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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.
Your personal information is now essentially open source, thanks to facebook.
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
Public figures and media entities don't give a flying fuck what it is or isn't. It's a matter of "can we monetize?" and "holy shit, look at that untapped audience". Things like "open source" and "decentralized" are the things only we nerds care about, and even in that group we find ourselves often in the minority.
If you want to build that social network utopia and get it to see some actual usage, you'll need to have a clear advantage and be able to get everyone and their grandma to move away from facebook, twitter and whatnot. For a media entity "decentralized social network" means "unreliable demographics" and "open source" sadly still means "not easy to monetize". Aside from that, you also need a certain momentum to build up, and have features that someone else doesn't have. Google+ is a perfect example of not being able to convince the greater public that you've got a better offer.
Personally, I can think of hundreds of more interesting hobby projects than hacking together an open source decentralized social network. But if you find it interesting, please do contribute code/documentation/fleshed out ideas to the community. Happy hacking!
Here's the tricky thing about privacy and social networks: Facebook's privacy support is actually pretty good. Whilst people might tell you in the abstract that they want more privacy from Facebook, figuring out what they would change in concrete terms is very hard. For example, they might say "I don't want to see ads" - but given the choice, they don't want to pay for anything either. So this feedback ends up being pretty useless, equivalent to hearing "I want everything and a pony". It's not a basis for a product.
Google learned this one the hard way with Google+. The original way Google+ tried to differentiate itself from Facebook was with circles. The idea is, Facebooks relatively singular notion of "friend" doesn't reflect the way real people work, this means it doesn't respect people's privacy and so people use the product less .... therefore by giving them better tools, they'd win a lot of users. Facebook responded that they'd tried the same thing, it turns out people don't like making lists of friends and controlling their sharing at a fine grained level, so it wouldn't work. And guess what? Facebook were right. Sure, you interview people in focus groups and they say one thing. In reality they might do something else.
So - decentralised open source social networks. Not gonna work. People might sound enthusiastic when you pitch it to them in the abstract, but actually Facebook works fine for them, and the kind of privacy that matters to them (can people see who views their profile?! Can my parents see my drunken party pics?) is already well supported and tuned.
Ultimately what will do off Facebook, eventually, is a change in how people use social networking that for whatever reason they cannot replicate in their main product.
No platform will work until you make it easy to migrate. Just like nothing could replace Lotus 123 until it could open it's file types. Write an open source social network that can post to facebook, and see facebook posts so that the users don't have to give up their friends in order to switch and you'll have something.
Unfortunately the only way I see this happening is via federal regulation, and I cringe at the thought of what other nonsense the feds would stick into such a law.
So unfortunately this means there really aren't any open source alternatives.
Unfortunately the distributed model has fundamental privacy problems. One needs complete trust in all server nodes as they can do nearly anything with a user's data after they have access. e.g. a user can revoke permission but that doesn't prevent a networked server from having cached & continuing to display it. Or potentially a rogue server which makes everything they have permission to see publicly available.
The biggest problem that I found with Diaspora was that even as somebody who already has a hosting service for my personal web site I found that I wasn't able to get Diaspora to actually working on my server. Making it easy to deploy on various web hosts is key if you want people to be about to host it. Also, it has to integrate with existing solutions. It would be great if those of us who chose to use whatever open source social networking is created could still interact with facebook, twitter, and other social networks without having to go to those other sites.
The rest of the problem is actually pretty straight forward. Most social networking sites are nothing more than an RSS Feed of a bunch of content produced by the user. Add in the ability to attach pictures and videos to the posts and you have most of what people use social networks for. Private messages are nice too. We actually have tools that do most of what we need out of a social networking site. The difficulty is putting the pieces together into a cohesive package and getting it to play nice with the other social networks so that people can slowly move over.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
. -- locutusofborg.
" It isn't an open source, decentralized social networking technology."
I hate to break it to you, but people don't care. That's techobabble to the overwhelming majority of the audience. When it comes to social networks, people care about the following things:
1. Are the people I want to connect with using it
2. Does it look good
3. Is it easy to use
4. Privacy, sometimes
Disapora failed because it was high on technobabble and low on the other stuff.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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
Public figures and media entities don't give a flying fuck what it is or isn't. It's a matter of "can we monetize?" and "holy shit, look at that untapped audience". Things like "open source" and "decentralized" are the things only we nerds care about, and even in that group we find ourselves often in the minority.
There' s nothing wrong with open source, but making something open source doesn't automatically make it better or more desirable. If you want to create a legitimate competitor to Facebook, Google or just about any other tech company, it's going to take a serious amount of hardware and infrastructure, and that ain't free..
Since it's unlikely that you can pull a couple of billion dollars out of your ass, your only options are (a) Charge people for access. We already know how well that (won't) work. Or, (2) Advertising. Which puts you right back into the whole privacy problem. Companies like Facebook and Google don't abuse your privacy because they are evil, they do it because it's the only way to make the money that keeps them in business.
There's a reason why companies like Facebook, Google and Ebay have no significant competition .Anyone who says they are going to create a competitor to one of the popular tech companies AND striclty respect your privacy is either a liar or completely delusional with no idea how business actually works.
I would like to see a few things happen:
The "average" person is not going to setup their own Diaspora server. If Diaspora came pre-installed and setup on a Roku like device that a user simply plugged in and connected to their home network then I think it would be more viable. It has to be really really easy to setup so that Grandma can use it.
Beyond that I would like to see someone develop an ad network that allowed individual users of Diaspora to monetize their own information. Say I really don't mind being part of an anonymized data-set. Then I should be able to opt-in to an advertising network and get a chunk of that ad revenue.It would be great if the user could even decide what companies advertise to them. 35 year old man? Home Depot is ok, but maybe you don't want to see advertisements for the newest Hunger Games movie.
I think that we need to fundamentally change the web so that Google and Facebook share their profits with us. They are after all making profits by selling your data. Now obviously they do lots of complicated analysis which is where a lot of the value added is but the raw resource is your data. You should be compensated for it.
lol I thought the same.
Oh, so they've got one, then.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So, what is your business plan to attain the popular uptake necessary to achieve the network effects required to make it viable? The technical challenges to create a social networking site are relatively trivial - in terms of user-facing functionality Facebook isn't *that* much different from the BBSes of yore. Decentralization makes things more interesting, but the real challenge is to make it culturally (and economically) viable.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
(Sorry for the shameless plug)
Personally, I created OpenAutonomy to solve this (and other) problems in an open, federated network (here is a video I did at FSOSS 2014 talking about this space). There is no centre of the network, nor is there much of a limitation in terms of what it can actually do.
That said, most of the approaches to solving this problem focus on social networking, specifically, and there are tons of them!
The problem is figuring out a way to explain the vision to a non-technical audience and get their interest in something new/different. The problems aren't technical, they are related to communication and marketing.
If you want to create a legitimate competitor to Facebook, Google or just about any other tech company, it's going to take a serious amount of hardware and infrastructure, and that ain't free..
But it also does not have to be yours... Look at the massive amount of data bit torrent moves around by everyone gives a little of what they have. If you make a thick app that runs all the time, you have some amazing processing power and bandwidth. And a peer 2 peer, decentralized Facebook has some serious advantages.
And put that on a mobile...
Currently, the most interesting option for me is secushare.org, because it is p2p. Make sure it is available on android/apple/etc. and easy to use. And the p2p-capabilities can provide your backup as well
It would be nice if someone created a not for profit charity based facebook like alternative. Use the same model to sell advertising, etc.. but send most of the proceeds to the charities the users select. Something similar to smile.amazon.com but not for profit like craigslist.org
I have been happily using Friendica for a family network for a while. While quirky, it works, and has a bunch of stuff for interoperating with other sites including facebook and even using RSS feeds. In terms of privacy, development has moved on to redmatrix. The problem being that going to a truly privacy-oriented framework means interoperability is out.
But really it seems like the protocol and the software need to be separated so that different social networking software can interoperate. There is already some of this in friendica for protocols like identi.ca and others. Nominally redmatrix is still largely just a protocol: Zot, but the user interface is progressing.
Sad that neither of these are on this guy's list. I think the wikipedia page on open social networking services is more informative than this article.
Those who do not understand Usenet are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And other AGPL3 alternatives?
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.
Diaspora is still very much alive.
Advice: on VPS providers
An alternative to "Post-Facebook" is to not use an all-encompassing social media tool/website instead of replacing it with a clone that offers better privacy.