16 ms·

Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

324 points by Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

panarky 9y ago
I see this form of argument a lot: Companies have an {obligation, fiduciary duty} to maximize value for shareholders, therefore they have no choice but to do horrible things to {users, customers, the environment, civic institutions} Presumably, decentralization, federation and open source will eliminate the profit-maximizing corporation, thereby stopping all the horrible things. The problem with this reasoning is that it only addresses one side of a two-sided transaction. The corporation doesn't transact with itself. The other side of the transaction is the user. What if every user was willing to pay $5 per month for a "clean Facebook" without ads, without surveillance, without psychological profiling, without selling private data to malevolent third parties? If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook could continue their current business with the best computer science talent and a global network of data centers. If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook's shareholders would do fabulously well. But of course, that's a ridiculous proposition. Only an infinitesimal number of Facebook's 2.2 billion users are willing to pay for the service. Since a social network only has value to a user when all the user's friends and family are also on the network, a Facebook that only has a few people willing to pay won't be very useful. Advocates of decentralized social networks need to explain (1) who will pay, and (2) how to get enough users to make the network valuable to a typical user. Until we figure that out, we're stuck with social networks that are free for users, monetized with advertising, and regulated by the state.
- AHMagic 9y ago
  We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail. They worked great in 1998. Why can't they work great in 2018?
  - yorwba 9y ago
    There are now phone plans that are paid for by selling your data and sending you spam SMS. There are e-mail providers that operate similarly, and most e-mail addresses are registered with one of them. Those things don't really work for snail mail, but few people use it anymore, because sending a letter costs more and they have come to expect communication not to cost money. The formerly decentralized services are no longer so decentralized since "free of charge, paid for by data and ads" has shown itself to be a viable business model that users love. (Until they understand what's happening, at least.)
    - AHMagic 9y ago
      Your point is valid, but we still live in a world where we can call Verizon phones with AT&T phones; send e-mails to Gmail users with Yahoo; and send mail with UPS instead of USPS. With those means of communication, we still have control over our providers. There is no control within Facebook's ecosystem. Similar with AOL, if you don't use Facebook, you're necessarily out of the loop, and I don't feel comfortable with that.
      - jake-low 9y ago
        > and send mail with UPS instead of USPS Not to detract from your point, just thought you might be interested to know that USPS actually has a legally-protected partial monopoly on the right to carry letters (18 U.S. Code § 1696). An exemption was added in 1979 allowing private carriers to deliver "extremely urgent" mail. This is why UPS and FedEx express mail envelopes bear that text on their front. Apart from this exemption, USPS, FedEx and the like are only allowed to deliver 'parcels', not 'letters', though I'm not sure where the distinction is legally defined. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes
        AHMagic 9y ago
        Interesting, thanks.
      - kodablah 9y ago
        I don't think decentralization just means > 1. That you can use 4 services is not very decentralized.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        While true, I think it is important to emphasize the difference between 4 platforms and 4 carriers. With both postal mail and email, its not just that there are alternative systems, but rather that you as the sender can choose any of the offerings to reach anyone, even if they use a different carrier for their own needs, so there is a lot more competitive pressure on those 4 carriers than with 4 platforms where network effects keep people locked in.
  - pishpash 9y ago
    You pay for all three.
    - AHMagic 9y ago
      The world was better when people paid for communications. It's why the internet was better in 1995. Most of the people who had access needed to afford a landline and likely had to own a home or rent an apartment. The only way kids got online is if a guardian had access. Nowadays, any kid can get online. The range of intelligence and character has expanded dramatically.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    > We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail. I disagree that we currently do. And only agree for email in 1998 when its decentralized nature costed more to the users than the benefit of being decentralized, hence the transition.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      That's only true if you ignore the long-term externalities of centralization.
  - cwyers 9y ago
    E-mail is largely centralized now. There's a handful of major companies who are able to run an e-mail service and communicate with the hordes of GMail's users who are living behind GMail's spam filters. (Spam filters, it should be noted, that make the service usable for most people.) So what happened is that decentralization worked for a moment in time, but as the Internet grew it worked less well, and we reinvented the pre-Internet solutions (BBSes/Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve) on top of the open Internet.
    - Jansemon 9y ago
      It is unfortunately true that e-mail is mostly centralized (as in even if I don't want to use GMail & Co., I will mostly communicate with people on those bign centralized platforms, thus giving them again my data). But it is absolutely federated - I have the choice of running my own server and can communicate with every other e-mail address on this planet. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to setup - average Joe has no chance to get his own server. On the other hand, for IT people it isn't extremely hard either. Once setup, it is nearly maintenance free... I'm running my (and a company) e-mail server since 2001 and I don't want to miss it. I only once had a problem with being blocked by big sites, after moving to a new server where the IP range has gotten on some blacklists, because of the previous owner. Also never a problem with spam filters. I hope e-mail will never be replaced - or at least there's some new way of communicating federated where every internet user is reachable.
  - lamename 9y ago
    They can work but people have largely moved from them because mobile/Internet based platforms are more convenient. Just as people can travel by horse and carriage but most prefer the convenience of car. This is what happens as technology progresses. I don't think the solution here is to abandon imperfect technology in favor of old, but to improve upon it.
    - AHMagic 9y ago
      I hear what you're saying, but the analogy doesn't hold because we no longer need horses. In order to use Facebook, you have to sign up with an e-mail and typically a phone number (and in many cases, a photo ID, birth certificate, etc.) If we need e-mails and phone numbers to sign up for social media, then we don't actually need the social media. We can go back to simply using the numbers and e-mails.
      - lamename 9y ago
        Of course we don't need it, but the fact that millions use it is the proof that people prefer it....for some reason or another. Added value of some kind. Better to extract the value of Facebook and move forward by eliminating the negative, than revert to something many people find less convenient.
- pishpash 9y ago
  A sharing model where the content you create allows you to access content is viable (see Bittorrent ratios). Facebook created a side market where they made markets to trade user data and targeted ads. That should have never been part of the bargain. It's like getting an ad toolbar from installing Java.
- eitland 9y ago
  > If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook's shareholders would do fabulously well. > But of course, that's a ridiculous proposition. Only an infinitesimal number of Facebook's 2.2 billion users are willing to pay for the service. Well, at least some tens of millions of users seemed to be happy about the idea to pay USD 1 a year for WhatsApp. They were running this operation with something like 50 engineers so it should have been really profitable. Then came Facebook...
  - lrem 9y ago
    WhatsApp without any server-side storage nor content discovery? These are primary requirements towards a social network and they'll cost more than another dollar to fulfil.
    - Tepix 9y ago
      You can rent a dedicated server for less than $10/month that has enough resources for an estimated 100+ users. Heavy users that upload a large amount of data (videos, pictures) may be willing to pay more than casual users.
      - eitland 9y ago
        Seems some people disagree but I think you are right. All chats I've been in on Telegram and Whatsapp over the last few years could be stored in a few gigabytes of disk space. How would I know? I've had a look at what Telegram and WhatsApp stores on my phone.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  What if every user was willing to pay $5 per month for a "clean Facebook"... The problem is that, to a sufficient degree, they're not. Likely because the value proposition (or its assurance) is a hard sell. And that hard sell limits network scale (and hence, value). Mind, even free alternatives have exceptional difficulty in competing with scale. Viz, G+.
kpcyrd 9y ago
Decentralization is mostly about power distribution, it doesn't imply privacy. There are a couple of decentralized projects that are worse for privacy (for the sake of decentralization) and ended up being used for OSINT.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  I don't imply it's about privacy. I talk entirely about power distribution in this article.
  - redthrow 9y ago
    Do people who run the centralised, private Signal app have more power over the user than people who run decentralised, non-private Mastodon instances? Or do Mastodon people say it's strictly for broadcasting and encourage people to use proper end-to-end encrypted messaging apps for private communication?
    - tortasaur 9y ago
      The latter.
- 0xsfv 9y ago
  Decentralization, only by itself, does not imply privacy, agreed. However, it is a step towards it, in the sense of trust distribution.
marknadal 9y ago
Yeah, Mastodon and others are Federated which means the same thing that happened to email (gmail, which everybody uses) will happen there. Instead, we should make the developer tools EASY to create P2P (not federated) decentralized apps. This is what we are working on: http://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8 http://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wit... Also, d.tube is a pretty good decentralized YouTube clone, worth a mention.
danbruc 9y ago
Companies like Facebook, publicly traded, have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Private companies with investors are similarly obligated. There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. Not true. [1] [1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-companies-legally-obligated-to-maximize-profits-for-shareholders https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...
- devmunchies 9y ago
  Even if it were true, couldn’t a company argue that they want to put users before shareholders to prevent a public fallout like we are seeing with Facebook? Which could be seen as risk management.
  - danbruc 9y ago
    If it were true, then there would have to exist at least some framework to judge what counts as maximizing profits. Maximizing the profit this quarter may require a vastly different course of actions than maximizing the profit over the next ten years. So depending on exactly what would fall under maximizing profits, this may or may not be a valid argument But fortunately we don't have to worry about that, the people writing laws are not all idiots and it would be a pretty stupid idea to put requirements into laws that are essentially impossible to fulfill due to a lack of psychic powers and time machines.
snvzz 9y ago
Mastodon does everything signed and unencrypted. This includes followers-only and private messages. I can't in good faith recommend Mastodon.
- kodablah 9y ago
  Pardon my naivete towards Mastodon, but unencrypted at rest (i.e. an implementation thing) or in transit (i.e. TLS not supported in the protocol)?
  - slipstream- 9y ago
    Unencrypted at rest.
  - detaro 9y ago
    Not end-to-end encrypted. TLS is recommended (or even required, not sure), but the instances involved can see the contents of private messages.
    - kodablah 9y ago
      Out of curiosity, if the messages themselves were encrypted externally, would this solve most people's concerns? Or is the metadata that is leaked (I assume to/from, timestamp, size) also unacceptable? Also curious for those that have this beef with Mastodon, would transit anonymity help alleviate some of the concerns w/ data transparency?
      - snvzz 9y ago
        Note metadata includes where someone is posting from. Connect to post something without encryption means your location is revealed to anybody observing the network. This is indeed dangerous.
        daveid 9y ago
        >Connect to post something without encryption means your location is revealed to anybody observing the network. Where are you taking this from? You think connecting to your Mastodon server you have an account on somehow broadcasts to the whole network?
kodablah 9y ago
Lots of people are working on this problem. I too am even trying to spin up something simple on top of Tor v3 hidden services. I think too many implementations are focused on the wrong things. Too many implementations are hung up on the distributed storage part. These can be plugged into abstractions as new ones come about. In the meantime, just because it says "decentralized" doesn't mean that pieces can't be centralized on some people's computers. I think when most people say that they mean off the cloud and into the home. Also, too few implementations care enough about anonymity.
downrightmike 9y ago
Here's a good resource for setting up self-hosted alternatives: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted
- mycloud 9y ago
  There are also projects like https://yunohost.org/ https://yunohost.org/ and https://cloudron.io/ https://cloudron.io/ which aim to lower the technical requirements to get started with selfhosting as well as lower the ongoing maintenance burden.
tmikaeld 9y ago
I think that these points have to click before people move from FB: Simple -> Start the app and commicate (on all devices) Minimum features -> Feed, Chat, Groups, Events, Friends Fast -> No one will use a slow App Ownership -> All self-owned data can be removed from everywhere Decentralized -> And no one else can remove your data Privacy -> With simple sharing control So far, I've not seen anything that has all of these.
- rixrax 9y ago
  >> Decentralized -> And no one else can remove your data So here's the rub: 1) you post stupid stuff, but by the time you realize this, you've already forgotten your password and the account recovery doesn't work, 2) someone gets hold of your account, posts stupid stuff, and 'throws away any means to recover the account', 3) someone posts stupid stuff that is determined to violate law, how do you take that down?
  - confounded 9y ago
    How do you take it down with a centralized system?
  - toolz 9y ago
    It's decentralized so the only person who should be accountable is the poster. if they mess up that's on them and no one else. Who would the state prosecute if not the poster?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- thewarrior 9y ago
  Also : - Handle DMCA notices and law enforcement requests for taking down illegal content. - Hackers compromising accounts. - Private data being compromised because of Wordpress like security bugs. - Spam / Bots spreading junk and fake news. - Permanently deleting content. - Concerns around terrorism, grooming, child pornography etc These problems will become major headaches at scale.
osteele 9y ago
The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.” The argument in the OP article stands without this — it is nearly as bad that companies have incentives to misbehave, as if they were legally obligated to — but there is also room for improvement at the margin, if employees and customers understand that corporate actions are management’s choice; their hands are not tied. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... [2] https://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=13-354 https://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&v...
- Barrin92 9y ago
  It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al. Their business is the elimination of privacy and selling off the data and attention of their users. It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise. Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Their entire business model is based on squeezing as much value as possible out of the limited attention span of consumers.
  - danbruc 9y ago
    Well, they could just make users pay for the service, there is nothing that forces them to collect money from them via the indirect route of ads.
    - Barrin92 9y ago
      Obviously only my personal intuition but I'd wager there's not much of a business in a pay-to-play social network. My FB account is practically on hiatus already and I'd not pay for it. If there would be so much value in a privacy conscious, paid social network that is mass-consumer facing we'd probably have seen it by now.
redthrow 9y ago
It would be more convincing if the author had their Mastodon account info at the bottom, not their Github / Twitter account. Also I'd like to hear the author's thoughts on GPG's viability, as discussed below: https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ Eventually I realized that when I receive a GPG encrypted email, it simply means that the email was written by someone who would voluntarily use GPG. I don’t mean someone who cares about privacy, because I think we all care about privacy. There just seems to be something particular about people who try GPG and conclude that it’s a realistic path to introducing private communication in their lives for casual correspondence with strangers.
- jdiez17 9y ago
  The link next to the bird icon is sircmpwn's Mastodon profile, not his Twitter account.
  - redthrow 9y ago
    > not his Twitter account I stand corrected. I'll have a look at Mastodon.
austincheney 9y ago
Weird... I always thought Google was inescapable, but I cannot get a single data point to display on that tracking map. I should note I am currently (and frequently) signed into Google and Google maps normally seems to know where home is.
- ken 9y ago
  Same. At /maps/timeline it says "Location history is off", so I guess that's something that needs to be enabled.
krupan 9y ago
Facebook should split into Facebook the aggregator and Facebook the content hoster. You could talk about a third piece that is Facebook the content provider, which is for providing things like gifs, templates, memes, emoji, games, and other stuff like that. Because Facebook hasn't completely broken from open web standards those types of content providers already exist today. Aggregators would be where you go to set up your friend list and see your feed. It could look and feel like Facebook does now. It would have an open standard protocol that content hosters would use if they wanted to be aggregated. This could still be an add driven business, but subscription, self hosted, and DIY solutions could exist too. Content hosters could either charge a monthly hosting fee, or they could serve up their own adds. Self hosted and DIY solutions could also exist. The big benefit to this would of course be the competition. Since it's an open standard anyone could be a content host, and anyone could be an aggregator. To make extra sure there is competition, and this could come in a phase two after the initial splitting up of Facebook, there should be open standards for exporting and importing friends, follows, likes, etc. to and from aggregators, and open standards for importing and exporting content from the hosters. Speaking of follows and likes, there could also be aggregator aggregators (AAs). People could opt in to publicly and anonymously share their likes and follows and the AAs would consume those and report on trends that cross aggregator boundaries. Anonymity could be much more protected this way while still giving us that interesting information about what is trending. One tricky part of this is how do I as a content author only allow my friends to see certain posts of mine? It would have to be with encryption. My content provider could keep public keys of my friends and only my friends (well, their aggregators) would be able to decrypt my posts using my friends' private keys. I can see some challenges and holes in this, but it doesn't seem any worse overall than how Facebook protects privacy now. Open implementations and peer review could get us to better-than-Facebook privacy quickly.
matado 9y ago
xirleide 2525674 -433453
danielrhodes 9y ago
This article like so many others perpetuates this idea that Facebook and others are selling your data. You can more or less disprove they are doing this with a little critical thought. Facebook has a disincentive to sell data: if they sold user data, they no longer have exclusive control over it and somebody else can profit off their efforts in its collection. The value of Facebook is they have lots of eyeballs and they have lots of data on what those eyeballs like to see. If they simply sold this to an advertiser, why would the advertiser want to come back and pay them in the future? What they actually do is let advertisers target on this data, but the advertisers never actually have direct access - they can only assume that the users they target are ones that have the attributes they requested. So what is Facebook selling? The same thing any other media platform, from newspapers to TV, is selling: your attention. Are you the product? Kind of. But just like any other marketplace, Facebook knows that if their platform doesn't provide value you're not going to come back and then neither will the advertisers. Personally I think Google has played this balance far worse, by comparison: their interaction time with their users is so small that they have gotten more and more spammy to wedge into the little bit of your attention they get. Facebook gets a lot of user time and thus can be far more judicious on when and how they show you advertisements.
- specialist 9y ago
  How does that distinction changes the OP's thesis?
- sjg007 9y ago
  Well the advertiser needs to reach the customer so that’s why they would come back to the platform.
- crowbahr 9y ago
  Except you're exactly wrong in that Facebook has been directly selling data while Google has not. Cambridge Analytica was crunching specific user data, not just buying aggregate targeted ads. That's what this whole uproar is about: they're allowing wholesale data access, not aggregated targets through their API. Google, whom you criticize, is the one actually only selling aggregates.
HIPisTheAnswer 9y ago
Grep'd the articles and the comments (thus far) and I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned matrix, Check it out - matrix.org PS: Even more importantly, the Host Identity Protocol. The US army has been using it for over 10 years. If that doesnt speak volumes ...
- zaarn 9y ago
  Matrix still has too many problems. Synapse takes a buttload of memory to run (there is even warning in the README.md), all the clients are a joke and E2E encryption isn't part of the protocol, worse, it's an optional setting, not even default for private chats. Last I checked E2E isn't even available for group chats. Plus, the author talks about Mastodon, which solves an entirely different problem than matrix to begin with. Matrix doesn't even support ActivityPub, which is basically the W3C approved standard for federated social activity, it should be easy for Matrix to integrate into the fediverse. Until then I won't consider matrix as a serious solution to anything.
  - mxuribe 9y ago
    To be fair, matrix's synapse server was always only supposed to be the reference server...reference servers aren't always built for top-notch performance, just for admins/implementors to get understanding of protocol, etc. To address performance, the team is busy building a matrix server in Go; see https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite I do agree that mastodon and matrix - of which I'm a fan of both - solve for different scenarios. Mastodon replaces twitter; sort of short social media bursts/broadcasts. While matrix replaces slack (and other chat platforms like xmpp). I've always seen matrix as a modern-day irc; also allowing expansion and enhancement via plugins, and programmability like good ol' irc is/was. ActivityPub was only recently approved, so can't expect every project to instantly support it; though to be fair it has been on many projects' radar well before its approval by w3c. I truthfully haven't followed the latest matrix news, so not sure if support for activitypub is coming soon. I do feel that supporting activityPub really make it that much more powerful of a protocol AND platform...but i'm sure that's not a trivial matter. If you haven't played around with clients for matrix (such as the Riot clients), i suggest you give it a try. Riot keeps getting better and better with each new release.
darklajid 9y ago
Tangential, but what is it with people using German words, randomly? "Achtung" here, I saw some (US, afaict) people on Twitter try to establish "#forwärts" yesterday.. Is there a connection between any recent event and German(y) that I missed?
- qwerty456127 9y ago
  Pourquoi-Pas? Some words, phrases and symbols from foreign languages can become internationally-famous so almost everybody can understand them and also gain meme-like semantic self-emphasize. ¡No pasarán! ॐ PS: I have also heard it's quite popular among French metal bands to use German in their names to sound scarier (e.g. Blut Aus Nord).
coldtea 9y ago
>We don’t want to have our people’s opinions radicalized Why not? Not a fan of the 60s?
CookieMon 9y ago
I would like to decentralize, but projects like Masterdon are not the way forward. If you want to decentralize the servers then you MUST also decouple user accounts from the server they signed up with. Today, if you switch to Masterdon (or perhaps someone you know is running a diaspora node), everything appears to go well until a year from now when the volunteer who was providing the server loses interest or moves on, and your account/photos/journal/social network vanishes. So you start over by creating a new account with another server... tick tick tick, gone. Rinse repeat. Centralized services don't have this problem - even myspace is still up today, meaning this killer problem isn't on our radar when we evaluate things like Masterdon, or promote it. We don't realize this is a temporary arrangement with a clock ticking down to complete account destruction. Hubzilla is the only decentralized social media project I've encountered that tackled this problem and sort of solved it (they call it "nomadic identity"). I hear that needing an architecture able to solve this problem was why when Friendica was gaining popularity, the guy behind it realized the whole concept was a lost cause and subsequently started again with what would later be called Hubzilla. Regardless of whether Hubzilla itself is your cup of tea, separating user accounts from volunteer run servers is necessary before centralized social networks can be challenged, otherwise you just inoculate people against ever leaving the central networks again. (not to suggest this is the only necessary thing, or only hard nut to crack)
- black_puppydog 9y ago
  Actually, what you're describing is a problem of federated services. True decentralization has no servers, and thus none of those problems. Take twister for example [1]: * Identity management via blockchain (one of the use cases where IMHO this is a good, or at least defensible choice). * Metadata storage in a DHT * Content storage in torrent swarms None of this depends on any single peer/server. [1] http://twister.net.co/ http://twister.net.co/
  - CookieMon 9y ago
    > Take twister for example Y'all got any more of them "examples" I'm now aware of two social media alternatives that aren't dead accounts walking. Twister is in beta, but that looks interesting enough to play with and keep an eye on.
amelius 9y ago
But how is federation going to protect my privacy? E.g. will my friends list not end up on different servers of unknown origin?
- Tepix 9y ago
  Only your server needs to know your friends list. Unless you decide to publish this information to your friends. You are right that you are putting a certain amount of trust your friends' server choices. That's why having several trusted, non-commercial entities that run these nodes is important.
mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
Or just build a dapp on eos and solve all the issues at once : decentralize, data ownership, users can make money by choosing what they want to share with advertisers, everyone is essentially an owner.
- mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
  Let users generate tokens based on how much data they choose to share. Advertisers purchase tokens and proceeds are split between token holders based on their share of total tokens. Everyone wins - users are in full control, advertisers reach an audience, everyone gets paid.
erikb 9y ago
This is nice, but also naive. The current battle against data grabs is not about getting rid of data grabs, it's about giving the government control over data grabs, so they can compete with China and Russia when it comes to knowing their citizen. Facebooks problem is that they don't want to give the government this kind of access. So now they get negative PR, regulatory probes, etc. Yes, decentralization would be the right solution. But this will always be discouraged by governments and corps alike, basically by everybody who has already lots of power and wants to have more power over your life. As always you as a single person can choose to either be part of the ant swarm, giving someone else all power over you, but by that sharing in the ant swarms gains and luxuries as long as you are loyal, or by being self reliable but therefore also really be required to build everything by yourself that you really need and want to have. If you decide for the first part there is really no reason not to give the person who has power over you also access to all your data. It's part of how a group works. And if the people at the top don't like you anymore then they will find ways to kick you out no matter what you do or keep secret. On the other hand its also part of the deal that the people above you don't use their power to peek into your life as long as you stay loyal and support their goals. So FB either needs to accept to only live on the fringe instead of being the market dominator, or they need to accept that the government has bigger power and yield to them. The only thing I feel one needs to be wary about is parasites who wants to keep the whole cake without sharing even a little bit with people below them. Trump is one such example. With these people you can't do either of the two paths, there's only the battle for who's stronger. And if you are like most people you don't really enjoy being in a constant struggle for survival. It might very well be that Zuck is fighting against Trump here, and then that's the parasite situation and all Zuck could do is move out of the US, give up that market until Trump is gone again.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

324 points by Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

I see this form of argument a lot: Companies have an {obligation, fiduciary duty} to maximize value for shareholders, therefore they have no choice but to do horrible things to {users, customers, the environment, civic institutions} Presumably, decentralization, federation and open source will eliminate the profit-maximizing corporation, thereby stopping all the horrible things. The problem with this reasoning is that it only addresses one side of a two-sided transaction. The corporation doesn't transact with itself. The other side of the transaction is the user. What if every user was willing to pay $5 per month for a "clean Facebook" without ads, without surveillance, without psychological profiling, without selling private data to malevolent third parties? If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook could continue their current business with the best computer science talent and a global network of data centers. If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook's shareholders would do fabulously well. But of course, that's a ridiculous proposition. Only an infinitesimal number of Facebook's 2.2 billion users are willing to pay for the service. Since a social network only has value to a user when all the user's friends and family are also on the network, a Facebook that only has a few people willing to pay won't be very useful. Advocates of decentralized social networks need to explain (1) who will pay, and (2) how to get enough users to make the network valuable to a typical user. Until we figure that out, we're stuck with social networks that are free for users, monetized with advertising, and regulated by the state.

AHMagic 9y ago
We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail. They worked great in 1998. Why can't they work great in 2018?
- yorwba 9y ago
  There are now phone plans that are paid for by selling your data and sending you spam SMS. There are e-mail providers that operate similarly, and most e-mail addresses are registered with one of them. Those things don't really work for snail mail, but few people use it anymore, because sending a letter costs more and they have come to expect communication not to cost money. The formerly decentralized services are no longer so decentralized since "free of charge, paid for by data and ads" has shown itself to be a viable business model that users love. (Until they understand what's happening, at least.)
  - AHMagic 9y ago
    Your point is valid, but we still live in a world where we can call Verizon phones with AT&T phones; send e-mails to Gmail users with Yahoo; and send mail with UPS instead of USPS. With those means of communication, we still have control over our providers. There is no control within Facebook's ecosystem. Similar with AOL, if you don't use Facebook, you're necessarily out of the loop, and I don't feel comfortable with that.
    - jake-low 9y ago
      > and send mail with UPS instead of USPS Not to detract from your point, just thought you might be interested to know that USPS actually has a legally-protected partial monopoly on the right to carry letters (18 U.S. Code § 1696). An exemption was added in 1979 allowing private carriers to deliver "extremely urgent" mail. This is why UPS and FedEx express mail envelopes bear that text on their front. Apart from this exemption, USPS, FedEx and the like are only allowed to deliver 'parcels', not 'letters', though I'm not sure where the distinction is legally defined. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes
      - AHMagic 9y ago
        Interesting, thanks.
    - kodablah 9y ago
      I don't think decentralization just means > 1. That you can use 4 services is not very decentralized.
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        While true, I think it is important to emphasize the difference between 4 platforms and 4 carriers. With both postal mail and email, its not just that there are alternative systems, but rather that you as the sender can choose any of the offerings to reach anyone, even if they use a different carrier for their own needs, so there is a lot more competitive pressure on those 4 carriers than with 4 platforms where network effects keep people locked in.
- pishpash 9y ago
  You pay for all three.
  - AHMagic 9y ago
    The world was better when people paid for communications. It's why the internet was better in 1995. Most of the people who had access needed to afford a landline and likely had to own a home or rent an apartment. The only way kids got online is if a guardian had access. Nowadays, any kid can get online. The range of intelligence and character has expanded dramatically.
- kodablah 9y ago
  > We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail. I disagree that we currently do. And only agree for email in 1998 when its decentralized nature costed more to the users than the benefit of being decentralized, hence the transition.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    That's only true if you ignore the long-term externalities of centralization.
- cwyers 9y ago
  E-mail is largely centralized now. There's a handful of major companies who are able to run an e-mail service and communicate with the hordes of GMail's users who are living behind GMail's spam filters. (Spam filters, it should be noted, that make the service usable for most people.) So what happened is that decentralization worked for a moment in time, but as the Internet grew it worked less well, and we reinvented the pre-Internet solutions (BBSes/Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve) on top of the open Internet.
  - Jansemon 9y ago
    It is unfortunately true that e-mail is mostly centralized (as in even if I don't want to use GMail & Co., I will mostly communicate with people on those bign centralized platforms, thus giving them again my data). But it is absolutely federated - I have the choice of running my own server and can communicate with every other e-mail address on this planet. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to setup - average Joe has no chance to get his own server. On the other hand, for IT people it isn't extremely hard either. Once setup, it is nearly maintenance free... I'm running my (and a company) e-mail server since 2001 and I don't want to miss it. I only once had a problem with being blocked by big sites, after moving to a new server where the IP range has gotten on some blacklists, because of the previous owner. Also never a problem with spam filters. I hope e-mail will never be replaced - or at least there's some new way of communicating federated where every internet user is reachable.
- lamename 9y ago
  They can work but people have largely moved from them because mobile/Internet based platforms are more convenient. Just as people can travel by horse and carriage but most prefer the convenience of car. This is what happens as technology progresses. I don't think the solution here is to abandon imperfect technology in favor of old, but to improve upon it.
  - AHMagic 9y ago
    I hear what you're saying, but the analogy doesn't hold because we no longer need horses. In order to use Facebook, you have to sign up with an e-mail and typically a phone number (and in many cases, a photo ID, birth certificate, etc.) If we need e-mails and phone numbers to sign up for social media, then we don't actually need the social media. We can go back to simply using the numbers and e-mails.
    - lamename 9y ago
      Of course we don't need it, but the fact that millions use it is the proof that people prefer it....for some reason or another. Added value of some kind. Better to extract the value of Facebook and move forward by eliminating the negative, than revert to something many people find less convenient.
pishpash 9y ago
A sharing model where the content you create allows you to access content is viable (see Bittorrent ratios). Facebook created a side market where they made markets to trade user data and targeted ads. That should have never been part of the bargain. It's like getting an ad toolbar from installing Java.
eitland 9y ago
> If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook's shareholders would do fabulously well. > But of course, that's a ridiculous proposition. Only an infinitesimal number of Facebook's 2.2 billion users are willing to pay for the service. Well, at least some tens of millions of users seemed to be happy about the idea to pay USD 1 a year for WhatsApp. They were running this operation with something like 50 engineers so it should have been really profitable. Then came Facebook...
- lrem 9y ago
  WhatsApp without any server-side storage nor content discovery? These are primary requirements towards a social network and they'll cost more than another dollar to fulfil.
  - Tepix 9y ago
    You can rent a dedicated server for less than $10/month that has enough resources for an estimated 100+ users. Heavy users that upload a large amount of data (videos, pictures) may be willing to pay more than casual users.
    - eitland 9y ago
      Seems some people disagree but I think you are right. All chats I've been in on Telegram and Whatsapp over the last few years could be stored in a few gigabytes of disk space. How would I know? I've had a look at what Telegram and WhatsApp stores on my phone.
dredmorbius 9y ago
What if every user was willing to pay $5 per month for a "clean Facebook"... The problem is that, to a sufficient degree, they're not. Likely because the value proposition (or its assurance) is a hard sell. And that hard sell limits network scale (and hence, value). Mind, even free alternatives have exceptional difficulty in competing with scale. Viz, G+.

kpcyrd 9y ago

Decentralization is mostly about power distribution, it doesn't imply privacy. There are a couple of decentralized projects that are worse for privacy (for the sake of decentralization) and ended up being used for OSINT.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
I don't imply it's about privacy. I talk entirely about power distribution in this article.
- redthrow 9y ago
  Do people who run the centralised, private Signal app have more power over the user than people who run decentralised, non-private Mastodon instances? Or do Mastodon people say it's strictly for broadcasting and encourage people to use proper end-to-end encrypted messaging apps for private communication?
  - tortasaur 9y ago
    The latter.
0xsfv 9y ago
Decentralization, only by itself, does not imply privacy, agreed. However, it is a step towards it, in the sense of trust distribution.

marknadal 9y ago

Yeah, Mastodon and others are Federated which means the same thing that happened to email (gmail, which everybody uses) will happen there. Instead, we should make the developer tools EASY to create P2P (not federated) decentralized apps. This is what we are working on: http://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8 http://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wit... Also, d.tube is a pretty good decentralized YouTube clone, worth a mention.

danbruc 9y ago

Companies like Facebook, publicly traded, have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Private companies with investors are similarly obligated. There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. Not true. [1] [1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-companies-legally-obligated-to-maximize-profits-for-shareholders https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...

devmunchies 9y ago
Even if it were true, couldn’t a company argue that they want to put users before shareholders to prevent a public fallout like we are seeing with Facebook? Which could be seen as risk management.
- danbruc 9y ago
  If it were true, then there would have to exist at least some framework to judge what counts as maximizing profits. Maximizing the profit this quarter may require a vastly different course of actions than maximizing the profit over the next ten years. So depending on exactly what would fall under maximizing profits, this may or may not be a valid argument But fortunately we don't have to worry about that, the people writing laws are not all idiots and it would be a pretty stupid idea to put requirements into laws that are essentially impossible to fulfill due to a lack of psychic powers and time machines.

snvzz 9y ago

Mastodon does everything signed and unencrypted. This includes followers-only and private messages. I can't in good faith recommend Mastodon.

kodablah 9y ago
Pardon my naivete towards Mastodon, but unencrypted at rest (i.e. an implementation thing) or in transit (i.e. TLS not supported in the protocol)?
- slipstream- 9y ago
  Unencrypted at rest.
- detaro 9y ago
  Not end-to-end encrypted. TLS is recommended (or even required, not sure), but the instances involved can see the contents of private messages.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, if the messages themselves were encrypted externally, would this solve most people's concerns? Or is the metadata that is leaked (I assume to/from, timestamp, size) also unacceptable? Also curious for those that have this beef with Mastodon, would transit anonymity help alleviate some of the concerns w/ data transparency?
    - snvzz 9y ago
      Note metadata includes where someone is posting from. Connect to post something without encryption means your location is revealed to anybody observing the network. This is indeed dangerous.
      - daveid 9y ago
        >Connect to post something without encryption means your location is revealed to anybody observing the network. Where are you taking this from? You think connecting to your Mastodon server you have an account on somehow broadcasts to the whole network?

kodablah 9y ago

Lots of people are working on this problem. I too am even trying to spin up something simple on top of Tor v3 hidden services. I think too many implementations are focused on the wrong things. Too many implementations are hung up on the distributed storage part. These can be plugged into abstractions as new ones come about. In the meantime, just because it says "decentralized" doesn't mean that pieces can't be centralized on some people's computers. I think when most people say that they mean off the cloud and into the home. Also, too few implementations care enough about anonymity.

downrightmike 9y ago

Here's a good resource for setting up self-hosted alternatives: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted

mycloud 9y ago
There are also projects like https://yunohost.org/ https://yunohost.org/ and https://cloudron.io/ https://cloudron.io/ which aim to lower the technical requirements to get started with selfhosting as well as lower the ongoing maintenance burden.

tmikaeld 9y ago

I think that these points have to click before people move from FB: Simple -> Start the app and commicate (on all devices) Minimum features -> Feed, Chat, Groups, Events, Friends Fast -> No one will use a slow App Ownership -> All self-owned data can be removed from everywhere Decentralized -> And no one else can remove your data Privacy -> With simple sharing control So far, I've not seen anything that has all of these.

rixrax 9y ago
>> Decentralized -> And no one else can remove your data So here's the rub: 1) you post stupid stuff, but by the time you realize this, you've already forgotten your password and the account recovery doesn't work, 2) someone gets hold of your account, posts stupid stuff, and 'throws away any means to recover the account', 3) someone posts stupid stuff that is determined to violate law, how do you take that down?
- confounded 9y ago
  How do you take it down with a centralized system?
- toolz 9y ago
  It's decentralized so the only person who should be accountable is the poster. if they mess up that's on them and no one else. Who would the state prosecute if not the poster?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
thewarrior 9y ago
Also : - Handle DMCA notices and law enforcement requests for taking down illegal content. - Hackers compromising accounts. - Private data being compromised because of Wordpress like security bugs. - Spam / Bots spreading junk and fake news. - Permanently deleting content. - Concerns around terrorism, grooming, child pornography etc These problems will become major headaches at scale.

osteele 9y ago

The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.” The argument in the OP article stands without this — it is nearly as bad that companies have incentives to misbehave, as if they were legally obligated to — but there is also room for improvement at the margin, if employees and customers understand that corporate actions are management’s choice; their hands are not tied. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... [2] https://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=13-354 https://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&v...

Barrin92 9y ago
It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al. Their business is the elimination of privacy and selling off the data and attention of their users. It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise. Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Their entire business model is based on squeezing as much value as possible out of the limited attention span of consumers.
- danbruc 9y ago
  Well, they could just make users pay for the service, there is nothing that forces them to collect money from them via the indirect route of ads.
  - Barrin92 9y ago
    Obviously only my personal intuition but I'd wager there's not much of a business in a pay-to-play social network. My FB account is practically on hiatus already and I'd not pay for it. If there would be so much value in a privacy conscious, paid social network that is mass-consumer facing we'd probably have seen it by now.

redthrow 9y ago

It would be more convincing if the author had their Mastodon account info at the bottom, not their Github / Twitter account. Also I'd like to hear the author's thoughts on GPG's viability, as discussed below: https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ Eventually I realized that when I receive a GPG encrypted email, it simply means that the email was written by someone who would voluntarily use GPG. I don’t mean someone who cares about privacy, because I think we all care about privacy. There just seems to be something particular about people who try GPG and conclude that it’s a realistic path to introducing private communication in their lives for casual correspondence with strangers.

jdiez17 9y ago
The link next to the bird icon is sircmpwn's Mastodon profile, not his Twitter account.
- redthrow 9y ago
  > not his Twitter account I stand corrected. I'll have a look at Mastodon.

austincheney 9y ago

Weird... I always thought Google was inescapable, but I cannot get a single data point to display on that tracking map. I should note I am currently (and frequently) signed into Google and Google maps normally seems to know where home is.

ken 9y ago
Same. At /maps/timeline it says "Location history is off", so I guess that's something that needs to be enabled.

krupan 9y ago

Facebook should split into Facebook the aggregator and Facebook the content hoster. You could talk about a third piece that is Facebook the content provider, which is for providing things like gifs, templates, memes, emoji, games, and other stuff like that. Because Facebook hasn't completely broken from open web standards those types of content providers already exist today. Aggregators would be where you go to set up your friend list and see your feed. It could look and feel like Facebook does now. It would have an open standard protocol that content hosters would use if they wanted to be aggregated. This could still be an add driven business, but subscription, self hosted, and DIY solutions could exist too. Content hosters could either charge a monthly hosting fee, or they could serve up their own adds. Self hosted and DIY solutions could also exist. The big benefit to this would of course be the competition. Since it's an open standard anyone could be a content host, and anyone could be an aggregator. To make extra sure there is competition, and this could come in a phase two after the initial splitting up of Facebook, there should be open standards for exporting and importing friends, follows, likes, etc. to and from aggregators, and open standards for importing and exporting content from the hosters. Speaking of follows and likes, there could also be aggregator aggregators (AAs). People could opt in to publicly and anonymously share their likes and follows and the AAs would consume those and report on trends that cross aggregator boundaries. Anonymity could be much more protected this way while still giving us that interesting information about what is trending. One tricky part of this is how do I as a content author only allow my friends to see certain posts of mine? It would have to be with encryption. My content provider could keep public keys of my friends and only my friends (well, their aggregators) would be able to decrypt my posts using my friends' private keys. I can see some challenges and holes in this, but it doesn't seem any worse overall than how Facebook protects privacy now. Open implementations and peer review could get us to better-than-Facebook privacy quickly.

matado 9y ago

xirleide 2525674 -433453

danielrhodes 9y ago

This article like so many others perpetuates this idea that Facebook and others are selling your data. You can more or less disprove they are doing this with a little critical thought. Facebook has a disincentive to sell data: if they sold user data, they no longer have exclusive control over it and somebody else can profit off their efforts in its collection. The value of Facebook is they have lots of eyeballs and they have lots of data on what those eyeballs like to see. If they simply sold this to an advertiser, why would the advertiser want to come back and pay them in the future? What they actually do is let advertisers target on this data, but the advertisers never actually have direct access - they can only assume that the users they target are ones that have the attributes they requested. So what is Facebook selling? The same thing any other media platform, from newspapers to TV, is selling: your attention. Are you the product? Kind of. But just like any other marketplace, Facebook knows that if their platform doesn't provide value you're not going to come back and then neither will the advertisers. Personally I think Google has played this balance far worse, by comparison: their interaction time with their users is so small that they have gotten more and more spammy to wedge into the little bit of your attention they get. Facebook gets a lot of user time and thus can be far more judicious on when and how they show you advertisements.

specialist 9y ago
How does that distinction changes the OP's thesis?
sjg007 9y ago
Well the advertiser needs to reach the customer so that’s why they would come back to the platform.
crowbahr 9y ago
Except you're exactly wrong in that Facebook has been directly selling data while Google has not. Cambridge Analytica was crunching specific user data, not just buying aggregate targeted ads. That's what this whole uproar is about: they're allowing wholesale data access, not aggregated targets through their API. Google, whom you criticize, is the one actually only selling aggregates.

HIPisTheAnswer 9y ago

Grep'd the articles and the comments (thus far) and I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned matrix, Check it out - matrix.org PS: Even more importantly, the Host Identity Protocol. The US army has been using it for over 10 years. If that doesnt speak volumes ...

zaarn 9y ago
Matrix still has too many problems. Synapse takes a buttload of memory to run (there is even warning in the README.md), all the clients are a joke and E2E encryption isn't part of the protocol, worse, it's an optional setting, not even default for private chats. Last I checked E2E isn't even available for group chats. Plus, the author talks about Mastodon, which solves an entirely different problem than matrix to begin with. Matrix doesn't even support ActivityPub, which is basically the W3C approved standard for federated social activity, it should be easy for Matrix to integrate into the fediverse. Until then I won't consider matrix as a serious solution to anything.
- mxuribe 9y ago
  To be fair, matrix's synapse server was always only supposed to be the reference server...reference servers aren't always built for top-notch performance, just for admins/implementors to get understanding of protocol, etc. To address performance, the team is busy building a matrix server in Go; see https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite I do agree that mastodon and matrix - of which I'm a fan of both - solve for different scenarios. Mastodon replaces twitter; sort of short social media bursts/broadcasts. While matrix replaces slack (and other chat platforms like xmpp). I've always seen matrix as a modern-day irc; also allowing expansion and enhancement via plugins, and programmability like good ol' irc is/was. ActivityPub was only recently approved, so can't expect every project to instantly support it; though to be fair it has been on many projects' radar well before its approval by w3c. I truthfully haven't followed the latest matrix news, so not sure if support for activitypub is coming soon. I do feel that supporting activityPub really make it that much more powerful of a protocol AND platform...but i'm sure that's not a trivial matter. If you haven't played around with clients for matrix (such as the Riot clients), i suggest you give it a try. Riot keeps getting better and better with each new release.

darklajid 9y ago

Tangential, but what is it with people using German words, randomly? "Achtung" here, I saw some (US, afaict) people on Twitter try to establish "#forwärts" yesterday.. Is there a connection between any recent event and German(y) that I missed?

qwerty456127 9y ago
Pourquoi-Pas? Some words, phrases and symbols from foreign languages can become internationally-famous so almost everybody can understand them and also gain meme-like semantic self-emphasize. ¡No pasarán! ॐ PS: I have also heard it's quite popular among French metal bands to use German in their names to sound scarier (e.g. Blut Aus Nord).

coldtea 9y ago

>We don’t want to have our people’s opinions radicalized Why not? Not a fan of the 60s?

CookieMon 9y ago

I would like to decentralize, but projects like Masterdon are not the way forward. If you want to decentralize the servers then you MUST also decouple user accounts from the server they signed up with. Today, if you switch to Masterdon (or perhaps someone you know is running a diaspora node), everything appears to go well until a year from now when the volunteer who was providing the server loses interest or moves on, and your account/photos/journal/social network vanishes. So you start over by creating a new account with another server... tick tick tick, gone. Rinse repeat. Centralized services don't have this problem - even myspace is still up today, meaning this killer problem isn't on our radar when we evaluate things like Masterdon, or promote it. We don't realize this is a temporary arrangement with a clock ticking down to complete account destruction. Hubzilla is the only decentralized social media project I've encountered that tackled this problem and sort of solved it (they call it "nomadic identity"). I hear that needing an architecture able to solve this problem was why when Friendica was gaining popularity, the guy behind it realized the whole concept was a lost cause and subsequently started again with what would later be called Hubzilla. Regardless of whether Hubzilla itself is your cup of tea, separating user accounts from volunteer run servers is necessary before centralized social networks can be challenged, otherwise you just inoculate people against ever leaving the central networks again. (not to suggest this is the only necessary thing, or only hard nut to crack)

black_puppydog 9y ago
Actually, what you're describing is a problem of federated services. True decentralization has no servers, and thus none of those problems. Take twister for example [1]: * Identity management via blockchain (one of the use cases where IMHO this is a good, or at least defensible choice). * Metadata storage in a DHT * Content storage in torrent swarms None of this depends on any single peer/server. [1] http://twister.net.co/ http://twister.net.co/
- CookieMon 9y ago
  > Take twister for example Y'all got any more of them "examples" I'm now aware of two social media alternatives that aren't dead accounts walking. Twister is in beta, but that looks interesting enough to play with and keep an eye on.

amelius 9y ago

But how is federation going to protect my privacy? E.g. will my friends list not end up on different servers of unknown origin?

Tepix 9y ago
Only your server needs to know your friends list. Unless you decide to publish this information to your friends. You are right that you are putting a certain amount of trust your friends' server choices. That's why having several trusted, non-commercial entities that run these nodes is important.

mrhappyunhappy 9y ago

Or just build a dapp on eos and solve all the issues at once : decentralize, data ownership, users can make money by choosing what they want to share with advertisers, everyone is essentially an owner.

mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
Let users generate tokens based on how much data they choose to share. Advertisers purchase tokens and proceeds are split between token holders based on their share of total tokens. Everyone wins - users are in full control, advertisers reach an audience, everyone gets paid.

erikb 9y ago

This is nice, but also naive. The current battle against data grabs is not about getting rid of data grabs, it's about giving the government control over data grabs, so they can compete with China and Russia when it comes to knowing their citizen. Facebooks problem is that they don't want to give the government this kind of access. So now they get negative PR, regulatory probes, etc. Yes, decentralization would be the right solution. But this will always be discouraged by governments and corps alike, basically by everybody who has already lots of power and wants to have more power over your life. As always you as a single person can choose to either be part of the ant swarm, giving someone else all power over you, but by that sharing in the ant swarms gains and luxuries as long as you are loyal, or by being self reliable but therefore also really be required to build everything by yourself that you really need and want to have. If you decide for the first part there is really no reason not to give the person who has power over you also access to all your data. It's part of how a group works. And if the people at the top don't like you anymore then they will find ways to kick you out no matter what you do or keep secret. On the other hand its also part of the deal that the people above you don't use their power to peek into your life as long as you stay loyal and support their goals. So FB either needs to accept to only live on the fringe instead of being the market dominator, or they need to accept that the government has bigger power and yield to them. The only thing I feel one needs to be wary about is parasites who wants to keep the whole cake without sharing even a little bit with people below them. Trump is one such example. With these people you can't do either of the two paths, there's only the battle for who's stronger. And if you are like most people you don't really enjoy being in a constant struggle for survival. It might very well be that Zuck is fighting against Trump here, and then that's the parasite situation and all Zuck could do is move out of the US, give up that market until Trump is gone again.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]