8 ms·

This touches on so many issues at once I don't even know where to start (private versus public, social medial popularity cycles, distributed versus centralized

by kem 9y ago

This touches on so many issues at once I don't even know where to start (private versus public, social medial popularity cycles, distributed versus centralized services...) I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services. The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). The success of things like Facebook and Twitter has never seemed like that much of a mystery to me: they basically allow people to have a web page without needing to make one. There was MySpace that did that, and then people wanted to add on privacy and discussions, etc. to their webpage, so Facebook supplied that; Twitter was basically providing a way for people to post rss/Atom feeds, etc. But then you cede control to these large providers. I don't think that model completely applies anymore, with messaging, photo sharing, and what not becoming so integrated, but I think the fundamental issues are the same, in that that the internet was developed with a greater ratio of providers:users in mind than is the case now. I think there was a much more federated model in mind when the internet was developed than is the case today.

X86BSD 9y ago
I've just started using mastodon.social as a replacement for FB and like it just fine. Give it a look.
- glenstein 9y ago
  I think it's more of a replacement for twitter. And I am genuinely excited about Mastodon, with ~600k users and 1400 instances, I think something special is happening there. I guess diaspora* is supposed to be the decentralized facebook replacement, but I don't think it's any good. I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed). But now? I don't think you can.
  - Existenceblinks 9y ago
    We need 1 instance for every individual, that's the problem. Non techies who already have privilege to access internet should be able to instantiate their own instances very easily.
    - glenstein 9y ago
      I'm all for it if we can get there, but I think a wide range of individual, federated instances is a good step in that direction, and even that would be a huge achievement. I think something like Opera Unite had the potential to be a single instance per person if that ever caught on.
      - Existenceblinks 9y ago
        I think Mastodon as a native or Electron app that uses bit torrent protocol should do it. Not sure what's the problem with that or I am too optimistic.
    - piaste 9y ago
      That would be optimal, but I don't think it's strictly necessary. The fundamental requirement is that, if the owner of an instance behaves poorly, users should be able to move elsewhere without being cutting off from the larger network.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    The name Mastodon is bad. Doesn't say anything about what the site does. Compare Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat....
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Yes, it's just a twitter clone where people 'toot' instead of 'tweet'. It's fine work but they don't seem to have any idea how to make it desirable for people to use.
      - 9y ago
- sr2 9y ago
  Twitter should be a public utility like water. It shouldn't rely on surveillance capitalism to make money. There's another social network called Ello and it's essentially a registered charity. Twitter should be like that.
  - angry-hacker 9y ago
    You can always copy twitter but you can't get the traction. You think TV companies will advertise your network 24/7? If you think Twitter should be utility either govs have to force some standards to every social network or nationalize it. The people in the offices are too dumb to even grasp what servers are, let alone distributed services or why would standards be beneficial for the society. Maybe next generation knows better if we by then are not under the iron rule of few SV companies.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Why? Twitter is in no way essential.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      It's not, but it's clearly highly useful and is the incumbent in the short public messaging market.
      - watwut 9y ago
        Highly useful and is the incumbent should be criteria for something to become public utility like water?
  - noarchy 9y ago
    >Twitter should be a public utility like water. It shouldn't rely on surveillance capitalism to make money. There's another social network called Ello and it's essentially a registered charity. Twitter should be like that. A charity? Sure, if you can make it work. But a public utility? That would link it to governments, which I think is the last thing we should be pushing. I think there is already enough concern over how Twitter interacts with governments, especially those looking to censor speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  It's more like Twitter than FB, and it works, but it has some problems. You can't stop someone from impersonating you unless you run your own instance (fine for tech people, useless for the average user), and while the feature is good there's no way to get list of trending hashtags, so finding people/topics is a pain.
Sir_Substance 9y ago
>The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). We already have a model for this: email. You and I can use whoever we want as email providers, including hosting our own, and if you don't think I'm a trustworthy provider, you can drop my messages. The system isn't without it's corner cases, but it's certainly proven to be a robust model over the last ~30 years. The only thing it requires is standards. We already have one for facebook messenger: XMPP. Facebook and Google used to support it, but they both shut it down because they wanted to lock their users in harder. We have CalDav for events, but again, none of the big players want to know about it. We could have a "social status" standard, allowing you to send a robustly versioned life update to other servers from whatever social service manager you'd prefer, but you and I know that no amount of user outcry could persuade any of the major players to adopt it. Network effects, peer pressure and social expectation (e.g. please submit a snapchat along with your job interview) power their meteoric growth. What we need is a "Regulating the Gauge of Railways Act 1846" for the digital age. We need international bodies to review software that has become mandatory to the modern world, distill it down to a set of living specifications, and then ram it down the throats of software vendors.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  The W3C Social Web Working Group [1] is working on this. Relevant standards through that lens include Micropub [2] and Activity Streams [3]. [1] https://www.w3.org/Social/WG https://www.w3.org/Social/WG [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ [3] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
  - Sir_Substance 9y ago
    I didn't know that, but that's excellent. I've got some reading to do!
- skybrian 9y ago
mcshicks 9y ago
If you haven't read Jarod Laniers book, "Who Owns the future", you might find it an interesting. He refers to this problem as "Siren Servers" and thinks the problem is structural to web technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F
jstanley 9y ago
> I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services. > The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). I think this is spot on. In case you haven't come across it already, IPFS is trying to do this, and already works today for many applications. https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ This talk is quite good if you have an hour to spare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONZtXMu03w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONZtXMu03w
- zeta0134 9y ago
  I've been working with IPFS a lot more recently thanks to their efforts to snapshot Wikipedia to get around censorship in Turkey. This immediately made me realize the advantages of learning the system, and once you wrap your head around content-based addressing, everything makes sense after that. https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/ https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/ I think the biggest thing they're going to struggle with for adoption is their addressing system, which is brilliant from a technology point of view, but impossible to memorize for regular humans. Some sort of naming system (or, ideally, several such systems) needs to emerge I think, before the network will be properly usable by casual folks.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    There is already DNS integration. Here is an IPFS path to my blog: /ipns/jes.xxx/ No longer than the corresponding HTTP version: http://jes.xxx/ http://jes.xxx/ Of course, DNS isn't distributed or trustless, but if it can work with DNS it can work with the likes of Namecoin or ENS (https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/). Currently you need to prepend an IPFS gateway URL to the IPFS path in order for it to be backwards-comaptible with existing browsers (e.g. https://ipfs.io/ipns/jes.xxx/ https://ipfs.io/ipns/jes.xxx/), but I don't think it will take too many years to get native IPFS support in browsers. I'm really really excited by what's going possible already, and what's going to become possible soon, with IPFS.
tdb7893 9y ago
People here seem to always want their social media to be decentralized but I doubt that would happen unless you could convince the standard consumer that it's actually better, and I think that's a hard argument to make to them. When I talk to people about what their solution looks like it tends to sacrifice usability, which no consumer wants to sacrifice
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >People here seem to always want their social media to be decentralized but I doubt that would happen unless you could convince the standard consumer that it's actually better, and I think that's a hard argument to make to them. We need a well designed pretty home server that's as easy to set up and use as a smartphone. That's all, really. The killer app would be ultra fast backup from your phone and laptop over a local network that subsequently drips over the internet (encrypted) to a friend or family member's home server. Then, just put an app store on top. An ecosystem around that would spring up with all sorts of stuff that would sometimes be worse and sometimes be way, way, better than the centralized web. Any facebook equivalent would probably be way better. I kind of wish this was what Mozilla was getting in on - it's way more disruptive than building Yet Another Smartphone/Desktop OS. Most of the software to do all of this is actually already there, it just a matter of putting it together in an easy to use way and putting some lipgloss and snazzy marketing on it (not necessarily an easy task but very doable all the same). It's worth remembering that smartphones were pretty uncool, nerdy and uninteresting to 'normal' people in 2006.
  - type0 9y ago
    > We need a well designed pretty home server that's as easy to set up What do you do about all those people whose ISPs don't allow them to run public facing server on residential connection?
    - crdoconnor 9y ago
      VPN, maybe.
agnivade 9y ago
You might want to take a look at - https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/
simplehuman 9y ago
> The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. cloudron.io is tackling this very problem. sandstorm was trying to solve this as well but the project is not active anymore.
- type0 9y ago
  Cloudron is great but how do you get non-nerds over the fear of running VPS?
- rpdillon 9y ago
  https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm Looks pretty active.
  - kentonv 9y ago
    It's not as active as it used to be, but yeah, we're still working on it. See also: https://sandstorm.io/news/ https://sandstorm.io/news/
CM30 9y ago
This might be why a federated system like Mastodon or GNU Social could win out over a fully decentralised one like torrents. Because for a lot of people, the individual services that act as network nodes could work like Facebook/Twitter does now whereas more technically advanced users could host their own nodes instead. Which reminds me. Why are all these decentralised/federated services focusing so much on trying to replace Twitter? I mean, maybe it's a silly question, but replacing Facebook, Instagram, Reddit or any other number of services would be just as valid a goal. Why is every one of these systems seemingly going for the microblogging market in particular?
- type0 9y ago
  > Why is every one of these systems seemingly going for the microblogging market in particular? Because OStatus is tailored for microblogging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus
closeparen 9y ago
Facebook as a website builder hasn't been true since the news feed appeared. Its main value-add at this point is discovery and messaging by real name and social graph (you can find people you met in real life but don't know well enough to exchange phone numbers). Secondarily, it's a long form town-hall forum on, for example, campus-specific pages where students discuss goings-on and outrage-of-the-week. In distant third, it's a way for people to broadcast content to their followers. Really only important life milestones, travel photos, and political outrage are socially acceptable here. Website publishing is barely even used anymore. No one fills in a public profile. A specific person's Facebook page is just a WHERE clause on the larger News Feed. At least, these are my observations as a Millenal going on 10 years of Facebook membership.

by kem 9y ago

X86BSD 9y ago

I've just started using mastodon.social as a replacement for FB and like it just fine. Give it a look.

glenstein 9y ago
I think it's more of a replacement for twitter. And I am genuinely excited about Mastodon, with ~600k users and 1400 instances, I think something special is happening there. I guess diaspora* is supposed to be the decentralized facebook replacement, but I don't think it's any good. I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed). But now? I don't think you can.
- Existenceblinks 9y ago
  We need 1 instance for every individual, that's the problem. Non techies who already have privilege to access internet should be able to instantiate their own instances very easily.
  - glenstein 9y ago
    I'm all for it if we can get there, but I think a wide range of individual, federated instances is a good step in that direction, and even that would be a huge achievement. I think something like Opera Unite had the potential to be a single instance per person if that ever caught on.
    - Existenceblinks 9y ago
      I think Mastodon as a native or Electron app that uses bit torrent protocol should do it. Not sure what's the problem with that or I am too optimistic.
  - piaste 9y ago
    That would be optimal, but I don't think it's strictly necessary. The fundamental requirement is that, if the owner of an instance behaves poorly, users should be able to move elsewhere without being cutting off from the larger network.
- ams6110 9y ago
  The name Mastodon is bad. Doesn't say anything about what the site does. Compare Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat....
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Yes, it's just a twitter clone where people 'toot' instead of 'tweet'. It's fine work but they don't seem to have any idea how to make it desirable for people to use.
    - 9y ago
sr2 9y ago
Twitter should be a public utility like water. It shouldn't rely on surveillance capitalism to make money. There's another social network called Ello and it's essentially a registered charity. Twitter should be like that.
- angry-hacker 9y ago
  You can always copy twitter but you can't get the traction. You think TV companies will advertise your network 24/7? If you think Twitter should be utility either govs have to force some standards to every social network or nationalize it. The people in the offices are too dumb to even grasp what servers are, let alone distributed services or why would standards be beneficial for the society. Maybe next generation knows better if we by then are not under the iron rule of few SV companies.
- watwut 9y ago
  Why? Twitter is in no way essential.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    It's not, but it's clearly highly useful and is the incumbent in the short public messaging market.
    - watwut 9y ago
      Highly useful and is the incumbent should be criteria for something to become public utility like water?
- noarchy 9y ago
  >Twitter should be a public utility like water. It shouldn't rely on surveillance capitalism to make money. There's another social network called Ello and it's essentially a registered charity. Twitter should be like that. A charity? Sure, if you can make it work. But a public utility? That would link it to governments, which I think is the last thing we should be pushing. I think there is already enough concern over how Twitter interacts with governments, especially those looking to censor speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter
anigbrowl 9y ago
It's more like Twitter than FB, and it works, but it has some problems. You can't stop someone from impersonating you unless you run your own instance (fine for tech people, useless for the average user), and while the feature is good there's no way to get list of trending hashtags, so finding people/topics is a pain.

Sir_Substance 9y ago

>The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). We already have a model for this: email. You and I can use whoever we want as email providers, including hosting our own, and if you don't think I'm a trustworthy provider, you can drop my messages. The system isn't without it's corner cases, but it's certainly proven to be a robust model over the last ~30 years. The only thing it requires is standards. We already have one for facebook messenger: XMPP. Facebook and Google used to support it, but they both shut it down because they wanted to lock their users in harder. We have CalDav for events, but again, none of the big players want to know about it. We could have a "social status" standard, allowing you to send a robustly versioned life update to other servers from whatever social service manager you'd prefer, but you and I know that no amount of user outcry could persuade any of the major players to adopt it. Network effects, peer pressure and social expectation (e.g. please submit a snapchat along with your job interview) power their meteoric growth. What we need is a "Regulating the Gauge of Railways Act 1846" for the digital age. We need international bodies to review software that has become mandatory to the modern world, distill it down to a set of living specifications, and then ram it down the throats of software vendors.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago
The W3C Social Web Working Group [1] is working on this. Relevant standards through that lens include Micropub [2] and Activity Streams [3]. [1] https://www.w3.org/Social/WG https://www.w3.org/Social/WG [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ [3] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
- Sir_Substance 9y ago
  I didn't know that, but that's excellent. I've got some reading to do!
skybrian 9y ago

mcshicks 9y ago

If you haven't read Jarod Laniers book, "Who Owns the future", you might find it an interesting. He refers to this problem as "Siren Servers" and thinks the problem is structural to web technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F

jstanley 9y ago

> I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services. > The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). I think this is spot on. In case you haven't come across it already, IPFS is trying to do this, and already works today for many applications. https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ This talk is quite good if you have an hour to spare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONZtXMu03w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONZtXMu03w

zeta0134 9y ago
I've been working with IPFS a lot more recently thanks to their efforts to snapshot Wikipedia to get around censorship in Turkey. This immediately made me realize the advantages of learning the system, and once you wrap your head around content-based addressing, everything makes sense after that. https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/ https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/ I think the biggest thing they're going to struggle with for adoption is their addressing system, which is brilliant from a technology point of view, but impossible to memorize for regular humans. Some sort of naming system (or, ideally, several such systems) needs to emerge I think, before the network will be properly usable by casual folks.
- jstanley 9y ago
  There is already DNS integration. Here is an IPFS path to my blog: /ipns/jes.xxx/ No longer than the corresponding HTTP version: http://jes.xxx/ http://jes.xxx/ Of course, DNS isn't distributed or trustless, but if it can work with DNS it can work with the likes of Namecoin or ENS (https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/). Currently you need to prepend an IPFS gateway URL to the IPFS path in order for it to be backwards-comaptible with existing browsers (e.g. https://ipfs.io/ipns/jes.xxx/ https://ipfs.io/ipns/jes.xxx/), but I don't think it will take too many years to get native IPFS support in browsers. I'm really really excited by what's going possible already, and what's going to become possible soon, with IPFS.

tdb7893 9y ago

People here seem to always want their social media to be decentralized but I doubt that would happen unless you could convince the standard consumer that it's actually better, and I think that's a hard argument to make to them. When I talk to people about what their solution looks like it tends to sacrifice usability, which no consumer wants to sacrifice

crdoconnor 9y ago
>People here seem to always want their social media to be decentralized but I doubt that would happen unless you could convince the standard consumer that it's actually better, and I think that's a hard argument to make to them. We need a well designed pretty home server that's as easy to set up and use as a smartphone. That's all, really. The killer app would be ultra fast backup from your phone and laptop over a local network that subsequently drips over the internet (encrypted) to a friend or family member's home server. Then, just put an app store on top. An ecosystem around that would spring up with all sorts of stuff that would sometimes be worse and sometimes be way, way, better than the centralized web. Any facebook equivalent would probably be way better. I kind of wish this was what Mozilla was getting in on - it's way more disruptive than building Yet Another Smartphone/Desktop OS. Most of the software to do all of this is actually already there, it just a matter of putting it together in an easy to use way and putting some lipgloss and snazzy marketing on it (not necessarily an easy task but very doable all the same). It's worth remembering that smartphones were pretty uncool, nerdy and uninteresting to 'normal' people in 2006.
- type0 9y ago
  > We need a well designed pretty home server that's as easy to set up What do you do about all those people whose ISPs don't allow them to run public facing server on residential connection?
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    VPN, maybe.

agnivade 9y ago

You might want to take a look at - https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/

simplehuman 9y ago

> The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. cloudron.io is tackling this very problem. sandstorm was trying to solve this as well but the project is not active anymore.

type0 9y ago
Cloudron is great but how do you get non-nerds over the fear of running VPS?
rpdillon 9y ago
https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm Looks pretty active.
- kentonv 9y ago
  It's not as active as it used to be, but yeah, we're still working on it. See also: https://sandstorm.io/news/ https://sandstorm.io/news/

CM30 9y ago

This might be why a federated system like Mastodon or GNU Social could win out over a fully decentralised one like torrents. Because for a lot of people, the individual services that act as network nodes could work like Facebook/Twitter does now whereas more technically advanced users could host their own nodes instead. Which reminds me. Why are all these decentralised/federated services focusing so much on trying to replace Twitter? I mean, maybe it's a silly question, but replacing Facebook, Instagram, Reddit or any other number of services would be just as valid a goal. Why is every one of these systems seemingly going for the microblogging market in particular?

type0 9y ago
> Why is every one of these systems seemingly going for the microblogging market in particular? Because OStatus is tailored for microblogging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus

closeparen 9y ago

Facebook as a website builder hasn't been true since the news feed appeared. Its main value-add at this point is discovery and messaging by real name and social graph (you can find people you met in real life but don't know well enough to exchange phone numbers). Secondarily, it's a long form town-hall forum on, for example, campus-specific pages where students discuss goings-on and outrage-of-the-week. In distant third, it's a way for people to broadcast content to their followers. Really only important life milestones, travel photos, and political outrage are socially acceptable here. Website publishing is barely even used anymore. No one fills in a public profile. A specific person's Facebook page is just a WHERE clause on the larger News Feed. At least, these are my observations as a Millenal going on 10 years of Facebook membership.