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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.
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.
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.
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.