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Maybe that there is a hugely popular free, zero-installation social network as Diaspora's primary competitor?

by jarin 16y ago

loup-vaillant 16y ago
Free? Free? Let me put it this way. Say you have a Facebook account. Say you use it as intended: by doing most of your (semi) private communication through it. Now, how much would I have to pay you for you to surrender a copy of your Facebook account, with your wall, your past conversations, and a copy of what your friends let you see? Promise, I won't do anything bad, but please sign this little paper that let me to, just in case. That's the real price of using Facebook. Either you really think your price is $0, or you didn't think this through (most people don't, which is why I think Facebook is so popular). My price is $you_can't_afford_it. (Edit: I forgot to mention advertisements, but I don't know how much they really cost me.)
- jarin 16y ago
  Diaspora is asking users to do the exact same thing: give up their Facebook accounts and start over on Diaspora. In order for that to happen, there needs to be a serious incentive for users to move over. "It's open source" is not going to cut it for anyone but a subset of techies. Data portability probably won't be a big incentive for most people either, considering you can't even get them to back up their hard drives. Although I think it is a pretty cool idea (and I would like to have one), I have serious doubts that "you can pay us for a thing that you plug into your wall and your profile lives on it" will be much of a sales point for most people either.
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    Fair points. However… (1) Diaspora does not ask you to surrender your data to anyone. You host it yourself. At home. Now there's still the switching busyness. As far as I know, Diaspora is shall communicate with existing social networks, and of automatic import for your remote data. So, the transition really amounts to by the FreedomBox, plug it in, and push a few buttons. From there you feel no change, except for the eye candy. No change, no cost. Sure, Zuck will still spy on you while your friends are still at Facebook, but as they move, he progressively won't be able to. The same mechanism can apply to gmail: when you move out, you can still send and receive emails, and you are spied by Google when you communicate with a gmail user (but only then). I glossed over encryption, but that's the idea. (2) Well, you nailed it: convenience trumps everything. It's like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but for the "average consumer". Concrete and immediate needs, like convenience, are at the bottom. More abstract and remote needs, like freedom, are at the top. That's not how it should be, but I'm a bit guilty of this myself. So, I agree that if the FreedomBox isn't as convenient as services on the cloud, it won't be used. I just believe that it can be. Heck it will even do automatic distributed backup. It could even do High Availability with your mail server (and your web servers if we manage to actually change HTTP to look up srv records). Now, I reckon the FreedomBox is like Diaspora 2 months ago: vaporware. For now, we can only wait, see, and contribute. But I'm confident. An Iphone-like success in 2 years from now as predicted by Eben Moglen seems actually quite realistic.

Maybe that there is a hugely popular free, zero-installation social network as Diaspora's primary competitor?

by jarin 16y ago

Maybe that there is a hugely popular free, zero-installation social network as Diaspora's primary competitor?

Free? Free? Let me put it this way. Say you have a Facebook account. Say you use it as intended: by doing most of your (semi) private communication through it. Now, how much would I have to pay you for you to surrender a copy of your Facebook account, with your wall, your past conversations, and a copy of what your friends let you see? Promise, I won't do anything bad, but please sign this little paper that let me to, just in case. That's the real price of using Facebook. Either you really think your price is $0, or you didn't think this through (most people don't, which is why I think Facebook is so popular). My price is $you_can't_afford_it. (Edit: I forgot to mention advertisements, but I don't know how much they really cost me.)

jarin 16y ago
Diaspora is asking users to do the exact same thing: give up their Facebook accounts and start over on Diaspora. In order for that to happen, there needs to be a serious incentive for users to move over. "It's open source" is not going to cut it for anyone but a subset of techies. Data portability probably won't be a big incentive for most people either, considering you can't even get them to back up their hard drives. Although I think it is a pretty cool idea (and I would like to have one), I have serious doubts that "you can pay us for a thing that you plug into your wall and your profile lives on it" will be much of a sales point for most people either.
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  Fair points. However… (1) Diaspora does not ask you to surrender your data to anyone. You host it yourself. At home. Now there's still the switching busyness. As far as I know, Diaspora is shall communicate with existing social networks, and of automatic import for your remote data. So, the transition really amounts to by the FreedomBox, plug it in, and push a few buttons. From there you feel no change, except for the eye candy. No change, no cost. Sure, Zuck will still spy on you while your friends are still at Facebook, but as they move, he progressively won't be able to. The same mechanism can apply to gmail: when you move out, you can still send and receive emails, and you are spied by Google when you communicate with a gmail user (but only then). I glossed over encryption, but that's the idea. (2) Well, you nailed it: convenience trumps everything. It's like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but for the "average consumer". Concrete and immediate needs, like convenience, are at the bottom. More abstract and remote needs, like freedom, are at the top. That's not how it should be, but I'm a bit guilty of this myself. So, I agree that if the FreedomBox isn't as convenient as services on the cloud, it won't be used. I just believe that it can be. Heck it will even do automatic distributed backup. It could even do High Availability with your mail server (and your web servers if we manage to actually change HTTP to look up srv records). Now, I reckon the FreedomBox is like Diaspora 2 months ago: vaporware. For now, we can only wait, see, and contribute. But I'm confident. An Iphone-like success in 2 years from now as predicted by Eben Moglen seems actually quite realistic.