4 ms·

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 terribl

• 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
          Absolutely! This is something my prior comment overlooked, so thanks for catching that. It's another good argument for remote hosting, too; correlating identities is easy when they all originate their communications from the same network address, especially if it belongs to a phone or a residential broadband account. When the phone's just a client, such correlation becomes much harder. I would go a bit more general than what you said, though - instead of a given person being allowed multiple nexi, I'd say that ideally there should be no one in a position to grant or revoke such permission. If the fashion in which I manage my identity is not wholly within my control, to what extent can the identity so managed be said to be mine?
          • mountaineer22 10y ago
            I am actually advocating a new form of authorization that is based on AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe handles.
            • throwanem 10y ago
              That'd be funny if only it were funny, you know? The names have changed, and the scale, but that's about all - Facebook is a better AOL than AOL ever dreamt of being.
              • mountaineer22 10y ago
                AOL had better non-user generated content, same with Prodigy, and better sense of communities (which I see in Reddit sometimes).
                • throwanem 10y ago
                  Note that I didn't say Facebook was better for the people who use it.
            • toast0 10y ago
              I always wanted to be known as two integers separated by a comma, but I was too late.
• berntb 10y ago
  Terrible? Rather interesting start point, I'd say. It should be trivial to install, maybe come preconfigured on a stick computer or even run directly in a mobile phone? The Dropbox functionality should be encrypted and download stuff only when asked for. With very carefully designed access rights. Ideally, people should feel safe putting nude sunbathing pictures there together with their girlfriend/boyfriend. And their sport tournament meant for the whole world. (Make it two small computers, one for (semi) public data?) Then add blogs with allowed comments. An 80% solution of FB, if the UI is simple. Add some P2P or global directories of people, so they can connect their servers. Some more features are needed to follow e.g. your favourite music bands and local music avenues if those only use FB. (My personal fear with privacy is that I'll end up on some terrorist list, then be sued for big damage by a police officer for emotional damage, because of my dullness and sense of humour. :-) ) Edit: If you and your friends backup your data, it should probably be an encrypted backup. But then, an encrypted cloud service function would probably be worth the money instead.
• fian 10y ago
  Check out Retroshare: https://retroshare.github.io/index.html https://retroshare.github.io/index.html
  • anc84 10y ago
    Nice, did they finally get a new UI?
• uabstraction 10y ago
  I've toyed with the idea of an open source P2P social network for a while now. You're idea isn't horrible, it's essential. We can keep trying to support start-ups which will compete with Facebook, but they will all either get bought out, or succumb to the same profit motives which make Facebook corrupted by advertising and unchecked government surveillance. The only way a social network can grow to the size where it can displace Facebook without getting shut down for political reasons is by providing real privacy over a distributed open source infrastructure. While it may be abysmal from a PR standpoint, It needs to be the kind of thing where you can post a video of yourself running down mailboxes while DUI, share copyrighted files, or even illegal activity such as black market distribution of drugs, weapons, and CP. That doesn't mean everyone on it needs to be a criminal, but it needs to be that level of bulletproof in order to gain widespread adoption. With the right selection of cryptographic protocols and algorithms, it should be possible to build a distributed system where each user hosts and advertise dozens or hundreds of profiles without being able to access them. The only way to access the data is by request. The only major issue I see is an immense data and computational overhead if your profile must be encrypted with dozens of public keys. From a usability standpoint, accessing it should be no different than installing an IM client. Edit: Essentially, the killer feature is being able to ask your circle of friends is anyone's got some extra weed they can sell you, and actually getting responses because there's no surveillance chilling effect.