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I wonder how many people have considered building something along these lines. I know I did when I started hearing about what came out of f8, and I don't even

I wonder how many people have considered building something along these lines. I know I did when I started hearing about what came out of f8, and I don't even use Facebook currently.

jf 17y ago
I also considered building something along these lines - which is why I contributed to this project.
alttab 17y ago
I played with this idea a full year ago. The ability to own your own data and share it out as a web service or data host. There would be no need for a centralized server, and it would provide many competitive opportunities to host what I came to call "identity servers." This would create innovation as each value added provider can experiment with the direction. I won't be the first to call it now - but I can imagine the popularity of decentralized architectures catching mainstream attention. Git is getting popular, vs say SVN or CVS. Remember, the internet itself is decentralized.
- runevault 17y ago
  Yeah the ability to easily self-host an identity server or to be able to just pay someone else to be hosted on theirs is hugely important. Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update. Doing that last part securely is one of the things that hung me up when thinking about it, but I also only really dug into it for an hour or so.
  - wmf 17y ago
    Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update. I think DNS is the key here; it lets you move a server while keeping the same name.
    - runevault 17y ago
      That works if you have a domain name just for your "identity", but if you are hosting on someone else's then it gets interesting. Of course I may be stuck on the way I was looking at it of a fully qualified URL (say http://runevault.com/runevault http://runevault.com/runevault for my id, and I don't think DNS currently goes farther then domains).
      - rue 17y ago
        Being that it is the Domain Name System...:)
    - Todd 17y ago
      This can be handled by 301 redirect or it can be built into the protocol. When moving a profile from one provider to another, the standard could require a response indicating the location of the profile for a minimum period of time (such as a week or a month). A standard such as this would be crawled on a frequent basis by the social network apps built on top of it, as well as the search engines. They would all update their canonical profile addresses and that would be that--an organic, self repairing network.
      - wmf 17y ago
        I don't even trust providers enough to provide a 301 redirect, but your paranoia may vary.
  - wisty 17y ago
    Dreamhost costs about $50 a year. That's not a lot. Of course, it's not a turn key solution, but I'm sure they'd support one if it emerged. Getting people to pay for an otherwise free service might be tricky, but I'm sure google would foot the bill (and do the hosting) if they got to push more ad-words. It will probably go: self-hosted and hosted (by techies), then big companies find a way to do the hosting for non-techies in order to push ads. Movable identities - DNS works. A DHT with email-addresses as the primary key (rather than domain names) would also work (though you would need some karma ratings system to keep it from being hacked). You would either use DNS, or reinvent a DNS-like protocol. No big deal.
- viraptor 17y ago
  > Remember, the internet itself is decentralized. I think it's a common misconception. You can be decentralised with friends. With the whole world, you need a single entity. Just look at Facebook, Twitter, Google, MSN -vs- Jabber (even gtalk is not a jabber in the mind of users - it's gtalk / google chat), money transfer services, iAnything from Apple, etc. People seem to like centralisation - they know where to go and how to call it.
  - anthonyb 17y ago
    Email, the web, DNS, routing and TCP/IP are all decentralised. I think the push is to try and do that for social apps like Facebook as well, instead of having AOL-email style monopolies...
    - viraptor 17y ago
      DNS, routing and TCP/IP are things you never see. They're technically decentralised and they stay like that in practice. Email and web? Not so much really. Everyone serves their little page from their own site. But as soon as you want to interact / share, you're back to hubs like dropbox, facebook, twitter, etc. The data may flow through decentralised links, but it's still coming from FB.
      - anthonyb 17y ago
        If I want to view a web page that you've created, I go to a server which you control (or your ISP controls). I don't have to go to web.com and click through to an account that you've created on the web.com service. If I want to send you an email, I talk to my server, my server talks to your server, and you get an email in your inbox. Maybe I use GMail and you use Yahoo, but the underlying protocol is the same, so it doesn't matter. Services like Facebook and Twitter have been written as a closed protocol right from the start, so you're not used to thinking of them in open or interoperable terms, but it looks like it's happening - it's just a question of time and the right impetus. (Perhaps you're thinking of 'decentralised' as being able to host stuff on any computer in some sort of cloud, but I prefer to think of it as 'not controlled by any one entity' - maybe that's where some of the confusion is coming from?)
Todd 17y ago
I have been in the process of doing the same thing for a few weeks. It seems like the time is right. My plan is similar. RESTful API built on OAuth 2.0 and Open Social, with OpenID as an option. The specification will be open and the first implementation will be OSS.
- jf 17y ago
  I really think that we should be thinking bigger that just social networking. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to only allow email from people in your social graph? Give all your friends SSH accounts on your server?
  - ohashi 17y ago
    Yeah it would be awesome... except people I don't know email me. It's how I meet people. It's how I reach out to people I think are interesting and would like to talk to for any reason. It's how customers and potential customers contact me.
anthonyb 17y ago
I have, although I have limited free time to work on it right now. My 'market testing' page is here: http://openf.oarsum.com/ http://openf.oarsum.com/ The idea is that there needs to be a protocol such that I can friend you, even though you're hosted on a completely different server. I suspect that it's a difficult concept to wrap your head around unless there's something that you can actually play with (although it's not too dissimilar to email). Perhaps the Django/Python choice might throw people too...
omouse 17y ago
This idea has been around for a while I think. Freenet would be a pretty sweet platform for something like it ;p
sireat 17y ago
I have considered it, ok scratch that, dreamed about something like this around the time Friendster craze started. Even for a decentralized project you still need the big "seeders", that is the problem.

I wonder how many people have considered building something along these lines. I know I did when I started hearing about what came out of f8, and I don't even use Facebook currently.

jf 17y ago

I also considered building something along these lines - which is why I contributed to this project.

alttab 17y ago

I played with this idea a full year ago. The ability to own your own data and share it out as a web service or data host. There would be no need for a centralized server, and it would provide many competitive opportunities to host what I came to call "identity servers." This would create innovation as each value added provider can experiment with the direction. I won't be the first to call it now - but I can imagine the popularity of decentralized architectures catching mainstream attention. Git is getting popular, vs say SVN or CVS. Remember, the internet itself is decentralized.

runevault 17y ago
Yeah the ability to easily self-host an identity server or to be able to just pay someone else to be hosted on theirs is hugely important. Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update. Doing that last part securely is one of the things that hung me up when thinking about it, but I also only really dug into it for an hour or so.
- wmf 17y ago
  Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update. I think DNS is the key here; it lets you move a server while keeping the same name.
  - runevault 17y ago
    That works if you have a domain name just for your "identity", but if you are hosting on someone else's then it gets interesting. Of course I may be stuck on the way I was looking at it of a fully qualified URL (say http://runevault.com/runevault http://runevault.com/runevault for my id, and I don't think DNS currently goes farther then domains).
    - rue 17y ago
      Being that it is the Domain Name System...:)
  - Todd 17y ago
    This can be handled by 301 redirect or it can be built into the protocol. When moving a profile from one provider to another, the standard could require a response indicating the location of the profile for a minimum period of time (such as a week or a month). A standard such as this would be crawled on a frequent basis by the social network apps built on top of it, as well as the search engines. They would all update their canonical profile addresses and that would be that--an organic, self repairing network.
    - wmf 17y ago
      I don't even trust providers enough to provide a 301 redirect, but your paranoia may vary.
- wisty 17y ago
  Dreamhost costs about $50 a year. That's not a lot. Of course, it's not a turn key solution, but I'm sure they'd support one if it emerged. Getting people to pay for an otherwise free service might be tricky, but I'm sure google would foot the bill (and do the hosting) if they got to push more ad-words. It will probably go: self-hosted and hosted (by techies), then big companies find a way to do the hosting for non-techies in order to push ads. Movable identities - DNS works. A DHT with email-addresses as the primary key (rather than domain names) would also work (though you would need some karma ratings system to keep it from being hacked). You would either use DNS, or reinvent a DNS-like protocol. No big deal.
viraptor 17y ago
> Remember, the internet itself is decentralized. I think it's a common misconception. You can be decentralised with friends. With the whole world, you need a single entity. Just look at Facebook, Twitter, Google, MSN -vs- Jabber (even gtalk is not a jabber in the mind of users - it's gtalk / google chat), money transfer services, iAnything from Apple, etc. People seem to like centralisation - they know where to go and how to call it.
- anthonyb 17y ago
  Email, the web, DNS, routing and TCP/IP are all decentralised. I think the push is to try and do that for social apps like Facebook as well, instead of having AOL-email style monopolies...
  - viraptor 17y ago
    DNS, routing and TCP/IP are things you never see. They're technically decentralised and they stay like that in practice. Email and web? Not so much really. Everyone serves their little page from their own site. But as soon as you want to interact / share, you're back to hubs like dropbox, facebook, twitter, etc. The data may flow through decentralised links, but it's still coming from FB.
    - anthonyb 17y ago
      If I want to view a web page that you've created, I go to a server which you control (or your ISP controls). I don't have to go to web.com and click through to an account that you've created on the web.com service. If I want to send you an email, I talk to my server, my server talks to your server, and you get an email in your inbox. Maybe I use GMail and you use Yahoo, but the underlying protocol is the same, so it doesn't matter. Services like Facebook and Twitter have been written as a closed protocol right from the start, so you're not used to thinking of them in open or interoperable terms, but it looks like it's happening - it's just a question of time and the right impetus. (Perhaps you're thinking of 'decentralised' as being able to host stuff on any computer in some sort of cloud, but I prefer to think of it as 'not controlled by any one entity' - maybe that's where some of the confusion is coming from?)

Todd 17y ago

I have been in the process of doing the same thing for a few weeks. It seems like the time is right. My plan is similar. RESTful API built on OAuth 2.0 and Open Social, with OpenID as an option. The specification will be open and the first implementation will be OSS.

jf 17y ago
I really think that we should be thinking bigger that just social networking. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to only allow email from people in your social graph? Give all your friends SSH accounts on your server?
- ohashi 17y ago
  Yeah it would be awesome... except people I don't know email me. It's how I meet people. It's how I reach out to people I think are interesting and would like to talk to for any reason. It's how customers and potential customers contact me.

anthonyb 17y ago

I have, although I have limited free time to work on it right now. My 'market testing' page is here: http://openf.oarsum.com/ http://openf.oarsum.com/ The idea is that there needs to be a protocol such that I can friend you, even though you're hosted on a completely different server. I suspect that it's a difficult concept to wrap your head around unless there's something that you can actually play with (although it's not too dissimilar to email). Perhaps the Django/Python choice might throw people too...

omouse 17y ago

This idea has been around for a while I think. Freenet would be a pretty sweet platform for something like it ;p

sireat 17y ago

I have considered it, ok scratch that, dreamed about something like this around the time Friendster craze started. Even for a decentralized project you still need the big "seeders", that is the problem.