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But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet. These "social netwo
by losteric 9y ago
But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet.
These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB.
Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and standard APIs for 3p apps - plus, perhaps, a web-of-trust or some other mechanism for validating identity. All rolled into standardized APIs backed by large competitors of FB (perhaps MS/Goog/etc?).
If the ISP monopolies can be broken, perhaps all that could be hosted on a little Android-like box connected to a home ISP - your little social box, connecting you to every human on earth... always online, it caches messages from friends when your phone looses signal, p2p shares videos from friends so you can watch high quality with no load time, and automatically curates content from connected feeds (perhaps with some on-board ML).
No ads, no big brother, for pennies a month.
I know Google's ad revenue is getting eaten by FB - perhaps they would profit from something like this. Cap FB at the knees by giving people FB's functionality without the corporate data-mining/lock-in, and reap ad revenue from the increased relevance of el Goog's search.
There are similar benefits to shops, manufacturers, services, bands, etc all too. Standard information/inventory protocols, and a review system connected to those individual personal identities, could undermine Yelp and even AMZN.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit and I think it's mostly a matter of execution. There is prior art covering all of the pieces, but no one has assembled all the pieces into a compelling product (think: iPod vs prior mp3 players, FB versus the myriad of ex-competitors)... hard but tractable with the right support.
- nradov 9y agoThe vast majority of Facebook users don't want to install and maintain a home server. A distributed social network will never take off if it requires users to purchase another dedicated piece of hardware.
- tboughen 9y agoMake it run on as a part of a distributed cloud computing service on a device that consumers are paid to install and keep. Maybe its a radiator/secondary water heater too. The payment is for reduced datacentre cooling expense.
- losteric 9y agoThat's the point: They don't have to! If you have protocols and software that lets someone run a social OS on their personal hardware and connected to the global network, then the walls have been broken. Any 3rd party can integrate or offer hosting. You could also take the rabbit hole of battery improvements leading to running this on mobile devices or sending data through a distributed p2p network instead of personal HW. None of those are orthogonal to the proposal.
- mahyarm 9y agoIt turns into email with all of it's problems. And everyone will just use a gmail equivalent or whatever else they signed up with 15 years ago anyway.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- skybrian 9y agoThe biggest issue is what the rules are and how that affects the user interface. Using email, the rule is that if someone sends you something, you own it; they could ask you to do delete it, but you can refuse. Facebook and other social networks let you edit and delete posts. Snapchat became big because you can send pictures that are automatically deleted after you view them. Sure, you can reimplement basic message exchange in a decentralized way, but figuring out how to enforce the same rules in a decentralized system is nontrivial.
- losteric 9y agoI think RSS is a closer analogy than email, but anyway... it could be argued those rules don't really exist today. Good snaps get stored and shared forever, everyone knows to screenshot dumb posts on FB, and there are plenty of twitter archival tools. Youtube's DRM and takedowns work OK against film pirates, but it's still easy to find many movies and redistributed personal content online. Though I'd be curious what fraction of those instances are someone speaking without thinking, or accidentally sharing to a broader audience... the former seems PEBKAC and the latter is a solvable UX issue.
- skybrian 9y agoDespite the exceptions and workarounds, the defaults matter for the user experience and social dynamics of an online forum. Even on Hacker News, the various moderation features and things like being able to edit your post after publishing make a difference to how the community works. It's not only what you can get away with but also what people feel like they have a right to do. An interesting proof of concept might be to try to create a forum like Hacker News, but using distributed software.
- losteric 9y agoI think those features are compatible with this model - RSS handles edited content just fine (clients can store the old content, but there is a canonical "latest" version).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bitmapbrother 9y ago>I know Google's ad revenue is getting eaten by FB No it's not. >For the first three months of this year, Alphabet reported just over $26 billion in revenue, up 21 percent from the same period last year. Without the EU fine, it would have notched $6.87 billion in operating income, up around 15 percent from the second quarter of 2016.
- losteric 9y agoThe market is growing, of course both FB and Google will keep growing for a bit - but FB's 39% (and growing) share is nothing to sneeze at. FB is a cancerous walled garden that is increasingly hostile to search engines.