature for users.

Now, as a Diaspora user, I can make public comments about games and movies, but keep political ones only for friends and family. My family is on Diaspora too, through facebook. Facebook thus can report everything I share with my family to the CIA/FBI/TSA so the next time I have to unfortunately venture into the "Land of the Free Home of the Brave" I can be properly hassled, scanned, molested and denied entrance into your delightful country for being an ethnic terrorist..

Ok so I make sure to never friend anyone who uses facebook for their Diaspora pods, I'm safe now right? Not quite. For simplicity purposes, posts and profile sections can be made either "Public", "Friends-only" and "Friend of a Friend".

"Friend of a Friend" is the most useful one, it's the one that puts the "network" in "social networks". FOAF is the one you want to post about parties and family vacations. Not public but still shareable with your immediate friends and their families. But how do you know your friends are as strict on banning Facebook users from their firend list?

Worse yet, FOAF can only be enforced Friend-side. I have made my disdain of facebook obvious enough, but ANY Diaspora pod can be just as bad, if not worse so. Since my friends are going to be using random Diaspora providers, I have little hope of controlling their FOAF policies.

It doesn't even have to be an "evil" pod provider. A compromised one is just as bad. And even if my friends all use "good" pod providers which enforce FOAF policies correctly. If they have friends using compromised service providers, my night club exploits will again become available to the highest bidder (very likely including facebook and google anyway).

Don't get me wrong. I still think it is a step above using facebook. I would still rather have a Diaspora profile than a facebook one. But the main advice about things you don't public is still valid. Don't post it online.

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me up when you have some news. Thanks!

More F2F social networking instead

[kheldan]

Personally I think that so-called "social networking" contributes to the achievement of the opposite of it's intent: It actually keeps people apart rather than bringing them together. It has created another, deceptive definition of the word "friend", whereas now you have "Friends" (with a capital 'F', for your real, actual friends) and "friends" (with a lower-case 'f', for your online 'friends', who very often may as well be 'bots for all the real meaning they have to your life). We have an entire generation of kids growing up who are more sociall awkward than ever before, because "social networking" gives them an excuse to not learn to interact with each other on an in-person level. I'd like to see people outgrow all this so-called "social networking" and get back to actually relating to each other in real life.

Re:More F2F social networking instead

[Desler]

Yeah, if not for that pesky little fact that most of people's Facebook friends are their real-life friends and famly. Very few people are the attention whores who friends every and anyone.

Re:More F2F social networking instead

[kheldan]

Sorry, but I disagree with you. I'm not pulling this opinion out of my ass, it's based on my observations of more than just Facebook.

it's called web and email servers.

[gl4ss]

yo, '95 called and wants it nerd social networking back(and irc).

isn't this the second article about diaspora becoming _UNMAINTAINED_?

Re:it's called web and email servers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite my disgust at the term, the best way I can describe "decentralized social networking" is THE FREAKING BLOGOSPHERE WE ALREADY HAVE, YOU GODDAMNED BUZZWORD WHORES.

You can start a blog on your own server. You can post status updates as entries. You can post long-form things as entries. You can store your pictures there. We have RSS feeds. People can subscribe to them and they'll show up in their own readers. We have OpenID so you can log in cross-website and post comments. We have pingbacks for referencing and sharing. If you want to search for your friends, we have Google. What in the hell does a "decentralized social network" offer that just plain blogging DOESN'T? The only advantage of a "social network" IS the centralized part of it, making it easier to find people and keep their posts organized. The second you don't want the centralization part in the first place is the second you don't want a social network.

THAT'S why Diaspora-Star-Tilde-Wingdings-Whatever failed. It's a completely worthless concept.

Re:it's called web and email servers.

[CRCulver]

Despite my disgust at the term, the best way I can describe "decentralized social networking" is THE FREAKING BLOGOSPHERE WE ALREADY HAVE, YOU GODDAMNED BUZZWORD WHORES.

On a traditional blog, how can I conveniently specify that a post should be visible only to a selected subset of subscribers ("friends")? You can make the website completely closed, requiring a username and password to read, or you can keep it completely open and every visitor can see everything. There's no in-between.

Unlike a typical blog, decentralized microblogging seeks to offer variable privacy of posts. It's not even a matter of privacy (which is threatened by the ability of any reader to repost the content anyway). If I am writing a post about some nerdy subject like Emacs or hacking the N900, I might as well limit its visibility to those friends who I know are passionate about that subject, and avoid cluttering most of my friends' feeds.

Re:it's called web and email servers.

[gl4ss]

Despite my disgust at the term, the best way I can describe "decentralized social networking" is THE FREAKING BLOGOSPHERE WE ALREADY HAVE, YOU GODDAMNED BUZZWORD WHORES.

On a traditional blog, how can I conveniently specify that a post should be visible only to a selected subset of subscribers ("friends")? You can make the website completely closed, requiring a username and password to read, or you can keep it completely open and every visitor can see everything. There's no in-between.

Unlike a typical blog, decentralized microblogging seeks to offer variable privacy of posts. It's not even a matter of privacy (which is threatened by the ability of any reader to repost the content anyway). If I am writing a post about some nerdy subject like Emacs or hacking the N900, I might as well limit its visibility to those friends who I know are passionate about that subject, and avoid cluttering most of my friends' feeds.

if you want sub forums and privilidged users then you want forum sw.. possibly with *tadaa* centralised login system.

anyhow, usually what people do in such case is that they use this magical technology called email to email only those who are supposed to get the post.

Re:it's called web and email servers.

[lennier]

if you want sub forums and privilidged users then you want forum sw..

No. Nobody really wants web forums. They're all universally awful both to admin and to use. People only put up with them because they don't realise how much better it could be.

What I want, and have wanted for some time, is a really basic publishing platform for small snippets of text. Something that I can use to assemble a blog, a wiki, a forum conversation, anything like that. Something that will automatically subscribe and publish to RSS, email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook gadget, whatever the cool viewing tech of the day is, but still keep the underlying content online, filed neatly and accessible. Something I can host on a public service or on my own server. Something that has a shared interlinked namespace so I can reply to friends' posts wherever they are.

It's not rocket science, or it shouldn't be, but we've somehow allowed Web publishing to stagnate into a hard division between pages, forums, wikis, and "social networks"; there really needn't be any such walls.

I just don't want to try to write it because the #1 web development tool for availability is PHP, which means it will get rooted instantly. I'd like to see, say, Wordpress, which has shaken most of its security bugs out now, evolve into something more general like this; but the signs aren't promising.

Start by replacing the "page" concept with "posts" and "views", and we'll be getting somewhere.

We are already there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone so inclined may run a webserver, with various forums or bulletin boards or private guest pages or whatever. As well as mailing lists. All of that is social networking. We've been there for some time - but without a brand name like 'facebook'. The Internet itself is a social network.

I've actually been waiting for this.

[BMOC]

The idea of a central company having complete control of my information and social network is just absurdly bad, to me. I don't care what privacy protections they give assurances of, that information alone is so powerful in the hands of those who would seek power, it is literally irresistable. It is a testament to how little people give thought to their everyday actions that so many people use Facebook.

Replace "facebook" with "a 3-letter federal agency" performing the same task, and the outrage would be unquenchable... but somehow people trust Facebook not to betray them. I just don't understand it.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[Desler]

Because most people don't care? Yes, if you are sharing highly personal information on Facebook that is a dumb idea, but Facebook doesn't force you to do so.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[BMOC]

While it is true that facebook never forces anyone to share personal information, the fact that the user has no ultimate control over access to it limits its social use quite a bit, now doesn't it? Most people should care who has access to that information, just as people generally care when they see someone spying on/stalking them in public. The difference on Facebook is, you never even know you're being stalked, you're blind to all attempts to access your information.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just don't understand it.

Here, let me help you. Most people aren't paranoid. They see that no actual harm comes to them if "zomg teh facebooks knows i exist!!11one!!". They correctly see that Facebook doesn't care about them personally. Facebook provides a valuable service to people with a social life (explaining why most slashdotters don't understand it).

I've been on Facebook for ages and I've yet to see a single negative consequence. Any more if you want a social life, being invited to parties and knowing about all the events your friends are doing, you need to be on Facebook. Well over 90% of the 18-35 age bracket is. If you're not, well, maybe that's a problem with YOU. Maybe you need to work on your paranoia a little bit, because it's going to cause problems for you in ways beyond FB too.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[Virtucon]

That's my point with all of this. It started with MySpace, no Facebook and there will be others. Remember that old model of "who pays for all this content?"
well it's the information gleaned from all that nice personal data that people gladly hand over. In 10 years there will be two possible outcomes. 1) People will suddenly wake up and say that their privacy matters or 2) Facebook will be able to tell you and everybody else what you had for Breakfast, when you last fucked your wife and how much money is in your bank account.

I prefer option 1, always and keeping the information in 2 to myself and those I chose to share it with. Fundamentally the technology has outstripped our privacy rights and it is time we all started caring about that because if you look at this you can see how some innocuous information can lead to oppression and tyranny. Governments know this and passively use this to their advantage now and when they want to flip the switch they'll be able to crack down on any anti-government movement for "public safety." The beauracrats in DC will just go to Congress and make a "We need to collect and monitor the people for safety" and the dipshit congressmen will open the coffers.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[Desler]

No, it doesn't considering that most Facebook users don't care. You are projecting.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[BMOC]

You entirely skipped the context quoting me there. Why is ok to be concerned of the CIA/FBI/NSA listening to your entire life, but not ok to share that same concern over a private company?

I've been called worse things than paranoid. So until you can answer ^^that^^ question to my satisfaction, with no hand-waving of privacy agreements, or anecdotal "well they haven't hurt me so far" nonsense, I'll continue to think what I think.

Also, the "everybody's doing it" argument is quite high-school.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[BMOC]

What exactly am I projecting? Is it unreasonable to be concerned when you see someone following you on the street, taking pictures of what you're doing, listening to your conversations? If you saw that happening to yourself or someone you were with, would it be paranoia to be concerned?

Now imagine a system wherein someone can do this to you, or your friends, while being invisible and undetectable. That's what facebook allows and I don't consider it an unreasonable concern to effectively not use facebook because of that.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is ok to be concerned of the CIA/FBI/NSA listening to your entire life, but not ok to share that same concern over a private company?

Who said people are generally concerned with the NSA etc listening to their entire life? Hint, they're not.

People care about things that matter to them. Facebook doesn't harm them in any way, and it provides a valuable service to them. Go around and ask a thousand FB users if they are being harmed by FB. You'll just get a lot of blank looks and confused stares. There's no reason for them to avoid Facebook, so why should they?

And yes, to normal people, "your friends are there" DOES matter. Most people have social networks and relate to other human beings. Antisocial types don't tend to understand this, but it's true. The average person is social, not antisocial. Going off to sit alone by yourself in a dark room might be fine for some, but the majority want to be included, not excluded.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[BMOC]

Who said people are generally concerned with the NSA etc listening to their entire life? Hint, they're not.

From the OP:

...It is a testament to how little people give thought to their everyday actions that so many people use Facebook.

People care about things that matter to them. Facebook doesn't harm them in any way, and it provides a valuable service to them. Go around and ask a thousand FB users if they are being harmed by FB. You'll just get a lot of blank looks and confused stares. There's no reason for them to avoid Facebook, so why should they?

You seem to want to explain social pressures as it if excuses ignorance of the consequences, unless I'm wrong.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[aaaaaaargh!]

Here, let me help you. Most people aren't paranoid. They see that no actual harm comes to them if "zomg teh facebooks knows i exist!!11one!!".

What you say might hold for yourself, but in my experience is not at all typical. People care a lot about privacy. In fact, I have never met a single person who didn't care about what companies like FB or Google do with their data. However, most people also tend to prefer ease of use and simplicity over privacy and security.

Make the p2p part transparent to the user, make the application cross-platform (incl. phones) and zero configuration, and offer something additional (like e.g. encrypted anonymous file transfer) and people will use it. None of this is easy, though, even just NAT traversal is a pain in the ass...

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[farble1670]

I just don't understand it.

facebook has different motivations than the FBI. facebook wants to make money- that is all. to make money, the need as large of a user base as possible. sharing data w/ the FBI would almost certainly reduce their user base.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[BMOC]

Exactly how would the general public find out if they ever shared information with the government? Facebook has no incentive to tell you, and the government certainly doesn't. Facebook isn't even subject to FOIA requests, whereas the government (outside of classified operations) is. The government, however, has many legal ways of extracting that information while keeping their request from the public.

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[farble1670]

i guess you might not ever know, but if the mined data actually got used in any way, people would start figuring out who's leaking it. if they never used the data against us, i could care less.

that's goes for privacy in general. i don't care what they know about me as long as they don't use it against me. we should be focusing on laws prohibiting the use of personal data. i.e., you aren't allowed to deny me healthcare because of a pre-existing condition, vs. betting you can hide the fact that you have a pre-existing condition. actually keeping the data secret is nigh impossible today and will get 1k times harder in the coming decades.

that, and facebook is not run like a top secret govt agency. things like this tend to get leaked by disgruntled or just honorable employees and ex-employees

Re:I've actually been waiting for this.

[BMOC]

I think you assume too much of the decency of the average tech-firm employee, to be honest. Especially at times like these when the job market sucks, there's a lot more sealed lips when it comes to corporate corruption.

First we need Internet Bill of Rights

[matthollingsworth]

We need an Internet Bill of Rights to outline our goals around privacy for citizen infrastructure. Then we can move these projects forward. It needs to cover email, chat, social networking, voice, Skype/video... Please read my first draft and provide feedback: http://matthol.blogspot.com/ Also I don't like that Diaspora requires servers. I email, chat, social network, video calls etc should be P2P based on each person having a PGP key. And let's be clear that if we want to have the true democracies that we all deserve around the world, we need secure and private evoting which also depends on this same infrastructure. Let's get this thing done!

Re:First we need Internet Bill of Rights

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off shitbird, and keep your commie crap disguised as 18th century classical liberalism with you in your basement.

Re:First we need Internet Bill of Rights

[matthollingsworth]

said the anonymous walnut brain

Hopefully distributed?

[0racle]

You already can run your own web server free of any corporate oversight. Guess how many people do.

You can already run your own mail server free of any corporate monitoring. Guess how many people do.

Diaspora failed because they thought people cared about these things. Guess how many people do.

People use Facebook/G+/Twitter and whatnot because:
1. Everyone else is.
2. They don't have to run it.

Re:Hopefully distributed?

[Anonymous Coward]

You already can run your own web server free of any corporate oversight. Guess how many people do.

Dunno what that makes me, but the majority of my "techy" friends do. I mean, who doesn't have a home server that replies to http nowadays?

You can already run your own mail server free of any corporate monitoring. Guess how many people do.

Way less than with web servers, and I don't, but I can list 6 of my friends who do (one of whom hosts my "personal" email adress, otherwise I actually might have to do it myself).

Diaspora failed because they thought people cared about these things. Guess how many people do.

People use Facebook/G+/Twitter and whatnot because:
1. Everyone else is.
2. They don't have to run it.

True, they are way less convenient compared to FB/G+. For me, the reason I don't run a pod is that I don't use Facebook and fire up Google+ roughly once per month. Cue the base-dwelling-no-life-nerd jokes, but I claim to live a fulfilled social life without online networks.

Re:Hopefully distributed?

[betterunixthanunix]

You already can run your own web server free of any corporate oversight. Guess how many people do.

So? The web is still decentralized, and is one of the most popular and successful decentralized software systems ever developed. We don't need the average Joe running his own web server, we just need enough so that no single organization actually controls the system. The fact that the operator of a web server might have oversight over the sites on that specific server is not nearly as relevant as the fact that they do not have any oversight when it comes to the sites that link to that server's sites.

You can already run your own mail server free of any corporate monitoring. Guess how many people do.

This is not just a "same as above" answer, because with email, we can do better: we can encrypt our mail so that the people running the system cannot read it, and we can send it through the anonymous remailer system to thwart traffic analysis. Email is a case in point when it comes to distributed social networking; it is a bit dated in terms of features ("tagging" photos is not exactly easy to do), but it was not that long ago that people exchanged email addresses when they met each other (and in fact, people still do; it is just that now, some people don't bother, and only go on Facebook).

What we really need is a standard for social networking messages, so that different systems can interoperate. Sadly, the days when that would have been considered a cool or heroic thing to do are long gone; now everyone just wants to amass collections of data on their users, and allowing competitors to have a glimpse of that data is a mortal sin. The reason email, the web, Usenet, IRC, and other highly successful distributed systems were so highly successful was because anyone could extend the system, and any use could then make use of that extension. Anyone with a browser can connect to a website, anyone with an email client can receive mail from a mail server, anyone with an IRC client can chat through an IRC server, and if you use serverA and want to switch to serverB, you can do so at no loss. Yet if you use Facebook and decide you like Google+ instead, you have to either sacrifice all your Facebook friends / contacts / data, or else you have to have and maintain two separate accounts.

In short, what we need is not a new system, but a standard message format for social networks and a standard protocol for connecting to a social networking system -- in other words, we need to unify the world's social networking systems, and decouple the user interface from the system itself. Once we have that, this becomes a matter of getting at least two social networking systems to make use of that format and protocol; the rest would then be forced to do the same, for fear of being left out of the global social networking system. Of course, that is a hard sell -- what reason does Facebook have to allow its users to exchange messages/tags/etc. with Google+ users, and why would they ever commit any developers to such a project?

Re:Hopefully distributed?

[Damek]

Yeah - the answer isn't decentralization, it's interoperability... which yields a sort of decentralization.

Someone pointed out when ISPs offered email, but now (almost) everyone uses GMail, Yahoo, or Hotmail. But those three biggies all interoperate because email is a standard system.

It'd be nice if basic elements of social networking could somehow have standards, such that content I share on G+ was visible to G+ friends with Facebook accounts on their Facebook page, and vice versa ... but I suspect there's too much incentive to keep these services walled gardens, and any sort of open social network adoption is a decade off, perhaps.

Re:Hopefully distributed?

[aaaaaaargh!]

People don't give a fuck about whether they run a background service or not. What they care about is whether it can be started with one click or not. If not, they don't use it. You're right about the everyone else part, though.

Re:Hopefully distributed?

[dmt0]

You already can run your own web server free of any corporate oversight. Guess how many people do. You can already run your own mail server free of any corporate monitoring. Guess how many people do. Diaspora failed because they thought people cared about these things. Guess how many people do. People use Facebook/G+/Twitter and whatnot because: 1. Everyone else is. 2. They don't have to run it.

You can already choose between gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc., and your own personal mail server, and they all can exchange data with each other. Guess how many people do it?

Re:Hopefully distributed?

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

The web is still decentralized.

How does the DNS qualify as 'decentralized?'

Re:Hopefully distributed?

[Anonymous Coward]

You already can run your own web server free of any corporate oversight. Guess how many people do.

You can already run your own mail server free of any corporate monitoring. Guess how many people do.

Diaspora failed because they thought people cared about these things. Guess how many people do.

Worse than that, actually. Not only do so few people care about it, but those few that DO fall into the first two categories and therefore can't see the use of Diaspora, being an extra abstraction layer of no practical use.

Re:Hopefully distributed?

[lennier]

In short, what we need is not a new system, but a standard message format for social networks and a standard protocol for connecting to a social networking system

Yes. This.

I had high hopes, back in the day, of RSS/Atom, OpenID and Jabber/XMPP becoming just this - in fact I'm still constantly surprised that Twitter managed to get anywhere with Jabber being out there for free. Facebook at least does active matchmaking of friends and maintains a mapping of real name to handle - but Twitter doesn't even do that. It's just a web interface to an instant messaging system with persistent logs - however did that become something that couldn't be repeated by all the IRC servers in the world, let alone XMPP?

What I would like though, if we're starting afresh, is something like a data publishing protocol rather than oldschool blogging or messaging. Let's say JSON (it's not the best possible data standard, but it is widely supported). Can we get a protocol for giving me my own persistent namepace for publishing arbitrary JSON objects? Define a way of publishing standard data formats themselves described by JSON objects, such as data/time/timezone stamps, text blocks, HTML links, user names, photos, books, movies, GPS coordinates. Then let me link them together how I want: let's say I want to say "at universal/local time X I was in place Y, here's the OpenStreetMap reference. Here are my friends and hobbies. Here's my photos. Here's a review about a movie I just saw. Here's the Wikipedia link. Here's the IMDB link." And let me build views which can easily do lookup to find universal references like ISBNs rather than raw text strings for any of these which have been categorised.

The trick is to standardise as little as possible in the core - just the basics of publish, subscribe, and identity - and leave the system open to be evolved by the users. Turn "social media" back into a Web, but a web of personally-published data, where we can choose how much to publish and to whom.

Hey, I just invented Semantic Web! And schema.org. And a lot of other attempts. But how about we try to make it simple and doable, and just get it done? I still don't understand what the holdup is, and why we're still letting the Facebooks of the world set the tone.

Multiple points of failure

[Havenwar]

1. No farmville
  Congratulations, you lost 99% of potential users.
2. No mention of abuse
  Sometimes pictures and profiles are removed for good reasons. Without that oversight the decentralized network would be much like the hidden web - overrun by places like silk road and so on. Not to mention all the photos posted without someone's permission. Not that I care much about copyrights, but what about someone posting nude pics of their ex, to shame them? No safeguards.
3. Too complicated.
Congratulations, you lost 99% of potential users.

Really, I could go on and on, I could go into detail, but you're over-thinking it... The average user couldn't care less. If it's complicated, it's not going to get chosen over the easy option. Figure out how to do ALL that you wrote about, with absolutely no technical know-how, and make it work as seamlessly as facebook or similar sites, then we're talking.

Oh, and don't forget the games.

Re:Multiple points of failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Point number 2: if somebody thinks a picture on my hypothetical self-hosted Diaspora node is abusive they can report it to the police. This is no different than abusive pictures on a self hosted web site or am I wrong?

About the other points, this is not for the average user yet, as WordPress is not and never was for the average user. The average user started posting stuff when Facebook became big. Diaspora as a Facebook replacement? Maybe in the long run but how this makes it less interesting as a software and social project? I'm considering to use it to replace my static web site.

Re:Multiple points of failure

[Havenwar]

Well, in the way the poster describes it, he wants it to be a facebook replacement. So it has to be argued that this isn't realistic with the way he's setting the idea up. He needs to build the framework of his idea to fit his long term goals, otherwise he might have to start over rather than continue the development when it gets big - if it ever does.

As for point number 2, true, it's no different than a self-hosted website, except it is. It's more like say a facebook profile... presumably supposedly simple to set up, simple to spread, visible to everyone if you wish... and presumably you would be able to tag other users as well. If he links to her on his pictures, she wouldn't have the authority to "unlink", because of the distributed way the system works. And if the "node" he's on threatens to delete him, he can just keep moving his profile to new hosting, over and over again, making the issue linger forever. Meanwhile it's not quite as trivial to set up your own website (well, it can be, but most people don't know that,) and if you abuse it your host can shut you down quickly and efficiently - and there'll be a trace back to you as a person due to billing records and so on. Your diaspora account can be entirely anonymous if you set it up over TOR, for instance... and it doesn't even matter if you just find some node off in faraway-istan that couldn't care less about what you put on it as long as it doesn't bring the heavy hitters in.

So really, there are some issues there. It makes it trivially EASY to do that sort of thing, which is a bad thing, because it today's society that shit happens constantly.

wat

[bhcompy]

We've had these forever. It's called a BBS. Current implementations include PHPBB and VBulletin

Color me stupid...

[Lordfly]

...but if I sign up for Alice's network, and ten of my friends are on Bob's network, and another 35 are on Charlie's network... what do we gain by belonging to 3 separate networks?

If the content is all federated (Alice's network pulls contact info from Bob's network, etc), it acts the exact same as Facebook does for the end user.

This to me sounds like an arbitrary barrier to social networking. My friends don't fit easily into social network "buckets", and nearly none of my friends have time to sort and connect to various federated sources of information. They have 15 seconds to check one spot - facebook - for notifications, messages, and status updates. The really hip ones use Twitter.

So really: Sell myself and my friends on this in one sentence. "It's not facebook" is not that sentence - if Google can't make that work, neither will geeks trying to precisely bucket social communication like we were robots instead of messy, finicky humans.

Re:Color me stupid...

[__aaeihw9960]

And it also seems to me that decentralization is also an interesting way to remove one layer of anonymity (in the individual sense - not anonymity in the I want to hide from massive corporations standpoint - because in my opinion, if I wanted to hide from corporations or the gov't, I wouldn't use social networking in the first place) from the situation. Should you know my real name, you would play hell finding me on facebook. There are around 800 of me. Decentralize that, and I become much more easily traceable as an individual.

My biggest concern, though, is that with decentralization, we have many, many, many points of possible entry to my information, instead of just one. I don't know about you, but I would rather fight one burglar, not fifteen.

Unless I had a sword. Then all bets are off.

Re:Color me stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

My friends don't fit easily into social network "buckets", and nearly none of my friends have time to sort and connect to various federated sources of information. They have 15 seconds to check one spot - facebook - for notifications, messages, and status updates. The really hip ones use Twitter.

What are you talking about?
So, when you are checking your mails, you check on gmail, hotmail, yahoo, [ every site where someone you know could be] ? ...You and your friends seems really inefficient.

Re:Color me stupid...

[kwalker]

That's not how the idea of distributed social networking works. At least not distributed FEDERATED networking. I haven't seen anyone saying "Join my social network, it's better because it's mine." I see people saying "join this social network because it is YOURS and it can work with other networks" (through connectors or the native protocol.

You sign up for Alice's network, you friend the ten people on Bob's network, and the 35 on Charlie's network, then when you hit your feed page (On your node) you see all the posts shared with you from your friends on Bob's network, Charlie's network, etc. All of your agents (nodes) communicate and send data around on your behalf (shares, likes, posts, pics, videos, events, etc).

It's like E-mail (Or XMPP). You have an identifier that "belongs" to you, and an agent (your node) that works for you. It aggregates everything you care about (And everything anyone cares to share with you) and presents it to you. You don't have to do anything special. And anyone can find you based on your identifier.

I'm not totally on-board with Bennett's platform, mainly because if there are ANY costs implied or associated with running your profile, that will strip out a good 80% or so of the people who would participate. Think of all the people who go bonkers when a "Facebook is going to start charging you" message hits the wire.

Re:Color me stupid...

[Desler]

No, he says they go to one place which is, you know, the opposite of your scenario.

Oh, goodie

[jeffmeden]

the end of horror stories about accounts and company pages being shut down arbitrarily by Facebook

And the beginning of horror stories about fake accounts, porn pics getting scattered about willy-nilly, and countless "what if the password reset gets hijacked?" claims, problems, attempted (bad) solutions, etc. Yes, the decentralized model is clearly the way to go.

Fat chance. What is needed is a "new" centralized Facebook, but by a company that doesn't have to justify a $100B valuation (perhaps built purely on open source code) with the only stated goal of being "good to users". If Google+ can't gain critical mass (although it might, eventually) then I doubt any other such concoction has a chance. You are more likely to see Facebook "utilitied" by the government after being convicted of having a de facto monopoly. Maybe then, some of those things that Facebook seems to do wrong can get changed for the better (with a heaping helping of things changing for the worse).

Re:Oh, goodie

[denvergeek]

"...porn pics getting scattered about willy-nilly..." That's already on Diaspora! It gives you a NSFW warning in the one instance I stumbled across, but I'm not sure how uniformly it gets implemented, as I only messed around with DIaspora once.

Apparently Decentralized is Unsafe

[bbeesley]

amusing how Trend Micro blocks access to this site http://global.sitesafety.trendmicro.com/

Re:Apparently Decentralized is Unsafe

[Krojack]

Yeah I just got that myself. Interesting.

Sounds familiar

[History's Coming To]

You're describing a system that runs on any host, can be transferred easily, and is fully customisable by the user to show whatever text and pictures they want. Frankly, I struggle to see the difference between what you're talking about and "a website". OK, you've got connections to other users, but this isn't anything that can't be handled by an inbuilt XML feed in an agreed format. Define a common socialXML format for all websites with some fairly simple authorisation system (Oauth style) and you've got everything you need to make any website you can think of "social". If we're decentralising why lock everybody into the very small feature set of Facebook or whoever?

Re:Sounds familiar

[CodingHero]

It'll be like Web 2.0 but with open standards for ultra-mega-social networking so everyone can make their own customized part of the web but only share it with their friends or have content that changes based on who their friends are/are not. Instead of "Web 3.0" we can call it something like "MySpace 2.0" complete with flashing text and automatically playing videos and music!

Re:Sounds familiar

[Burz]

First, a lot of people here are assuming that everyone who wants a Diaspora presence has to run it themselves. AFAIK that isn't the case.

I think of it as being more of a Wordpress, but for people who want 'friends', a 'wall', chat and some games in one place. People could choose sites that are less commercial or surveillance-minded, or do so based on other factors that become important to them.

If you access a Wordpress-based site, you expect a certain minimum of features to be there, though that does not limit the site operators from adding more. The same could be true for Diaspora.

Decentalization rocks!

[NFiorentini]

I'm increasingly seeing Facebook crack down on pages for reasons which seem silly and arbitrary. I've had a friend whose criticism about a movie was removed by Facebook admin. Yesterday, a business which sells e-cigarette products had their page shut down by Facebook. The explanation: Facebook's policy prohibits marketing tobacco and they include e-cigarettes in that category.

There's nothing wrong with the concept of social networking itself, but it's survival will depend on decentralization.

And as far as Diaspora's use requiring skills and know-how that, currently, most people don't possess...give them time. I remember an era when people complained that setting the clock on their VCRs was too difficult. Nowadays, most high school students know how to work Excel and many high schools even teach college-level Java programming.

I'm an old fart who has gone back to school and, during class recently, I had a brand new TI-84 which did not have a Quadratic Formula program on it. I mentioned it to a classmate young enough to be my daughter. She asked for the calculator and handed it back to me two or three minutes later. She had programmed a Quadratic Formula app it in for me.

People can learn stuff when they feel like there's an incentive to learn it. Don't underestimate the incentive that is people's ability to post cat photos.

Re:Decentalization rocks!

[Urza9814]

I remember an era when people complained that setting the clock on their VCRs was too difficult. Nowadays, most high school students know how to work Excel and many high schools even teach college-level Java programming.

...and most people still can't figure out how to set the clock on their VCR/DVD player (though most no longer seem to have a clock)...shit, most people I know just leave their car's clock an hour off during daylight savings because they don't know how to reset it!

Great essay! Also, need for effective monetization

[adjustable_pliers]

timothy has eloquently expressed with good detail what I believe. I have told friends, family, and acquaintances that the pinnacle of social networking will not be another centralized offering, but a distributed model. This is nothing new: the FOAF (friend of a friend) protocol with its cousin, the Semantic Web, was bandied about in the '90s, and in more recent, pre-Facebook days by Tim Berners-Lee.

I cheer loudly for Diaspora but I'm painfully aware of network effects: Facebook already got grandma and grandpa, a herculean tech task in its own right, and I doubt the confusion of an anti-statist social network protocol will get many friends out of the gate. I'm still cheering for it, though.

Finally, I strongly believe that half-hearted, amateur implementations of new social network nodes will damage the "brand" of distributed social networking. There needs to be a monetization tool ready from the start, be it advertising modules, e-commerce and credit card processing (unfortunately), PayPal hooks (frightening!), BTC—whatever. A good start to distributed social networking can't depend on the work of the good graces of some well meaning hobbyists donating server space.

Push the concept even further

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud computing was an utter failure. Decentralized cloud computing is the future of the internet when laws like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA become the norm.
Don't just virtualize/deventralize some crappy "social" network. Social is just a trend, social won't last.

Virtualize the whole fucking web, enforce default strong anonymity, make every node a proxy for the outside, anonimyze uploads of content, fragment the data, encrypt it.

Make it an "app": hipsters, applefags and whatnots will finally be able to make something usefull out of their gazillions shiny toys.

And most of all don't let Kim.com, Pooperberg and alikes eat all of the cake first.

No need to imagine Google open soc-net protocols

[DragonWriter]

. My guess is that if it took off, it would have to be started as a side project by an established company that gave it name recognition, and which could possibly provide free hosting for the first wave of users. Google+ never gave most people a compelling reason to switch, but imagine if it had been released not as a website but as an open protocol, complete with an open-source implementation that could be installed anywhere.

Google actually introduced a number of open protocols to support social networking and federation of independent networks (some alone, some in coordination with other players), including reference implementations of many of them, long before introducing Google+ (Additionally, Google's gotten behind open protocols that were introduced by others.) Examples of protocols Google developed (alone or with others) specifically for or with application in the social space include OpenSocial and PubSubHubbub among others. Third-party open specifications in the space that they have promoted and leveraged in the past (some still currently) include OAuth, FOAF, and others.

So you don't need to imagine what would happen if Google produced and released open protocols instead of Google+, since they did that before Google+. What actually happened was...well, not quite nothing, but hardly an eruption of decentralized social networking systems displacing centralized systems.

what "released as open source" means here

[HaggiStan]

It's funny how Bennett thinks that the release of diaspora as open source would be a step forward towards the success of that platform. The sad reason behind that release is that the money is out and the developers don't see a way that diaspora would give them any income, so they couldn't continue working full time on that project and had to move on.

Of course, they're not gonna say it's dead but "release it as open source" (after all, some other guys could continue the work, right?) but there's not gonna be any full time core team behind the project simply because it's not a viable model to pay the rent/mortgage.
IIRC, the initial funding about 2 years ago was about $200000 for 4 devs. That's $25000 per dev per year. It would take a lot of idealism to continue working full time as a dev for that money, and even more so for $0 now that that money is gone and there's no income in sight.

This is the right direction, anyway...

[dtjohnson]

Facebook is a monstrous data bucket that is never full and is never emptied. We've already seen job applicants being asked for their facebook logon info so that potential employers could see what was stored on facebook. People want a way to communicate informally with friends and family without those personal communications being stored, tracked, and logged for 50 years and then distributed to irrelevant future data leaches. The Diaspora distributed approach is the direction that this needs to go.

I do not get it.

[rickb928]

Decentralizing lets us run our own 'servers', linking these together into a whole constellation of users. Right?

- Is it safe to assume that some servers will not be configured the same as others? If so, then will I see 'friends' out 'there' with different bits of data available to me? Inconsistency is the hobgoblin of restaurants and web services. This is not good. It sure isn't an improvement. If I want more granularity, I will also suffer from others granularizing themselves into irrelevance. Then I get sleepy.

- Am I expected to trust other adminstrators? Sure. Now I get to decide which of thousands (millions?) of admins I am willing to trust. And this is an improvement how?

- Disapora protects my data from other admins snarfing it and giving it to whoever, right?

- You think it's a good idea to host these servers all over the Web? My ISP has a very different view of this, even if it is for a dozen family members who register a few dozen hits a day. Somehow, I betcha we end up with Disapora hosts that consolidate these servers into hosting sites. For a fee. How much do you think it's worth to me to offer my friends and family this social network? Discount that for the abuse I will take when I refuse to delete some unflattering post. Not really very attractive to me yet.

- These hosting aggregators would probably offer free sevice if I let them mine my data, you know. Back to the future. Mission accomplished.

I just don't get it.

Re:I do not get it.

[Urza9814]

- Am I expected to trust other adminstrators? Sure. Now I get to decide which of thousands (millions?) of admins I am willing to trust. And this is an improvement how?

No, you're supposed to trust specific service providers. Just like email. Most people would be somewhat wary of an email coming from an @lrciudhbk.net address, unless you happened to know who owns that domain.

Somehow, I betcha we end up with Disapora hosts that consolidate these servers into hosting sites.

That's exactly the point. It will be more like email. The benefit is that if you don't like Google scanning your email messages for targeted ads, you can switch to another provider without needing to opt out of the entire network. You can even host your own email server if you want -- just like you can host your own Diaspora node -- but it's not really expected that every user will do so.

These hosting aggregators would probably offer free sevice if I let them mine my data, you know. Back to the future. Mission accomplished.

Or for having ads appear on your profile. Just like existing free services. Or you could pay for a premium server. Or you could host your own. The entire point is to give control back to the user. You have more options than 'tolerate whatever Facebook decides to do with your data' vs 'don't participate in social networking'

Now...how many people care about Google scanning their email? Not many. How many would care about what a specific Diaspora node operator did with their data? Not many. But it would provide options for those who do, and if it was easier to move the hosts would be more cautious in their actions. Ever month I see a flood of "I'm about to leave Facebook" posts -- but most of them don't do anything, because they're locked in. If you could leave Facebook while still being connected to all your friends on Facebook as easily as downloading a file and uploading it to a new service, I bet a decent number of people would do so.

OStatus is here and working

[Anonymous Coward]

StatusNet, Diaspora and Friendica already all support OStatus as a means of standard communication. It's a technology and protocol easily implemented in other software too, as all the technology in use is standardized and well-spread (Webfinger, PoCo, PuSH, Salmon etc.)

The reason most people haven't started using any of those services are of course the network effect. But with recent Twitter Api lockdowns and Facebook getting all kinds of bad press, maybe more users try to find alternatives.

Why trust hosting companies?

[jdogalt]

The part you lost me at was here-

"
"There's no particular reason why any one of those functions could only be carried out on a centralized system. I can envision a distributed protocol with many different servers, or 'nodes,' run by different hosting companies, and each 'node' can be used to store many accounts
"

*I* can envision a distributed protocol with many different servers, or 'nodes', run by *the users themselves*, and each 'node' can be used to store many accounts...

Note that I've recently filed an FCC Form 2000F complaint about Google's anti-network-neutrality bahavior as they are entering the fixed broadband ISP market here in Kansas City, Kansas. It's something of a quixotic war about the right for all end users of fixed broadband connections protecting their FCC-10-201(p13) rights to create successful content, applications, services, and devices on the general purpose technology of the (IPv6) internet. You can read the 57 post, 14 author (out of 23 members) thread in the discussion forum of the Kansas Unix and Linux Users Association here-

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/kulua-l/LxsOtdglNM0

Re:Great essay! Also, need for effective monetizat

[NFiorentini]

I disagree. I think that monetization is what has created the current mess and the pressure on Facebook to be a profitable corporation will piss off users into fleeing at an increasingly faster clip. I also think that the future model of social networking will look more like the Diaspora model where people pay for their own hosting, write their own code or use software which expedites the process, and where people have a greater involvement in their online persona. There won't be a need for monetization in this scenario. There was a time where paying for television seemed absurd; tv should be free! (Free after you buy the rabbit-ear antenna.) Today, people regularly pay triple digits on their cable and satellite bill. So it isn't a stretch to think that people will pay for hosting, or form groups with friends to share hosting costs, to continue social networking.

Money

[tonywestonuk]

I made a game, hosted on facebook that earns me a fair income from people spending facebook credits with it. ..... Facebook handle everything to do with credits, etc.... purchasing them, giving refunds, etc.

How can I make money, if Diaspora took over. Would people become too frightened to spend if there isn't a benevolent dictator to step in should they feel they've been duped?... If I cant make money, then I wont make stuff. No stuff, means a boring Social network

Re:Money

[Kimomaru]

I don't think you have anything to worry about. It feels like only die-hards would move to it (although I'd love to be wrong). Facebook users are not goingt to move to it unless there was a compelling enought reason (sadly, security and privacy are not important enough to non-techies.)

Re:Money

[erice]

I made a game, hosted on facebook that earns me a fair income from people spending facebook credits with it. ..... Facebook handle everything to do with credits, etc.... purchasing them, giving refunds, etc.

How can I make money, if Diaspora took over. Would people become too frightened to spend if there isn't a benevolent dictator to step in should they feel they've been duped?... If I cant make money, then I wont make stuff. No stuff, means a boring Social network

No. It means a social network with less potential for people who want to make money there and fewer annoyances for the users.

People don't join Facebook to play your games. They join Facebook to connect with their friends. They play your games (those that do) because they are already on Facebook.

For those that don't play games, the games that their friends play are an annoyance as they bombard them with useless requests and "information" they don't care about. (Honestly, even a description of a friend's breakfast is more interesting than the results of their latest hit in Mafia Wars)

Re:Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol,

I realize you believe you 'contribute' to a social network, but I have news for you. Your game has absolutely dickle to do with Social Networking.
It may attract more users, but to say not having your crap stuffed into something designed to do something else equals the original intent boring....then it was shit to begin with.

I'm sorry but, in a strict sense, you social game devs are freaking parasites. Pimping wares people abandoned years ago as something new, all because there's money in it, and your target base is the laziest in history, congratulations....you earn the internet relevance award.

Re:Money

[Urza9814]

This.

Of course, there's no reason you couldn't have an apps system on top of a distributed social network. Maybe the nodes would handle the app deployment process, and the apps would just be available to everyone from that node. Or maybe you can have special app servers (which, frankly, the first model would probably evolve into rather quickly anyway) that the network can connect to and allow users to access these apps. After all, there's no reason you couldn't do the same with Facebook -- you can already create "apps" that are just dedicated websites that interact with a user's Facebook profile, just need someone to set up a framework to make the deployment easier.

But the benefit of a decentralized system? There will certainly be 'no apps' servers that pop up. Or app limited servers. One where I can say 'do not send me ANY app requests'. The best Facebook has is 'ban requests from THIS app', which is useless when I'm getting inundated with requests from a different app every week...

Re:Money

[TheDarkener]

Nobody is frightened to pay money for something if it's not made by a benevolent dictator. If it's good enough to warrant paying for, it *really* doesn't matter what platform it's on.

And non-geeks are moving away from computers

[Fred Ferrigno]

The media-hype name for it is "the post-PC era", but the point is that most people, most of the time, don't need a general-purpose computer sitting on their desk. They're happy with an updated version of the TV, a mostly one-way consumption device that restricts their activities to what's safe and easy.

We may look upon the last twenty years as an aberration, a time when the technology advanced to the point of being useful to a mass audience, but hadn't yet been pared back to only what was useful to them. After all, isn't that Apple's whole M.O.? Removing features most people don't need?

People also don't run email servers...

[betterunixthanunix]

...yet somehow, email remains decentralized...

Re:People also don't run email servers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Increasingly not true. Between gmail, yahoo, and hotmail, you're talking about over 90% of all email users. That's pretty centralized.

Re:People also don't run email servers...

[Urza9814]

I dunno, I still email comcast.net addresses on a daily basis
and tcs.com addresses
and cvs.com addresses
and sometimes hushmail.com addresses
and a TON of psu.edu addresses
and yesterday I emailed an attleboropolice.com address
and I could go on...but I won't.

In fact, if you look at the top hundred messages in my inbox, you'd find around 50 different domain names for the senders. If you look at my sent box, it is probably around 90% to two domains -- but those are psu.edu and comcast.net, not gmail, yahoo, or hotmail. Those three combined are maybe 5%.

I know a lot of people who still use their ISPs email. I also know a number of people whose only email is their work address. Or school address. I won't argue that people creating their own addresses are almost always going with gmail, hotmail, or yahoo...but I highly doubt that's even breaking 50% of all email users.

Re:People also don't run email servers...

[Anonymous Coward]

whoosh!

Re:Great essay! Also, need for effective monetizat

[Anonymous Coward]

I visualize a bit-torrent like protocol with a number of seeders, that maintain the locations of your distributed profile. A part of John's profile will be stored on Alice's system. Alice herself cannot view Johns profile since it is encrypted, unless Alice happens to be in John's social network. Alice is effectively seeding Johns profile in the background while she runs the client herself. John's complete profile can be recovered through torrent like hosting sites lets call this Bob. Alice and Bob will be remunerated via advertising ( say ) for keeping their servers up and the network healthy and available. Thoughts?

Facebook's value isn't its code

[Anonymous Coward]

The value of Facebook isn't in the software. The value of Facebook is the user network. Good luck open sourcing that.

Re:Great essay! Also, need for effective monetizat

[CRCulver]

This is nothing new: the FOAF (friend of a friend) protocol with its cousin, the Semantic Web, was bandied about in the '90s

The FOAF project began in 2000, not "the '90s".

I'd be happy to use this, but...

[John Bresnahan]

First you have to convince my family to switch to it, because the only reason I'm on Facebook is because that's how my family members (non-geeks) communicate these days.

But, before that, you'll have to convince everyone who is friends with anyone in my family to switch. And, you'll have to apply this recursively until you've switched everyone in the world.

Oh, and you'll have to add stupid games, because that's why my family and their friends are on Facebook.

But as soon as you do that, count me in!

Re:I'd be happy to use this, but...

[Burz]

Just tell your family that you have a website.

They'll still use FB mostly, but if FB starts getting bad publicity for their actions, then your family know they can use your website as a refuge where they can continue to interact with each other.

Re:Great essay! Also, need for effective monetizat

[adjustable_pliers]

Good idea, Anon Coward. Using BitTorrent would be a big departure from the client-server web service that we've all become accustomed to. Advertising depends on metrics (views/impressions, sources, clicks). I don't understand how these metrics would work in such a model, but I welcome the idea.

You're still locked in as it is now.

[hobarrera]

Due to how diaspora was designed, you're still locked in onto a provider.
Supose I have an account an serverA, and want to move to serverB. Sure, I can export my data, and import it into serverB, but there's no way to delete force serverA. to redirect my profile to serverB, or even delete it. My profile's URL is still valid, so people might not know/be sure I moved.

The obvious fix for this is to use my own domain on some free provider (maybe delegating the same way one would delegate e-mail). However, this feature was deemed too complex and won't be implemented.

My only choice is to set up my own pod. Of course, I can't be bothered since it's not at all an easy task (and this comes from someone who runs his own XMPP/email servers).

Re:You're still locked in as it is now.

[Urza9814]

In other words, it works exactly like email.

People change email addresses. It happens. It's not easy, but arguably that could be a feature. Might not be great if people are switching nodes every week. But it would be nice to be able to switch nodes if I discover a flaw with the node I am currently on. This also makes some forms of abuse more difficult -- if you're doing some seriously shady stuff, it's a lot harder to just keep jumping from one node to the next. The example someone gave was a guy posting nude photos of his ex. If it takes you a couple days to switch nodes, that'll be fine for someone who wants to go somewhere with a better privacy policy, but useless for someone who just wants to do it to harass people.

You can't force deletion of data that you have placed on someone else's server. Doesn't matter if it's email, social networking, a website...once it's in someone else's hands, they can theoretically do whatever they want with it. Why is this a surprise? You could always do what a lot of people did during the Myspace > Facebook migration -- change your profile text to something like 'I'm no longer using this profile, please find me at: [url]'

Re:You're still locked in as it is now.

[hobarrera]

Wrong.
If I get my own domain, the email protocol allows me to move to different providers without anyone else noticing (changing MX records). XMPP also allows the same (with SRV records). That's what can't happen with diaspora.

IRC with graphics!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whos going to run Chanserv and Nickserv?

Decentralization makes privacy worse?

[perpenso]

... why should I care? ...

Well it could make the privacy situation even worse. There is no reason to believe that a node will not try to mine and monetize your data just like facebook, or try to censor some type of information they are hosting (due to local laws not a personal bias?), ... As a person objects to one node's policy and moves to another they are increasing the number of 3rd parties that have their private info.

Basically there is no free lunch. There is a potential downside to hopping from one node to another.

Diaspora wasn't recently open-sourced.

[Anonymous Coward]

Diaspora has always been open source.

Re:Great essay! Also, need for effective monetizat

[adjustable_pliers]

No disagreement here, NFiorentini: Forming groups to share the costs would work, as well. I merely think that the mechanism for collecting that payment ought to be included in a social network implementation, perhaps an extension to the Diaspora code.

I only mentioned advertising as one of the four monetization examples (among credit card, PayPal, etc.). Personally, I agree that I would like to avoid the advertising model. The person or business who pays money is the customer. The targeted audience is the product that the media sells. (I think "attention economy" is the term I learned from Wikipedia.) E.g. Google gets paid via advertisers (its true customers) and sells the attention of its users (its true product). The point in having a monetization model beyond advertising is that I, as a user, would be come the customer, not the product, and removing the motivation for the social-network node owner from selling my information.

Re:Great essay! Also, need for effective monetizat

[adjustable_pliers]

Thanks, CRCulver. I stand corrected.

Am I Missing Something?

[medcalf]

NNTP + HTML + a web browser + a few search tools. How hard is this, really?

Friendica

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm impressed nobody talks about Friendica.

my comments, my property

[Cyko_01]

He mentions in TFA that your comments are stored on the server you are posting to. If that is the case then how can I control who sees what I write on someone elses profile? Can I still edit/delete my own comments?

Re:IT'S CALLED USENET MOTHERFUCKERS !!

[Anonymous Coward]

If by awesome you meant, enjoyment derived from looking for missing, presumed lost, parts of bloat-base64 encoded warez, then yes.

Reminds me of UseNet . . .

[Kimomaru]

It reminds of of the qualities that have lent themselves well to UseNet (distributed servers all serving content).

Re:Reminds me of UseNet . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

It reminds of of the qualities that have lent themselves well to UseNet (distributed servers all serving content).

I was going to say the same thing, except that Usenet was all publicly viewable and your access normally depended on which groups your ISP chose to host.

If they could do something like Usenet, but encrypted and signed, with some way of coordinating accounts and logins among the hosts, it could be a winner!

Diaspora Failed Before It Began

[Anonymous Coward]

Diaspora was fail before it even began by being written in Ruby on Rails. The idea that everyone was going to get Ruby hosting to run Diaspora was insane. The Diaspora project was never serious about it's alleged mission because there was simply no chance even the technically inclined among us would ever be able to conviently run it. The developers took a route that made it easy for /them/, and thereby doomed the project.

If you're actually serious about distributed social networking, it needs to be written in PHP or /maybe/ Perl. You know, the things everyone has in their hosting, not Ruby, Python, Erlang, Lua, or the wonderful new language someone invented last week.

It'll only work if one can join impulsively...

[John Hasler]

...because "it's what everyone is doing", with no need to gather information and/or make choices. No system that depends on rational behavior and requires thought will ever be popular with more than a minority. That's no reason not to do it, though. Just don't expect to displace FaceBook.

Re:One answer

[formfeed]

Dude:

Everyone (technical or non) has one question: "Are my friends on Diaspora?"

Me:
"No. Diaspora is like Facebook, but for the kids that weren't popular in High School."

Dude:
"Oh, its ona these geek thingies [sic]" followed by:

"...then what's the point?"

Re:Great essay! Also, need for effective monetizat

[Desler]

Protip: timothy didn't write this.

tl;dr

[Anonymous Coward]

The Big Question of 2012 is:
Will a babbler on slashdot change the destiny of social networks writing a long pile of bullshit?

Re:Great essay! Also, need for effective monetizat

[adjustable_pliers]

Oh, yeah. Bennett Haselton did. I stand corrected.

Already started.

[balls199]

I've actually started much of the work with public private keys in a decentralized social network. With the exception of having it on a peer to peer network instead of a federation of websites the idea described above is exactly the same as the one I came up with for this project. With a peer to peer network, you don't have to worry about censorship (unless the whole network is censored), and you don't have to worry about the website owner selling your information.

To get around the spam problem, you can simply not accept connections from people who you haven't friended or aren't friends of friends (finding your first friend may be a problem).

Porn won't be an issue since everyone is basically hosting their own content. If you don't want to see something, you don't have to friend that person. My guess is accidentally seeing porn won't be much of a problem since most people will have friends with similar morals.

Everything is open sourced. It's only me working on it so the progress is slow. Here's the github link: https://github.com/macourtney/masques

Re:Already started.

[funky_vibes]

Very interesting project, but what a weird language you've written it in :P
Is it meant to be just a proof-of-concept?

DNS

[Anonymous Coward]

Strictly speaking, DNS is just a convenience system. All it does is swap a name with a number.

Using an IP directly isn't significantly more complex than using a phone number.

But even so, you have your "hosts" file, and you can use it as a purely local DNS if you like. You don't have to depend on the formal DNS system, we just do because it's easy, it's free, and generally speaking, it doesn't do bad things to us like censor or steal our data.

Re:DNS

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

Uh, Megaupload? Most people have a very difficult time with IP addresses. And have you ever heard of IPv6?

Re:Yes it is like email

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution is like email. You get your account, it lives on a server. Messages are sent to and fro, and some client program decides how you see the messages.

Seriously, this doesn't seem like something that hard. You could even build most of using email if you wanted.

Also look at Frendica

[Anonymous Coward]

Also look at Frendica

Email history

[kwerle]

I mean, I will say I have no personal experience with this having not been alive at the time, but it is my understanding that in the early days of personal computers there were many email providers with proprietary systems that were not capable of sending messages between networks.

From http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2002/cmsc434-0101/MUIseum/applications/emailhistory.html :
"In the late-1970's and 1980's the phenomenal growth of personal computers (Apple II 1978 - 1985; IBM PC 1983 and Apple Macintosh 1984) created a whole new genre of email technologies. Some of these systems were proprietary 'dial-up' systems such as MCI Mail, EasyLink, Telecom Gold, One-to-One, CompuServe, AppleLink etc. For two people to exchange messages remotely on these systems they had to both be subscribers. The proprietary systems did not interoperate or transmit messages from one system to another, or for the few systems that did these were notoriously unreliable...."

I guess I have the "advantage" of having been alive way back then :-)

From my limited perspective as a Californian geek who graduated high school in '86...
In the mid 80's there were a lot of BBS's, and many of them were isolated nodes. A fair number of them did pass messages back and forth, however. But the number of users back in the day was ridiculously small compared to today.

At the same time, in the 80's, all the major universities in the States had interconnected email. Again, the number of users was tiny - mostly CompSci majors. People studying others subjects very often did not own a computer.

In the late 80's, many of the small BBS's started to integrate with the internet (lowercase 'i', which used to indicate nodes that would store and forward email and news), and you could send and receive email to many different kinds of BBS from any internet node.

And, of course, in the mid 90's, we all explained to our parents what email is and how it works.

So there was a small window in the mid or late 80's when there were some BBSs and companies with proprietary email systems that did not connect. But at the same time (and for some time before) there was the university system. For the vast majority of people who heard the term 'email', the first time they heard it it was interconnected.

Who are you?

[kwerle]

I fail to see how this is a problem. That's kind of the point of social networks -- you only see posts from people you have agreed to see posts from. Unless you're talking about the common 'message' feature on most networks -- in which case there's really no difference between that and email, and the same technology that manages to keep my Gmail completely devoid of spam should work just as well in something like diaspora.

When you look someone up on Facebook, you are searching one server and it has controls.

When you look someone up on diaspora, what's to keep thousands of zombie diaspora nodes from replying with bogus accounts hoping to connect to you?

From the other direction: have you ever received a spam friend request on a social network like Facebook or g+? Imagine what it would be like with the same connectivity as email, but with less context to determine if an invitation is spam?

It's the interface, stupid

[TheDarkener]

Like many have echoed in here, nobody that isn't alrady passionate about stuff like this is going to really give a hoot about decentralization. You have to "beat" Facebook at their interface. Then people will like it. Here's my take - K.I.S.S. Facebook's interface is already very simple. We have to almost think of the old-school BBSes (the original decentralized social networks) and see how clean some of those interfaces were. I personally would love to see an ANSi re-implementation in HTML5. People *do* have the capacity to use the keyboard to navigate, and once they learn it, as long as it's efficient, people will start flocking. There's nothing wrong with a menu system - UI simplicity is Facebook's whole goal, after all. It's just that they have so much sh*t going on that it's almost impossible to do. That's everyone's problem with design. Not that I'm a designer, but I did make my own ANSi menus for Renegade back in the day. And they rocked.

I run a D* pod

[Todamont]

It's actually a lot of fun, and I've met some very interesting people. Diaspora already has most of the features described above, such as federation. I like how you can follow hashtags also, because it allows you to see comments from people you don't already know, and thus make new friends, something which I feel Facebook lacks. There are some strong devs still out there and waiting to jump in the game, I think D* will stay alive and eventually overtake Facebook.

Work Offline

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of what we call "social networking" can be reduced to a few services:

list of friends is - contacts and address book
messaging systems - email or instant messaging chat
newsfeeds
games

What I would really like to see is a greater ability to Work Offline and take back the data, a local fork if you prefer. With a decent data plan most people are happy enough to be always online but a greater ability to work offline makes things more useful to when you do not have a good connection or in the possible case of Facebook being unplugged in future. I lot of this I can do already, I can already download a big copy of my facebook history, it just is not very useful offline. I do have my contacts but it is not as rich an experience as the online face/phone/address book.
I'm cautiously optimistic I will get much of what I already want due to the push to centralize user data and make it portable every time a user loses their smartphone and wants to get all the information on their next phone, but the idea of being able to share less with the cloud and keep what amounts to a live, and private, local copy or fork of my social network could be very useful.
Full "lifetracking" even something as simple as tracking all the food you eat, could be very useful so long as you could keep it private and data mine it for your own health and wellbeing, but I wouldn't want that level of detail anywhere near the cloud.

Hey

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't we already have decentralized networking? Isn't it called email?

Secondary ids in diaspora?

[Anonymous Coward]

...let me emphasize something more important first: to make the protocol censorship resistant, it would have to be possible to move your entire account from one node to another node at a completely different company, without breaking any of the existing links with friends, your events, etc. That way, the node hosting your profile wouldn't be able to lean on you by saying, "Delete that one photo you posted, or I'll delete your entire profile and you'll lose all the friend links and events that you created."

To make a profile "seamlessly portable" in this manner, my suggestion would be to have the profile associated with a domain name owned by the user, with a URL like http://yourdomainname.com/profileprotocol/yourusername/. The domain name could be hosted with any hosting provider, as long as you paid their hosting fee (or as long as you were willing to display their advertisements to people who viewed your profile). But if your hosting company ever kicked you to the curb, you could simply change the domain name to point to a different hosting provider, and be back up and running after just a few hours of downtime (assuming you had backups of all of your data!).

Just wondering whether it's possible to have multiple ids pointing to your profile in Diaspora?

Similar way that you can have several secondary email addresses forwarding all your mail to your main email address.

I doubt normal users would be that much interested in acquiring a domain just to use it as an identifier for their profile. Instead having multiple secondary ids from different parties would sound more plausible way to protect your profile from getting locked to any one service provider.

I have a better analogy

[Burz]

Facebook is a DataVampire that sucks the info-juices out of peoples' interpersonal interactions.

email is client-server model not peer2peer

[lpq]

No, email goes through "Servers" and thus can be cut off at a central point. Even though I have my own email server, it still goes through my ISP who still filters it for spam -- that can still be used accidently or on purpose to block arbitrary content.

I believe the point of decentralization is to not make it so easy for someone to filter your conversations and habits. Presumably, node-connections will support encryption, so those who monitor your connection won't know what you are sending without, at least, a little work....and that's about the best security we can have today...