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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

Another question

[opus_magnum]

just how many users are there on Diaspora?

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.

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

[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

[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.

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_?

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?

[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?

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:IT'S CALLED USENET MOTHERFUCKERS !!

[Anonymous Coward]

If by ruined you mean made awesome, then yes.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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

People also don't run email servers...

[betterunixthanunix]

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

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.

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.

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?"