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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They don't care except for when it affects their user experience. Too many inline ads in Facebook for instance would be something that eventually people could get sick of and make them start looking around. Facebook being such a dominant and established presence and being under pressure to make money means they could certainly piss off their users with too many ads. Look at what happened to all the search engine companies before Google came along. All of a sudden a clean interface with real search results and fewer ads. Same thing could happen to Facebook if it becomes a tool for making money instead of a tool for its users to communicate with other people.
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.
Except that I can sign up for Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/G+/Whatever with a browser, and costs me zero dollars.
A Disapora appliance would have to cost more than zero dollars, because you're making and distributing hardware. Why would people ever buy it? What happens when it fails, or the baby spills juice on it, or it needs patching, or any number of other real world things happens to it?
It's a complete non-starter unless it also does something game changing.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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
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.
People would switch if the open source, decentralized social networking technology was also easy to use, had a good user interface, and offered all of the features of the commercial centralized social networks except for advertising.
Getting al of that to work is difficult, but it's a worthwhile problem to solve.
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.
You are being compensated just not monetarily. You get free access to search engines and social networking sites.
I wish I were as sure of anything as some people are of everything