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Revisiting Open Source Social Networking Alternatives
reifman writes Upstart social networking startup Ello burst on the scene in September with promises of a utopian, post-Facebook platform that respected user's privacy. I was surprised to see so many public figures and media entities jump on board — mainly because of what Ello isn't. It isn't an open source, decentralized social networking technology. It's just another privately held, VC-funded silo. Remember Diaspora? In 2010, it raised $200,641 on Kickstarter to take on Facebook with "an open source personal web server to share all your stuff online." Two years later, they essentially gave up, leaving their code to the open source community to carry forward. In part one of "Revisiting Open Source Social Networking Alternatives," I revisit/review six open source social networking alternatives in search of a path forward beyond Facebook.
At least in the US a lot of "personal information" can be obtained from public sources. And with Facebook's tendrils into other sites (with things like beacons and such) they can probably get a surprising amount of information from sources you wouldn't expect.
Install Ghostery sometimes and see how many websites you log in to every day have beacons that go to a Facebook-affiliated site.
Look at the problems you're trying to solve if you want a viable Facebook or Twitter alternative that's distributed and private.
1. Any user has got to be able to get involved, the barrier to entry in terms of technical knowledge should be as low as possible.
2. All data should be stored encrypted and moved around encrypted, so a person has to hack your personal machine (laptop, desktop, phone) to decrypt anything you have hosted on the network or that has been shared with you by a friend.
3. Because there is no central hosting, the network should have some kind of builtin distributed backup system.
For a while it looked like a fundamentally unsolvable problem to me, but some groups have at least an idea of an answer and are working on it. There's crypto-currency (off hand I think "maidsafe", "quark", and "ethereum", but I could be remembering wrong) that is under development that lets users farm coins based on the resources they make available to the crypto-currency network: RAM, CPU, and storage. If you contribute more of those resources to the network than you consume, you accumulate extra currency you can use to buy real things. If you contribute less, you have to buy currency to cover your operating costs. All that seems tangential to a distributed social network, but you can link the two. Host the distributed social network on the computing resources made available by that crypto-currency. Your messages and data transfers to other users are tiny micro-transactions on the crypto-currency market. Your backups are micro-transactions on the crypto-currency market, and all of the redundant backups are encrypted. The same public/private key infrastructure governing transactions can be hooked into to make sure all data is encrypted in transit. Anyone that wants to participate can install the client on a phone, laptop, or desktop and get started.
Who knows if it will ever actually work. But as crazy as it is, it seems to have a more realistic chances of mainstream success than something like Diaspora. With Diaspora you need to trust your hosting provider or else have the technical knowhow and interest to host your own, and that absolutely won't scale large enough to make a dent in the established players.