13 ms·

Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popul

by Kenji 10y ago

Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.

jacquesm 10y ago
Even email is no longer really decentralized. Google and a few other email silos now make up the bulk.
- ycombinete 10y ago
  This is why I use Fastmail, and encrypt my Google Drive data. It isn't any more secure as far as I can tell, but I'm tired of 2-3 companies holding all my easily accessible data in one place. Especially when they are openly using that data for advertising. These days I'll always take a paid service over a "free" one where I'm the product.
  - dexterdog 10y ago
    But that requires scrutiny as well. Just because you're paying does not mean that they are not profiting off of your data.
    - nkristoffersen 10y ago
      I trust google reasonably well when they say they do not scan G Suite (paid) products for advertising. https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056650?hl=en https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056650?hl=en
      - EuAndreh 10y ago
        After Snowden leakage, I don't think you should take their word for it.
    - ycombinete 10y ago
      This is absolutely true. I guess I'm avoiding people who explicitly use my data for profit, in favour of those whose profit model doesn't require it. The trust is that Fastmail et al. are successful enough, and honest enough to not use it. Ultimately I'd love to host everything myself. But, at present, I don't have the technical knowledge to trust myself to secure everything. On top of that, on an even more emotional level, the principle of myself being the product doesn't sit right with me.
- icc97 10y ago
  You still can have all your own data though in a useable form, all you need is IMAP. So it's better than social networks albeit not as decentralised as we'd like
- simias 10y ago
  At least it's still mainly interoperable with 3rd party solutions through open standards. I host my own email and as long as you adhere to the guidelines (use DKIM, make sure your IP range isn't part of some blacklist, triple check your postfix config etc...) you don't feel like a 2nd class netitizen.
  - e12e 10y ago
    Not quite. You still (in my experience) need to go through obscure web-forms to avoid having gmail/hotmail black list your domain. And even then gmail is way too aggressive with its spam labeling. I've seen replies to an email thread be marked as spam by gmail when the sender is in the recipient's address book. Gmail considers anything beyond big corporate email providers as second class participants - and so does the other big providers.
    - simias 10y ago
      Maybe I've been lucky but implementing DKIM, DMARC and SSL SMTP support seems to have been enough to make gmail happy (I even get the small "lock" icon in gmail inboxes as a bonus). I've used one of the many blacklist check websites to test my domain and only ended up with two false positives which I've rectified through their web forms. It was mostly smooth sailing from there. Note that this is using a dedicated server as a host, a while ago I tried the same thing from my home ADSL (with a static IP) and that was a pain since those "home" addresses are generally blacklisted by default since people tend to assume that emails from those addresses are sent by compromised computers. Nowadays I know many ISPs even block port 25 by default so that's not even an option anymore.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - sergiosgc 10y ago
      Sorry, but no. That is entirely false. I run a mail provider for companies, and as long as you adhere to standards and do not emit spam, you don't have to do anything like filling out obscure web forms. You may, on occasion, hit a spam trap due to a compromised account or similar, but de-listing on good RBLs is time-based and automatic. Be vigilant, take care of security faults in your network and, when solved, take the affected IPs out of service for a while. This may not apply if you are a low volume sender.
icc97 10y ago
I've heard of diaspora being described like email.
krona 10y ago
That was essentially the promise of RDF, OWL, The Semantic Web, Web2.0 and so on. After swimming in that stuff for 3 years in the early 00's, I could tell back then that it was mostly a boondoggle, and even though those technologies have found their niche, the project failed for the same reason that the original WWW was successful. It was like 'AI' in the 80's, but with XML.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  The feeling I got was that most of those were just too general to be suited for any specific purpose. You could, in principle, build a piece of social networking software out of them, but there was never a product that you could just deploy to your web server and use.
kayoone 10y ago
diaspora probably was the most popular failed project which tried to achieve this. It did not really fail per se, but it's pretty clear by now that it will never reach impactful adoption.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  I was rooting for those guys and I'm still following their releases, but I can't see it ever being accepted by the masses.
danielpatrick 10y ago
As a matter of fact, this is what Sir Berners Lee is working on right now at MIT. https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/ The issue is not storing the data, just like "email" doesn't store data. It's just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service. Ex: Don't like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don't lose the ability to interact with people who do use Gmail. Don't like Facebook? Go to Ello. But now you've lost your entire network. The decentralized web will be built on data formats and protocols that allow you to take your data with you and force companies to compete with the quality of their service, not the size of their network.
- qplex 10y ago
  So does one export their existing network information to these open formats? I don't think the companies who currently hold that information will part with it willingly.
  - jasonkostempski 10y ago
    If it catches on, I assume a bunch of services will pop up offering to export you data. All they'll need is your password.
    - qplex 10y ago
      But how would you verify that YourFacebookFriend is YourFacebookFriend on some other service?
      - Nadya 10y ago
        This is a solved problem, but not one that would catch on. See: PGP If my friend can sign a message using the same key on both services - and I already trust that key is them - I can be almost certain it is them. Regardless of the service. This is one of the first use cases for keybase.io - verifying identities across a few main social sites. (E: For clarification, Keybase makes it easier to find these proofs. It isn't necessary as part of the proofs.) For example, you can find me on Reddit or Twitter and know it is me. You can also see my website URL and know that I own it - and a bitcoin address where you know I will receive the money. This is because I've verified that I own these accounts using PGP - and I've done the same for HN in my user profile. See: https://keybase.io/nadya https://keybase.io/nadya
chriswarbo 10y ago
> There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability. The difficulty with decentralising is that these are the biggest challenge to centralised systems like Facebook; they're problems which are very nice to have ("oh no, we have a billion users!"). The biggest challenge for decentralised systems is getting momentum behind an agreed-upon protocol. Email was born when there were few people who needed to agree, and their major concern was being able to send/receive messages. As the Internet expanded, the momentum behind email ensured that it could ride that wave as well. These days the Internet, and hence the number of people who need to agree on the protocols, is huge. Think about, for example, HTTP2; how many organisations and individuals were involved in its definition and publication? How many more have been involved in implementing it for various browsers, servers, crawlers, libraries, etc? How many more have been installing updates, editing config files, etc. to use it? Another change is the concerns of the stakeholders; if all we cared about were sending/receiving messages, then we could use something like telnet, HTTP, email, etc. Instead, the concerns are more fuzzy (e.g. "presence", "likes", etc.) and more political (silos vs federation vs p2p, expectations of privacy, encryption, archiving, searchability, etc.). Reaching agreement on such things is very difficult, as everyone wants different things. The results either: - Have buy-in from too-few people (e.g. diaspora, pump.io, gnusocial) - Are so general as to be inappropriate for most particular tasks (e.g. RDF; an interesting example considering that RSS is a stripped-down subset of RDF, and is/was widely adopted; also compare to ATOM, which took that subset, threw away the ties to RDF, and became more interoperable!) - Only offer tiny featuresets (e.g. the various microformats)
- laumars 10y ago
  "email" isn't even a single protocol. Even just talking about SMTP you'd run into lots of "common edge cases" where different servers respond to errors differently, a lack of TLS uniformity, variations in auth, variations in host detection, etc. And that's before you take collection into account (POP3, IMAP, IMAP+, ActiveSync, etc). Email is a mess of kludges and frankly could benefit from a ground up re-implementation. In fact many have tried. But like with creating a decentralised social network, it doesn't matter if you have an arguably better implementation if you don't generate the snowball effect attracting users to your "better" platform.
sopooneo 10y ago
I expect getting that many requests would be a bigger challenge than serving them.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
TheShadowRunner 10y ago
Have you heard about Mastodon? https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon It's like a decentralized version of Twitter, with federalization. Might need to find a instance that's not busy with signups though.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  Mastodon is (mainly?) a new implementation of GNU Social. It federates with existing GNU Social servers (which, as StatusNet go back to like 2007 or so). I hear it's a good quality implementation, though.
maxxxxx 10y ago
That's the nice thing they did in the 90s and before. They created standards like FTP, HTTP, Gopher and whatever and people could build upon these standards. Now we are back to everything being proprietary,
KeatonDunsford 10y ago
Help build Urbit.
rocky1138 10y ago
What about GNU Social? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social I run a GNU Social site. It works well. It's a bit slow and the themes are out-of-date, but if it had more of a following I'm sure we could turn it around.
btschaegg 10y ago
This this this. I really like the idea that Eben Moglen seems to pitch in every of his recent talks when talking about FreedomBox: A decentralized network of cheap "plug-computers" that run Facebook-like functionality on the hardware of the users. And yet, while FreedomBox is a great project and does many things right, it omits the one crucial aspect of this: the decentralized social network. Let's hope Solid or something similar takes over the social networking world eventually and we can get rid of all the megacorporations hoarding our data.

by Kenji 10y ago

jacquesm 10y ago

Even email is no longer really decentralized. Google and a few other email silos now make up the bulk.

ycombinete 10y ago
This is why I use Fastmail, and encrypt my Google Drive data. It isn't any more secure as far as I can tell, but I'm tired of 2-3 companies holding all my easily accessible data in one place. Especially when they are openly using that data for advertising. These days I'll always take a paid service over a "free" one where I'm the product.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  But that requires scrutiny as well. Just because you're paying does not mean that they are not profiting off of your data.
  - nkristoffersen 10y ago
    I trust google reasonably well when they say they do not scan G Suite (paid) products for advertising. https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056650?hl=en https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056650?hl=en
    - EuAndreh 10y ago
      After Snowden leakage, I don't think you should take their word for it.
  - ycombinete 10y ago
    This is absolutely true. I guess I'm avoiding people who explicitly use my data for profit, in favour of those whose profit model doesn't require it. The trust is that Fastmail et al. are successful enough, and honest enough to not use it. Ultimately I'd love to host everything myself. But, at present, I don't have the technical knowledge to trust myself to secure everything. On top of that, on an even more emotional level, the principle of myself being the product doesn't sit right with me.
icc97 10y ago
You still can have all your own data though in a useable form, all you need is IMAP. So it's better than social networks albeit not as decentralised as we'd like
simias 10y ago
At least it's still mainly interoperable with 3rd party solutions through open standards. I host my own email and as long as you adhere to the guidelines (use DKIM, make sure your IP range isn't part of some blacklist, triple check your postfix config etc...) you don't feel like a 2nd class netitizen.
- e12e 10y ago
  Not quite. You still (in my experience) need to go through obscure web-forms to avoid having gmail/hotmail black list your domain. And even then gmail is way too aggressive with its spam labeling. I've seen replies to an email thread be marked as spam by gmail when the sender is in the recipient's address book. Gmail considers anything beyond big corporate email providers as second class participants - and so does the other big providers.
  - simias 10y ago
    Maybe I've been lucky but implementing DKIM, DMARC and SSL SMTP support seems to have been enough to make gmail happy (I even get the small "lock" icon in gmail inboxes as a bonus). I've used one of the many blacklist check websites to test my domain and only ended up with two false positives which I've rectified through their web forms. It was mostly smooth sailing from there. Note that this is using a dedicated server as a host, a while ago I tried the same thing from my home ADSL (with a static IP) and that was a pain since those "home" addresses are generally blacklisted by default since people tend to assume that emails from those addresses are sent by compromised computers. Nowadays I know many ISPs even block port 25 by default so that's not even an option anymore.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - sergiosgc 10y ago
    Sorry, but no. That is entirely false. I run a mail provider for companies, and as long as you adhere to standards and do not emit spam, you don't have to do anything like filling out obscure web forms. You may, on occasion, hit a spam trap due to a compromised account or similar, but de-listing on good RBLs is time-based and automatic. Be vigilant, take care of security faults in your network and, when solved, take the affected IPs out of service for a while. This may not apply if you are a low volume sender.

icc97 10y ago

I've heard of diaspora being described like email.

krona 10y ago

That was essentially the promise of RDF, OWL, The Semantic Web, Web2.0 and so on. After swimming in that stuff for 3 years in the early 00's, I could tell back then that it was mostly a boondoggle, and even though those technologies have found their niche, the project failed for the same reason that the original WWW was successful. It was like 'AI' in the 80's, but with XML.

NoGravitas 10y ago
The feeling I got was that most of those were just too general to be suited for any specific purpose. You could, in principle, build a piece of social networking software out of them, but there was never a product that you could just deploy to your web server and use.

kayoone 10y ago

diaspora probably was the most popular failed project which tried to achieve this. It did not really fail per se, but it's pretty clear by now that it will never reach impactful adoption.

dexterdog 10y ago
I was rooting for those guys and I'm still following their releases, but I can't see it ever being accepted by the masses.

danielpatrick 10y ago

As a matter of fact, this is what Sir Berners Lee is working on right now at MIT. https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/ The issue is not storing the data, just like "email" doesn't store data. It's just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service. Ex: Don't like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don't lose the ability to interact with people who do use Gmail. Don't like Facebook? Go to Ello. But now you've lost your entire network. The decentralized web will be built on data formats and protocols that allow you to take your data with you and force companies to compete with the quality of their service, not the size of their network.

qplex 10y ago
So does one export their existing network information to these open formats? I don't think the companies who currently hold that information will part with it willingly.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  If it catches on, I assume a bunch of services will pop up offering to export you data. All they'll need is your password.
  - qplex 10y ago
    But how would you verify that YourFacebookFriend is YourFacebookFriend on some other service?
    - Nadya 10y ago
      This is a solved problem, but not one that would catch on. See: PGP If my friend can sign a message using the same key on both services - and I already trust that key is them - I can be almost certain it is them. Regardless of the service. This is one of the first use cases for keybase.io - verifying identities across a few main social sites. (E: For clarification, Keybase makes it easier to find these proofs. It isn't necessary as part of the proofs.) For example, you can find me on Reddit or Twitter and know it is me. You can also see my website URL and know that I own it - and a bitcoin address where you know I will receive the money. This is because I've verified that I own these accounts using PGP - and I've done the same for HN in my user profile. See: https://keybase.io/nadya https://keybase.io/nadya

chriswarbo 10y ago

> There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability. The difficulty with decentralising is that these are the biggest challenge to centralised systems like Facebook; they're problems which are very nice to have ("oh no, we have a billion users!"). The biggest challenge for decentralised systems is getting momentum behind an agreed-upon protocol. Email was born when there were few people who needed to agree, and their major concern was being able to send/receive messages. As the Internet expanded, the momentum behind email ensured that it could ride that wave as well. These days the Internet, and hence the number of people who need to agree on the protocols, is huge. Think about, for example, HTTP2; how many organisations and individuals were involved in its definition and publication? How many more have been involved in implementing it for various browsers, servers, crawlers, libraries, etc? How many more have been installing updates, editing config files, etc. to use it? Another change is the concerns of the stakeholders; if all we cared about were sending/receiving messages, then we could use something like telnet, HTTP, email, etc. Instead, the concerns are more fuzzy (e.g. "presence", "likes", etc.) and more political (silos vs federation vs p2p, expectations of privacy, encryption, archiving, searchability, etc.). Reaching agreement on such things is very difficult, as everyone wants different things. The results either: - Have buy-in from too-few people (e.g. diaspora, pump.io, gnusocial) - Are so general as to be inappropriate for most particular tasks (e.g. RDF; an interesting example considering that RSS is a stripped-down subset of RDF, and is/was widely adopted; also compare to ATOM, which took that subset, threw away the ties to RDF, and became more interoperable!) - Only offer tiny featuresets (e.g. the various microformats)

laumars 10y ago
"email" isn't even a single protocol. Even just talking about SMTP you'd run into lots of "common edge cases" where different servers respond to errors differently, a lack of TLS uniformity, variations in auth, variations in host detection, etc. And that's before you take collection into account (POP3, IMAP, IMAP+, ActiveSync, etc). Email is a mess of kludges and frankly could benefit from a ground up re-implementation. In fact many have tried. But like with creating a decentralised social network, it doesn't matter if you have an arguably better implementation if you don't generate the snowball effect attracting users to your "better" platform.

sopooneo 10y ago

I expect getting that many requests would be a bigger challenge than serving them.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

TheShadowRunner 10y ago

Have you heard about Mastodon? https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon It's like a decentralized version of Twitter, with federalization. Might need to find a instance that's not busy with signups though.

NoGravitas 10y ago
Mastodon is (mainly?) a new implementation of GNU Social. It federates with existing GNU Social servers (which, as StatusNet go back to like 2007 or so). I hear it's a good quality implementation, though.

maxxxxx 10y ago

That's the nice thing they did in the 90s and before. They created standards like FTP, HTTP, Gopher and whatever and people could build upon these standards. Now we are back to everything being proprietary,

KeatonDunsford 10y ago

Help build Urbit.

rocky1138 10y ago

What about GNU Social? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social I run a GNU Social site. It works well. It's a bit slow and the themes are out-of-date, but if it had more of a following I'm sure we could turn it around.

btschaegg 10y ago

This this this. I really like the idea that Eben Moglen seems to pitch in every of his recent talks when talking about FreedomBox: A decentralized network of cheap "plug-computers" that run Facebook-like functionality on the hardware of the users. And yet, while FreedomBox is a great project and does many things right, it omits the one crucial aspect of this: the decentralized social network. Let's hope Solid or something similar takes over the social networking world eventually and we can get rid of all the megacorporations hoarding our data.