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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

by 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.

by jarin 16y ago

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.