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We Need Distributed Social Networks More Than Ello
At the end of September, "FacebookDragQueenGate" fell from the sky like a gift from the gods to the founders (and venture capital backers) of the Ello social network. The company promised not only to remain ad-free and to allow drag queen stage names, but even stated that they planned to allow pornographic content (something that received relatively little press, compared to the ad-free model). But critics such as Aral Balkan wrote that once Ello received venture capital funding, the backers would inevitably pressure the company to change its relationship with its users in order to make money. In an interview published in Forbes on Monday, Harvard Business School professor John Deighton was blunt: "The board will need to monetize the membership in whatever fashion ensures a profitable return of capital for the venture fund’s investors. So my advice, if they believe Ello is still viable by then, is to buy out [Paul Budnitz, the idealistic founder who came up with the 'no ads' idea]."
There is, in short, nothing to stop Ello from doing what Facebook does whenever they make a significant change to their Terms of Service: presenting users with a dialog box next time they sign in, saying, "These are the new rules, by checking this box, you are agreeing to abide by the new contract which you're not going to read." If Ello succeeds beyond its founders' dreams, then its ad-free nature might start to hinge on its founders all turning down buyout offers of tens of millions of dollars to stick to their ideals -- hardly a sure thing. Or the VCs might get enough seats on the board that they can outvote the founders and render their objections moot.
As Joshua Kopstein writes in an editorial for Al-Jazeera America, what really would have changed the game would have been a distributed, decentralized social network. I already wrote two pieces arguing that a distributed social network could work, and how -- a protocol that allows users to create profiles, "status" posts, groups, events, and other familiar social networking features as "objects" that live on their own server, but that can interact with users' profiles hosted on other servers. I don't want to re-hash all the details here, but the short version is that there seems to be nothing about social networks, as we currently use them, which would require all of the data to be stored in a single centralized system. In a distributed protocol, you could host your profile with any hosting company, and users could "subscribe" to updates from your profile, as well as the ability to receive invites to your events and your groups, and direct messages from you. Think RSS feeds, but with better support for well-defined objects like "event invites".
If your profile were linked to a domain name that you own, then if your existing hosting company ever deleted your profile (or threatened to), you could simply move your profile to a new hosting company, the same way that any person or company can currently switch their domain name between hosting providers. This, obviously, would instantly render moot any one company's policies about "real names" (or porn, for that matter) -- all you have to do is find at least one company, anywhere in the world, whose policies are permissive enough to host your profile, and that should be possible for all but the most extreme or illegal content.
This also renders moot all the worries about profile hosting companies trying to amass tens of millions of users and then stabbing them in the back, by changing the terms of service to allow them to sell user data or stuff unwieldy ads down their throat. When users can switch seamlessly between hosts, no one host is going to be able to "charge" more than the going market rate for hosting a profile (where "charging" could be in the form of monetary payment or displaying ads to the user). How much would it actually cost to host a profile for the typical user these days, complete with all their photos and status updates? It's hard to know, because other than university professors, nobody really has personal webpages any more, after they all went to MySpace and then to Facebook. But since the old days when people did actually host their own personal pages, hosting and serving data has gotten really, really cheap. For the average user, with a few hundred photos and a few hundred friends looking at them, $1 per year might be enough. Maybe they'd just have to watch one of those ads once a year that Youtube puts in front of a Beyoncé music video, and that would cover it.
Unfortunately, to many people the concept of distributed social networking is linked with the failure of Diaspora, the most ambitious attempt to create a decentralized protocol to compete with the likes of Facebook. But Diaspora didn't fail because the idea lacked merit; it almost certainly failed because people asked the same question that they asked of any other upstart Facebook competitor: Why should I join, when all of my friends are on Facebook instead? Of course people might reasonably asked the same question about Google+, but when Google launches a product, people join because they know the quality will be decent, they know that probably some of their friends will join because of the Google brand, and they know people will be buzzing about it anyway so they want to join in order to see what the big deal is.
And that brings up the story's second moral: Despite what you may have heard from your cousin who just read The Fountainhead, the products that are the most successful are not necessarily the best, by any objective measure; rather, they're usually the ones that had major backing (Google+) or were the beneficiaries of a staggering lucky break (Ello). Diaspora didn't take off, because it didn't have either one of these.
And since you cannot manufacture a lucky break, I continue to believe that the last best hope for truly free social networking -- with minimal censorship, and ads and costs kept to a minimum by market competition -- would be for a major player like Google to launch a social networking protocol, and to set up themselves as the default host for new profiles, but allowing the protocol to interoperate seamlessly with profiles hosted elsewhere. Either that, or if the system is launched by a startup or a nonprofit, make sure that you have a host of widely respected luminaries or organizations standing ready to help promote it -- if the EFF and the BoingBoing guys endorsed a new social networking system as the future of Internet freedom, people would join because it would seem uncool not to. As long as the product itself is functional, just have the right connections lined up when you launch it. Because that's what matters, and don't let the deluded ghost of Ayn Rand tell you otherwise.
Wasn't that called MySpace???
A distributed social networking protocol backed by a large player would be indistinguishable from what we have now.
Especially if it can be used to shield Bennett's posts from my eyes
Hell .. I'm getting tempted to pay for such a service if Bennet would move his blog there
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Ello have covenanted themselves in a legally binding way so that they cannot ever have ads or show other people's ads, and so that they are required to make imposition of the same covenant terms on any buyer a condition of sale.
So, no, they can't just do what facebook did, and neither can anyone they sell to.
I do wish Diaspora had taken off though. That seemed quite good. Needed a bit of polish, but definitely promising. Never got the critical mass though.
But ... who should back it, and why? Who has a financial interest in you actually retaining a figment of privacy?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... and not enough coding going on around here.
...this fucking guy again?
We don't need social networks at all.
I love when someone writes drivel assuming what they think is what everyone needs or wants.
Two articles in a row about ello? Anyway, as usual, BH is overthinking things.
>> If your profile were linked to a domain name that you own, then if your existing hosting company ever deleted your profile (or threatened to), you could simply move your profile to a new hosting company,
Duh...we already have a widely-adopted system to personally identify most people. It's called a "cell phone number," and we already have the mechanisms to transfer it between companies. Roll up an identification and authorization system around that and you're set.
Since when is it a requirement to sell ads in order to make a profit? Since when is "selling ads" the only way to make a profit? The entire premise is idiotic, because it presumes that "selling ads" is the only way to achieve cash flow.
If you create a service, and price it reasonably, you can charge a subscription / membership fee, and have a perfectly profitable business.
I pay for services all the time, why should an online service be any different?
The problem with this recent crop of op-ed's is that it gives the editors the perfect to show off how much they don't know or understand. For instance, the pot-shot at Randian capitalism (disclaimer: I'm no fan of Rand and I'm pretty sure she would hate my guts) tells me that he has never actually read Ayn Rand, and if he did, did not understand what he was reading.
There IS no objective measure. One man's trash, yadda yadda yadda. The most successful products meet the most demand at the most sustainable price and supply. Period.
Bullshit. No one gets sucess by happy accident and remains so. Lottery winners lose their money within months. The coolest invention with a bad business model goes kaput. The richest tech guys toiled in a basement or garage or dorm room for years on end before they got their break. No one succeeds without busting their balls and working hard. Luck plays a factor. Luck can open a window, but it can't make you successful.
I don't even know what to make of this ignorant word salad. Pick up a book and read it sometime.
How is Ello any different than any of the other multitude of wannabe social networks? I'm not sure it counts as a success to get $10million in funding.
Saying "we won't advertise" isn't enough to get users, because people generally don't mind advertising.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
please fucking stop with Bennett haselton blabber. why is this one person's opinion treated like scripture by dicedot?
captcha mankind
It was called the World Wide Web. People made their own websites with their own domains. If they liked something, they linked to it They communicated on mailing lists or web forums or by IM or IRC. All the tech is still there, and we can go back to using it instead of feeding our lives into one corporate silo after another.
Bring back the independent Web!
I write sci-fi for metalheads
if the EFF and the BoingBoing guys endorsed a new social networking system as the future of Internet freedom, people would join because it would seem uncool not to.
Seriously? The EFF and BoingBoing are not the epitome of cool to 99% of the population, who probably never even heard of them.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Diaspora put the cart before the horse. They developed the relatively easy piece, the local application, and then apparently assumed the federated protocol would reveal itself. Thus far, they don't yet have a formal specification, it's still defined by "how the application interacts on the wire".
Step 1) Take $5M in investment funds
Step 2) Convert to a PBC so that you can skirt the fiduciary duty to investors
Step 3) Overpay yourselves (profit!!!)
Diaspora failed partly because it presents itself in such a confusing way. See Join Diaspora.: "JoinDiaspora.com Registrations are closed But don't worry! There are lots of other pods you can register at. You can also choose to set up your own pod if you'd like. There's no "Join" button, but two "Donate" buttons. Take a look at a few "pods". You can't see anything without signing up, and many sound like they're run by wierdos.
The latter is the real problem. A system where anyone can join anonymously and can have as many identities as they want will be overrun by spammers and jerks. Facebook has some pushback in that area, which helps. Facebook also started by getting people from big-name schools, so they didn't start with a loser-heavy population.
A social network needs some cost to creating an identity. The cost can be money, or reputation, or even a proof of work, like Bitcoin. Otherwise, the network is overrun with fake accounts. A distributed social network needs good anti-forgery mechanisms, to prevent one node from spoofing another. That's hard without central control.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present: https://cupcake.io/ ... an alpha implementation of a distributed social protocol called tent. You can make a free account. There is only one app right now; a Twitter clone called micro. But it works well and there's a good community.
What is Tent and Why Does It Matter? http://housejeffries.com/artic...
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
IT BURNS! PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!
Seriously, will someone please shove a red-hot poker up Bennet's ass? This would greatly improve the SNR of Slashdot.
Instead of hosting a social network on a standard web site, it seems like to make it really distributed, it should be more similar to (but not exactly like) BitTorrent where the content originally local to the users computer/phone but mirrored to other client computers so that it is available widely without any sort of centralized control. The size of the content on a social network ends up being large but the updates are usually small. Just an idea, probably others have done it already.
Boycott Bennett!
So I have to get a cell phone just to use a website?
Who the fuck is he and who cares what he thinks about anything?
I can think of only 3 reasons why his bullshit keeps making the front page:
1) He owns Dice,
2) He blows whoever does,
or
3) He's got pictures of #2 as well
Most of these social networks can FOAD and people who care about privacy, anonymity, etc. Won't care. Why? Because if you care about that stuff there's a good chance you're already in some interest-specific forum. I"ve been on a few of those. I drifted in and out of them as my interests and motives have changed. Slashdot has been surprisingly durable.
Let's face it. The thundering herds of people who are walking into walls while staring into their idiotPhones don't care about any of that shit. In fact, let's do more than face it. Let's embrace it.
The commercial powers have actually done us a service. They've segregated eternal September onto FaceBook. Oh sure, it might annoy you that you have to be there for granny. So? Just use it for granny, or if you really can't stand the idea of having such an account then pick up the phone and give granny a call, old school. It won't hurt you or her.
Trying to take the exploitation and stupidity out of the social networking model is a turd-polishing exercise. The interest graph is where we started, and it's still there. Just use it, and let the social network tards play on social networks.
just wondering.
But people need a way to actually access your profile. It would be hard to come up with a protocol to host your profile "on your cell phone number", as opposed to hosting it at a webpage which can be accessed under your domain.
What in the fuck? Too much fail
their name also didn't help... Diaspora sounds like inverse constipation...
Connected to an email service.
With some automated responses (like) and mass mailing features.
Connected to some games
All held together by exclusivity That is, they won't let you someone's blog, email them, or get emails, unless you join them.
Well, I did leave some extra stuff out - but basically the other stuff is all the privacy killing back office things that no users wants - i.e. the ability to tag other people's photos, the ability to track people viewing, etc. etc.
If you make a distributed version of it, it's called THE INTERNET.
P.S. It already exists. Frankly, the entire thing is just a simplified way for non technical people to get involved on the internet. Not everyone realizes how useful a blog, mass mailings, etc. are so they packaged them up as a "Social Network" and suddenly people that never heard of a blog are blogging.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
He read an editorial on Al-Jazeera America and explained the parts he understood.
That would be pretty cool, but I don't know if the incremental gain would be worth it.
By switching from centralized social networking (Facebook) to decentralized (Diaspora), the big change is that whereas previously your content would get removed if it displeased only one entity (Facebook), now you can host any content as long as you can find one hosting provider anywhere in the world who is willing to host it.
By switching to decentralized (Diaspora) to a decentralized, distributed model (some kind of BitTorrentFacebook), now you've added the benefit that you can also post stuff that no hosting provider anywhere in the world would be willing to host. (This is in fact what BitTorrent often gets used for, serving files that no hosting provider will host for you, either because they violate copyright laws or because they consume too much bandwidth.) Whether that's worth it or not, depends on how much value you assign to those pieces of content that "nobody would be willing to host".
Freenet is a little closer to what you are talking about. It's been through a few incarnations over the years and works a lot better than it did originally (much better performance.)
Stop trying to make Diaspora happen. It's not gonna happen.
Distributed social networks won't work.
The problem is that if you are hosting the content on your own server, you have ultimate revisionist control of what you've said in the past, and now regret to the point that you're willing to rewrite history. In the limit, there's always the "off" switch if you want to duck out on the responsibility for what you've said.
I'm also not sure I'd be comfortable with some types of content showing up in "my feed", particularly content that happens to be illegal in my jurisdiction. I certainly don't want some anarcho-syndicalist tearing down all of the political borders because he thinks he should be able to post Nazi propaganda into Germany, or some other radical element deciding that I should have to hear his manifesto.
Right now we are seeing the problem with this with the whole "GamerGate" fiasco with Twitter because Twitter has strong distribution links for all their content (unlike Facebook). People who want to be seen, heard, and use social networking for self-promotion, or for a cheap way to send out coupons to their followers appreciate the strong links in Twitter, and complain bitterly about the less strong links in Facebook. Sometimes having the ability to self-damp these things is not altogether bad.
>> It would be hard to come up with a protocol to host your profile "on your cell phone number", as opposed to hosting it at a webpage which can be accessed under your domain.
Hmmm...try to think this through from the perspective of a mere mortal non-techie. (Not everyone knows how to stand up a web site.) If you had a portable profile that your cell phone company hosted (as long as you had your number with them), that could be accessed via web site, web service, etc. and could use a DNS-like service to find the phone company's service.
I think a PKI web of trust model is the most likely solution. It could be made user friendly and allow you to sign for different levels of trust in other users. Then update that trust over time.
>> So I have to get a cell phone just to use a website?
Close: you'd have to get a cell phone to get a UNIVERSAL PROFILE.
A PITA, sure, but even now, I'd claim that personal cell phone adoption is higher than any possible universal ID system would ever hope to achieve. (e.g., Think of all the whining about ID cards and voting: many activist claim that it's too hard for people to get drivers licenses or free ID cards when a lot of the "disenfranchised" already have their own cell phone!)
Bennett needs to let off some steam... elsewhere.
There is no sig.
Very interesting but abandoned low level protocol for distributed social networking.
Uses encryption and trust relationships which can be granted/withdrawn. There was a document describing it, but I cant find it on the net anymore, but the sourcecode is on github. It just needs somebody to set up an easy to access front end.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
The author doesn't seem to know about http://pump.io/ which is the successor to StatusNet (now GNU Social).
Evan's doing good work, and it's already used by several interesting personalities (joeyh from Debian/git-annex fame, Bradley Kuhn who's fighting the good GPL fight, and many others).
It's easy to try... there's already many many hosts and you can try one at: http://pump.io/tryit
Anonymous Cowards: Proving daily that human beings are innately jerks.
Look, just because you want something doesn't mean we want something.
Feel free to build your own, but don't be surprised that all the cool kids choose Ello instead.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Comment removed based on user account deletion
CHK6, I often suspect that those most prone to bloviating about what the Internet needs aren't programmers or technicians with a working knowledge of how the net actually works.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Websites that require cell phones are horrible, privacy-invading trash, and anyone who actually surrenders their number is an idiot.
He's only a "frequent contributor" because his low quality submissions keep being approved. How can this be fixed, short of moving to SoylentNews?
It's still under development AFAIK and so to say that it failed seems to be the incorrect analysis as best I can tell. It's unclear if it will ever reach a state where it's ready for prime time or whatever, but I wouldn't count it out just yet.
Well technically it is.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Stage artists where also subjected to the rule. Hence, cEven Key (yes, that's how it's spelt) of Skinny Puppy fame was forced to change his FB account back to his Kevin Crompton causing a very public backslash in his follower's community (incl. myself) where a good number of fans changed their FB name to cEven Key in protest and support.
Eventually FB backtracked and he was able to resume using his stage name (which he has for 30+ years now). But others are still stuck in the bureaucracy of getting their name fixed.
cEven Key was one of many who ended up on ELLO.
Do you mean USENET? It was like reddit without the voting.
A social network needs some cost to creating an identity. The cost can be money, or reputation, or even a proof of work, like Bitcoin. Otherwise, the network is overrun with fake accounts. A distributed social network needs good anti-forgery mechanisms, to prevent one node from spoofing another. That's hard without central control.
Nope. It's not hard. These are not new problems and have been solved over and over in other domains. We just need the right people and their time to build it, which no one is willing to pony up the money for, since distributed social networking is good for privacy and bad for business / police statism / etc.
...a protocol that allows users to create profiles, "status" posts, groups, events, and other familiar social networking features as "objects" that live on their own server
I believe that mobile device computing power and storage will advance to the point that everyone will be able to carry his/her own server, removing even the need to contract with a third party for services.
All that's necessary is the user-hardware and the FOSS protocol. No deep-pocketed sponsor necessary.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Not convinced people want to host something distributed. They just want to use it. Perhaps on mobile devices that aren't always online.
But plenty might prefer less ads and not being "the product".
Enter app.net, a platform that would allow people to build the social networks of the future that arenb't Facebook,
And for an opening performance, they built a twitter clone on it.
Because there's no ads, you pay to use it.
How's that working out for them ?
How many people are (as it turns out) actually prepared to pay ?
Look Bennett, don't hide behind the shield of freedom while deciding an entire group of people (classical liberals) are worthy of your ignorance. You're no better than Facebook, douchwad.
How about no one gives a shit about your new gay social network? On top of that, facebook is a fucking joke.
Ill be on IRC you fagots.
Its stuff like this that makes me check /. less and less frequently.
I had not heard of Diaspora, I am currently working on a personal project to create something to fill a similar gap in the social media framework. (Project yet to be named) My project is different, but I'm not ready to expand on it publicly.
The people who know best what the fucking Internet needs are the people who don't bullshit from wold honey about any technical shit at all.
Refrigerators are designed to meet consumer demand. Fuck the repairman.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
where you hosted your own website and the ICQ persistent presence has a profile page and a dynamic DNS link to your personal server? That was way back when with a teeny little hack you could just link through and have your own free (as in beer) no-ad website and maintain complete control. Then at some point they changed it and the personal space went cloud-based and you lost control (and that's when I stopped using it).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Bennett Haselton is the only person that both Chuck Norris and Vin Diesel hate equally
The reason why we don't have one yet is that writing a distributed social network is HARD. It's a much harder problem than inventing the web or email, because the security stakes are much higher. The consequences of spamming and spoofing are even worse than what we see in email; thus an author of a distributed social network needs to solve this problem early in the process.
Another problem is encrypted communication. Https requires buying certificates, thus a well-designed distributed social network needs a means of key distribution that allows a casual server operator to get running without purchasing a certificate.
When I met the Diaspora team, they were very ambitious; but they just weren't experienced enough for the task. Something like a distributed social network requires a team with significant experience, much more then a group of fresh grads will have.
No, I will not work for your startup
But why then would anybody with deep pockets ever invest in creating such an open infrastructure, if at any point their user base could declare them 'evil' and defect to a competitor? Nobody ever will trail blaze product development with the idea of creating a product that someone else can essentially appropriate.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Know thine enemy.
Objectivism was, in part, Ayn Rand's pathological rejection of, and obsession with, the Soviet Russian propaganda used to justify yet another brand of totalitarianism.
Parsing the rhetoric of social control shouldn't require a pyrhic sacrifice of reason. So there's some value in understanding the origins of her fear and loathing as well as her philosophy.
yup
captcha = disrupt
>> Websites that require cell phones are horrible, privacy-invading trash, and anyone who actually surrenders their number is an idiot
That's the flipside of a universal profile (and why most of us have at least a dozen different, sometimes conflicting profiles)
>> You don't own a cell number, you rent it, and only from an officially sanctioned, FCC approved telecom. It's like real estate. Stop paying taxes, and see how long you 'own' it.
So...you want to tie universal profiles to social security numbers? Those are free. ;)
Friendica is *EXACTLY THAT*. A completely distributed social network. Diaspora I believe is too, but it requires node.js whereas Friendica was AFAIK php-only.
That said, neither of them really instilled confidence in their security. Friendica notably defaulted to pushing data to the global network, and even after disabling it continued to spider my site (along with google) even with a robots.txt file denying spidering to everything on the server as well as the friendica directory itself. Despite not including any identifying personal information on it (it was intended for a net-only group of friends), it didn't inspire much trust in the social networking concept, monolithic or distributed.
Is it me, or does a distributed way of posting messages to be read by other people interested in your postings sound a lot like NNTP? Back to the Future, as they say.
No, honestly, you arrived pre-cracked.
It may well, somehow, be our fault that you are cracked, but it an absolute certainty that our habits of actually talking to people are superior to yours of sitting at a table or walking down the street with your friends, looking only at your phones, as you busily talk to anyone but the people you're actually with.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I just posted this on Ars, but at least to me a distributed social network is screaming at Microsoft to be implemented. Let me explain:
They don't have a social network; I don't know if they want one, but they probably wouldn't *mind* one. More than wanting a social network, they probably wouldn't mind dishing out a bit of trouble to Google/Facebook.
They're also looking to transition everyone from licenses to yearly subscriptions, which lots of people are resisting. Microsoft also now has a very large, mature cloud.
Microsoft should make it so that if you pay for a Windows service that you get a small, configurable slice of the cloud. Then make it super easy to add services, and enable some by default. Make a distributed social media platform, or partner with some like WithKnown and establish an industry-wide API. Then enable it by default on the user's cloud account. Boom instant secure federate social media that the user controls, and Microsoft just enabled it. If successful, they also just increased their subscription rates and dealt a decent blow to Facebook and Google.
They could also do the same with basic webpages, email (for those paranoid, host your own Outlook.com instance), photo uploads, etc. That could be the hook to get onto the services and keep that service active and the money flowing. Honestly, I hate yearly subscriptions, but if someone had something like that set up, easy to use and administer I'd pay for that service. Hell, I'd even pay Microsoft which is something I really don't like doing.
No, because it is not an obvious compound word, so it cannot be easily MisSpelled in CamelCase CorporateSpeak.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Why does a distributed social network need servers at all? Why not just flag stuff on your PC to share? It gets copied encrypted into a bittorrent directory using a session key, and that session key is held in a wrapper than can only be unencrypted by the people/group you have 'shared' with. The bittorrent network will ensure it's available even when your computer is off. Adding nodes to boost network speed just means pointing some bittorrent client to that .torrent.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
For every website where users can upload data, it needs to be distributed.
Slashdot, Github, Google*, all the forums, large and small, you name it.
They're all controlled by relatively few people, and subject to censorship, hardware failure and human madness.
Upside of the centralized system is (usually) fast speeds and comparatively easy maintenance and development.
"E-mail" is a social network, a distributed one, and it works pretty well, even considering the spam problem.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Why the romantic allure of buying a sailboat and stepping off the continent for the solitude of the sea where the maddening crowd who believe the world can be salvaged, if only a better internet app can connect us all, doesn't trouble me.
The world needs a better way to winnow false information from contemporary education and political discourse, than it needs another social networking platform.
Finding a way to hack ad servers with socially resposible messaging would be a better use of time than creating yet another social networking platform.
...than just "distributed social networking" already out there:
http://redmatrix.me/
In short, distributed social networking doesn't take off because it is too narrow a concept. These people have fixed the web, which was at fault from the start.
I was thinking about that not long ago, and if your content is encrypted and the spammer's content is encrypted, they have no way to get it in front of you without "friending" you and getting a public key to enable them to send content to you.
Have anonymous "handles" if you like, but allow friend requests to send only 140 chars of plain text along with the invitation. That way your friends, family, and colleagues can identify themselves with a few words and you can ignore invitations that say "Hey babe! Its me, Adriana. I miss you on Facebook 3 3 3"
So the protocol needs to be "pull based" rather than push based. You don't get "asshole" content unless you subscribe to it.
So to follow the facebook structure, you only see assholes that you accepted the friend request for.
Applying sufficient filtering to your requests a la spam filters, should mean that the worst that happens is you might miss the occasional friend request.
Applying sufficient smarts to your searching for friends should mean that most friends will be found.
So this leaves you no worse off than with the standard email / browsing problems (unsolicited data, and too much data)
Facebook solves a very serious problem. Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Facebook is the answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.
You have to concern yourself with privacy issues though. For all that FB sells your life to advertisers (and probably the government,) they're pretty good about not showing your naked keg stand to your boss (though admittedly they DID have to be forced into it to some degree..)
Though when I think about it it might not be all THAT hard. Generate a public/private key pair and send the public half to your friends. Encrypt your profile with the private half and distribute it randomly around to whoever will take it. Pretty simple I guess, though you'd need a way to reject friends (which would probably amount to generating a new keypair and re-encrypting your profile.. and a way to distribute the new key to your now-reduced set of friends and only to them..)
Also need a way for clients to figure out what the most recent version of your profile is since there could be multiple versions flying around the internet at the same time depending on whether each of the random cache copies have realized that its time to purge and/or update their own copy..
Probably all doable, but its not a simple task.
I am amazed at what Facebook doesn't do. You cannot discuss anything seriously on Facebook not because people don't want to, but because the design prevents it. The design is there because of the economic model which could be totally unnecessary, as the OP suggests. A distributed model would allow users more freedom to use alternative UIs and to control what they see and how they interact. The only good thing about Facebook is the global list of friends, but their monolithic CMS amd the revenue needed to support the huge backend are unecessary. I hope that someone does Facebook better, you and I don't need or care about 1 Billion users, and most of our 100 or so friends live locally. Handle the outliars with some latancy local to their peak time and cut down the size of the backend accordingly. You can offer an alternative service for far less than the billions of capitalization Facebook now has. It is a waste.
Amateur radio is all the socializing I need. 73 KM4COL
And I think the absolutely best chance of success would be if one made a social "network" that allowed one to share (and possibly monetize your own) content - think Youtube, but distributed and not limited to movies but to everything - pictures, audio, video, blog posts etc. :)
Best way to accomplish that using current technology would be to use BuddyCloud and replace its mediaserver with GNU Media Goblin. In the future however, it might be possible to do this without administering a physical server - it'll all be decentralised and in the cloud. That would be most convenient, but of course there are quite a few issues to resolve before then, not the least with regards to privacy...
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
Drivers licenses and ID cards don't require recurring payments to keep an active account at your carrier. Besides the cost of owning a cell phone, what happens when it slips out of my pocket while riding the bus, or I get mugged in a dark alley? Would I still be able transfer the number even if I no longer have physical control over the device where security codes are sent to? It's the same reason I don't use those two factor authentication schemes for mobile devices. It's theoretically more secure, but the risk of locking myself out of my own accounts is too great.
What is with the multipage user-submitted manifestos on here lately? It seems way worse than it used to be in the past...
Avoiding spam is difficult, but possible. If default model is pulling data from people you trust then you can revoke trust if somebody turns to be a spammer.
If nobody trusts these fake accounts and nobody fetches their data then it makes zero sense to generate them.
But such system must be as easy in use as Facebook and that is the main Problem.
Ideas like GEMS comes to mind. Open source project with opt-in adverts that pay you in native currency. Though at this point I'm not sure if they are going for a full fledged social media platform. Still an interesting concept. GETGEMS I believe is the url
The problem with the distributed social network is that anybody can create millions of fake users at will, clone existing accounts, etc. With no central authority (like FB) to delete it, the wheat will soon get buried under a deluge of chaff.
It would take a lot more than a dollar to make me watch a Beyoncé video.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
PS
Just because I could build this thing Bennett Haselton wants, doesn't mean that I agree that it would be a useful or monetarily rewarding or socially redeeming thing to do. I don't even think the technology would be all that tricky, or even patentable, for the most part. As far as I can tell, it's just a "I want to build an X just like Y, but different from Y in these ways" play, like all the other idiots who want to compete with a big player in a large market niche in the hopes of a big $$$ exist strategy.
You're trying to solve a problem that most people don't see as a problem. And do it by creating a system that can't use its centralized control to assure a certain minimum level of quality of experience, because there is no centralized control. This is a non-starter.