11 ms·

Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

134 points by techmagus 9y ago

techmagus 9y ago
Made good points but missed the fact that social networks like Facebook and Google started like decentralised networks today. In the Philippines, Facebook wasn't popular at all when Friendster and MySpace were kicking. It was only after the demise of Friendster, and the MySpace was forgotten, that Facebook gained attention. It's similar for decentralised networks. Secondly, decentralised networks are good as it is. It does not have to be the "next Facebook" or the "next Twitter", although many such networks and writers dubbed these as such. Slow growth and adoption is better than an explosive one. These networks are being developed generally for free and offered for free, with no ads whatsoever even. The developers are few and they do it during their free time. Thus a slow adoption is to its advantage. I use decentralized networks, even used to run my own instance.
codewithcheese 9y ago
What short sighted click bait. Steem has already solved or partially solved most of these problems and we haven't even scratched the service. Read the Steem white paper [1] if you want your mind blown. [1] https://steem.io https://steem.io
- yborg 9y ago
  Now if we could only solve the shilling problem on social networks. Your whitepaper blew my mind in trying to bootstrap YACC via the hook of a decentralized social network. I'd say odds of long-term success are zero here, but points for originality.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    Please do some research before posting nonsense comments. Steemit is a pretty big community already, with a thriving ecosystem. Go to https://steemit.com/ https://steemit.com/ to see for yourself. Steem is just the blockchain/cryptocurrency, while Steemit is the actual community front-end on top of it. There's no shilling going on here. Just a user recommending it.
- deleted 9y ago
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- cetra3 9y ago
  It's decentralized but needs: - My Email Address - My Phone Number Not really the sort of decentralized I was hoping for..
  - Kiro 9y ago
    You can spin up a node or use a wallet to create an account directly on the Steem blockchain instead of doing it through the Steemit webpage.
    - cetra3 9y ago
      If that's an option I haven't found it from a quick glance on the website. I just followed what was there without looking too deeply into it. Maybe if that's something you can do, there should be a clear process written up somewhere
      - codewithcheese 9y ago
        Anon Steem makes it easier for you to create an account anonymously. https://anon.steem.network/ https://anon.steem.network/ You can create an account through steem connect if you have a friend with steem https://steemit.com/news/@timcliff/new-tool-from-busy-org-create-new-steem-blockchain-accounts-with-steemconnect https://steemit.com/news/@timcliff/new-tool-from-busy-org-cr... For advanced users you can do the steem account creation transation yourself using the steem cli
      - Kiro 9y ago
        Steemit is not aimed at advanced users. Most probably don't even know that it's powered by a blockchain other than on a buzzword level. There are plenty of guides how to work with the Steem blockchain directly posted as blog posts on the blockchain itself. :)
    - dspillett 9y ago
      I've only scanned the "how to build" documentation but from what I saw there is only information on producing a test network not joining the public blockchain? Is there a set of instructions for hosting your own "real" node? (I've not read the white paper or other documentation so the info may be buried in there, I'm unlikely to find time for that in the near future though so asking out of "laziness" in case you have a quick answer to give)
- amelius 9y ago
  I wonder if the concepts in Steem could be applied to the real economy, to arrive at a more fair distribution of wealth.
  - tyywebb 9y ago
    That would be interesting. Basically instead of companies existing, make every project in the world an open source project on a blockchain and people get compensated for contributing directly as a consequence of how the blockchain works.
- mannigfaltig 9y ago
  What are the key reasons someone should go to Steem rather than to some existing social platform? Steem will likely be slower and the barriers to contribute will likely be higher. Secondly, do you think it is a good basis for building communities if everything is associated with monetary rewards? Sites like Reddit are exactly enjoyable because, most of the time, reward is only imaginary, just like in real-world gatherings of people: It is about having a good time rather than about an exchange of money. Thirdly, how do you ensure that the things people post on Steem are their own work, especially if the data is hosted elsewhere, e.g. on YouTube. There will probably be massive, irreversible thefts of intellectual property (a.k.a. reposters, but with actual money involved). Conversely, a lot of valuable content comes actually from reposting and "karma theft" (which is what linking e.g. a blog article from someone else actually is). Fourthly, how do you avoid fraud as for example often found on Kickstarter? Kickstarter actually has a review process and even they are not fully equipped for it. I am not seeing reliable moderation ever scale enough such that it can withstand the likely immense fraudulent interests due to the monetary incentives.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    > There will probably be massive, irreversible thefts of intellectual property (a.k.a. reposters, but with actual money involved). Whatever this might be, it's not theft. And it might just be something we have to accept if we don't want to live in a de-facto police state. > Conversely, a lot of valuable content comes actually from reposting and "karma theft" (which is what linking e.g. a blog article from someone else actually is). That's a fallacy, though pretty common. People who connect other people with stuff those other people want do provide a useful service, and being rewarded for a useful service is not obviously a bad idea, let alone some sort of "theft". > Fourthly, how do you avoid fraud as for example often found on Kickstarter? Kickstarter actually has a review process and even they are not fully equipped for it. I am not seeing reliable moderation ever scale enough such that it can withstand the likely immense fraudulent interests due to the monetary incentives. Just like everywhere else in life? You don't need a big brother managing every step you take in order to avoid fraud.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    I need to be honest, for me it was definitely the fact that you can earn money for just writing blog posts and curating. Also that it's so transparent what people make, it really motivates you to post when you see someone earn thousands of dollars from one post. I did however find out that the community is great, made many new friends and read a lot of interesting posts. Lately it looks like it has been kind of overrun with people from China or third-world countries, which is interesting, but sometimes the posts are not translated and the steemit.com site does a poor job of managing different languages. I haven't been active on Steemit for more than a year but thinking of going back since I miss it. It's very consuming though, a lot more than Facebook. Since there's a monetary reward on everything you do it feels like "working" even when you're mindlessly upvoting stuff. I used to spend many hours a day just reading, jotting on a new blog post or connect with fellow steemians on the official chat server.
- crucialfelix 9y ago
  I find it and the white paper I interesting. It is very well thought out. I joined. But the stink of money is everywhere and this is distracting. Reddit and HN have worthless internet karma points but we can laugh it off. Making it explicit that we are whoring ourselves in a market pushes it too far I think. It makes us self conscious and that is an impediment to creative discussion. But something will come out of these attempts. Something with tokens and systems and weird rules. It's a game. We just need to find the right game to play in.
deleted 9y ago
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nippples 9y ago
GNU Social is low traffic, but it's alive and well.
- mattl 9y ago
  And GNU social and Mastodon are two different projects that speak OStatus. I'm pleased to see Mastodon's success, and while I'm basically done with GNU these days, I hope to see the two projects continue to cooperate on the OStatus network.
soufron 9y ago
Like email or Google Docs? LOL.
- HugoDaniel 9y ago
  Google Docs is centralized. Maybe you meant Google Reader ?
panic 9y ago
None of the reasons they give -- difficulty of user acquisition, conflict between security and convenience, curation, or economies of scale -- are fundamental obstacles to making a decentralized social network. Mastodon has found some success despite facing the same problems.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  Mastodon is not successful by any metric compared with even the smallest social networks, let alone the giants
  - panic 9y ago
    Where would you find these metrics? Looking at the federated timeline, I see posts appearing at a pretty fast rate (more than one per second), though most of them are in Japanese.
    - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
      go and ask everyone you meet in person today if they've heard of mastodon
      - zemnl 9y ago
        I bet that few of them will reply that it is an extinct animal, some others that it is a cool band, and most of them that they have never heard of such a thing.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - dest 9y ago
      It's very popular in Japan because of the "lolicon" phenomenon (cultural sexy drawings of youth people), which is not accepted by Twitter because of the occidental culture in which this is a taboo.
- 9y ago
vasilakisfil 9y ago
The same could have been said 30 years ago for an open source OS.
- beagle3 9y ago
  or that decentralized social network called 'email'.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    Email is not a social network. It is equivalent to a text message or phone call.
    - DeepYogurt 9y ago
      You might call it a network of social connections.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Also, people call e.g. Snapchat a social network. But by this definition, e-mail is much more of a social network than Snapchat.
        DeepYogurt 9y ago
        I guess that gets at the point that the term social network is poorly defined.
- ab5tract 9y ago
  Then again, we're still waiting for the year of the Linux Desktop.
  - executesorder66 9y ago
    Yeah, but at least that open source OS dominates on literally every other platform in the world.
CalRobert 9y ago
Except in one sense, it already does. I have some friends with blogs. Those blogs have RSS feeds. Feeds of "news", you might say. I load up sageRSS in Firefox, see friends who have new content in bold, and get their news. A "news feed", you might even say. Admittedly I can't easily use that to deduce that x is friends with y is friends with z, or (easily) get a map of where all of my friends went on vacation last year, but I kind of think that's a good thing.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  this is kind of dying though, or at least flat in terms of growth overall
nstart 9y ago
Just in case any bright eyed hopeful person is reading this, please don't think "ah shucks" and go away. Some of the biggest things in the internet including the protocols the internet lives on were never envisioned as something that would change the life of billions of people. They were initially created to solve a problem for a small group and then grew into something much bigger over time. Please please don't back away from this problem just because some article says it's going to be challenging. Solve it for yourself. Post on your own blogs on your own servers. Solve it for others. Help others get set up with their own servers. Create solutions for people Make attempts at creating decentralized solutions. Even if a 1000 people use it, someday we might crack the code to getting people off the walled gardens. Basically, if that article sounded like a demotivating blow to your hopes, please flip the bird at it, and keep working to solve this problem.
- 2sk21 9y ago
  You are right - after reading this article, it just seemed to confirm my opinion the decentralized networks don't work but we ought not to give up.
  - pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
    decentralized networks only work to connect centralized nodes... there is always a local authority. a 51% attack allows anyone to disrupt the larger network, so local nodes get more and more locked down to prevent that. even 5% network attacks could still sway opinion or spam and disrupt many local nodes, so the centralized nodes lock down further. we can't have nice things because assholes are allowed to live. you're all idiots.
- scandox 9y ago
  I'd like to add one remark to this: everything doesn't have to be huge. We don't have to deal always in millions and billions. Small groups. Even individuals. What they do is meaningful. What we do is not pointless just because it doesn't create some massive impact.
  - 9y ago
dest 9y ago
I use Diaspora* as a blogging platform. The social interactions are a plus. It works well
edhelas 9y ago
Decentralized social networks aren't working for now because they reinvent their own protocol each time which creates fragmentation and incompatibilities between the platforms. I think that decentralized social network projects should relies on existing standards and help with their development. That's why I'm working on Movim (https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/) for several years now, which is fully based on XMPP and is de facto compatible with many other clients and services out there.
- leoc 9y ago
  > Decentralized social networks aren't working for now because they reinvent their own protocol each time which creates fragmentation and incompatibilities between the platforms. Recall that all computing problems are solved by adding more abstraction ( ;) ) and not all problems yield to a direct attack with the current tools. Maybe the point of maximum leverage here is actually the problem that interoperation between different protocols is too difficult?
  - edhelas 9y ago
    The interoperability between the protocols is indeed difficult. But pushing a standard protocol is, I think, the best way to promote this compatibility. Imagine if we didn't have a standard protocol for emails (SMTP/IMAP/POP) but instead several protocols built using JSON on top of HTTP. We would have to take most of our time to work on broken transport libraries and fix incompatibility issues between all those solutions. Hopefully we have a standard (even if it's not the best one) and we can "just" build on top using the many existing libraries and projects out there. I think that such "social standard" should be build on Internet protocols (TCP/TLS/DNS/IP…) and not Web only (HTTP), even if it's "easier". Also instead of re-starting from scratch I prefer to improve something existing like XMPP that have flaws but is already an industry standard with a strong community, many libraries/clients and servers deployed all across the world.
- lazyjones 9y ago
  > Decentralized social networks aren't working for now because they reinvent their own protocol each time nope... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
"People do not want to operate their own servers" ... oh, how much I hate that argument. There are so many baseless assumptions in there. What does "operate a server" even mean? Is "loading a web page that accepts WebRTC requests" "operating a server"? Obviously, what people mean is some sort of "people don't want to learn how to manage the installation and configuration of a linux distribution on the command line". Which probably is true--but also completely irrelevant. Arguably, home routers are servers. People routinely "operate" home routers. So, people routinely operate their own servers. Yes, usability might need to be improved. But obviously, the first generations of new technological ideas are built by and for enthusiasts and thus require a bit more motivation to get started. There is absolutely no reason to think that that is therefore an inherent property of the idea itself.
- gwenzek 9y ago
  Totally agree with you. I think a successful decentralized network should come with pre-configured Raspberry Pi that would act as a web server hosting the user pictures, contacts… And maybe a bit of friends data for backup.
  - ashark 9y ago
    1) What happens when it breaks? If you plug in a new one, will it auto-restore? Where from? 2) Updates. How do they happen, who does them? What about when they go wrong? What about 5 years in when there are three models of the device (or way, way more if it's not proprietary) and an update goes out that bricks one? Difficulty: the answers to the above must leave you with a product easy to use and reliable enough to compete with doing approximately zero work to use and maintain a Facebook account. Plus it needs to offer at least as many features. I've for some time wanted a kind of private swarm-storage product (probably using IPFS, I guess, for lack of alternatives) that lets you plug in a new node at a friend/relative's house with a few TB of storage, put in the credentials (keys, bootstrap node[s]) for the swarm, and has it intelligently back up some amount of content from the network such that everything has at least X copies (3, say) while making all the rest available (that's where IPFS helps) on request, with some interface for adding content to the swarm from any node. The above problems have kept me from attempting even this task. A social network would be even harder.
stuaxo 9y ago
They do in real life.
timwaagh 9y ago
the benefits are non obvious. social media does not have bandwith issues and few people want to share illegal text/images. so centralized platforms can work almost just as well as decentralized ones. should social networks become subject to a lot of censorship, this will change.
- zeratax 9y ago
  But that's already happening? I constantly on Twitter see "7 replies", but I'm only able to see 2. Lots of users get shadowbanned. Now with perspective ai it looks like this will only increase and all of this is never a user choice, it's always the platform deciding for me what level of toxicity I'm able to handle. And it often plain fails. Lots of false positives. I see this on every platfrom, nontransparent moderation and algorithm filtering everything without my knowledge nor any control. I personally use mastodon daily, I don't know what a platform needs to reach to be successful, but when I use it daily it's successful enough for me. Even the pawoo drama makes it sound like the only reason people in japan use it, is to see lolicon content, but the whole pixiv platform is far more than just lolicon. It's like deviantart full of talented artists that don't draw any lolicon content. This platform just doesn't think of lolicon as taboo. Mastodon is constantly growing and it's not just the pawoo instance.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    >> But that's already happening? I constantly on Twitter see "7 replies", but I'm only able to see 2. Lots of users get shadowbanned. Those are probably locked accounts.
jswizzy 9y ago
Just about everyone I know on Facebook would jump ship if they could. Not a day goes by that I don't notice someone complaining or leaving over anger at Google and Facebook supporting invading their privacy, promoting extremist politics, and censorship of conservative and liberal ideas.
infinity0 9y ago
I've never seen an actual well-thought out technical argument on why decentralised social networks can't work. That's because there isn't one. People who are familiar with the technical issues surrounding this are humble and don't make bogus over-generalised statements like "X can't work [ever, everywhere, in all contexts]". This article is not a well-thought out argument either. It's a bunch of random irrelevant anecdotes with some hand-waving tacked onto the end that the writers though was good to write down here because the same words impressed their friends. The main barriers here actually are: - over-advertising and self-promotion of non-advanced stuff like Diaspora etc that doesn't actually solve any inherently hard problems in this area, wasting people's time especially that of interested people that want to enter the field - lack of funding on solving the hard problems in this field - lack of structured educational material to get good new engineers onto these topics When people say this stuff "can't work", they really have no realistic concept of the amount of actual resources it takes to bring a great idea into reality, and how little resources are being (and have been) fed into this topic that they so over-confidently dismiss "can't work".
- gwenzek 9y ago
  > lack of funding on solving the hard problems in this field Also some of the hard problems like spam detections are only ads related. If you build a decentralized social network you don't face those
  - AndrewDucker 9y ago
    People will still send spam messages, "friend" you with spam profiles, etc.
- inanutshellus 9y ago
  What "advanced stuff" was/is Diaspora lacking for you? The problems I had with it I can't imagine being able to solve technically. It was merely not top-of-mind for the group I set it up for. They came for a little while but weren't inherently invested (e.g. you're "inherently invested" in your football team's communication mechanism. don't log in, and you don't find out about a schedule change). Instead it was just a group of friends I wanted to "facebook-verb-without-facebook-noun with". Point is, Diaspora worked for me technically, just not socially. What was it missing in your eyes?
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martindale 9y ago
Reading the article now, but I can tell you that this is almost certainly false.
deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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rainbowmverse 9y ago
Cross-posting from Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/web/statuses/18182566 https://mastodon.social/web/statuses/18182566 Another tech media article misunderstanding Mastodon as a Twitter competitor. They can't understand Mastodon because they can't imagine a technology that doesn't cater to them. Tech media personalities can't understand a world where their opinion means less than that of a random furry.
arkh 9y ago
Here is the problem I have with most advertised decentralized social networks. Their only added value is being decentralized. Decentralized twitter / facebook / instagram. What do you gain from using those decentralized things? Nothing aside from being a hipster. And you lose your current social connections. Even worse, decentralized solutions existed before and are still available: blog software, bulletin boards, IRC, even mails. So if you want people to create their own hubs they should get something for their effort. I don't have a solution there but something as stupid as being able to watch some show with 6 or 8 participants all over the world could be a start. Even the old Google Wave (I think it was), the mix of chat, code, wiki which was too slow for a webapp at the time should be reconsidered. Maybe with native clients.
- tyywebb 9y ago
  You gain control over the platform you're using. That's illustrated in the first paragraph of the Wired article. People are getting pretty sick of getting pushed around by these mega corporations whether it's when they're telling you what software you're allowed to have on your cell phone or what you're allowed to write on a social media site. I think the next decade is going to be defined by an explosion in decentralized technologies.
- ionised 9y ago
  The fact that it is decentralised is the main benefit I am interested in.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  What do you gain from a democracy over a monarchy or a dictatorship? The only added value is being decentralized. Yes, the "only" added value of decentralized power structures is their decentralization. And the absense of all the terrible effects that centralized power structures tend to have in the long term.
  - always_good 9y ago
    I'll have to pop your analogy bubble and ask the question again: How are you going to convince people that the decentralization of a platform they use to get laid and keep up with friends/family is going to have a meaningful impact on their lives? And how are you going to do it to the point where you can cause an exodus large enough to cause any real change? You're going to have to do better than draw some analogies to monarchies on Hacker News. And things like "but they sell your data!" has had no impact beyond desensitizing everyone with Chicken Little'ism.
maufl 9y ago
I don't think it's a technical problem and I think the problems the articel points out are social and economic problems. I once started to design a protocol that could be used to build a decentralized social network. (FOSP https://github.com/maufl/fosp-specification https://github.com/maufl/fosp-specification) However, I now think that a peer-to-peer solution would be better, even if it is technically more challenging, as it would not require anybody to run a server and untilize the resources the users already pay for (storage, network connection).
ojr 9y ago
decentralized social networks won't work because in order to keep a business running you need profits or the expectation of profits to acquire the talent needed to provide a nice user experience. Solutions motivated by capitalism will not disappear anytime soon. "But email is decentralized". Actually not true, it is heavily centralized around gmail. Same true with bitcoin, it is centralized around exchanges.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Decentralize the funding; rely on users rather than advertising or VC. Developing Mastodon is now the full-time job of he guy who wrote it, thanks to Patreon. I think he's starting to hire a few people, too. And a lot of Mastodon servers also have their own Patreons to help out with the hosting costs.
  - ojr 9y ago
    To be an accredited investor in the United States, you need to make at least $200,000 a year or have $1,000,000 in assets. Would you rather be funded by users of your app or accredited investors? I think in a free market, the most competitive companies will prefer the second option.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      Except this isn't about companies, but about users. I as a user don't care about what the company prefers, I care about whether their goals align with my goals. And if I fund them, chances are potentially higher that their goals are aligned with my goals.
    - egypturnash 9y ago
      Would you rather be in charge of a machine designed to make money, no matter what the cost to the humans who use it, or would you rather be in charge of something designed to foster useful connections between people? Would you be happier building a social network designed to keep people on it as long as possible, so that it looks like a good way to get a lot of eyeballs in front of the ads posted by your real customers, or would you be happier building one that people interact with for a small portion of their day in ways that generally leave them happier, and then get on with doing whatever else they're gonna do? Not everything needs to be about making as much money as possible. And so far Mastodon has been doing okay by taking a more distributed approach: development is partially funded by users who care to pay something, and partially a volunteer effort by people with enough time to spare; hosting is funded by people spinning up a Mastodon instance for their friends or their community, and if it starts to get to be more than they can handle they close off new signups and/or start asking their users for a few bucks here and there. Mastodon is, thus, not obligated to anyone but Gargron's vision of what it should be, and what the users of his software are willing to support. Sure, it's not gonna make any lists of "ten hottest unicorns in Silicon Valley". Who gives a shit? Would you rather lie there on your deathbed thinking "I sure generated a ton of value for shareholders and helped a racist con-man get elected president", or "I sure helped a ton of people have a lot of conversations and connections"?
Dowwie 9y ago
in other words, the MIT Media Lab is a business accelerator that hasn't figured out the space that Mastadon is operating in and is afraid that Mastadon will succeed
htormey 9y ago
I think viable alternates to Facebook/Twitter have less to do with the underlying technology and are more about attracting audiences not served by these social networks. Hence I think the next viable alternative to twitter/Facebook will probably be a centeralized one that caters to multiple niche communities. Mastodon was released in October 2016, it currently has about 800k users spread across 2000+ servers. Currently the maintainer of mastodon gets ~$2800 from Patreon to host one of the main #mastodon servers & work on the project. Mastodon is kind of like Wordpress for niche communities who want a twitter like experience outside of twitter for 1 reason or other. Right now one of the biggest use cases for mastodon is lolicon in Japan. Here is how much it costs to host your own instance: https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ Let’s contrast mastodon with gab. Gab (centralized) was launched August 2016 has about ~270k users, 3,000+ customers and it just raised $1m. It also gets mainstream media recognition. The main use case for gab is people with political views that were booted off of twitter. Aka free speech. Right now gabs community is not really my cup of tea but I can see why you would use it. I think something like gab has more of a chance of going mainstream by collecting fringe communities effected by stuff like the adpocalypss than mastodon does. I think his mainly because of the problems around federated identity. A good critique of this can be read here: https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e8abb1 https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https://hac...
- aryehof 9y ago
  Is there a need for a more closed group solution for families and immediate friends? Perhaps one based on definable groups and encrypted posts and comments only those members can see?
  - htormey 9y ago
    Maybe. I personally just use Whatsapp and messenger group chats to communicate with my family/friends.
Animats 9y ago
So how would you launch a decentralized social network? You could do what Zuckerberg did. Start with big-name colleges. Call it FratNet. Get a few key fraternities and sororities on board. Each frat has their own node, but it's probably in a data center and costs like a Wordpress site. Offer it on mobile. Log in with face recognition. A key function is a good events calendar and invite system. Then roll it out to other groups which have lots of events, such as churches.
mogpt 9y ago
what a lazy and pessimistic article. evil shit.
sharkhacks 9y ago
The reason distributed/decentralized things fail isn't because of the BS reasons this article gives. In my opinion it is about - Usability: open source UI and UX sucks for the most part... build an amazing UI and user experience and users will come. - Do NOT expect people to download and setup software and run nodes... Can you build it in the universal piece of software that everybody has today.. AKA browser ? I think whoever nails these challenges will win. - I think somebody (maybe me) should build such a 'universal browser' that allows all of these decentralized things to happen. I was thinking Brave would be that browser.. but I'm not sure..
mogpt 9y ago
What a lazy and cynical article. Evil shit.
tyywebb 9y ago
Decentralized anything will never work. Keep your trust in the banks and the corporations and the gov. They would never do anything that wasn't in your best interests.
panglott 9y ago
"Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip, particularly among sailors. It is also the name of a peer-to-peer system ideal for social graphs, identity and messaging. ...Secure Scuttlebutt is also different to federated social networks like Mastodon, Diaspora, GNU social, OStatus. Those technologies are not peer-to-peer, because each component is either a server or a client, but not both." https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html It's also a system with a clear, although niche, use case that adds value in a way that FB wouldn't.
dannyrosen 9y ago
This was discussed at length here [0] where the original link was the origin paper [1] for this wired post. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15055522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15055522 [1]: http://dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/decentralized_web.pdf http://dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/decentralized_web.pdf
Animats 9y ago
The anonymity and spam problem is really tough. Facebook has a "real name" policy for good reasons.
librexpr 9y ago
Let's not forget that just because a network is decentralized, doesn't mean that you have to host your own server. I use mastodon, but I don't host my own server. I just joined one of the many already existing servers. Similarly, email is decentralized, but most people don't host their own servers.
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ddevault 9y ago
I think a major "innovation" from Mastodon was integrating with the GNUSocial and ActivityPub networks. Mastodon is new and shiny, like many other attempted decentralized social networks have been. But what's crazy is that it's new and shiny and built on the old social networks, so it inherits their communities and reinvigorates the old communities. This novel approach to "make a new social network" contributes greatly to Mastodon's success imo. I think we should keep trying. All private internet services are doomed to die. It's inevitable. Only decentralized services can live on and keep us truly free.
gwbas1c 9y ago
I've experimented in this space. The biggest challenge, IMO, is that we don't have good federated user authentication. What do I mean? Pretty much all major social networks need to re-invent user authentication, and then taking your profile from one social network to another is a very inconsistent user experience. Can I "friend" a Linkedin user via Facebook? If I sign into other sites via Facebook, they often demand that I enter personal info that I don't want to enter. A decentralized social network needs to be built upon a better authentication system. What we really need is something like government-backed user profiles. Imagine if the US government provided a government-backed user profile. Now imagine that web sites had to allow interaction with government profiles without registering, providing email addresses, ect. That's the point where a decentralized social network could start working. Otherwise, the social networks end up needing to perform services that really are the government's job.

134 points by techmagus 9y ago

Made good points but missed the fact that social networks like Facebook and Google started like decentralised networks today. In the Philippines, Facebook wasn't popular at all when Friendster and MySpace were kicking. It was only after the demise of Friendster, and the MySpace was forgotten, that Facebook gained attention. It's similar for decentralised networks. Secondly, decentralised networks are good as it is. It does not have to be the "next Facebook" or the "next Twitter", although many such networks and writers dubbed these as such. Slow growth and adoption is better than an explosive one. These networks are being developed generally for free and offered for free, with no ads whatsoever even. The developers are few and they do it during their free time. Thus a slow adoption is to its advantage. I use decentralized networks, even used to run my own instance.

codewithcheese 9y ago

What short sighted click bait. Steem has already solved or partially solved most of these problems and we haven't even scratched the service. Read the Steem white paper [1] if you want your mind blown. [1] https://steem.io https://steem.io

yborg 9y ago
Now if we could only solve the shilling problem on social networks. Your whitepaper blew my mind in trying to bootstrap YACC via the hook of a decentralized social network. I'd say odds of long-term success are zero here, but points for originality.
- Kiro 9y ago
  Please do some research before posting nonsense comments. Steemit is a pretty big community already, with a thriving ecosystem. Go to https://steemit.com/ https://steemit.com/ to see for yourself. Steem is just the blockchain/cryptocurrency, while Steemit is the actual community front-end on top of it. There's no shilling going on here. Just a user recommending it.
deleted 9y ago
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cetra3 9y ago
It's decentralized but needs: - My Email Address - My Phone Number Not really the sort of decentralized I was hoping for..
- Kiro 9y ago
  You can spin up a node or use a wallet to create an account directly on the Steem blockchain instead of doing it through the Steemit webpage.
  - cetra3 9y ago
    If that's an option I haven't found it from a quick glance on the website. I just followed what was there without looking too deeply into it. Maybe if that's something you can do, there should be a clear process written up somewhere
    - codewithcheese 9y ago
      Anon Steem makes it easier for you to create an account anonymously. https://anon.steem.network/ https://anon.steem.network/ You can create an account through steem connect if you have a friend with steem https://steemit.com/news/@timcliff/new-tool-from-busy-org-create-new-steem-blockchain-accounts-with-steemconnect https://steemit.com/news/@timcliff/new-tool-from-busy-org-cr... For advanced users you can do the steem account creation transation yourself using the steem cli
    - Kiro 9y ago
      Steemit is not aimed at advanced users. Most probably don't even know that it's powered by a blockchain other than on a buzzword level. There are plenty of guides how to work with the Steem blockchain directly posted as blog posts on the blockchain itself. :)
  - dspillett 9y ago
    I've only scanned the "how to build" documentation but from what I saw there is only information on producing a test network not joining the public blockchain? Is there a set of instructions for hosting your own "real" node? (I've not read the white paper or other documentation so the info may be buried in there, I'm unlikely to find time for that in the near future though so asking out of "laziness" in case you have a quick answer to give)
amelius 9y ago
I wonder if the concepts in Steem could be applied to the real economy, to arrive at a more fair distribution of wealth.
- tyywebb 9y ago
  That would be interesting. Basically instead of companies existing, make every project in the world an open source project on a blockchain and people get compensated for contributing directly as a consequence of how the blockchain works.
mannigfaltig 9y ago
What are the key reasons someone should go to Steem rather than to some existing social platform? Steem will likely be slower and the barriers to contribute will likely be higher. Secondly, do you think it is a good basis for building communities if everything is associated with monetary rewards? Sites like Reddit are exactly enjoyable because, most of the time, reward is only imaginary, just like in real-world gatherings of people: It is about having a good time rather than about an exchange of money. Thirdly, how do you ensure that the things people post on Steem are their own work, especially if the data is hosted elsewhere, e.g. on YouTube. There will probably be massive, irreversible thefts of intellectual property (a.k.a. reposters, but with actual money involved). Conversely, a lot of valuable content comes actually from reposting and "karma theft" (which is what linking e.g. a blog article from someone else actually is). Fourthly, how do you avoid fraud as for example often found on Kickstarter? Kickstarter actually has a review process and even they are not fully equipped for it. I am not seeing reliable moderation ever scale enough such that it can withstand the likely immense fraudulent interests due to the monetary incentives.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > There will probably be massive, irreversible thefts of intellectual property (a.k.a. reposters, but with actual money involved). Whatever this might be, it's not theft. And it might just be something we have to accept if we don't want to live in a de-facto police state. > Conversely, a lot of valuable content comes actually from reposting and "karma theft" (which is what linking e.g. a blog article from someone else actually is). That's a fallacy, though pretty common. People who connect other people with stuff those other people want do provide a useful service, and being rewarded for a useful service is not obviously a bad idea, let alone some sort of "theft". > Fourthly, how do you avoid fraud as for example often found on Kickstarter? Kickstarter actually has a review process and even they are not fully equipped for it. I am not seeing reliable moderation ever scale enough such that it can withstand the likely immense fraudulent interests due to the monetary incentives. Just like everywhere else in life? You don't need a big brother managing every step you take in order to avoid fraud.
- Kiro 9y ago
  I need to be honest, for me it was definitely the fact that you can earn money for just writing blog posts and curating. Also that it's so transparent what people make, it really motivates you to post when you see someone earn thousands of dollars from one post. I did however find out that the community is great, made many new friends and read a lot of interesting posts. Lately it looks like it has been kind of overrun with people from China or third-world countries, which is interesting, but sometimes the posts are not translated and the steemit.com site does a poor job of managing different languages. I haven't been active on Steemit for more than a year but thinking of going back since I miss it. It's very consuming though, a lot more than Facebook. Since there's a monetary reward on everything you do it feels like "working" even when you're mindlessly upvoting stuff. I used to spend many hours a day just reading, jotting on a new blog post or connect with fellow steemians on the official chat server.
crucialfelix 9y ago
I find it and the white paper I interesting. It is very well thought out. I joined. But the stink of money is everywhere and this is distracting. Reddit and HN have worthless internet karma points but we can laugh it off. Making it explicit that we are whoring ourselves in a market pushes it too far I think. It makes us self conscious and that is an impediment to creative discussion. But something will come out of these attempts. Something with tokens and systems and weird rules. It's a game. We just need to find the right game to play in.

deleted 9y ago

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nippples 9y ago

GNU Social is low traffic, but it's alive and well.

mattl 9y ago
And GNU social and Mastodon are two different projects that speak OStatus. I'm pleased to see Mastodon's success, and while I'm basically done with GNU these days, I hope to see the two projects continue to cooperate on the OStatus network.

soufron 9y ago

Like email or Google Docs? LOL.

HugoDaniel 9y ago
Google Docs is centralized. Maybe you meant Google Reader ?

panic 9y ago

None of the reasons they give -- difficulty of user acquisition, conflict between security and convenience, curation, or economies of scale -- are fundamental obstacles to making a decentralized social network. Mastodon has found some success despite facing the same problems.

albertgoeswoof 9y ago
Mastodon is not successful by any metric compared with even the smallest social networks, let alone the giants
- panic 9y ago
  Where would you find these metrics? Looking at the federated timeline, I see posts appearing at a pretty fast rate (more than one per second), though most of them are in Japanese.
  - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    go and ask everyone you meet in person today if they've heard of mastodon
    - zemnl 9y ago
      I bet that few of them will reply that it is an extinct animal, some others that it is a cool band, and most of them that they have never heard of such a thing.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - dest 9y ago
    It's very popular in Japan because of the "lolicon" phenomenon (cultural sexy drawings of youth people), which is not accepted by Twitter because of the occidental culture in which this is a taboo.
9y ago

vasilakisfil 9y ago

The same could have been said 30 years ago for an open source OS.

beagle3 9y ago
or that decentralized social network called 'email'.
- threeseed 9y ago
  Email is not a social network. It is equivalent to a text message or phone call.
  - DeepYogurt 9y ago
    You might call it a network of social connections.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Also, people call e.g. Snapchat a social network. But by this definition, e-mail is much more of a social network than Snapchat.
      - DeepYogurt 9y ago
        I guess that gets at the point that the term social network is poorly defined.
ab5tract 9y ago
Then again, we're still waiting for the year of the Linux Desktop.
- executesorder66 9y ago
  Yeah, but at least that open source OS dominates on literally every other platform in the world.

CalRobert 9y ago

Except in one sense, it already does. I have some friends with blogs. Those blogs have RSS feeds. Feeds of "news", you might say. I load up sageRSS in Firefox, see friends who have new content in bold, and get their news. A "news feed", you might even say. Admittedly I can't easily use that to deduce that x is friends with y is friends with z, or (easily) get a map of where all of my friends went on vacation last year, but I kind of think that's a good thing.

albertgoeswoof 9y ago
this is kind of dying though, or at least flat in terms of growth overall

nstart 9y ago

Just in case any bright eyed hopeful person is reading this, please don't think "ah shucks" and go away. Some of the biggest things in the internet including the protocols the internet lives on were never envisioned as something that would change the life of billions of people. They were initially created to solve a problem for a small group and then grew into something much bigger over time. Please please don't back away from this problem just because some article says it's going to be challenging. Solve it for yourself. Post on your own blogs on your own servers. Solve it for others. Help others get set up with their own servers. Create solutions for people Make attempts at creating decentralized solutions. Even if a 1000 people use it, someday we might crack the code to getting people off the walled gardens. Basically, if that article sounded like a demotivating blow to your hopes, please flip the bird at it, and keep working to solve this problem.

2sk21 9y ago
You are right - after reading this article, it just seemed to confirm my opinion the decentralized networks don't work but we ought not to give up.
- pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
  decentralized networks only work to connect centralized nodes... there is always a local authority. a 51% attack allows anyone to disrupt the larger network, so local nodes get more and more locked down to prevent that. even 5% network attacks could still sway opinion or spam and disrupt many local nodes, so the centralized nodes lock down further. we can't have nice things because assholes are allowed to live. you're all idiots.
scandox 9y ago
I'd like to add one remark to this: everything doesn't have to be huge. We don't have to deal always in millions and billions. Small groups. Even individuals. What they do is meaningful. What we do is not pointless just because it doesn't create some massive impact.
- 9y ago

dest 9y ago

I use Diaspora* as a blogging platform. The social interactions are a plus. It works well

edhelas 9y ago

Decentralized social networks aren't working for now because they reinvent their own protocol each time which creates fragmentation and incompatibilities between the platforms. I think that decentralized social network projects should relies on existing standards and help with their development. That's why I'm working on Movim (https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/) for several years now, which is fully based on XMPP and is de facto compatible with many other clients and services out there.

leoc 9y ago
> Decentralized social networks aren't working for now because they reinvent their own protocol each time which creates fragmentation and incompatibilities between the platforms. Recall that all computing problems are solved by adding more abstraction ( ;) ) and not all problems yield to a direct attack with the current tools. Maybe the point of maximum leverage here is actually the problem that interoperation between different protocols is too difficult?
- edhelas 9y ago
  The interoperability between the protocols is indeed difficult. But pushing a standard protocol is, I think, the best way to promote this compatibility. Imagine if we didn't have a standard protocol for emails (SMTP/IMAP/POP) but instead several protocols built using JSON on top of HTTP. We would have to take most of our time to work on broken transport libraries and fix incompatibility issues between all those solutions. Hopefully we have a standard (even if it's not the best one) and we can "just" build on top using the many existing libraries and projects out there. I think that such "social standard" should be build on Internet protocols (TCP/TLS/DNS/IP…) and not Web only (HTTP), even if it's "easier". Also instead of re-starting from scratch I prefer to improve something existing like XMPP that have flaws but is already an industry standard with a strong community, many libraries/clients and servers deployed all across the world.
lazyjones 9y ago
> Decentralized social networks aren't working for now because they reinvent their own protocol each time nope... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago

"People do not want to operate their own servers" ... oh, how much I hate that argument. There are so many baseless assumptions in there. What does "operate a server" even mean? Is "loading a web page that accepts WebRTC requests" "operating a server"? Obviously, what people mean is some sort of "people don't want to learn how to manage the installation and configuration of a linux distribution on the command line". Which probably is true--but also completely irrelevant. Arguably, home routers are servers. People routinely "operate" home routers. So, people routinely operate their own servers. Yes, usability might need to be improved. But obviously, the first generations of new technological ideas are built by and for enthusiasts and thus require a bit more motivation to get started. There is absolutely no reason to think that that is therefore an inherent property of the idea itself.

gwenzek 9y ago
Totally agree with you. I think a successful decentralized network should come with pre-configured Raspberry Pi that would act as a web server hosting the user pictures, contacts… And maybe a bit of friends data for backup.
- ashark 9y ago
  1) What happens when it breaks? If you plug in a new one, will it auto-restore? Where from? 2) Updates. How do they happen, who does them? What about when they go wrong? What about 5 years in when there are three models of the device (or way, way more if it's not proprietary) and an update goes out that bricks one? Difficulty: the answers to the above must leave you with a product easy to use and reliable enough to compete with doing approximately zero work to use and maintain a Facebook account. Plus it needs to offer at least as many features. I've for some time wanted a kind of private swarm-storage product (probably using IPFS, I guess, for lack of alternatives) that lets you plug in a new node at a friend/relative's house with a few TB of storage, put in the credentials (keys, bootstrap node[s]) for the swarm, and has it intelligently back up some amount of content from the network such that everything has at least X copies (3, say) while making all the rest available (that's where IPFS helps) on request, with some interface for adding content to the swarm from any node. The above problems have kept me from attempting even this task. A social network would be even harder.

stuaxo 9y ago

They do in real life.

timwaagh 9y ago

the benefits are non obvious. social media does not have bandwith issues and few people want to share illegal text/images. so centralized platforms can work almost just as well as decentralized ones. should social networks become subject to a lot of censorship, this will change.

zeratax 9y ago
But that's already happening? I constantly on Twitter see "7 replies", but I'm only able to see 2. Lots of users get shadowbanned. Now with perspective ai it looks like this will only increase and all of this is never a user choice, it's always the platform deciding for me what level of toxicity I'm able to handle. And it often plain fails. Lots of false positives. I see this on every platfrom, nontransparent moderation and algorithm filtering everything without my knowledge nor any control. I personally use mastodon daily, I don't know what a platform needs to reach to be successful, but when I use it daily it's successful enough for me. Even the pawoo drama makes it sound like the only reason people in japan use it, is to see lolicon content, but the whole pixiv platform is far more than just lolicon. It's like deviantart full of talented artists that don't draw any lolicon content. This platform just doesn't think of lolicon as taboo. Mastodon is constantly growing and it's not just the pawoo instance.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  >> But that's already happening? I constantly on Twitter see "7 replies", but I'm only able to see 2. Lots of users get shadowbanned. Those are probably locked accounts.

jswizzy 9y ago

Just about everyone I know on Facebook would jump ship if they could. Not a day goes by that I don't notice someone complaining or leaving over anger at Google and Facebook supporting invading their privacy, promoting extremist politics, and censorship of conservative and liberal ideas.

infinity0 9y ago

I've never seen an actual well-thought out technical argument on why decentralised social networks can't work. That's because there isn't one. People who are familiar with the technical issues surrounding this are humble and don't make bogus over-generalised statements like "X can't work [ever, everywhere, in all contexts]". This article is not a well-thought out argument either. It's a bunch of random irrelevant anecdotes with some hand-waving tacked onto the end that the writers though was good to write down here because the same words impressed their friends. The main barriers here actually are: - over-advertising and self-promotion of non-advanced stuff like Diaspora etc that doesn't actually solve any inherently hard problems in this area, wasting people's time especially that of interested people that want to enter the field - lack of funding on solving the hard problems in this field - lack of structured educational material to get good new engineers onto these topics When people say this stuff "can't work", they really have no realistic concept of the amount of actual resources it takes to bring a great idea into reality, and how little resources are being (and have been) fed into this topic that they so over-confidently dismiss "can't work".

gwenzek 9y ago
> lack of funding on solving the hard problems in this field Also some of the hard problems like spam detections are only ads related. If you build a decentralized social network you don't face those
- AndrewDucker 9y ago
  People will still send spam messages, "friend" you with spam profiles, etc.
inanutshellus 9y ago
What "advanced stuff" was/is Diaspora lacking for you? The problems I had with it I can't imagine being able to solve technically. It was merely not top-of-mind for the group I set it up for. They came for a little while but weren't inherently invested (e.g. you're "inherently invested" in your football team's communication mechanism. don't log in, and you don't find out about a schedule change). Instead it was just a group of friends I wanted to "facebook-verb-without-facebook-noun with". Point is, Diaspora worked for me technically, just not socially. What was it missing in your eyes?

deleted 9y ago

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martindale 9y ago

Reading the article now, but I can tell you that this is almost certainly false.

deleted 9y ago

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deleted 9y ago
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rainbowmverse 9y ago

Cross-posting from Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/web/statuses/18182566 https://mastodon.social/web/statuses/18182566 Another tech media article misunderstanding Mastodon as a Twitter competitor. They can't understand Mastodon because they can't imagine a technology that doesn't cater to them. Tech media personalities can't understand a world where their opinion means less than that of a random furry.

arkh 9y ago

Here is the problem I have with most advertised decentralized social networks. Their only added value is being decentralized. Decentralized twitter / facebook / instagram. What do you gain from using those decentralized things? Nothing aside from being a hipster. And you lose your current social connections. Even worse, decentralized solutions existed before and are still available: blog software, bulletin boards, IRC, even mails. So if you want people to create their own hubs they should get something for their effort. I don't have a solution there but something as stupid as being able to watch some show with 6 or 8 participants all over the world could be a start. Even the old Google Wave (I think it was), the mix of chat, code, wiki which was too slow for a webapp at the time should be reconsidered. Maybe with native clients.

tyywebb 9y ago
You gain control over the platform you're using. That's illustrated in the first paragraph of the Wired article. People are getting pretty sick of getting pushed around by these mega corporations whether it's when they're telling you what software you're allowed to have on your cell phone or what you're allowed to write on a social media site. I think the next decade is going to be defined by an explosion in decentralized technologies.
ionised 9y ago
The fact that it is decentralised is the main benefit I am interested in.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
What do you gain from a democracy over a monarchy or a dictatorship? The only added value is being decentralized. Yes, the "only" added value of decentralized power structures is their decentralization. And the absense of all the terrible effects that centralized power structures tend to have in the long term.
- always_good 9y ago
  I'll have to pop your analogy bubble and ask the question again: How are you going to convince people that the decentralization of a platform they use to get laid and keep up with friends/family is going to have a meaningful impact on their lives? And how are you going to do it to the point where you can cause an exodus large enough to cause any real change? You're going to have to do better than draw some analogies to monarchies on Hacker News. And things like "but they sell your data!" has had no impact beyond desensitizing everyone with Chicken Little'ism.

maufl 9y ago

I don't think it's a technical problem and I think the problems the articel points out are social and economic problems. I once started to design a protocol that could be used to build a decentralized social network. (FOSP https://github.com/maufl/fosp-specification https://github.com/maufl/fosp-specification) However, I now think that a peer-to-peer solution would be better, even if it is technically more challenging, as it would not require anybody to run a server and untilize the resources the users already pay for (storage, network connection).

ojr 9y ago

decentralized social networks won't work because in order to keep a business running you need profits or the expectation of profits to acquire the talent needed to provide a nice user experience. Solutions motivated by capitalism will not disappear anytime soon. "But email is decentralized". Actually not true, it is heavily centralized around gmail. Same true with bitcoin, it is centralized around exchanges.

egypturnash 9y ago
Decentralize the funding; rely on users rather than advertising or VC. Developing Mastodon is now the full-time job of he guy who wrote it, thanks to Patreon. I think he's starting to hire a few people, too. And a lot of Mastodon servers also have their own Patreons to help out with the hosting costs.
- ojr 9y ago
  To be an accredited investor in the United States, you need to make at least $200,000 a year or have $1,000,000 in assets. Would you rather be funded by users of your app or accredited investors? I think in a free market, the most competitive companies will prefer the second option.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    Except this isn't about companies, but about users. I as a user don't care about what the company prefers, I care about whether their goals align with my goals. And if I fund them, chances are potentially higher that their goals are aligned with my goals.
  - egypturnash 9y ago
    Would you rather be in charge of a machine designed to make money, no matter what the cost to the humans who use it, or would you rather be in charge of something designed to foster useful connections between people? Would you be happier building a social network designed to keep people on it as long as possible, so that it looks like a good way to get a lot of eyeballs in front of the ads posted by your real customers, or would you be happier building one that people interact with for a small portion of their day in ways that generally leave them happier, and then get on with doing whatever else they're gonna do? Not everything needs to be about making as much money as possible. And so far Mastodon has been doing okay by taking a more distributed approach: development is partially funded by users who care to pay something, and partially a volunteer effort by people with enough time to spare; hosting is funded by people spinning up a Mastodon instance for their friends or their community, and if it starts to get to be more than they can handle they close off new signups and/or start asking their users for a few bucks here and there. Mastodon is, thus, not obligated to anyone but Gargron's vision of what it should be, and what the users of his software are willing to support. Sure, it's not gonna make any lists of "ten hottest unicorns in Silicon Valley". Who gives a shit? Would you rather lie there on your deathbed thinking "I sure generated a ton of value for shareholders and helped a racist con-man get elected president", or "I sure helped a ton of people have a lot of conversations and connections"?

Dowwie 9y ago

in other words, the MIT Media Lab is a business accelerator that hasn't figured out the space that Mastadon is operating in and is afraid that Mastadon will succeed

htormey 9y ago

I think viable alternates to Facebook/Twitter have less to do with the underlying technology and are more about attracting audiences not served by these social networks. Hence I think the next viable alternative to twitter/Facebook will probably be a centeralized one that caters to multiple niche communities. Mastodon was released in October 2016, it currently has about 800k users spread across 2000+ servers. Currently the maintainer of mastodon gets ~$2800 from Patreon to host one of the main #mastodon servers & work on the project. Mastodon is kind of like Wordpress for niche communities who want a twitter like experience outside of twitter for 1 reason or other. Right now one of the biggest use cases for mastodon is lolicon in Japan. Here is how much it costs to host your own instance: https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ Let’s contrast mastodon with gab. Gab (centralized) was launched August 2016 has about ~270k users, 3,000+ customers and it just raised $1m. It also gets mainstream media recognition. The main use case for gab is people with political views that were booted off of twitter. Aka free speech. Right now gabs community is not really my cup of tea but I can see why you would use it. I think something like gab has more of a chance of going mainstream by collecting fringe communities effected by stuff like the adpocalypss than mastodon does. I think his mainly because of the problems around federated identity. A good critique of this can be read here: https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e8abb1 https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https://hac...

aryehof 9y ago
Is there a need for a more closed group solution for families and immediate friends? Perhaps one based on definable groups and encrypted posts and comments only those members can see?
- htormey 9y ago
  Maybe. I personally just use Whatsapp and messenger group chats to communicate with my family/friends.

Animats 9y ago

So how would you launch a decentralized social network? You could do what Zuckerberg did. Start with big-name colleges. Call it FratNet. Get a few key fraternities and sororities on board. Each frat has their own node, but it's probably in a data center and costs like a Wordpress site. Offer it on mobile. Log in with face recognition. A key function is a good events calendar and invite system. Then roll it out to other groups which have lots of events, such as churches.

mogpt 9y ago

what a lazy and pessimistic article. evil shit.

sharkhacks 9y ago

The reason distributed/decentralized things fail isn't because of the BS reasons this article gives. In my opinion it is about - Usability: open source UI and UX sucks for the most part... build an amazing UI and user experience and users will come. - Do NOT expect people to download and setup software and run nodes... Can you build it in the universal piece of software that everybody has today.. AKA browser ? I think whoever nails these challenges will win. - I think somebody (maybe me) should build such a 'universal browser' that allows all of these decentralized things to happen. I was thinking Brave would be that browser.. but I'm not sure..

mogpt 9y ago

What a lazy and cynical article. Evil shit.

tyywebb 9y ago

Decentralized anything will never work. Keep your trust in the banks and the corporations and the gov. They would never do anything that wasn't in your best interests.

panglott 9y ago

"Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip, particularly among sailors. It is also the name of a peer-to-peer system ideal for social graphs, identity and messaging. ...Secure Scuttlebutt is also different to federated social networks like Mastodon, Diaspora, GNU social, OStatus. Those technologies are not peer-to-peer, because each component is either a server or a client, but not both." https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html It's also a system with a clear, although niche, use case that adds value in a way that FB wouldn't.

dannyrosen 9y ago

This was discussed at length here [0] where the original link was the origin paper [1] for this wired post. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15055522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15055522 [1]: http://dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/decentralized_web.pdf http://dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/decentralized_web.pdf

Animats 9y ago

The anonymity and spam problem is really tough. Facebook has a "real name" policy for good reasons.

librexpr 9y ago

Let's not forget that just because a network is decentralized, doesn't mean that you have to host your own server. I use mastodon, but I don't host my own server. I just joined one of the many already existing servers. Similarly, email is decentralized, but most people don't host their own servers.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ddevault 9y ago

I think a major "innovation" from Mastodon was integrating with the GNUSocial and ActivityPub networks. Mastodon is new and shiny, like many other attempted decentralized social networks have been. But what's crazy is that it's new and shiny and built on the old social networks, so it inherits their communities and reinvigorates the old communities. This novel approach to "make a new social network" contributes greatly to Mastodon's success imo. I think we should keep trying. All private internet services are doomed to die. It's inevitable. Only decentralized services can live on and keep us truly free.

gwbas1c 9y ago

I've experimented in this space. The biggest challenge, IMO, is that we don't have good federated user authentication. What do I mean? Pretty much all major social networks need to re-invent user authentication, and then taking your profile from one social network to another is a very inconsistent user experience. Can I "friend" a Linkedin user via Facebook? If I sign into other sites via Facebook, they often demand that I enter personal info that I don't want to enter. A decentralized social network needs to be built upon a better authentication system. What we really need is something like government-backed user profiles. Imagine if the US government provided a government-backed user profile. Now imagine that web sites had to allow interaction with government profiles without registering, providing email addresses, ect. That's the point where a decentralized social network could start working. Otherwise, the social networks end up needing to perform services that really are the government's job.