7 ms·

Is social graph portability workable?

58 points by avyfain 9y ago

dreamfactory2 9y ago
Wasn't this covered by OStatus/SWAT0?
dreamfactor 9y ago
A lot of work has been done on this at - https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SWAT0 https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SW... and https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtXMsLaocacrdDAwTzdPeGdPNlhZSHFMelg0MnQ2N2c https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtXMsLaocacrdDAwTzd...
wmf 9y ago
The social graph is only a small part of it. To make this work would require full federation so that, for example, someone on Facebook could friend someone on G+ and posts would flow in both directions so the timeline would work as normal. Like Ma Bell before them, Facebook will fight this to the death.
- jerf 9y ago
  And it isn't even remotely clear how this would work. Like all "let's just semantic web all the things!" projects it all makes sense at a super-ultra-high level, but when you try to manifest this in the real world there's an immense explosion of tricky details, by the literal thousands. Making social networks speak together is probably a good order of magnitude harder than unifying the IM networks, and even after a decade+ of effort and tons and tons of work, the multiprotocol IM clients are still generally quirky, involve losing useful features from any given specific network, and face constant issues where the semantics of the networks differ. (Especially around conferencing.) Shared social graphs is a nice idea, but it would take enormous effort backed by legal force to happen, at a minimum.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Not necessarily. Linux arose despite Windows' monopoly. Wikipedia arose despite Britannica et al.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      Linux didn't arise where Windows had a monopoly. Wikipedia didn't arise where Britannica had a monopoly. The industry changed, and the segment where Windows had a monopoly became less relevant, the same with Britannica. Windows still retains 90%+ market share on desktops.
      - EGreg 9y ago
        The same can happen with Facebook. By the way - I am surprised Windows is used so much on laptops because I see mostly Macs since 2008!
        ucaetano 9y ago
        Yes, it can! And that's why it bought WhatsApp, Instagram and tried to buy Snapchat. Defensive moves all the way.
  - ge0rg 9y ago
    I think that solving the technical problem is in the same order of complexity as the IM problem actually. It is solvable if you have some strong backers and not just the nerdy volunteers doing it in their leasure time, the ones who are telling you to use XMPP since 2004. Actually the XMPP protocol already has a distributed social graph, and there are micro blogging extensions (eg. Movim), so we can get a functional distributed social network basically overnight. The problem is that (a) you can't monetize an open, distributed network, so the incumbents will do everything they can to prevent federation, and (b) the only driving force that remains are the nerdy volunteers, who have a limited impact, even if they are able to tackle the UX challenges.
  - dane-pgp 9y ago
    The 80/20 solution would be to "just" free the authentication aspect from Facebook's control. If Facebook were forced to support something like OpenID Connect, then anyone with one of those IDs, from any provider, should at least be allowed to log in to Facebook and view posts from their friends who have accounts there. Facebook would be forbidden from storing any information about you, except for the fact that your friends on Facebook had manually specified your ID as someone who could view their posts. If your ID provider also ran a social network, and allowed people to log in with their Facebook accounts to view your posts, then that would cover a lot of use cases. The next step would be to allow/require Facebook to fetch RSS-style feeds of events from your social network, so that Facebook users would be alerted to your new posts, without having to manually browse to all the different sites that their friends are on. This would require more engineering work, but could perhaps be implemented as a browser plugin. At some point, if Facebook are making it unreasonably hard for competitors' users to interoperate with users on Facebook, there would be grounds for an anti-trust case against Facebook, which I'm sure the EU would be happy to consider.
dreamfactory2 9y ago
See https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/SWAT0 https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/SWAT0
ucaetano 9y ago
This highlights a recent episode I went through. I decided to delete everything on my FB account. I didn't want to close, just delete years of photos, posts, likes, comments, etc. Everything. Then these two surprising things happened: Having used Google Takeout many times, with great results, I decided to do the same with FB. For years I used FB as my primary way of storing and sharing photos from my phone (vs my desktop for a DSLR), so there were a lot of photos there that I didn't have anywhere else (pre-Google Photos times). When I downloaded, I was surprised: Facebook downsized all my photos to 90's-era 800x600 pixels, and stripped ALL metadata from it (date, hour, location, camera, etc.). This pissed me off so much. FB wasn't just "not doing a good job", they were purposefully sending me a big "fuck you" letter as I removed my content. FB still had all my images in the original size, and with the metadata, but they chose to give me a shitty version of them. This isn't laziness or incompetence, it's just plain evil. My second surprise was how hard it is to delete content on FB. There's no "delete all", or even a "select and delete". You need to manually click 2-4 times for every single comment, post, picture, etc on a laggy user interface. It almost looks purposefully designed to prevent you from doing so. There are some Chrome extensions that try to automate that, making deleting 1000's of items faster, but FB is constantly trying to break them. So the message is clear: FB doesn't give a fuck about you, and will try its best to fuck you if you want to delete content or even get it back. Don't use FB as content storage, don't expect to have your FB content back. PS: I went ahead and deleted everything anyway. Out of spite.
- lwansbrough 9y ago
  > PS: I went ahead and deleted everything anyway. Out of spite. Yeah, they still have the photos though. IIRC, when you upload a photo to Facebook you grant them a worldwide unlimited license to your photo, so there's really no reason for them to delete it. I suppose they can even use it for marketing purposes.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Why not use a Facebook App to extract all your photos and videos? You can have a desktop app get an api key and grant it photo permissions etc. and go to town. Full resolution everything. Also you can remove all your posts and comments this way. Perhaps such an app already exists. But if not, do you think FB would revoke keys of such an app? FOUND THEM: Odrive Fotobounce
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
What is sad, is how similar the ideal portable social graph looks to email with your own domain name. You own the identifier, and you can select which provider hosts your email. In addition, you can send an email to somebody which will just work no matter what host they are on. You have the option of having a local copy of everything. When we look back, I think we will see that in abandoning email as the medium of social interaction, we basically gave up on the open internet.
- subway 9y ago
  I think it's more the abandonment of federated protocols in favor of centralized services, than the abandonment of a specific protocol. An only tangentially related anecdote: SMTP and later XMPP offered beautifully portable social graphs. In fact, in 2012, I found it so portable that I decided to migrate off the self-hosted postfix/dovecot/ejabberd install I'd run on my own domain for years to GApps. Cue the replacement of GTalk with Hangouts, and now I really don't have much of a choice but to pay Google each month, or discard/re-establish the social connections I've built over the last decade and a half.
  - Xeoncross 9y ago
    Email is the only truly successful decentralized protocol which is why the OP's statement mentions it. A) Wide global adoption B) Decades of use
    - jimktrains2 9y ago
      > Email is the only truly successful decentralized protocol HTTP?
      - radarsat1 9y ago
        HTTP is a transfer protocol, not a semantic protocol. Email at least lets you identify the sender/receiver and other metadata and separate them from the message, HTTP is just "this is the filename, this is the data.." It's not much more than a TCP stream really.
EGreg 9y ago
It gets even more complex when we think about people’s private and public identities. Some of my Facebook posts are public and I read many public posts from the media, fan groups and companies. That is all part of my social graph but how would we work all of that? That said, there may be solutions there. The larger issue is how these links work is constantly evolving yet having a consumer controlled social graph may make it difficult to be responsive. After all, think about how you manage the social graph that is your pre-programmed fast dial numbers on a phone (if you even do those things). They quickly go out of date and you can’t be bothered updating them. This is a hard problem to solve. We solved it at Qbix. We're still working on releasing our Platform to everyone, but for now it's already open source and we are dogfooding it in all our own apps. https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform We are also working on an interoperable auth protocol where you do control your identity and keep your contacts private, but discover them across communities (venues and interests). https://github.com/Qbix/auth https://github.com/Qbix/auth
marcusestes 9y ago
Different social networking applications imply different social contexts. I may follow you back on Twitter, but that doesn't mean that I want to be your friend on Facebook.
- ge0rg 9y ago
  You could still have multiple different social networks per social context, which would compete on features, as opposed to lock-in and network effects.
Nomentatus 9y ago
Interoperability is already settled law (railroad gauges, telephone networks.) We just don't care to apply the law 'cause democracy is remarkably corrupt in our time.

58 points by avyfain 9y ago

Wasn't this covered by OStatus/SWAT0?

A lot of work has been done on this at - https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SWAT0 https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SW... and https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtXMsLaocacrdDAwTzdPeGdPNlhZSHFMelg0MnQ2N2c https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtXMsLaocacrdDAwTzd...

wmf 9y ago

The social graph is only a small part of it. To make this work would require full federation so that, for example, someone on Facebook could friend someone on G+ and posts would flow in both directions so the timeline would work as normal. Like Ma Bell before them, Facebook will fight this to the death.

jerf 9y ago
And it isn't even remotely clear how this would work. Like all "let's just semantic web all the things!" projects it all makes sense at a super-ultra-high level, but when you try to manifest this in the real world there's an immense explosion of tricky details, by the literal thousands. Making social networks speak together is probably a good order of magnitude harder than unifying the IM networks, and even after a decade+ of effort and tons and tons of work, the multiprotocol IM clients are still generally quirky, involve losing useful features from any given specific network, and face constant issues where the semantics of the networks differ. (Especially around conferencing.) Shared social graphs is a nice idea, but it would take enormous effort backed by legal force to happen, at a minimum.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Not necessarily. Linux arose despite Windows' monopoly. Wikipedia arose despite Britannica et al.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    Linux didn't arise where Windows had a monopoly. Wikipedia didn't arise where Britannica had a monopoly. The industry changed, and the segment where Windows had a monopoly became less relevant, the same with Britannica. Windows still retains 90%+ market share on desktops.
    - EGreg 9y ago
      The same can happen with Facebook. By the way - I am surprised Windows is used so much on laptops because I see mostly Macs since 2008!
      - ucaetano 9y ago
        Yes, it can! And that's why it bought WhatsApp, Instagram and tried to buy Snapchat. Defensive moves all the way.
- ge0rg 9y ago
  I think that solving the technical problem is in the same order of complexity as the IM problem actually. It is solvable if you have some strong backers and not just the nerdy volunteers doing it in their leasure time, the ones who are telling you to use XMPP since 2004. Actually the XMPP protocol already has a distributed social graph, and there are micro blogging extensions (eg. Movim), so we can get a functional distributed social network basically overnight. The problem is that (a) you can't monetize an open, distributed network, so the incumbents will do everything they can to prevent federation, and (b) the only driving force that remains are the nerdy volunteers, who have a limited impact, even if they are able to tackle the UX challenges.
- dane-pgp 9y ago
  The 80/20 solution would be to "just" free the authentication aspect from Facebook's control. If Facebook were forced to support something like OpenID Connect, then anyone with one of those IDs, from any provider, should at least be allowed to log in to Facebook and view posts from their friends who have accounts there. Facebook would be forbidden from storing any information about you, except for the fact that your friends on Facebook had manually specified your ID as someone who could view their posts. If your ID provider also ran a social network, and allowed people to log in with their Facebook accounts to view your posts, then that would cover a lot of use cases. The next step would be to allow/require Facebook to fetch RSS-style feeds of events from your social network, so that Facebook users would be alerted to your new posts, without having to manually browse to all the different sites that their friends are on. This would require more engineering work, but could perhaps be implemented as a browser plugin. At some point, if Facebook are making it unreasonably hard for competitors' users to interoperate with users on Facebook, there would be grounds for an anti-trust case against Facebook, which I'm sure the EU would be happy to consider.

dreamfactory2 9y ago

See https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/SWAT0 https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/SWAT0

ucaetano 9y ago

This highlights a recent episode I went through. I decided to delete everything on my FB account. I didn't want to close, just delete years of photos, posts, likes, comments, etc. Everything. Then these two surprising things happened: Having used Google Takeout many times, with great results, I decided to do the same with FB. For years I used FB as my primary way of storing and sharing photos from my phone (vs my desktop for a DSLR), so there were a lot of photos there that I didn't have anywhere else (pre-Google Photos times). When I downloaded, I was surprised: Facebook downsized all my photos to 90's-era 800x600 pixels, and stripped ALL metadata from it (date, hour, location, camera, etc.). This pissed me off so much. FB wasn't just "not doing a good job", they were purposefully sending me a big "fuck you" letter as I removed my content. FB still had all my images in the original size, and with the metadata, but they chose to give me a shitty version of them. This isn't laziness or incompetence, it's just plain evil. My second surprise was how hard it is to delete content on FB. There's no "delete all", or even a "select and delete". You need to manually click 2-4 times for every single comment, post, picture, etc on a laggy user interface. It almost looks purposefully designed to prevent you from doing so. There are some Chrome extensions that try to automate that, making deleting 1000's of items faster, but FB is constantly trying to break them. So the message is clear: FB doesn't give a fuck about you, and will try its best to fuck you if you want to delete content or even get it back. Don't use FB as content storage, don't expect to have your FB content back. PS: I went ahead and deleted everything anyway. Out of spite.

lwansbrough 9y ago
> PS: I went ahead and deleted everything anyway. Out of spite. Yeah, they still have the photos though. IIRC, when you upload a photo to Facebook you grant them a worldwide unlimited license to your photo, so there's really no reason for them to delete it. I suppose they can even use it for marketing purposes.
EGreg 9y ago
Why not use a Facebook App to extract all your photos and videos? You can have a desktop app get an api key and grant it photo permissions etc. and go to town. Full resolution everything. Also you can remove all your posts and comments this way. Perhaps such an app already exists. But if not, do you think FB would revoke keys of such an app? FOUND THEM: Odrive Fotobounce

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

What is sad, is how similar the ideal portable social graph looks to email with your own domain name. You own the identifier, and you can select which provider hosts your email. In addition, you can send an email to somebody which will just work no matter what host they are on. You have the option of having a local copy of everything. When we look back, I think we will see that in abandoning email as the medium of social interaction, we basically gave up on the open internet.

subway 9y ago
I think it's more the abandonment of federated protocols in favor of centralized services, than the abandonment of a specific protocol. An only tangentially related anecdote: SMTP and later XMPP offered beautifully portable social graphs. In fact, in 2012, I found it so portable that I decided to migrate off the self-hosted postfix/dovecot/ejabberd install I'd run on my own domain for years to GApps. Cue the replacement of GTalk with Hangouts, and now I really don't have much of a choice but to pay Google each month, or discard/re-establish the social connections I've built over the last decade and a half.
- Xeoncross 9y ago
  Email is the only truly successful decentralized protocol which is why the OP's statement mentions it. A) Wide global adoption B) Decades of use
  - jimktrains2 9y ago
    > Email is the only truly successful decentralized protocol HTTP?
    - radarsat1 9y ago
      HTTP is a transfer protocol, not a semantic protocol. Email at least lets you identify the sender/receiver and other metadata and separate them from the message, HTTP is just "this is the filename, this is the data.." It's not much more than a TCP stream really.

EGreg 9y ago

It gets even more complex when we think about people’s private and public identities. Some of my Facebook posts are public and I read many public posts from the media, fan groups and companies. That is all part of my social graph but how would we work all of that? That said, there may be solutions there. The larger issue is how these links work is constantly evolving yet having a consumer controlled social graph may make it difficult to be responsive. After all, think about how you manage the social graph that is your pre-programmed fast dial numbers on a phone (if you even do those things). They quickly go out of date and you can’t be bothered updating them. This is a hard problem to solve. We solved it at Qbix. We're still working on releasing our Platform to everyone, but for now it's already open source and we are dogfooding it in all our own apps. https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform We are also working on an interoperable auth protocol where you do control your identity and keep your contacts private, but discover them across communities (venues and interests). https://github.com/Qbix/auth https://github.com/Qbix/auth

marcusestes 9y ago

Different social networking applications imply different social contexts. I may follow you back on Twitter, but that doesn't mean that I want to be your friend on Facebook.

ge0rg 9y ago
You could still have multiple different social networks per social context, which would compete on features, as opposed to lock-in and network effects.

Nomentatus 9y ago

Interoperability is already settled law (railroad gauges, telephone networks.) We just don't care to apply the law 'cause democracy is remarkably corrupt in our time.