14 ms·

Why there is no Facebook killer: the death of the P2P dream (2014)

123 points by wheresvic1 10y ago

codingmyway 10y ago
The costs of running even a p2p system need to come from somewhere and you need to attract the right people (hubs in the social graph lingo). The trick is incentivizing them. There are going to be adverts somewhere but the people and content producers could get a cut. Synereo has a better chance of succeeding than a wishful thinking p2p open source project because there is a source or funds that can power the network. It still has to come from ads though, unless people pay for it.
sparkzilla 10y ago
You can complain about Facebook's appetite for data all you like, but reason Facebook is successful is that most of the users of the site are willing to trade their data for utility. To beat Facebook you need to create a new product based on something that people actually care about, by providing either a better social network, a better news distribution system, or a better way to share photos and memories (to name a few possibilities).
deleted 10y ago
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nxzero 10y ago
Issue isn't tech, it's that the average person doesn't see any value in what P2P offers.
- omginternets 10y ago
  Not to mention the average developer. I just spent the past few days wrangling NAT-punching issues for a small p2p project of mine. To say "the first rule of p2p is don't do p2p" is an understatement. The (very unfortunate) truth is that p2p is just more difficult than client/server.
  - hvidgaard 10y ago
    That problem is partially solved by using a supernode overlay structure. It isn't particular elegant, and it relies on certain nodes being willing to work more for the network - but it can enable nodes behind a NAT to parcitipate relatively easily.
    - omginternets 10y ago
      Sure, sure (and the tip is much appreciated), but this just goes to show that P2P is more difficult than client/server. The point is that one has to have a very good reason to use a P2P architecture, as it tends to create problems.
      - nxzero 10y ago
        Maybe it's me, but I'd assume the many-to-many is more complex that one-to-many, especially when laid on top of systems designed for one-to-many.
        omginternets 10y ago
        Good point. I was thinking of issues like peer discovery and NAT punching, but it's true that traffic topology changes as well.
- aavotins 10y ago
  So it's the same issue as with many failed startups - solving a problem, that does not look like a problem for the end user. At all.
imaginenore 10y ago
You are solving the wrong problem. The reason there's no FB killer is the network effect. You can create the best alternative in the world, but to actually populate it with users is the task that nobody knows how to solve.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  > You can create the best alternative in the world, but to actually populate it with users is the task that nobody knows how to solve Nobody except Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, et cetera
  - sparkzilla 10y ago
    S/he means that the core problem in creating a "Facebook killer" is not creating a social network, but figuring out how to get users through it. Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest etc did not use any new protocols or tech, but they were able to attract users and grow through their distribution methods (on mobile) and features (not their underlying tech). Using a new P2P protocol will not attract enough users to beat Facebook.
  - imaginenore 10y ago
    Instagram = photo sharing app Snapchat = chat app Pinterest = photo sharing app They are not social networks. They have social elements, but that's not their core design. And none of them are FB killers. Google+ and Diaspora are examples of social networks, but they couldn't solve the network effect problem.
    - sjg007 10y ago
      Umm Facebook lets me chat and share photos with family..?
      - imaginenore 10y ago
        Yes, so? These are secondary functions.
katpas 10y ago
I think if users paid to use social networks then those networks wouldn't have to sell ad data to make revenue. It makes sense that when Facebook, LinkedIn et. al were set up social networks were something new so people wouldn't understand the benefits enough to pay. Right now, we've seen what social looks like when you don't pay for it. You become the product. I would have happily paid for WhatsApp instead of letting them give all my numbers to fb.
- glogla 10y ago
  > I think if users paid to use social networks then those networks wouldn't have to sell ad data to make revenue. But the networks would still do it, even if they didn't have to. Look at Microsoft - you paid hard cash for you copy of Windows, and they still vacuum all your data and behave as if they were scummy cloud company. Even if you pay, there's no reason for companies not to do this. Neither users nor regulators don't punish companies that spy on their customers and sell their data, so for the companies, it's free money. Why wouldn't take free money? Sure, they could not be evil, but not being evil doesn't take you far in the business world - see every big company ever.
  - katpas 10y ago
    I would love to be able to name a company that's done well without the being evil component.
deleted 10y ago
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amelius 10y ago
The reason why there is no Facebook killer yet is that the telecommunications act, [1], does not extend yet to mass communication in the form of social networks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
- walterbell 10y ago
  Care to expand? There was a brief period of telco (CLEC) competition, followed by a series of mergers which returned the landscape to almost the same as the one preceding the Act. If such an Act applied to social networks, how would you envision the effects?
  - amelius 10y ago
    Well, take this quote: > Since communications services exhibit network effects and positive externalities, new entrants would face barriers to entry if they could not interconnect their networks with those of the incumbent carriers. Since social media are communications services, and also strongly exhibit network effects, the act could not only lower the barrier to entry, but actually create the possibility of entry (which is now virtually nonexistent for any newcomer, even if you have the money of Google).
    - walterbell 10y ago
      Good point. In practice, ILECs did everything possible to delay the provisioning of interconnects, until most CLECs failed. But it was a good objective, albeit difficult to enforce. Without a physical layer monopoly (social networks), there would be less plausibility for broken interconnections.
ciex 10y ago
Isn't it also the case that web usage is much more wide-spread now than it was when Facebook became popular? It just feels off to cram all of your contacts into one platform (the dreaded will my granny see this post effect). I think end-to-end encrypted social platforms could have a future if they are oriented towards a niche that sees advantages from the encryption and offers federated access for mobile devices in addition to full p2p connectivity.
qeternity 10y ago
There is no Facebook killer because the average user doesn't care about privacy. It's the same misunderstanding about Apple. Sure, techies of the world might rather have a rooted droid, but the vast majority of the world just wants something that works. They don't really care about ideals.
qeternity 10y ago
There is no Facebook killer because the average user doesn't care about privacy. It's the same misunderstanding about Apple. Sure, techies of the world might rather have a rooted droid, but the vast majority of the world just wants something that works. They don't really care about ideals.
CM30 10y ago
Well yeah, that's one technical reason. But I suspect we would have found a work around if these systems had caught on to begin with. If a site or service is popular, then that can influence what technology is adopted and how we use it. No, I think the real major reasons are marketing related. For example, Facebook's network effect is very strong, even compared to sites like Twitter and Instagram. The service is only replaceable by one that grows extremely quickly, to the point things don't settle down enough for the site to feel like a ghost town. And it ties into the real reason said effect is so strong. These P2P and decentralised networks are only appealing to a certain minority of users. They're basically marketed as 'censorship resistant' or 'free speech focuses'. And while these are nice things to be, they're not a selling point for 90% of the social media userbase. The vast majority of people either don't feel they're being censored or don't really care about anything controversial. As a result, the only people using these services are niche groups using subject specific networks and activists banned or unwelcome from the major ones. It's like why Voat failed to unseat Reddit; because the only people who joined were those interested in discussing controversial issues and hence the site wasn't useful for people wanting to discuss more mundane things. It's the social and marketing factors that really sunk any P2P attempts at a Facebook clone (or any other decentralised social networks). They just don't have value for people wanting to discuss non controversial things.
- teraflop 10y ago
  Yep. Another way to put it is that by ditching Facebook in favor of something open-source and decentralized, you automatically become "that guy": https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
- pjc50 10y ago
  "Censorship resistant" also means, in practice, that a large amount of your content is awful. Whereas the average person wants something with the sharp edges removed. Facebook's moderators, inconsistent as they are, are genuinely adding value.
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    I don't see why do you think such system will force you to experience content you don't want. It's just when your tastes diverge from what's forced on us as acceptable, you shouldn't let in the dark.
panic 10y ago
I think a P2P social network that positioned itself as a counter-cultural movement could do pretty well. People are willing to put up with a lot to be part of something cool.
- throwanem 10y ago
  A few people are.
- ThatGeoGuy 10y ago
  > People are willing to put up with a lot to be part of something cool. Funny enough, this is exactly how Facebook first marketed itself: only for students of Harvard, and then only for college students. Once it had enough on-board members, it pivoted and started allowing the general public, until today where even your grandmother uses it.
onion2k 10y ago
This scarily accurate extraction of our personality and needs is advertising gold, and advertisers will pay a lot more for it. I once liked a dance company on Facebook because I know the person who made their website. Now I see adverts for dance productions. That's not advertising gold; that's a waste of advertising money. I reckon most people's profiles are like this - a few likes or posts about something that you'd never actually buy and all that ad money is just thrown away. 90% of the adverts could be getting your profile wrong but simple confirmation bias makes us notice that 10% far more than the useless, poorly targeted adverts, so when advertisers survey people they get the impression their profiling is working. Or worse, the ad networks know that the profiling doesn't work but they carry on the myth in order to charge advertisers more. I might well be wrong on this, but while I see adverts for things that have no appeal to me I'll keep suspecting profiling doesn't actually work.
- sparkzilla 10y ago
  Advertisers don't really care about the wasted clicks; they care about the successful ones. If Facebook can give more efficiency (even 10% more) than other forms of advertising, which it tries to do through targeting, then it will attract more advertisers.
  - nsxwolf 10y ago
    As long as this is the case this is a recipe for encouraging users to block ads. I'd welcome relevant ads. I'm always about to buy something. If you could predict what I was about to buy and give me truly relevant ads, I'd be delighted. For instance, right now I'm really looking for the best way to deep clean the upholstery on my couch. Let's see what's in my Facebook feed right now... 1. A mortgage ad talking about HARP... nope, don't qualify for that 2. Home Depot wants me to buy the Arctic Cove Fan... In the midwest, in mid-September... 3. Vizio... I'm not in the market for a TV, but I do like TVs I guess... but who doesn't... 4. HTC Vive... already own it It just goes on and on.
- mootothemax 10y ago
  >I once liked a dance company on Facebook because I know the person who made their website. Now I see adverts for dance productions. That's not advertising gold; that's a waste of advertising money. I think it may be more subtle than that. - not all clicks are created equal: clicks advertised to people like you might be cheap, so why not pad out the "gold" budget with a few chances elsewhere? - the advertiser might be targeting incompetently and hoping for the best (possibly even succeeding!) - you might coincide with 90% of "gold" clicks --> still worth it - your demographic might be an experiment - etc. etc. etc. Marketing seems - to me - to have an awful lot of "let's make assumptions and test them" about it. With anything like that, you're going to reach people who aren't interested.
Joeboy 10y ago
At the moment the best plan for that seems to be, make sure that if Facebook somehow kills itself the best alternative is a P2P alternative. Excessive advertising or conspicuous, harmful info sharing seem like the most likely ways Facebook might drive people away. Obviously the network effect means they're going to have to fuck up quite badly to drive people to a competitor.
pif 10y ago
TLDR: someone has to pay the bill. If users don't, advertisers will.
- Joeboy 10y ago
  Not a problem for email, which is P2P.
  - sanswork 10y ago
    Most peoples personal email these days is paid for by advertising.
    - Joeboy 10y ago
      Sure, but it's not something that makes the P2P not work. The "problem" is that users have to either administer a server, pay for a service or accept ads, and they mostly choose the latter. I'm not crazy about the fact they make that choice, but the fact the choice exists is not really a problem with the protocol.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
jamespitts 10y ago
He omits a huge source of emerging P2P potential: cloud instances run by power users and businesses. These are currently powering the various blockchain communities and represent the next stage of P2P. Due to the security and accountability advantages of blockchains, these networks could lead to a large-scale "redecentralizion".
- Joeboy 10y ago
  What blockchain communities represent the next stage of P2P? Twister is the only thing I can think of that vaguely meets that description, and as far as I know it's not particularly thriving.
cheriot 10y ago
P2P Facebook needs a killer function to overcome the network effect. If Facebook can compete by throwing money and engineers at it, you loose. Here's a terrible idea. Build a desktop app that stores all it's data locally (and is easy to configure with Dropbox et al). The extremely popular social networking activity of sharing photos is indistinguishable from sharing all other kinds of files. Now everyone has a more convenient way to loan movies and books that's difficult for the RIAA to snoop on. Like I said, terrible idea. What's something legal that Facebook can't just outspend a P2P app on? Other than privacy.
- mountaineer22 10y ago
  What is a "desktop"? Is that where I place my phone to charge?
  - cheriot 10y ago
    Ha, way to make me feel old. A mobile app with one of the cloud storage providers can also work without killing your battery and data plan.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      I think you've just poked the point the article author misses. I'm not sure I see a technical reason why my nexus of identity has to be physically colocated with my person, and there are a lot of good reasons for it not to be. The important point is that, be it wherever it is, my nexus of identity is not Facebook's or anyone else's but mine.
      - mountaineer22 10y ago
        Also, why should a nexus be a 1:1 relationship with your person? Should a person be allowed multiple nexi?
        throwanem 10y ago
pipio21 10y ago
This is a bad excuse. Today you can do a Facebook that lives in your own server. Your server living in your house and being a simple box that you can buy like a TV or car and is super easy to configure. I already have something like this, but it is complex to configure as it is not mass manufactured but custom made for me and a small environment of people. Everything else, an excuse for not working on finding solutions for the problems that you have to face, like with any engineering problem. Of course you can't replicate the work of more than 500 programmers(facebook) with just one person, but you can go far reusing open source components and coordinating the work of other people. Instead of trying to replicate facebook(a clone), focus on making something useful for the people getting advantage of distributed computers. Facebook did not try to replicate myspace. For example, focus on networks that PAY real money for having a social media they can control(companies).
- walterbell 10y ago
  > For example, focus on networks that PAY real money for having a social media they can control(companies) What are some examples of companies or vertical markets that would pay for control that is missing at FB? Publishers seem to be looking for new revenue sources, not control. Are you thinking of advertisers? There aren't many proprietary content distribution networks. Bloomberg is one example. Note that P2P may conflict with a "control" objective. Synology NAS has valiantly built a standalone networked home server, complete with NAT hole punching (they run a central broker) and usable "sharing" and "consumption" mobile apps that connect to your home NAS. They earn revenue on hardware sales, similar to iX Systems and FreeNAS. Synology has an OSS pseudo-clone called XPnology, which is apparently compatible with Synology's free mobile apps. Tanium has a billion-dollar valuation for endpoint management and surveillance, allegedly with P2P techniques: http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/04/15/meet-tanium-the-secret-cybersecurity-weapon-of-target-visa-and-amazon/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/04/15/meet-tan... & https://kb.tanium.com/Unmanaged_Assets https://kb.tanium.com/Unmanaged_Assets
- pjc50 10y ago
  Various people have tried to charge for "social media within the company", and I think the only one that's really been successful is Slack. Maybe Bloomberg chat and Skype count (although comms is not the same as a social network).
NoOn3 10y ago
Maybe we need something in the middle of p2p and centralized. Main big server by company works like current facebook and the ability to create your page on your p2p node if needed. And you will can choose between a general server or host p2p node...
dade_ 10y ago
From my understanding of what he said, he thinks that distributed social media would mean that the hosting would happen from our mobile devices as a P2P network. So yeah, he did completely miss something, that would be a terrible architecture that would not only be completely unreliable, it would offer no scalability, except for really awesome cat videos. Distributed social, such as diaspora allows anyone to host their own social media platform, but also provided a federation interface to other nodes. The problem with diaspora is that it offers a small subset of features compared to Facebook, and the problems they needed to solve, especially with federation and content control, are really difficult. Further, the branding will confuse almost everyone as most people can't be bothered to understand the difference between a site, application, and protocol.
legulere 10y ago
One model that could work I thought of works like this: A packet based P2P network, where peers can also act as buffers to relay the packets. So basically the same as servers in the traditional sever client model. However your account isn't bound to a server like with email or diaspora. So the networks of computers of your friends can act as servers serving your smartphone. Or the developer of the app you use can provide a server that can also send you push notifications. The real problem for decentral messaging/social networks is discovering your friends. Friends of friends being suggested to you certainly is a good step forward but it's not enough. It doesn't work when creating a new account and when adding people outside of your friend's circle.
slavoingilizov 10y ago
The P2P network doesn't exist, because it doesn't solve a problem. Facebook solves the problem of "I want to keep in touch with people in my life digitally" and has built a sustainable (to say the least) business model around it. Being P2P by itself is not a reason to create a social network, unless it brings benefits for users that simply don't exist in FB. What are those? Privacy? Security? Only a small number of people care about those. Products are not created because they are technically possible - they are created to solve problems. This reasoning is flawed because it starts from the solution, not the problem.
- hodgesrm 10y ago
  Following your line of reasoning it's worth asking what would have to change to make Facebook's business model vulnerable. When Facebook IPO'ed the biggest technology threat on the horizon was mobile apps [1]. However, the FB folks negotiated that one pretty successfully. Since then they have been very paranoid about new types of chat applications, in short anything that could move communications onto a platform they don't control. I'm just speculating but the biggest threat to Facebook would be if people started to look for something that Facebook has a hard time delivering. For instance, what if users decided that getting real news from reliable sources was high value? (Something like a return to properly curated journalism rather than entertainment--this is of course just wild speculation.) In this case, it's something that puts a premium on quality of the content, not the size of the network. Another obvious threat would be new ad delivery technology, which attacks the "buy" side of the network. No doubt FB watches that area very carefully. [1] http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/facebooks-mobile-transition-on-track-user-base-continues-to-grow-361670 http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/facebooks-mobile-transi...
SCdF 10y ago
I don't think decentralised P2P is really the answer anyway: the answer is separating the content from the convenience. Facebook killed blogs because when I want to find my friend I just searched for their name, and if I was their friend their content made it to my wall. Because of Facebook's convenience my friends use it, and because it's a walled garden I am compelled to use it to. My dream for this kind of thing would be something akin to DNS but for identity (pseudo or not), and an open API for content. So, Adam knows nothing about computers and creates an account on Facebook, which creates an IdentityDNS entry for him on his behalf. Belinda is also not that techy, but likes G+'s layout more, and so has an account on there instead. She also has Twitter. Zer0cool is a massive nerd, and has their own domain and hand-written blog software. They went to some website somewhere and created their IdentityDNS entry, and has hooked up and validated their blog on their domain as their content. Adam can search for Belinda and Zer0cool in Facebook, which in turn searches IdentityDNS. He can add them to his Facebook wall, and their posts will show up in some fashion (maybe Facebook shows its own posts normally and only shows titles of external blog posts, FB can do what it wants). Belinda can do much the same with G+. Zer0cool has also added Adam and Belinda, and reads their posts through muttdentity, a mutt clone but for identity stuff. OR something. I don't know. Effectively something that means that I can choose FB because I like how it displays photos, or because it has the best mobile app, or because it has lots of storage. Or I can run my own blog because I want that control. ETC. I shouldn't have to use Facebook just because that's all my Dad can work out how to use.
- walterbell 10y ago
  http://indieweb.org http://indieweb.org allows independent blogs to aggregate discussion from centralized social networks. RSS used to enable centralized social media to aggregate indie blogs, but is less used these days. See recent discussion on these topics at http://www.decentralizedweb.net http://www.decentralizedweb.net
- madshiva 10y ago
  Hum, For my point of view Facebook didn't killed blog. Blog is used not only to show pictures of yourself, but writing. Nobody write on Facebook, they only share things. It's totally different, but hey anyway you can make your blog what you when that they are. Multiple account kill the service. You have at less 5 social media on every newspaper website. I don't use anymore twitter and I hope people will do it too. It's really a waste of time using 10 social media. I even don't use Facebook too.
sergiosgc 10y ago
I don't think Facebook will be dethroned by another Facebook. I also do not think the differentiator for such a new king is technological (e.g. P2P). The only kind of FB rival I can imagine succeeding is an open ecosystem one. A second FB would have to overcome the network effects, and the only chance for that to happen would be for FB's network effects to decrease. While negative network effects do occur -- it's what killed Orkut, for instance -- Facebook has learned that lesson well. FB's value for participants has decreased, but is now stable and that network is still a huge barrier for entry. Technology is largely irrelevant. People do not care if it's P2P, runs on functional code or if it is an engineering marvel. They care about the value provided to them. The article posits that P2P adds negative value, and it is probably right. The article infers from that to the impossibility of a FB killer, which I think is wrong, because the scope of the analysis is wrong. An open ecosystem social network: 1) Has the possibility of creating use cases that Facebook can't compete with; 2) May be extremely vibrant, if the ecosystem is large enough; 3) Can't be bought by Facebook, as it runs contrary to the main strategy of a walled garden. (It may be bought in order to be killed, though); 4) Can live perfectly well, for an indeterminate amount of time, in second place. I can't see any other avenue for Facebook's demise. Side note: Twitter nearly had these characteristics for a while. They squandered the opportunity when they kicked it's developer ecosystem in the nuts. Sad.
- intended 10y ago
  I think we've reached the stage where second order effects influence the discussion. So its not just a product which has to be killer, it has to be able to defeat facebooks increasing mass of capital. For that matter - lots of Facebook competitors HAVE been created. They've just been bought out by facebook or someone else. I suspect that eventually people will just die out of facebook, and at some point it will gain the moninker of gravebook. Once facebook stops being cool, it will stop gaining younger users and the network effect will end. Of course, people at FB have obviously considered this problem and have a plan for it. Perhaps they will live forever. Maybe we'll discover some first order effects of the network effect which limit its growth or even reverse its growth. Other than these 2 outcomes though, I don't think we have several degrees of freedom.
- xiaoma 10y ago
trestles 10y ago
Very few people care about the issues raised by the author. From a practical pov, I think the best way to create something like this would be from some prebuild community that might care like Burning Man or something.
xbmcuser 10y ago
Their has been no Facebook killer because Zuckerburg has bought anything that he felt will supplant Facebook or at least take away users from them. He bought Instagram and WhatsApp was after Snapchat as well but Snapchat founder didn't want to sell.
- tim333 10y ago
  Zuckerberg is a smart competitor. If only he'd sell the site to Yahoo or Murdoch it would be much easier to compete.
xbmcuser 10y ago
Their has been no Facebook killer because Zuckerburg has bought anything that he felt will supplant Facebook or at least take away users from them. He bought Instagram and WhatsApp was after Snapchat as well but Snapchat founder didn't want to sell.
xbmcuser 10y ago
Their has been no Facebook killer because Zuckerburg has bought anything that he felt will supplant Facebook or at least take away users from them. He bought Instagram and WhatsApp was after Snapchat as well but Snapchat founder didn't want to sell.
xbmcuser 10y ago
Their has been no Facebook killer because Zuckerburg has bought anything that he felt will supplant Facebook or at least take away users from them. He bought Instagram and WhatsApp was after Snapchat as well but Snapchat founder didn't want to sell.
_nalply 10y ago
Technology advances occur because something is provided what people want. Advertisement is not what people want. At least not too much of it. If something better comes up Google and Facebook will die. As with each technology advance it's impossible to know beforehand what will be a hit. Nobody knew that smartphones will be a hit before the first iPhone came out. However we all know that advertisement is something companies force down the throat of people. This won't be sustainable in the long term. We will experience the Facebook and Google killer. Perhaps it's neural networks people can train themselves and providing a layer above all communication technology. Perhaps with these neural networks we will recognize that email is truly all we need for asynchronously communicating with each other. We will see.
- intended 10y ago
  Well, tech firms and tech creators want money....so? unless the incentives for technology creators change this problem is going to remain as old as time. And we are doing a pretty terrible job of setting incentives which are not monetarily oriented.
  - _nalply 10y ago
    Yes that's why the people will perhaps run their neural networks themselves. Because nobody will do that for them for free.
soufron 10y ago
There is no Facebook killer because of the lack of interest of EU industralists for the Internet. They dont care because they dont see it as an infrastructure. They think it's a gadget. De minimis non curat praetor.
luke-stanley 10y ago
Some Retroshare developers are working on an mobile app for Android and like Bittorrent it won't need a server farm. Peers can carry their own weight using home servers that can talk to phones etc.
mozey 10y ago
"Your 3G connection isn't like your home ADSL or cable internet connection - it is designed for browsing web pages and downloading data off big servers, not serving up content to the whole world, like a mini version of a Facebook or Instagram server." If you had a container running somewhere in the cloud talking to containers owned by other users then the mobile device doesn't have to be a server?
- digi_owl 10y ago
  And now you have to trust the service provider that the container runs on etc etc etc.
- fulafel 10y ago
  You have to sign up for a new paid service for that. Significant barrier vs doing something off your existing wired home connection for free and having the easy to understand mental model of "stuff running on my PC there in the corner". Heroku/Lambda/App engine help with that a little but they aren't newbie friendly and there aren't many existing server apps for those that you can just install. Sandstorm has the right idea.
zer0gravity 10y ago
> It's very difficult, inefficient, and unreliable for your phone to serve out data to all-comers: it's a one-way street. But your phone can talk with your server and anybody who wants to access what you allow them to, can simply talk with your server. It is perfectly possible to host your own server nowadays. > Imagine if the messages and photos you shared with your friends only lived on their phones or computers, and not in some server being scrutinised by security agencies, used for targeting ads, or at risk of being hacked. Yes, it is possbile by implementing the idea described above where everyone hosts its own data. Actually I'm working on something like this. Currently I have developed some minimal applications that allow you to share your status and chat. It still uses a single server for now to relay events between the clients, but I am working on making it P2P. You can check them if you want : https://fruit-fly.herokuapp.com/client/statusapp.html https://fruit-fly.herokuapp.com/client/statusapp.html https://fruit-fly.herokuapp.com/client/chat.html https://fruit-fly.herokuapp.com/client/chat.html
45h34jh53k4j 10y ago
Fundamental problem with article -- says that Skype changed from p2p to centralized because it was a better experience for mobile. It was political, not technological. I believe it had more to do with 'Project Chess' which was LE/IC access to the Skype calls: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/20/skype-nsa-access-user-data https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/20/skype-nsa... Facetime, which is a similar thing to Skype for the Apple platform used to be p2p in ios4. Patent troll VirnetX sued and won for 600 million dollars to get them to stop being p2p. Facetime has never worked as well since, and VirnetX are still trying to get iMessage and Facetime blocked. No, p2p works fine. Better than centralized. There are forces that don't wish this.
guylepage3 10y ago
Hmm.. I believe there is a Facebook killer coming. Full disclosure. I am a front-end developer working with others on Blockstack Decentralized Open Source software. Although P2P systems seemed as though they could solve problems like decentralized identity, which in turn could have actually put a world of hurt on FB, the limitations of the system itself prevented it from any real world authentication applications. With a truly decentralized system, that utilizes the blockchain, users can now own their own identity. With this new breakthrough tech, Blockstack (http://blockstack.org http://blockstack.org), users now possess their own data and cannot be tracked. This puts FB, and other companies that rely upon advertising (tracking) as their main source of revenue, in a very tough position. Now that there are applications and projects being built on Blockstack tech, I strongly feel now that it's only a matter of time before a breakout social app, or FB killer, will hit the mainstream. Join the Blockstack community http://chat.blockstack.org http://chat.blockstack.org
- dominotw 10y ago
  >users can now own their own identity. Facebook's main feature is precisely the opposite of this. How can this be facebook killer.
  - guylepage3 10y ago
    Because if users own their identity and there is a new social network built upon the basis of owning your own identity and take it with you were ever you go, which is something most people want, then FB would be screwed. They would have to come up with a new revenue model to compete. Ad blockers are becoming more and more popular. A social app built on Blockstack would prevent users from being tracked.
Karunamon 10y ago
I think what always gets ignored in these "Facebook sucks, we should use/build X instead" arguments is the grandparents factor. My gran cannot be expected to learn server administration and security just to have an inferior* version of what she has right now with Facebook. For that matter, that's not a tradeoff you can expect almost any non-tech (or most tech - we have other things to be doing) people to make. (Inferior, meaning the supposed benefits to her are completely philosophical and theoretical, rather than practical. She doesn't give a tuppeny crap what advertisers are doing with her likes.) Unless she can right now click on an icon that brings her to something that looks like Facebook and has her family on it and is easy to use, all the alternatives in the world don't matter. And I get the sneaking suspicion she's not in the minority here! Everyone always starts looking at this from the tech side, as if having the system be P2P should be its primary selling point. No! In the real world, that isn't a selling point any more than something being Free Software is a selling point to anyone who doesn't read Stallman. The "threat" from advertisers, corporations, and governments accessing your Facebook data is going to have to get a lot more practical and a lot less theoretical (the NSA might do X Y and Z!) before that even winds up in the same universe where it can appear on a normal person's radar.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
falcolas 10y ago
Dear <whomever wants to kill facebook> - the answer is simple: Leverage email. Send marked up messages that look good in both HTML and can be transformed into threaded comment strings in your client. Embed XMPP chat, and set up enabled-by-default encryption around the whole thing. Leverage mailing lists for your special interest groups and your public pages. Sell server time for managing the mailing lists and image hosting, and for a web client. The infrastructure is there, just forgotten. This has been banging around in my head for a few years now, but I'll never have the time to do it myself. If you can poke holes in the core concept - please do. It needs to be fleshed out.
- woah 10y ago
  Maybe you have a great concept, but as a general principle that sounds bad. If someone doesn't have your special client, it will be disjointed. If someone does have your special client, why didn't you just use a saner protocol. Also, email is not really very decentralized. You need to be one of the major providers to avoid the spam filters.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    It would not be any more disjointed than any other form of email exchange - just not as well organized as a social network. > You need to be one of the major providers to avoid the spam filters. Yes, but you could take advantage of the existing email providers' IMAP and POP implementations, and companies have long worked to ensure their emails are not sent to spam folders; it's not entirely a black art or impossible.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    I realized I didn't address the more important of your two points, figured I'd do that now. > why didn't you just use a saner protocol. Mostly because your email network with your friends and colleagues already exists. Even more - we already rely on email as the ultimate identity authority for just about everything based on the web. My idea simply adds crypto-based authentication, UI improvements, and chat over the top of that. Emails are so simple and ubiquitous that people have already implemented email <-> help-desk bridges, this idea just takes that bridge concept and applies it to interactions between user. Take a moment and picture what it would be like to have every thread in Facebook delivered to your inbox. It would be a mess with the current mailbox UI, but there's not much impedance mismatch. Now picture the reverse - every email you get shows up as a "post" on Facebook. Both consist of the asynchronous distribution of messages from one user to many others, it's just that one relies on Facebook's network of servers, and the other relies on mail servers.
simbalion 10y ago
The article is very ignorant. The internet remains primarily a P2P technology, and will probably continue to be that way forever. The amount of valuable resources on the internet which are utilizing P2P methods are 10000000 to 1 compared to the number of Facebooks. Also consider that Facebook's #1 product, social blogging, is not profitable, and can never ever be profitable. 100% of their profits are made in other businesses which they've connected to their brand name, which is the only reason for their success. For example, microtransaction-scam "video games". This is a typical article by someone who does not really understand the internet and has not been using it for very long.
kowdermeister 10y ago
If you want to build a Facebook killer, then answer this question first without coding a single line: How do you plan to sign up non techie females? Do you have anything to offer to them?
- pjc50 10y ago
  More importantly, if you want women to use your service, how are you going to handle the inevitable abuse problems?
Kazamai 10y ago
If P2P is dead, does that mean that 99% of cryptocurrency traffic go through server farms?

123 points by wheresvic1 10y ago

The costs of running even a p2p system need to come from somewhere and you need to attract the right people (hubs in the social graph lingo). The trick is incentivizing them. There are going to be adverts somewhere but the people and content producers could get a cut. Synereo has a better chance of succeeding than a wishful thinking p2p open source project because there is a source or funds that can power the network. It still has to come from ads though, unless people pay for it.

sparkzilla 10y ago

You can complain about Facebook's appetite for data all you like, but reason Facebook is successful is that most of the users of the site are willing to trade their data for utility. To beat Facebook you need to create a new product based on something that people actually care about, by providing either a better social network, a better news distribution system, or a better way to share photos and memories (to name a few possibilities).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nxzero 10y ago

Issue isn't tech, it's that the average person doesn't see any value in what P2P offers.

omginternets 10y ago
Not to mention the average developer. I just spent the past few days wrangling NAT-punching issues for a small p2p project of mine. To say "the first rule of p2p is don't do p2p" is an understatement. The (very unfortunate) truth is that p2p is just more difficult than client/server.
- hvidgaard 10y ago
  That problem is partially solved by using a supernode overlay structure. It isn't particular elegant, and it relies on certain nodes being willing to work more for the network - but it can enable nodes behind a NAT to parcitipate relatively easily.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    Sure, sure (and the tip is much appreciated), but this just goes to show that P2P is more difficult than client/server. The point is that one has to have a very good reason to use a P2P architecture, as it tends to create problems.
    - nxzero 10y ago
      Maybe it's me, but I'd assume the many-to-many is more complex that one-to-many, especially when laid on top of systems designed for one-to-many.
      - omginternets 10y ago
        Good point. I was thinking of issues like peer discovery and NAT punching, but it's true that traffic topology changes as well.
aavotins 10y ago
So it's the same issue as with many failed startups - solving a problem, that does not look like a problem for the end user. At all.

imaginenore 10y ago

You are solving the wrong problem. The reason there's no FB killer is the network effect. You can create the best alternative in the world, but to actually populate it with users is the task that nobody knows how to solve.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> You can create the best alternative in the world, but to actually populate it with users is the task that nobody knows how to solve Nobody except Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, et cetera
- sparkzilla 10y ago
  S/he means that the core problem in creating a "Facebook killer" is not creating a social network, but figuring out how to get users through it. Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest etc did not use any new protocols or tech, but they were able to attract users and grow through their distribution methods (on mobile) and features (not their underlying tech). Using a new P2P protocol will not attract enough users to beat Facebook.
- imaginenore 10y ago
  Instagram = photo sharing app Snapchat = chat app Pinterest = photo sharing app They are not social networks. They have social elements, but that's not their core design. And none of them are FB killers. Google+ and Diaspora are examples of social networks, but they couldn't solve the network effect problem.
  - sjg007 10y ago
    Umm Facebook lets me chat and share photos with family..?
    - imaginenore 10y ago
      Yes, so? These are secondary functions.

katpas 10y ago

I think if users paid to use social networks then those networks wouldn't have to sell ad data to make revenue. It makes sense that when Facebook, LinkedIn et. al were set up social networks were something new so people wouldn't understand the benefits enough to pay. Right now, we've seen what social looks like when you don't pay for it. You become the product. I would have happily paid for WhatsApp instead of letting them give all my numbers to fb.

glogla 10y ago
> I think if users paid to use social networks then those networks wouldn't have to sell ad data to make revenue. But the networks would still do it, even if they didn't have to. Look at Microsoft - you paid hard cash for you copy of Windows, and they still vacuum all your data and behave as if they were scummy cloud company. Even if you pay, there's no reason for companies not to do this. Neither users nor regulators don't punish companies that spy on their customers and sell their data, so for the companies, it's free money. Why wouldn't take free money? Sure, they could not be evil, but not being evil doesn't take you far in the business world - see every big company ever.
- katpas 10y ago
  I would love to be able to name a company that's done well without the being evil component.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

amelius 10y ago

The reason why there is no Facebook killer yet is that the telecommunications act, [1], does not extend yet to mass communication in the form of social networks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

walterbell 10y ago
Care to expand? There was a brief period of telco (CLEC) competition, followed by a series of mergers which returned the landscape to almost the same as the one preceding the Act. If such an Act applied to social networks, how would you envision the effects?
- amelius 10y ago
  Well, take this quote: > Since communications services exhibit network effects and positive externalities, new entrants would face barriers to entry if they could not interconnect their networks with those of the incumbent carriers. Since social media are communications services, and also strongly exhibit network effects, the act could not only lower the barrier to entry, but actually create the possibility of entry (which is now virtually nonexistent for any newcomer, even if you have the money of Google).
  - walterbell 10y ago
    Good point. In practice, ILECs did everything possible to delay the provisioning of interconnects, until most CLECs failed. But it was a good objective, albeit difficult to enforce. Without a physical layer monopoly (social networks), there would be less plausibility for broken interconnections.

ciex 10y ago

Isn't it also the case that web usage is much more wide-spread now than it was when Facebook became popular? It just feels off to cram all of your contacts into one platform (the dreaded will my granny see this post effect). I think end-to-end encrypted social platforms could have a future if they are oriented towards a niche that sees advantages from the encryption and offers federated access for mobile devices in addition to full p2p connectivity.

qeternity 10y ago

There is no Facebook killer because the average user doesn't care about privacy. It's the same misunderstanding about Apple. Sure, techies of the world might rather have a rooted droid, but the vast majority of the world just wants something that works. They don't really care about ideals.

qeternity 10y ago

CM30 10y ago

Well yeah, that's one technical reason. But I suspect we would have found a work around if these systems had caught on to begin with. If a site or service is popular, then that can influence what technology is adopted and how we use it. No, I think the real major reasons are marketing related. For example, Facebook's network effect is very strong, even compared to sites like Twitter and Instagram. The service is only replaceable by one that grows extremely quickly, to the point things don't settle down enough for the site to feel like a ghost town. And it ties into the real reason said effect is so strong. These P2P and decentralised networks are only appealing to a certain minority of users. They're basically marketed as 'censorship resistant' or 'free speech focuses'. And while these are nice things to be, they're not a selling point for 90% of the social media userbase. The vast majority of people either don't feel they're being censored or don't really care about anything controversial. As a result, the only people using these services are niche groups using subject specific networks and activists banned or unwelcome from the major ones. It's like why Voat failed to unseat Reddit; because the only people who joined were those interested in discussing controversial issues and hence the site wasn't useful for people wanting to discuss more mundane things. It's the social and marketing factors that really sunk any P2P attempts at a Facebook clone (or any other decentralised social networks). They just don't have value for people wanting to discuss non controversial things.

teraflop 10y ago
Yep. Another way to put it is that by ditching Facebook in favor of something open-source and decentralized, you automatically become "that guy": https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
pjc50 10y ago
"Censorship resistant" also means, in practice, that a large amount of your content is awful. Whereas the average person wants something with the sharp edges removed. Facebook's moderators, inconsistent as they are, are genuinely adding value.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  I don't see why do you think such system will force you to experience content you don't want. It's just when your tastes diverge from what's forced on us as acceptable, you shouldn't let in the dark.

panic 10y ago

I think a P2P social network that positioned itself as a counter-cultural movement could do pretty well. People are willing to put up with a lot to be part of something cool.

throwanem 10y ago
A few people are.
ThatGeoGuy 10y ago
> People are willing to put up with a lot to be part of something cool. Funny enough, this is exactly how Facebook first marketed itself: only for students of Harvard, and then only for college students. Once it had enough on-board members, it pivoted and started allowing the general public, until today where even your grandmother uses it.

onion2k 10y ago

This scarily accurate extraction of our personality and needs is advertising gold, and advertisers will pay a lot more for it. I once liked a dance company on Facebook because I know the person who made their website. Now I see adverts for dance productions. That's not advertising gold; that's a waste of advertising money. I reckon most people's profiles are like this - a few likes or posts about something that you'd never actually buy and all that ad money is just thrown away. 90% of the adverts could be getting your profile wrong but simple confirmation bias makes us notice that 10% far more than the useless, poorly targeted adverts, so when advertisers survey people they get the impression their profiling is working. Or worse, the ad networks know that the profiling doesn't work but they carry on the myth in order to charge advertisers more. I might well be wrong on this, but while I see adverts for things that have no appeal to me I'll keep suspecting profiling doesn't actually work.

sparkzilla 10y ago
Advertisers don't really care about the wasted clicks; they care about the successful ones. If Facebook can give more efficiency (even 10% more) than other forms of advertising, which it tries to do through targeting, then it will attract more advertisers.
- nsxwolf 10y ago
  As long as this is the case this is a recipe for encouraging users to block ads. I'd welcome relevant ads. I'm always about to buy something. If you could predict what I was about to buy and give me truly relevant ads, I'd be delighted. For instance, right now I'm really looking for the best way to deep clean the upholstery on my couch. Let's see what's in my Facebook feed right now... 1. A mortgage ad talking about HARP... nope, don't qualify for that 2. Home Depot wants me to buy the Arctic Cove Fan... In the midwest, in mid-September... 3. Vizio... I'm not in the market for a TV, but I do like TVs I guess... but who doesn't... 4. HTC Vive... already own it It just goes on and on.
mootothemax 10y ago
>I once liked a dance company on Facebook because I know the person who made their website. Now I see adverts for dance productions. That's not advertising gold; that's a waste of advertising money. I think it may be more subtle than that. - not all clicks are created equal: clicks advertised to people like you might be cheap, so why not pad out the "gold" budget with a few chances elsewhere? - the advertiser might be targeting incompetently and hoping for the best (possibly even succeeding!) - you might coincide with 90% of "gold" clicks --> still worth it - your demographic might be an experiment - etc. etc. etc. Marketing seems - to me - to have an awful lot of "let's make assumptions and test them" about it. With anything like that, you're going to reach people who aren't interested.

Joeboy 10y ago

At the moment the best plan for that seems to be, make sure that if Facebook somehow kills itself the best alternative is a P2P alternative. Excessive advertising or conspicuous, harmful info sharing seem like the most likely ways Facebook might drive people away. Obviously the network effect means they're going to have to fuck up quite badly to drive people to a competitor.

pif 10y ago

TLDR: someone has to pay the bill. If users don't, advertisers will.

Joeboy 10y ago
Not a problem for email, which is P2P.
- sanswork 10y ago
  Most peoples personal email these days is paid for by advertising.
  - Joeboy 10y ago
    Sure, but it's not something that makes the P2P not work. The "problem" is that users have to either administer a server, pay for a service or accept ads, and they mostly choose the latter. I'm not crazy about the fact they make that choice, but the fact the choice exists is not really a problem with the protocol.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]

jamespitts 10y ago

He omits a huge source of emerging P2P potential: cloud instances run by power users and businesses. These are currently powering the various blockchain communities and represent the next stage of P2P. Due to the security and accountability advantages of blockchains, these networks could lead to a large-scale "redecentralizion".

Joeboy 10y ago
What blockchain communities represent the next stage of P2P? Twister is the only thing I can think of that vaguely meets that description, and as far as I know it's not particularly thriving.

cheriot 10y ago

P2P Facebook needs a killer function to overcome the network effect. If Facebook can compete by throwing money and engineers at it, you loose. Here's a terrible idea. Build a desktop app that stores all it's data locally (and is easy to configure with Dropbox et al). The extremely popular social networking activity of sharing photos is indistinguishable from sharing all other kinds of files. Now everyone has a more convenient way to loan movies and books that's difficult for the RIAA to snoop on. Like I said, terrible idea. What's something legal that Facebook can't just outspend a P2P app on? Other than privacy.

mountaineer22 10y ago
What is a "desktop"? Is that where I place my phone to charge?
- cheriot 10y ago
  Ha, way to make me feel old. A mobile app with one of the cloud storage providers can also work without killing your battery and data plan.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    I think you've just poked the point the article author misses. I'm not sure I see a technical reason why my nexus of identity has to be physically colocated with my person, and there are a lot of good reasons for it not to be. The important point is that, be it wherever it is, my nexus of identity is not Facebook's or anyone else's but mine.
    - mountaineer22 10y ago
      Also, why should a nexus be a 1:1 relationship with your person? Should a person be allowed multiple nexi?
      - throwanem 10y ago

pipio21 10y ago

This is a bad excuse. Today you can do a Facebook that lives in your own server. Your server living in your house and being a simple box that you can buy like a TV or car and is super easy to configure. I already have something like this, but it is complex to configure as it is not mass manufactured but custom made for me and a small environment of people. Everything else, an excuse for not working on finding solutions for the problems that you have to face, like with any engineering problem. Of course you can't replicate the work of more than 500 programmers(facebook) with just one person, but you can go far reusing open source components and coordinating the work of other people. Instead of trying to replicate facebook(a clone), focus on making something useful for the people getting advantage of distributed computers. Facebook did not try to replicate myspace. For example, focus on networks that PAY real money for having a social media they can control(companies).

walterbell 10y ago
> For example, focus on networks that PAY real money for having a social media they can control(companies) What are some examples of companies or vertical markets that would pay for control that is missing at FB? Publishers seem to be looking for new revenue sources, not control. Are you thinking of advertisers? There aren't many proprietary content distribution networks. Bloomberg is one example. Note that P2P may conflict with a "control" objective. Synology NAS has valiantly built a standalone networked home server, complete with NAT hole punching (they run a central broker) and usable "sharing" and "consumption" mobile apps that connect to your home NAS. They earn revenue on hardware sales, similar to iX Systems and FreeNAS. Synology has an OSS pseudo-clone called XPnology, which is apparently compatible with Synology's free mobile apps. Tanium has a billion-dollar valuation for endpoint management and surveillance, allegedly with P2P techniques: http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/04/15/meet-tanium-the-secret-cybersecurity-weapon-of-target-visa-and-amazon/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/04/15/meet-tan... & https://kb.tanium.com/Unmanaged_Assets https://kb.tanium.com/Unmanaged_Assets
pjc50 10y ago
Various people have tried to charge for "social media within the company", and I think the only one that's really been successful is Slack. Maybe Bloomberg chat and Skype count (although comms is not the same as a social network).

NoOn3 10y ago

Maybe we need something in the middle of p2p and centralized. Main big server by company works like current facebook and the ability to create your page on your p2p node if needed. And you will can choose between a general server or host p2p node...

dade_ 10y ago

From my understanding of what he said, he thinks that distributed social media would mean that the hosting would happen from our mobile devices as a P2P network. So yeah, he did completely miss something, that would be a terrible architecture that would not only be completely unreliable, it would offer no scalability, except for really awesome cat videos. Distributed social, such as diaspora allows anyone to host their own social media platform, but also provided a federation interface to other nodes. The problem with diaspora is that it offers a small subset of features compared to Facebook, and the problems they needed to solve, especially with federation and content control, are really difficult. Further, the branding will confuse almost everyone as most people can't be bothered to understand the difference between a site, application, and protocol.

legulere 10y ago

One model that could work I thought of works like this: A packet based P2P network, where peers can also act as buffers to relay the packets. So basically the same as servers in the traditional sever client model. However your account isn't bound to a server like with email or diaspora. So the networks of computers of your friends can act as servers serving your smartphone. Or the developer of the app you use can provide a server that can also send you push notifications. The real problem for decentral messaging/social networks is discovering your friends. Friends of friends being suggested to you certainly is a good step forward but it's not enough. It doesn't work when creating a new account and when adding people outside of your friend's circle.

slavoingilizov 10y ago

The P2P network doesn't exist, because it doesn't solve a problem. Facebook solves the problem of "I want to keep in touch with people in my life digitally" and has built a sustainable (to say the least) business model around it. Being P2P by itself is not a reason to create a social network, unless it brings benefits for users that simply don't exist in FB. What are those? Privacy? Security? Only a small number of people care about those. Products are not created because they are technically possible - they are created to solve problems. This reasoning is flawed because it starts from the solution, not the problem.

hodgesrm 10y ago
Following your line of reasoning it's worth asking what would have to change to make Facebook's business model vulnerable. When Facebook IPO'ed the biggest technology threat on the horizon was mobile apps [1]. However, the FB folks negotiated that one pretty successfully. Since then they have been very paranoid about new types of chat applications, in short anything that could move communications onto a platform they don't control. I'm just speculating but the biggest threat to Facebook would be if people started to look for something that Facebook has a hard time delivering. For instance, what if users decided that getting real news from reliable sources was high value? (Something like a return to properly curated journalism rather than entertainment--this is of course just wild speculation.) In this case, it's something that puts a premium on quality of the content, not the size of the network. Another obvious threat would be new ad delivery technology, which attacks the "buy" side of the network. No doubt FB watches that area very carefully. [1] http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/facebooks-mobile-transition-on-track-user-base-continues-to-grow-361670 http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/facebooks-mobile-transi...

SCdF 10y ago

I don't think decentralised P2P is really the answer anyway: the answer is separating the content from the convenience. Facebook killed blogs because when I want to find my friend I just searched for their name, and if I was their friend their content made it to my wall. Because of Facebook's convenience my friends use it, and because it's a walled garden I am compelled to use it to. My dream for this kind of thing would be something akin to DNS but for identity (pseudo or not), and an open API for content. So, Adam knows nothing about computers and creates an account on Facebook, which creates an IdentityDNS entry for him on his behalf. Belinda is also not that techy, but likes G+'s layout more, and so has an account on there instead. She also has Twitter. Zer0cool is a massive nerd, and has their own domain and hand-written blog software. They went to some website somewhere and created their IdentityDNS entry, and has hooked up and validated their blog on their domain as their content. Adam can search for Belinda and Zer0cool in Facebook, which in turn searches IdentityDNS. He can add them to his Facebook wall, and their posts will show up in some fashion (maybe Facebook shows its own posts normally and only shows titles of external blog posts, FB can do what it wants). Belinda can do much the same with G+. Zer0cool has also added Adam and Belinda, and reads their posts through muttdentity, a mutt clone but for identity stuff. OR something. I don't know. Effectively something that means that I can choose FB because I like how it displays photos, or because it has the best mobile app, or because it has lots of storage. Or I can run my own blog because I want that control. ETC. I shouldn't have to use Facebook just because that's all my Dad can work out how to use.

walterbell 10y ago
http://indieweb.org http://indieweb.org allows independent blogs to aggregate discussion from centralized social networks. RSS used to enable centralized social media to aggregate indie blogs, but is less used these days. See recent discussion on these topics at http://www.decentralizedweb.net http://www.decentralizedweb.net
madshiva 10y ago
Hum, For my point of view Facebook didn't killed blog. Blog is used not only to show pictures of yourself, but writing. Nobody write on Facebook, they only share things. It's totally different, but hey anyway you can make your blog what you when that they are. Multiple account kill the service. You have at less 5 social media on every newspaper website. I don't use anymore twitter and I hope people will do it too. It's really a waste of time using 10 social media. I even don't use Facebook too.

sergiosgc 10y ago

I don't think Facebook will be dethroned by another Facebook. I also do not think the differentiator for such a new king is technological (e.g. P2P). The only kind of FB rival I can imagine succeeding is an open ecosystem one. A second FB would have to overcome the network effects, and the only chance for that to happen would be for FB's network effects to decrease. While negative network effects do occur -- it's what killed Orkut, for instance -- Facebook has learned that lesson well. FB's value for participants has decreased, but is now stable and that network is still a huge barrier for entry. Technology is largely irrelevant. People do not care if it's P2P, runs on functional code or if it is an engineering marvel. They care about the value provided to them. The article posits that P2P adds negative value, and it is probably right. The article infers from that to the impossibility of a FB killer, which I think is wrong, because the scope of the analysis is wrong. An open ecosystem social network: 1) Has the possibility of creating use cases that Facebook can't compete with; 2) May be extremely vibrant, if the ecosystem is large enough; 3) Can't be bought by Facebook, as it runs contrary to the main strategy of a walled garden. (It may be bought in order to be killed, though); 4) Can live perfectly well, for an indeterminate amount of time, in second place. I can't see any other avenue for Facebook's demise. Side note: Twitter nearly had these characteristics for a while. They squandered the opportunity when they kicked it's developer ecosystem in the nuts. Sad.

intended 10y ago
I think we've reached the stage where second order effects influence the discussion. So its not just a product which has to be killer, it has to be able to defeat facebooks increasing mass of capital. For that matter - lots of Facebook competitors HAVE been created. They've just been bought out by facebook or someone else. I suspect that eventually people will just die out of facebook, and at some point it will gain the moninker of gravebook. Once facebook stops being cool, it will stop gaining younger users and the network effect will end. Of course, people at FB have obviously considered this problem and have a plan for it. Perhaps they will live forever. Maybe we'll discover some first order effects of the network effect which limit its growth or even reverse its growth. Other than these 2 outcomes though, I don't think we have several degrees of freedom.
xiaoma 10y ago

trestles 10y ago

Very few people care about the issues raised by the author. From a practical pov, I think the best way to create something like this would be from some prebuild community that might care like Burning Man or something.

xbmcuser 10y ago

Their has been no Facebook killer because Zuckerburg has bought anything that he felt will supplant Facebook or at least take away users from them. He bought Instagram and WhatsApp was after Snapchat as well but Snapchat founder didn't want to sell.

tim333 10y ago
Zuckerberg is a smart competitor. If only he'd sell the site to Yahoo or Murdoch it would be much easier to compete.

xbmcuser 10y ago

_nalply 10y ago

Technology advances occur because something is provided what people want. Advertisement is not what people want. At least not too much of it. If something better comes up Google and Facebook will die. As with each technology advance it's impossible to know beforehand what will be a hit. Nobody knew that smartphones will be a hit before the first iPhone came out. However we all know that advertisement is something companies force down the throat of people. This won't be sustainable in the long term. We will experience the Facebook and Google killer. Perhaps it's neural networks people can train themselves and providing a layer above all communication technology. Perhaps with these neural networks we will recognize that email is truly all we need for asynchronously communicating with each other. We will see.

intended 10y ago
Well, tech firms and tech creators want money....so? unless the incentives for technology creators change this problem is going to remain as old as time. And we are doing a pretty terrible job of setting incentives which are not monetarily oriented.
- _nalply 10y ago
  Yes that's why the people will perhaps run their neural networks themselves. Because nobody will do that for them for free.

soufron 10y ago

There is no Facebook killer because of the lack of interest of EU industralists for the Internet. They dont care because they dont see it as an infrastructure. They think it's a gadget. De minimis non curat praetor.

luke-stanley 10y ago

Some Retroshare developers are working on an mobile app for Android and like Bittorrent it won't need a server farm. Peers can carry their own weight using home servers that can talk to phones etc.

mozey 10y ago

"Your 3G connection isn't like your home ADSL or cable internet connection - it is designed for browsing web pages and downloading data off big servers, not serving up content to the whole world, like a mini version of a Facebook or Instagram server." If you had a container running somewhere in the cloud talking to containers owned by other users then the mobile device doesn't have to be a server?

digi_owl 10y ago
And now you have to trust the service provider that the container runs on etc etc etc.
fulafel 10y ago
You have to sign up for a new paid service for that. Significant barrier vs doing something off your existing wired home connection for free and having the easy to understand mental model of "stuff running on my PC there in the corner". Heroku/Lambda/App engine help with that a little but they aren't newbie friendly and there aren't many existing server apps for those that you can just install. Sandstorm has the right idea.

zer0gravity 10y ago

> It's very difficult, inefficient, and unreliable for your phone to serve out data to all-comers: it's a one-way street. But your phone can talk with your server and anybody who wants to access what you allow them to, can simply talk with your server. It is perfectly possible to host your own server nowadays. > Imagine if the messages and photos you shared with your friends only lived on their phones or computers, and not in some server being scrutinised by security agencies, used for targeting ads, or at risk of being hacked. Yes, it is possbile by implementing the idea described above where everyone hosts its own data. Actually I'm working on something like this. Currently I have developed some minimal applications that allow you to share your status and chat. It still uses a single server for now to relay events between the clients, but I am working on making it P2P. You can check them if you want : https://fruit-fly.herokuapp.com/client/statusapp.html https://fruit-fly.herokuapp.com/client/statusapp.html https://fruit-fly.herokuapp.com/client/chat.html https://fruit-fly.herokuapp.com/client/chat.html

45h34jh53k4j 10y ago

Fundamental problem with article -- says that Skype changed from p2p to centralized because it was a better experience for mobile. It was political, not technological. I believe it had more to do with 'Project Chess' which was LE/IC access to the Skype calls: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/20/skype-nsa-access-user-data https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/20/skype-nsa... Facetime, which is a similar thing to Skype for the Apple platform used to be p2p in ios4. Patent troll VirnetX sued and won for 600 million dollars to get them to stop being p2p. Facetime has never worked as well since, and VirnetX are still trying to get iMessage and Facetime blocked. No, p2p works fine. Better than centralized. There are forces that don't wish this.

guylepage3 10y ago

Hmm.. I believe there is a Facebook killer coming. Full disclosure. I am a front-end developer working with others on Blockstack Decentralized Open Source software. Although P2P systems seemed as though they could solve problems like decentralized identity, which in turn could have actually put a world of hurt on FB, the limitations of the system itself prevented it from any real world authentication applications. With a truly decentralized system, that utilizes the blockchain, users can now own their own identity. With this new breakthrough tech, Blockstack (http://blockstack.org http://blockstack.org), users now possess their own data and cannot be tracked. This puts FB, and other companies that rely upon advertising (tracking) as their main source of revenue, in a very tough position. Now that there are applications and projects being built on Blockstack tech, I strongly feel now that it's only a matter of time before a breakout social app, or FB killer, will hit the mainstream. Join the Blockstack community http://chat.blockstack.org http://chat.blockstack.org

dominotw 10y ago
>users can now own their own identity. Facebook's main feature is precisely the opposite of this. How can this be facebook killer.
- guylepage3 10y ago
  Because if users own their identity and there is a new social network built upon the basis of owning your own identity and take it with you were ever you go, which is something most people want, then FB would be screwed. They would have to come up with a new revenue model to compete. Ad blockers are becoming more and more popular. A social app built on Blockstack would prevent users from being tracked.

Karunamon 10y ago

I think what always gets ignored in these "Facebook sucks, we should use/build X instead" arguments is the grandparents factor. My gran cannot be expected to learn server administration and security just to have an inferior* version of what she has right now with Facebook. For that matter, that's not a tradeoff you can expect almost any non-tech (or most tech - we have other things to be doing) people to make. (Inferior, meaning the supposed benefits to her are completely philosophical and theoretical, rather than practical. She doesn't give a tuppeny crap what advertisers are doing with her likes.) Unless she can right now click on an icon that brings her to something that looks like Facebook and has her family on it and is easy to use, all the alternatives in the world don't matter. And I get the sneaking suspicion she's not in the minority here! Everyone always starts looking at this from the tech side, as if having the system be P2P should be its primary selling point. No! In the real world, that isn't a selling point any more than something being Free Software is a selling point to anyone who doesn't read Stallman. The "threat" from advertisers, corporations, and governments accessing your Facebook data is going to have to get a lot more practical and a lot less theoretical (the NSA might do X Y and Z!) before that even winds up in the same universe where it can appear on a normal person's radar.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

falcolas 10y ago

Dear <whomever wants to kill facebook> - the answer is simple: Leverage email. Send marked up messages that look good in both HTML and can be transformed into threaded comment strings in your client. Embed XMPP chat, and set up enabled-by-default encryption around the whole thing. Leverage mailing lists for your special interest groups and your public pages. Sell server time for managing the mailing lists and image hosting, and for a web client. The infrastructure is there, just forgotten. This has been banging around in my head for a few years now, but I'll never have the time to do it myself. If you can poke holes in the core concept - please do. It needs to be fleshed out.

woah 10y ago
Maybe you have a great concept, but as a general principle that sounds bad. If someone doesn't have your special client, it will be disjointed. If someone does have your special client, why didn't you just use a saner protocol. Also, email is not really very decentralized. You need to be one of the major providers to avoid the spam filters.
- falcolas 10y ago
  It would not be any more disjointed than any other form of email exchange - just not as well organized as a social network. > You need to be one of the major providers to avoid the spam filters. Yes, but you could take advantage of the existing email providers' IMAP and POP implementations, and companies have long worked to ensure their emails are not sent to spam folders; it's not entirely a black art or impossible.
- falcolas 10y ago
  I realized I didn't address the more important of your two points, figured I'd do that now. > why didn't you just use a saner protocol. Mostly because your email network with your friends and colleagues already exists. Even more - we already rely on email as the ultimate identity authority for just about everything based on the web. My idea simply adds crypto-based authentication, UI improvements, and chat over the top of that. Emails are so simple and ubiquitous that people have already implemented email <-> help-desk bridges, this idea just takes that bridge concept and applies it to interactions between user. Take a moment and picture what it would be like to have every thread in Facebook delivered to your inbox. It would be a mess with the current mailbox UI, but there's not much impedance mismatch. Now picture the reverse - every email you get shows up as a "post" on Facebook. Both consist of the asynchronous distribution of messages from one user to many others, it's just that one relies on Facebook's network of servers, and the other relies on mail servers.

simbalion 10y ago

The article is very ignorant. The internet remains primarily a P2P technology, and will probably continue to be that way forever. The amount of valuable resources on the internet which are utilizing P2P methods are 10000000 to 1 compared to the number of Facebooks. Also consider that Facebook's #1 product, social blogging, is not profitable, and can never ever be profitable. 100% of their profits are made in other businesses which they've connected to their brand name, which is the only reason for their success. For example, microtransaction-scam "video games". This is a typical article by someone who does not really understand the internet and has not been using it for very long.

kowdermeister 10y ago

If you want to build a Facebook killer, then answer this question first without coding a single line: How do you plan to sign up non techie females? Do you have anything to offer to them?

pjc50 10y ago
More importantly, if you want women to use your service, how are you going to handle the inevitable abuse problems?

Kazamai 10y ago

If P2P is dead, does that mean that 99% of cryptocurrency traffic go through server farms?