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>You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly. Of course y

>You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly. Of course you can, you just need to have standardized protocols. You and I can use any email provider we like, your client can use exchange to talk to it's server and mine can use a version of POP from the 80's and it /doesn't matter/ because the servers talk over a standardized protocol. Facebook and Google used to support this. There was once a time when Facebook and Google Plus both had XMPP gateways for their real time chat traffic, which meant you could send a message from Google Plus to Facebook Messenger with no problems. They shut it down because they both have a strong incentive to push vendor lock-in. They've been so successful that you've started to forget that life could ever be otherwise. Take a look at projects like diaspora and mastodon. There's nothing stopping Facebook from reaching out to these projects and working with them to incorporate Facebook nodes into their network using the same protocol. But it'll never happen, because Facebook needs the corral nice and enclosed before they can start tagging you and selling you off.

likpok 9y ago
There's a real engineering cost to federation. Your email example is a good one, I think. But digging a little deeper, what's the last major feature that got added to email? For example, we've been trying to get encryption in email for longer than WhatsApp has ever existed. WhatsApp rolled out encryption for everyone on its network last year. That's a billion people! I'd be surprised if 100 thousand people regularly used encrypted email, and even fewer used effectively encrypted email. Social networks have been adding lots of features over the years to compete with each other. Realistically I think that fractured platforms would struggle to catch on because each provider would prioritize different features. Since social networking grows in utility superlinearly with the connectivity with your friends, features get less useful and the whole thing stagnates. Basically: Microsoft Outlook is a social network of the kind you envision. Even Outlook for Mac versus Outlook for Windows is a sharp divide in terms of features! Do you think that people would use social networks if they looked like Outlook?
- Sir_Substance 9y ago
  The idea that centralization leads to better UX results is demonstrably false. Popcorn Time is a great example of distributed streaming providing a considerably better UX than most commercial solutions. Additionally, the notion that the necessity of making group decisions on a protocol must lead to stagnation is not guaranteed. There's plenty of space for Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter to form an an industry working group and make a protocol that meets their needs, and then throw it out and say "this is what we're using. Keep up or get left behind". However, to more directly answer your concerns, there's nothing stopping Facebook from exposing basic functionality via an established and fairly firm protocol, and keeping advanced features as their competitive advantage. Textual Timeline posts, IM's and event RSVP's are good candidates for things to be exposed by the protocol. Facial tagging of images is a good example of something that a core social protocol could skip.

likpok 9y ago

There's a real engineering cost to federation. Your email example is a good one, I think. But digging a little deeper, what's the last major feature that got added to email? For example, we've been trying to get encryption in email for longer than WhatsApp has ever existed. WhatsApp rolled out encryption for everyone on its network last year. That's a billion people! I'd be surprised if 100 thousand people regularly used encrypted email, and even fewer used effectively encrypted email. Social networks have been adding lots of features over the years to compete with each other. Realistically I think that fractured platforms would struggle to catch on because each provider would prioritize different features. Since social networking grows in utility superlinearly with the connectivity with your friends, features get less useful and the whole thing stagnates. Basically: Microsoft Outlook is a social network of the kind you envision. Even Outlook for Mac versus Outlook for Windows is a sharp divide in terms of features! Do you think that people would use social networks if they looked like Outlook?

Sir_Substance 9y ago
The idea that centralization leads to better UX results is demonstrably false. Popcorn Time is a great example of distributed streaming providing a considerably better UX than most commercial solutions. Additionally, the notion that the necessity of making group decisions on a protocol must lead to stagnation is not guaranteed. There's plenty of space for Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter to form an an industry working group and make a protocol that meets their needs, and then throw it out and say "this is what we're using. Keep up or get left behind". However, to more directly answer your concerns, there's nothing stopping Facebook from exposing basic functionality via an established and fairly firm protocol, and keeping advanced features as their competitive advantage. Textual Timeline posts, IM's and event RSVP's are good candidates for things to be exposed by the protocol. Facial tagging of images is a good example of something that a core social protocol could skip.